Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Ch 11: The Consecration of a Church

The cross is used by the priest in all the rites, orders, and services of consecration. The holy fathers taught that Christ consecrated the air by being lifted up; Christ consecrated the earth by being planted into it and descending. There are several orders involving different aspects of a church. Putting a cross on the cupola of it has its own order as well as one for the bell tower or campanile, and the consecration itself. Metr. Hilarion calls the act of consecrating a dedication. It’s where, among other liturgical services, the eucharist is offered and celebrated, and where we dedicate our whole life to Christ. The Barberini Euchologion is a manuscript of a prayer book from about the 8th c. It gives us a description of how an Orthodox church is established, and little has changed since then. Every founding of a church is a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies about Christ. A church is the antitype, the reality, that the kingdom of God is here now. There is really no other religion that has spread and become more influential in the world than Christianity. In 1794, less than 20 years after American Independence, the first Orthodox mission was set up in Alaska’s Kodiak Islands by the Orthodox Church in Russia. Obviously their primary audience wasn’t yet going to be the French, Spanish, or English colonists but the Inuit and Athabaskan people. Where the holy altar will be a cross is placed into the ground, and the service order censes the trenches dug out for the building. The first stone used in the construction is censed and prayers to a saint are offered whose name will be given to the church. The church is founded on holy people and dedicated women, men, and youth, not issues or causes. This interpersonal aspect of founding a church is considerably important to remember.

The order of dedication, as it’s called, of a church happens after the construction is finished. During this phase, the antimension is consecrated and given by the bishop. It’s a cloth or plank of wood with a relic inside of it and without it the eucharist cannot be offered. It’s the bishop’s apostolic signature and permission; a safeguard for the eucharistic community. This altar cloth is personal because it contains parts of the body of an Orthodox martyr. We are given this image and example to make our own hearts a foundation for the altar to God. The antimension is used in the liturgy right after the consecration of the church. Holy water and many other sacramental elements are used to bless the building. Chrism is an important mixture of ointment for maintaining connections to the bishop and receiving apostolic blessings. The blessed oil that comes from the bishop is distributed to the churches so that our spiritual needs are met.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Ch 10: The Blessing of Water

The rites for blessing of water belongs to several important blessings and liturgical functions. It’s part of preparation for baptism, the washing of the hands of the bishop at an hierarchical liturgy, and the consecration of a church building. The spiritual and liturgical meaning of water is worth our attention. This chapter is short. But it’s typological content is long and enriching to understand.

Metropolitan Hilarion discusses the great blessing of water the lesser blessing – two rites. The first is done before Theophany at least since the 6th c. during the Roman empire in the capitol city of Constantinople and Jerusalem, and the famous Barberini Euchologion gives witness to the blessing of water in the Orthodox Church as early as the 8th – 10th c. This rite of blessing water twice is from the Jerusalem Typicon. Some of the prayers read as follows. “The voice of the Lord upon the waters cries out, saying: Come, receive all of you the Spirit of wisdom …of Christ who is made manifest.” When Christ was baptized in the Jordan as a model for us, the prayers also teach us, “Today the nature of the waters is sanctified, and the Jordan is divided, and turns back the streams of its own waters, beholding the Master baptized.” The Son does what He sees His Father doing. “The waters saw Thee and were afraid.” Not only does creation seem to be rid of evil creatures in the waters, but it is the way in which God willed to be manifested as the Holy Trinity. The waters were used by the Holy Trinity from the inception of the world, the flood came as a cleansing of mankind, and the seas have been inhabited by Leviathan since the Fall of Adam. We know from these rites that the cross put in the waters is what makes it holy. Blessed water is a sacrament that Christians drink to heal the soul and body. What was meant for evil is turned into our sanctification.

The lesser blessing of water was done in Constantinople on the feast of the Procession of the Tree of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of the Lord. Christ was submerged into the earth, and He came out alive and a conqueror of the waters that bring death. The adamant Egyptians died by the rivers collapsing onto them while the Hebrews escaped through the waters and lived. The Theotokos of Blachernae is a Church in Constantinople that contained a hagiasma or healing spring. Because of these powerful fountains there are early manuscripts that record the blessings for waters with beautiful troparia that speak of not only Christ but also the Theotokos giving us water for our purification. The great litany teaches that “the waves of sensual desires” are as dangerous as hurricanes. The blessed waters are meant for blessing homes, icons, and cars. It’s used for baptism and the recurring cleansing of “the defilement of passions.” We can see that Orthodox Christians are trying to consecrate the world around us. The next two chapters are about the Consecration of a Church and the Preparation and Consecration of Chrism.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Ch 9: Burial and Commemoration of the Dead

Metropolitan Hilarion discusses the topic of Christian burial and commemoration. Many Protestants would disagree with the practice of commemorating the departed by praying for them. But Christ Himself teaches us that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – that is He is the God of the living, not of the dead (†John Chrysostom). Whether we are alive here or departed there Christ still recognizes and arranges for our need of continual communion and prayer for the absolution of our sins through the Church supplications to God and virtue practiced for the dead. Unlike Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Church prays for all people, whether Orthodox or not, whether holy or not. We just finished the Sunday of Pascha when we celebrate and sing that the iron gates, the bars, and the barriers of Hell are broken. St. Jerome teaches along with many holy fathers that the fires of Gehenna are quenched and the demons are in anguish. St. John Chrysostom’s paschal homily teaches that all can come to the feast no matter what hour they arrive, and that Hades has been embittered. Roman Catholicism at least since the scholastic period has divided hell (infernum makes no difference between hell and hades) into different parts: limbus patrum, limbus puerorum, purgatorium, and infernum. The Orthodox Church teaches that all of th need prayers for purification to move closer to God in rest. The Papal Office teaches that only those in purgatory can receive prayers that would alleviate them and in a sense absolve sins beyond the grave, since those in hell are already judged, and our prayers cannot help anyone there. Similarly to Protestantism, the Papal Office also by the same logic teaches that those in paradise don’t need our prayers because they are already saved. These differences between Western Christianity and the Orthodox Church is partly the result of the Council of Ferrara-Florence. In the 15th c. there was an attempt to discuss differences in belief and practice so that there might be a reunion. Interestingly, there isn’t a major distinction in Orthodox teaching between the Western Christian purgatory and hell. There isn’t, according to Metr. Hilarion, a separation between purifying fire, which is a related to theme constantly repeated through the entire scriptures recalling that God is fire, and the idea of eternal punishment for sinners. In fact, he shows that many of the prayers for the dead and the burial orders are founded on the teaching that people can be delivered from “eternal torment” by the prayers of the Church. So, his chapter begins with these foundational beliefs and some differences between Christians who aren’t in the Orthodox Church. A question that goes beyond the semantics of the word hell or hades is why have the Christians since the existence of the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire believed that fire was somehow purificatory for salvation at all? What we do know is that prayers are purificatory, and God’s word is a consuming fire. Metr. Hilarion returns to this theology near the end of the chapter. He refers to the teaching of Abba Macarius of Egypt from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, “Whenever you feel compassion for those in chastisement and pray for them they are a little relieved.”

Liturgical worship is commemorative, and the service books celebrate the feast days to saints and martyrs. Metr. Hilarion gives us many examples of prayers for the dead, and shows how they help us receive the forgiveness of sins after death. The basic concept of praying for the dead is apostolic and scriptural. 1 Timothy 2 teaches that we should pray “for all men.” St. Mark of Ephesus teaches that praying for the dead benefits all, and are meant for not only “the faithful” but for those who haven’t been in the faith. He says, “This is so even for those sinners confined in Hades, that they may obtain some relief” and that they may have a better stand at the judgment. St. Mark of Ephesus was involved at the Ferrara-Florence Council, which discussed certain aspects of purgatorial fire. He doesn’t seem to disagree that fire can be purifying in some way. How that works isn’t discussed. But he does argue against the idea that only the departed in purgatory need and can receive our prayers, and that there are some strictly separated parts of hell or hades that are limited by our prayers as taught in Roman Catholicism.

The ancient Church practiced commemoration of the dead by remembering them in prayers. The tombs of martyrs and saints are connected to the liturgy and the altar, and to the teaching of the resurrection, of which they are living proof, even after death. In Russia, during the persecutions, living priests would sometimes lie down and become the altar for a liturgy, when altars were absent. Christians have always remembered the dead. The Advesary has been planning to use persecutions, torments, setbacks, and martyrdom to traumatize us and trip us up. But Christ has literally made it our path to victory so that we can learn to deride these temptations of the Accuser and any temporary sufferings in hope of the resurrection. St. John Chrysostom teaches this many times. If we remember the martyrs, we can carry them with us everywhere, he says, and we can conquer all of our fears, especially the deepest one – death itself. St. Augustine of Hippo teaches that the eucharist is offered as a prayer. This mystery is a powerful way of receiving forgiveness when done to remember the departed. The liturgies of St. John Chrysostom and St. James have prayers for the dead and commemorations that “the Lord might show them forth worthy of remission of sins.” The liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church covers all kinds of sin: sins known and unknown, concealed out of shame, sins of ignorance, and transgressions. So important was praying for the dead to be forgiven by God that St. Dionysius the Areopagite called it a sacrament. It’s a way of practicing love and almsgiving.

The Book of Needs contains an order for the burial of the departed. It says, “Thou art the God who descended into Hell and loosed the bonds of the captives.” We pray that the departed receive “rest” in the sense that the freedom of passions and from the tyranny of the Serpent is the ultimate meaning of “free.” The resurrectional troparia and various psalms are sung. At the person’s coffin and after the last kiss, the words are sung, “eternal be thy memory, O our brother/sister, who are worthy of blessedness and ever-memorable.” The prayers after this are also sung for the departed who ask for our prayers. The Church anticipates this need and does it for us when we are no longer present here. There are orders for burial for monks and priests. Some of the major aspects of these prayers of burial and commemoration is remembrance and the forgiveness of our sins after death. The memory of the saints and martyrs outlasts anything on earth.

An important consideration is that none of the prayers for the dead in the Orthodox Church, as given in this chapter, presume that the departed, whether righteous or sinner, will reject these prayers based on their sins. Instead, it assumes that we will want forgiveness of sins and we will receive some benefit. It seems that “all men” will want freely to take these prayers after death, will need these prayers, and we hope confidently, will be forgiven by these prayers to God. The only creatures who are adamantly against forgiveness is the Enemy of all mankind, as it seems from these rites of burial and comemmoration. If the belief in Noah’s time was that no one will be saved from the flood, the whole world will perish, and all sinners will be destroyed, it would seem heretical to say that God would actually save mankind when Christ descended in Hades and preached to those waiting there since the flood. What we’ve learned through the years reading this five volume set and attending the divine services here is that whatever we deserve, whatever weaknesses we have and plots set against us the Holy Trinity can overturn that and renew us. Like in the Old Testament by water, we might wonder how the world could be saved when it’s destroyed by fire. These basic elements have an instructive value for us in the scriptures and these chapters that help us connect the mysteries, scriptures, and realities of the rituals of the Orthodox Church. Water has been worshipped, feared, studied, and given philosophical aspects. Water can represent death, but also life and cleansing just like fire. So, in the next chapter, we will outline the Blessing of Water.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Chp 8: Monastic Tonsure

In our last table discussion on monasticism and the rite of tonsure, we discussed the difference between a rite and a sacrament, and the preparation of becoming a monk, what it means, and its similarities to the mystery of marriage. Metropolitan Hilarion puts theological and dogmatic teaching in context of the liturgical texts, its wording and meaning, and the overall structure of the services and its historical development. 

A rite, as we talked about, puts some emphasis on the outward way of performing a sacrament or blessing. Metropolitan Hilarion briefly explained what a rite is in chapter one. A sacred rite is a mystery of salvation where the Holy Spirit is beseeched and asked to be present within us and bless the outward world around such as water, oil, wine, and bread. It’s something that can be done once or repeatable in our lives. Tonsuring can happen once in a person’s life, but the rite of blessing water and oil is needed yearly in the life of Christians. 

Rites are not random ways of worshipping as some Christians might think. Rites also aren’t some magical ways of controlling God, since all the prayers are about beseeching and “asking” the saints, the Most-Holy Theotokos, and the Holy Trinity to help us. Some speak of religious rites as if they were modes of fashion and not important in the participation of the mysteries. But they are important in the understanding of typology and the local development of a church within a certain region or city. A sacrament can be a rite but not all rites are sacraments, according to some opinions. A rite is sacramental if the Holy Spirit is asked to be present and to help us. For example, the formulation of the service of orders for baptism, chrismation, eucharist, unction, and confession have both an Old Testament passage and New Testament application that is fulfilled in the mysteries of the Church. Likewise, marriage, holy orders and monastic tonsure have types that are fulfilled in the Church. The cutting of the hair of the monk and catechumen have symbolic and typological meaning in the Old Testament, and Christian monastics fulfill that ritual action by renouncing the world and entering a community of monastics for progress toward unification with the Holy Trinity. The prostrations that monastic candidates make represent humility and obedience – Christian virtues that we clothe ourselves spiritually and equip ourselves for spiritual warfare. So, monks and nuns wear specific clothing to fulfill and remind ourselves of who we are and what we are doing in the physical and spiritual worlds. Name change is another major Old Testament practice and type that is fulfilled by monks who receive a new name from their spiritual father and guide in repentance. 

A rite is not merely a man-made custom or religious observance in a certain culture. But some still think that rituals and rites are a part of “organized religion” controlled by huge, impersonal, and powerful institutions rather than communities and individuals that form an organized whole under the practice of Christian love. The different ranks and robes of monasticism have varied by custom, place, and time. But the inner calling of monastic tonsure is a way of life, love, and total freedom. While the Orthodox Church agrees with the seven sacraments decided on by Roman Catholicism, there is not only seven sacraments in Holy Orthodoxy. The numbering and way of coming to that conclusion is somewhat artificial. It limits the way in which our needs are really met by the holy mysteries and the Book of Needs, which contains many rites and orders of blessings and sacraments. 

 Typology connects with the sacred rites of the Orthodox Church. The word ritual conjures up Old Testament practices that we tend to think are no longer necessary. Or they are seen as dangerous, syncretistic influences from Roman paganism that have crept into the Church. The typology of monasticism can be found in the Old Testament and with St. John the Forerunner who preached repentance. He opened the way for people to come to Christ. Monastics do much of the same in the structure and way of life in solitary sketes, hermitages, and cenobitic communities. St. Dionysius the Areopagites and many other Church fathers have taught that monastic tonsure isn’t only a rite, but also sacred rite or mystery. It has many connections to being a sacrament. The rite involves baptismal-like renunciations unto death of one’s former life (celibacy, poverty, obedience, family), a betrothal to Christ, a eucharistic union with Christ during the service order, they are sealed in holy oil, and a monk or nun receives a new name like a Christian baptism from their abbot or abbottess. 

Instead of starting with the historical patterns of the period between the 4th c. – 5th c. in and around Egypt and Palestine as the starting point of monasticism, Metropolitan Hilarion begins from the inside-out by investigating the monastic spirit within the service order itself. But he touches on the historical aspects of monasticism and differences between East and West. The Parable of the Good Samaritan teaches that love is boundless. It is what we do and say right now with whoever is in front of us. It makes a person truly free in mind and spirit. It is a totally free and radical way of interacting with people who cross our paths. Only then does the monastic life become a beautiful, burning desire for love unlimited by national institutions, commerce, and politics. The modern philosopher Ivan Illich describes this philia kind of love for all people in a way like St. Silouan the Athonite. That all should be loved ought to be our only thought in whatever place and situation we have found ourselves. Even St. John Chrysostom criticized having hospitals too close to churches because these public institutions had taken the place of everyday Christian love for one another and limited our freedom to love, supposedly, anyone whom we wish. Contrary to the common complaint that we live in a “post-Christian world,” Ivan Illich viewed our times as apocalyptic and the unique time of Christianity’s illumination to the world. Modern institutions are all based on Christian ideas and originals, but they have become the corruptio quae optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst). The legalization of Christianity was a proof that the Cross of Christ was victorious. But the mystery of iniquity has been working since Christianity was born. This age is a revelation to the world that what we have created in our institutions that seek and claim to solve mankind’s problems and ills have turned out to be dangerous and sometimes outright evil. Politics, nationalism, the university system, ubiquitous technology, and medical practices are but a few examples of what has become the mystery of iniquity in our times. At the point of darkness, however, Christianity’s light beams all the brighter to the world in its love and true life, because life isn’t a resource or economic commodity, it isn’t an idol that we can make with our hands; life is a person that was preached to be Jesus Christ by the holy apostles and bishops and martyrs of the Church. Monasticism believes in the old Christian way of changing the world individually and within communities, not by imposing law or institutions on the people of the world to solve our problems. These institutions tend to betray what they seek to be. The modern funeral industry, for example, has completely taken over how Christians used to care for the departed person’s body and loved ones. Instead the modern embalming process does major disrespect and violence to the person’s body, and for those who choose cremation, there is nearly complete disintegration and disposal of the body like garbage down the drain. Orthodox Christians, like Jews and other eastern religions, take special care of the body of a Christian and pray for that person. They are arranged peacefully to return to the earth naturally and dignified. But today’s funeral home business doesn’t have to replace this ancient rite of Christian burial.

The artificiality of the Latin definition of seven sacraments with other rites placed under a non-sacramental category misleads Christians in an unintended way. Why don’t Orthodox agree exactly with Protestants and Catholics on the number, meaning and practice of the rites and mysteries? Between the 9th and the 12th c., western European Christianity began translating the works of Aristotle and other Hellenic writings from Jewish and Arab texts into Latin, and learning flourished among the western monastic communities where they wrote manuscripts at their scriptorium – a wonderful and beautiful flowering of Christianity. In western Europe, there was no complete, approved Latin Bible like the Septuagint in use until St. Jerome. He compiled the Latin Vulgate from various and separate local traditions and translations. Some translations came from the Septuagint. The Latin Vulgate became the official standard translation of Latin Christianity at the Council of Trent in the 16th c. Scholasticism is a method of finding the truth by applying a kind of dialectics. It opposes one view over another until you reach a conclusion. But more specifically western monks began applying Aristotelian principles and the Greek tradition of disputation and dialectics to the holy mysteries to make sense of contradictions. Scholastic training was a kind of schooling in Aristotelian grammar, logic, and natural philosophy. It was not so much a negative event that Greek philosophy was introduced into monasteries. But the way in which some of the monks of the West began to use this method began unintentionally to divide the heart and the mind. Monastics had always taught that the mind must live in the heart, and that is a scriptural teaching too. Rufinus and many other European monks visited Egypt and Palestine, collected their desert wisdom, and applied it back home. But instead of that monks began to be taught how to hold positions and argue for beliefs that they didn’t believe. In this way, mysticism in the West is generally separated from the mind. Scholasticism didn’t study poetry or hymnography, literature, or history very much. So, typology and the mystical, noetic, ascetical teaching of the East were exchanged for schooling and an increasingly institutionalization of all spiritual life. Typology seems to be more related to discourse, hymnography, and it incorporates a synthesis and harmonizing of the mysteries from the types into the antitypes – the reality in the sacraments. Scholastic monks created some of the most basic and enduring institutions that are still influencing the western world today. 

The university was an essential place of learning. It’s a place where scholasticism, humanism, and other Enlightenment philosophies flourished and fought with each other. The university seems to have replaced the original monastic institutions of sketes, cenobia (communities), and hermitages, and eventually the idea of the divinely ordered monarchic ruler. There were disputations between the Dominican and Franciscan monastics so tense that it shook the foundations of the Pope of Rome. The scholastic method followed this pattern. First, there was a lectio or lesson and reading of a text that had contradictions or disagreements with another text. They look for these discrepancies and called them sententiae. They collected these sententiae and ordered these contradictory statements so that the dialectical method could be applied. They meditated, called meditatio, on the contradictions. Already the word meditation means a something like a purely logical and mental exercise separated from the heart. Dialectics requires two opposing sides to argue until a resolution of contradictions is reached. Before arguments are presented, words are analyzed and arranged by the study of grammar, and the author’s intent is scrutinized. Aristotle’s Ten Categories begins with an analysis of grammar and then logic to be mastered. The result seems magnificent and the process beneficial. But this practice, if overemphasized, leads to a separation of the mind from the heart that is the one of the major goals of monastic life and renunciation, and really the goal of every Christian. This scholastic method was tragically and originally applied to trinitarian theology. The Orthodox Church already had a system and institution for dealing with “contradictions.” The Christian emperor or empress – whoever the legitimate ruler was – the clergy, the monastics, and the monastic clergy met and held a council, and they prayed, listened, spoke, and studied attentively, and sometimes vehemently disagreeing with each other. An example of resolving such conflicting theology is the Council of Nicea. Scholastic universities didn’t give us, as it seems, the Nicaean Creed or our definitions of the two united natures of Christ, or the dogmas of the Holy Trinity, and ecclesiology. Much of the learning of the Middle Ages seems to have been very much inspired by Aristotle and Neo-Platonists, as it happened also in Byzantium, but also by writers from the Middle East like Ibn Sina and Maimonedes. In central and eastern Europe around the 9th c. and 10th c. when scholastic learning began growing, Sts. Cyril and Methodius and St. Rostislav of Great Moravia (The Church of the Czech and Slovak Lands today) began to baptize all the Slavs of Europe. They served liturgies in Old Slavonic that was understandable to the Slavic peoples. The Glagolitic alphabet was used instead of Greek or Latin or Hebrew that led to the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet in use by many Slavic countries today. Martyrdom and manuscripts can work together, and they often do as in the case of Sts. Cyril and Methodius. 

 We discussed marriage as a path to martyrdom that was symbolized by the crowning and betrothal. Monks and nuns too are betrothed, and there are many similarities between the two sacraments in meaning and the service’s order. The layman and the monk share many similarities in their entrance into the life of a Christian. Here is a list of similarities in service order and content: 

1) The priest performs the eucharist that is the center of the service 

2) Both wear white clothing symbolizing death and renewal

3) There is a cutting of hair as an offering, profession of faith (no oath taking or swearing) 

4) Both renounce Satan, they receive a new name, church members are present 

5) The sign of the cross is made over the body 

6) The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit is given 

7) Obedience to clergy and Church, the bishops like a monk under an abbot 

8) We both enter spiritual warfare 

9) They wear crosses around neck, shoulder, or stitched in clothes was a custom 

10) Both seek a union with God and crowns for martyrdom for Christ

11) Both must come under no pressure or coercion, but in freedom and mutuality 

Metropolitan Hilarion also teaches that a monk must become like “children of malice.” A child before the of two years old doesn’t become angry or resentful when put down, a young child doesn’t become offended when insulted in an adult way. A child doesn’t become vainglorious or prideful when praised or honored. In understanding we ought to be like the angels of heaven close to God’s throne, but in the things of this world that are malicious and grown-up, monks seek a solitary, non-marital life like a child or like an angel. Very young children are humble and pure in soul and body; they can pray noetically. One of the other main reasons for such an ascetic renunciation of the world was rooted in the Syriac tradition of monasticism. The Syrians called Christian monks “mourners” which referred to their life dedicated to repentance — another proof of the victory of the Cross and the resurrection. For this reason, St. John the Forerunner, and his main message of “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” seems to be connected to the inspiration for monastic principles. In Great Lent’s “bright-sadness,” monasticism seeks to repent and mourn to find great love and joy. They are like children who mourn the loss of our eternal and divine parent, Our Father in heaven, the Holy Trinity’s warm embrace and kiss that we lost because we grabbed food that wasn’t fit for our bellies and souls. Every year, all lay Orthodox Christians take up a monastic or penitential life during Great Lent, and every week on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday morning by fasting and cultivating compunction throughout the entire ecclesial year. 

There are so-called “monastic vows” during the tonsuring part of the service with a question-and-answer format. But they answer questions directly. There aren’t any made-up vows or swearing or oaths on people or objects. The abbot “interrogates” the candidate, “Question: Of thine own willing mind and thine own free will comest thou unto the Lord? Answer: Yes, God helping me, reverend father. Question: Not by any necessity, or constraint? Answer: No, reverend father.” Just as Christ commanded, married and monastic let their yes be yes and their no be no. Christians do not swear on the Bible, by anyone or anything, since God alone can keep his word. The monastic service order also borrows a lot from the Sunday of the Prodigal Son.  It touches on both repentance and marriage. The service reads, “For with compunction I cry to thee, O Lord: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee.” The monastic candidate is then “clothed in a long white shirt” just like catechumens are clothed in simple white clothing at their baptism. St. Isaac of Ninevah reminds us that a monk “is he who passes all the days of his life in hunger and thirst for the sake of his hope and future good things.” In Great Lent, every Christian makes himself mourn in secret, give away all in hiddenness, and make himself hungry and thirsty to receive Love and Life now and in the next world. The monastic calling is in a broad sense every Christian’s calling to avoid making “life” as we use the term today into an idol. Life isn’t a resource or a thing in itself; life is God became man from a woman – the Most Holy Theotokos. Life is the Holy Trinity. A monk, like every Orthodox Christian, seeks to avoid the “spectacles of the world” that come often from our ethnic customs and institutionalized morality, which are in our very own time becoming unveiled as the anti-Christian corruption of the best that has been given to us in the Church. St. Isaac of Nineveh in his Ascetical Homilies 22 teaches, “All the saints mourned …. He whose loved ones lie dead before him and who sees himself dead in sins” becomes aware of his own personal state of grief. He teaches also to “weep over your own soul that is precious and dead; look, your loved ones are dead in the grave where you too are now and will go into the earth.” Repentance may be the most natural way to grieve as a Christian. It is fitting to mourn to experience freedom and joy. The next chapter discusses burial and the commemoration of the dead. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Chp 7: Marriage

The focus of this chapter is the wedding service and its connection to the Eucharist in the divine liturgy. In Ephesians, the holy apostle Paul teaches that marriage is “a great mystery” in its image on earth and in its spiritual meaning that points to the kingdom of God. Marriage wasn’t exclusively a liturgical event in Paul’s times. But the wedding was considered a sacrament of the Church because it directly reflected the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and God’s unity with the Church as the Bride of Christ. 

The holy scriptures give us more insight into the meaning of the wedding service in Genesis. Mankind isn’t an “individual,” not he, she, or it. But we are “they,” Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. Man is “dual” in nature. The first man came from the Breath of God and created earth, woman came from man’s body in his sleep, and children come from a woman’s body through marital union, and so the begetting of our race is followed like this. That way of giving birth shows us the love of the Holy Trinity, since God is three persons in one. Likewise, man, woman, and child are three persons, but one in essence or human nature. So, the “fullness of mankind” is seen in marriage since our image is found in the Holy Trinity’s divine love.  Christ was sent from his Father in heaven, from his home to be betrothed and wedded to the Church and humanity itself. The attraction given to us by God leads us to “leave father and mother” and be united to a “wife.” The marital union itself – the bodily joining of man and woman – is trinitarian. That’s the first meaning that Metropolitan Hilarion draws out in this chapter. The next meaning is the begetting of children as the flow of the trinitarian image within us. Love breeds life. The book of Genesis gave the commandment to be fruitful and multiply before the Fall of Mankind and the temptation and trick for false life. The battle for how to build up life had begun. The lying Serpent came against this divine fruitfulness, the holy harvesting, and the growth of grace. It seems that the Liar wanted to persuade Adam and Eve to take their gaze away from each other’s love and the first commandment from God that was given to us to make love. Adam and Eve were commanded to be sexually united with each other, not food or spiritual authority or divine knowledge, and bring about a deeper unity with God. But they only fulfill that command after the fall when they see that their children are not growing toward righteousness and the fullness of unity with God, and food has become a burden of mankind and not a way of living forever. We want to multiply like God or not multiply at all by taking some short-cut by eating the fruit instead of being fruitful with our bodies and souls through the first marital union. And Christ’s first miracle brings us back to that very same point in humanity: marriage and sex and communion with God. It was God’s will that we become fruitful and grow so that we fill up the earth with God’s grace as He also fills up the universe and creation. So, the first sin was committed, as it seems, in a state of bodily virginity. But our first father and mother had not grown into a state of chastity in which sexual union was blessed. Christ blessed that union between spouses in the first miracle at the Wedding at Cana. The Serpent’s plan targeted marriage’s meaning as defined by God in the book of Genesis. The Devil sought to throw down that very trinitarian image in our body and soul by undoing the divine unity that God keeps together by grace so that humanity doesn’t carry out the mystery of salvation to be fruitful, bountiful, and grow in Christ Jesus toward a fuller union with the Holy Trinity who fills all things.

Marriage has been marred by sin and death, and that’s evident in how many cultures have expressed and governed marital relations and family. Howbeit, God still uses his pre-eternal plan to bring about the mystery of salvation through the Messiah and the Jewish people where the culmination of fruitfulness, righteousness, and love is found in the Holy Theotokos who gives birth to the Godman Jesus Christ. The meaning of marriage is fulfilled and revealed. Christians replenish the earth and bring love and blessings to all people. Metropolitan Hilarion focuses on this deeper teaching of Orthodoxy and says that “the welfare of spouses” was not the most sought-after ideal according to the Levirate Law in Deuteronomy and Matthew 22. Rather the Jews looked to the reproduction of children as a divine commandment that they took seriously. The icon of the Descent into Hades teaches that Christ is victorious over the prison of death and sin where unions are separated. The Serpent tempted Adam and Eve to cause a divorce between not only man and woman, but between God and man. Christ also brings victory for marriage as the mystical union of man and God, and the kind of love we ought to have within us. The poetic book of the Song of Songs is the Hebrew and Orthodox view of love that explicitly points out the physical aspects of marital love in the context of divine love for God. Against that, the widespread Greco-Roman view on love wasn’t as romantic or sensitive. The Mediterranean civilizations during apostolic times saw marriage generally as cohabitation for offspring, the continuation of male inheritance and honor, and a contractual relationship. It wasn’t a very erotic view of married love. Often Greek and Roman free men had children strictly with their legal wife while they fulfilled lusts with concubines and servants – both male and female ones. Very much like our current secularism in the United States, the Roman law nuptias non concuppitus sed consensus facit meant that consent alone was enough for a nuptial ceremony to be legalized and considered socially acceptable. Consent makes any expression of sexuality good is the common practice in our culture. Marriage mostly in the Roman mind was about consent to legal ramifications rather than the fulfillment of love as the divine image of God found in the holy scriptures. 

Zeno of Verona and John Chrysostom called sex the mystery. Whereas other cultures focused on the wealth, consent, legality, social status, and parties of marriage, Christians simply focused on the sex itself and its spiritual meaning as something greatly to be admired. This great mystery is seen in the Sunday of the Prodigal Son who left his home and didn’t find a wife or marriage but harlots and debauchery. But when he returned to the father’s house in repentance, he was loved, given a ring, expensive clothes, and a fatted calf. Everything appears to be a wedding feast in this image of love and repentance.

The order of the wedding service has a betrothal and a crowning. Crowns symbolize victory over sin, martyrdom, and glory as well as intelligence and wisdom. Crowns were often used as gravestone markers in the Roman catacombs. The connection between marriage and the eucharist wasn’t separate in the 9th c. But they gradually grew apart due to political and historical circumstances. Theodore the Studite taught that “before all people the rite was performed with the Eucharist.” Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the Eucharist is “the celebrated marriage by which the most holy Bridegroom espouses the Church.” God’s love is shown fully in the Eucharist so that all the mysteries of the Church are connected to this divine thanksgiving in the Body and Blood of Christ, and the Eucharist is the “ideal of Christian marriage.” In the 10th c., emperor Leo VI of Byzantium taught that marriage not blessed by the Church is not a marriage. That idea along with the growing number of Christians in the empire created a situation where the Church had to deal with citizens who dissolved and divorced rather than the state. But Orthodoxy has always seen the end of the Christian wedding service in the couple both receiving holy communion together. The link is so close that the structure of the Eucharistic liturgy and the marriage rite look alike in many ways. 

 Our betrothal of God is like the journey of Pascha, the passing over into the next world. It's noteworthy that like Pascha – having both a crucifixion pascha and a resurrection pascha – marriage is both a call to self-sacrifice and struggle as well as a merry-making mystery of joy and oneness of mind. Metropolitan Hilarion shows that the patriarchs of the Old Testament found their wives because God ordained it to be so. The prayers of the betrothal service, then, teach that God is “the arranger of the marriage.” Whether we think our parents and culture choose our spouse or choose a spouse on our own, for Orthodox Christians, God plans a marriage. Betrothal is about the pledge of God’s fidelity and our faithfulness in response. The crowning rite points to the Cross while at the same time it points to the Resurrection. There is a “bright sadness” in accepting marriage as primarily a way of martyrdom, and the liturgical service and order reveal that self-sacrificial meaning. The cross is a symbol of joy and suffering. So, the service speaks of St. Elena who found the Holy Cross and St. Sebaste the Soldier and the Forty Women Martyrs. That Orthodox teaching is directly contrary to the idea that marriage is keeping abreast with the world, the fulfillment of personal desires, the cumulation of wealth and influence. Marriage is a preparation for letting go of our will, changing our hearts, and dying to ourselves so that we can be dead to the world. Marriage is death to the world by dying to our desires. The crowns of marriage do not symbolize the hope that worldly success will always flow, but that the married couple will win crowns of martyrdom in this life. In his Letters 232, Gregory the Theologian teaches that “water to wine” meant that something and someone becomes better. Marriage ought to make us better like baptism, chrism, unction, confession, and the Eucharist. The Martyr Precopius urged young Christian women taken under persecution to “go to your death as to a [wedding] feast.” This is the Orthodox Christian attitude toward marriage. There are many paths to martyrdom, and some may not become married to another person here on earth. The next chapter discusses the monastic tonsure service and its many similarities to the mystery of wedded life.  All the mysteries of the Orthodox Church are rooted in the Eucharist, and the monastic tonsure is also a sacrament found with eucharistic and marital themes. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol V, Chp 2: Baptism and Christmation

The Epistle to Diognetus is an ancient Christian and poetic text. The author distinguishes the worship of the Jews and Gentiles with the way of the Christians by teaching and practice. History shows that Christians are to the world as the soul is to the body of a person. The soul loves the flesh, but the flesh hates the soul. Christians, then, too are despised by the world while at the same time they show great love and heartfelt yearning for the salvation of the world. The incarnation makes it possible to reunite the body and soul since Christ became the perfect man and God. History “seeks to persuade, not to compel us” as God has done by allowing historical patterns of typology and actual events of the antitypes to be set before every generation because God is all-loving. He doesn’t need to come in pomp, but He willed to come in humility to convince us that He is the true God and the Savior and the Lover of Mankind so that we can arrive at faith in the Word made Flesh. History and typology help us to see our lost home and our lost beauty that is only in the kingdom of the God. When we can experience that and come to this conclusion, we begin to enter baptism, chrismation, and the eucharist with our own“bright sadness.”

Metropolitan Hilarion introduces an important term to the discussion of the baptismal cycle and mysteries of the Church. The holy the fathers of the Church used a term not found, even despised, by the classical Greek philosophers. They referred to the type as the image or the first image (prototype) and the antitype as the reality or what represents the type. So, the fathers speak of Christ as the antitype of Adam, or the Eucharist as the antitype (the reality) of the Mannah from heaven. Both were miracles from God. Metropolitan Hilarion translates antitype as “sacramental representation.” That description doesn’t convey merely symbolism but the symbol in the source just as Christ became Man – the image united and brought back to the divine and spiritually infused life that was lost. To view the liturgical life of the Church and its rites as lacking efficacy on the spiritual condition of its members is to return to a Judaizing worldview, the Gentile path of science and philosophy, and the old fallen world of symbols – just idols without power. The mysteries point to the Old Testament types that specifically followed an image of inner spiritual renewal, not just symbolic acts, and rituals. Speaking of types and antitypes isn’t a comparison between real and not real. It belongs to a continuous reality and fuller, brighter meaning when we live in the mysteries. St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught that, “… and all things happen to you in images, since you are the images of Christ.” Typology and antitypes form the language of how to speak about communion and mystical indwelling and rejuvenation of the universe through the work of the All-powerful Creator. The communion of type and antitype – God and man – is what we can do in the mysteries of the Orthodox Church. The type is the beginning, and the antitype is the completion. So, the new creation must have a beginning and completion forever. St. Hippolytus of Rome taught that “the action is done on the body, the effect is spiritual.”One of the best illustrations of type and antitype is the relationship between St. John the Forerunner who baptized with water for repentance of sins and the baptism of Our Lord and Master whose baptism will be “in fire and in the Spirit” for the remission of sins and repentance, which begins the formulation of the historical order of the service of baptism and chrismation. These mysteries and typologies are fundamental in understanding how we enter the Church and remain living. It’s worth noting that many Jewish people accepted baptism by John, but many of the religious scribes did not repent and accept John’s baptism that was a type prefiguring both the Old Testament washing of sins and Christ’s baptism that would be given as a command to the apostles. 

These mysteries help prepare us to live in the kingdom of God where we will see Christ as the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist. Catechesis was a learning process that preceded and continued after baptism in Christianity. The Epistle of Diognetus taught in Chapter XII that “For neither can life exist without knowledge, nor is knowledge secure without life.” Seeking instruction in the mysteries and repentance and virtue is an ongoing struggle, since we have “declared war” at our baptism to fight against a cynical Evil creature and his darkened followers. The war begins within our own members, and it continues to radiate in the web of interrelationships. A regular time for focusing on catechesis became customary during Great Lent, but anytime could have become an opportunity for learning. St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught that there is some instruction before baptism that is useful, but that the Holy Spirit enlightens us to understand the mysteries after baptism. Knowledge is important, but it must not have been criterion for entering the Church. What was expected of catechumens was to lead as best they could a moral life of struggle, as St. Hippolytus of Rome taught in the 3rd c. AD. The mysteries give us knowledge. St. Justin the Philosopher taught that, “So that we should not remain children of necessity and ignorance, but become sons of free choice and knowledge, and obtain remission of the sins we have already committed, there is named at the water, over him who has chosen to be born again and has repented of his sinful acts, the name of God the Father and Master of all.” This washing or baptism is called “illumination” and “initiation.” A longer catechesis is also mentioned in the Apostolic Constitutions for baptism those who will be, “instructed …in the knowledge of the unbegotten God.” Instruction included the New Testament teaching on Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension. In the apostolic period, catechetical instruction didn’t end but increased after baptism. The important place of catechesis begs the question of why it isn’t considered a rank or mystery of the Church as well. Teachers are mentioned in the New Testament. No rite or laying on of hands seems to exist for this ministry in the Church. Catechetical discourse like Christ’s discourses seems also to be the natural way that Christians educate each other and grow together in spiritual knowledge and faith. Other forms of religious education include didacticism, most often seen in the preaching and biblical scholarship of the Protestant worldview or the Classical Greek period in Hesiod. Another kind is the dialectical method that belongs to the scholastic tradition of Medieval and modern Roman Catholicism and is linked also to the common Greek philosophical tradition of disputation. Orthodox Christianity doesn’t seem to rely on either didacticism like that of the sola scriptura and Protestant bible study or the dialectical method, which requires two opposing viewpoints to arrive at the truth — a legacy also of the Enlightenment in our times. The New Testament only uses Greek terms for “discourse” and “narrative,” not language that belongs to the realm of dialectic or didactic methods. 

Naming is an important ritual that happens before baptism. Names are like the divine because God created the world through the Word, and we are also endowed with words, and we are given names to identify our personality that represent our “mystical symbol.” We do not use names out of vanity, magic, or superstition. Metropolitan Hilarion quotes the scriptures, “as his name is, so is he” in 1 Samuel 25:25. Naming meant changing allegiance, a closer relationship, being subject to God. We are name-receivers and God is the name-changer. Worldly aspirations that aren’t pleasing to God are described in the Old Testament as people who desire “to make a name for themselves,” who wish to find transcendence without God’s strength. In Orthodox tradition, there are saints who watch and are chosen on behalf of the whole family, and they celebrate his or her name day by a feast with offerings of bread and wine in the nave. 

If there were an Orthodox approach to studying the humanities and philosophy of the West, it might be what Metropolitan Hilarion refers to as the recovering of our “humanness” in receiving the mysteries of the Church and carefully reading liturgical and hagiographic texts as well as the discourses our holy fathers have left to us. The effect of the mystical life is the renewal of our image and nature to loveliness and an aurora-like light. The Eucharist is the thanksgiving for such a transformation of our body and soul. The next chapter discusses the mystery of holy communion.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Ch. 1

“Theology is based on liturgical experience,” writes Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev in the preface of Volume III. Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, all offered sacrifices to God and served the Father in prayer. The presence of God was once in Eden and everywhere in creation. The first parents were shut out of this paradise. The Hebrew patriarchs did not construct a building for worship in contrast to the advanced cultures around them, most notably the Egyptians, who had built extravagant and elegant temples for worshiping idols of nature and deities of power, fertility, and war. The Old Testament patriarchs did revere holy places where the presence of God visited and appeared to them, and not merely like the sacred groves of Greco-Roman mythologies, but places that became witnesses to a real manifestation of God’s power and presence. Pillars of stone were held to be sacred to the Hebrew tribes in these places and they built altars wherever they dwelt. Some of the psalms of David are called miktams, translated into Septuagint as stelographia, or pillar inscriptions, which testify to these sacred stones.

After the Hebrews were delivered from Egyptian captivity, Exodus 27 begins to lay out the plan for building a transportable tent for worshipping God called the tabernacle. It consisted of twenty posts in the north and the south sides, ten posts in the east and west sides. There was a sanctuary with seven lamps of gold, a table of showbread, an altar for incense, and the holy of holies with the art of the covenant that was separated by a veil of blue, purple, and scarlet linen. There was a tent of meeting that filled with a “cloud of smoke” in the day and at night a fire appeared, both of which were understood to be the glory of the Lord. The people followed the presence of God wherever they traveled. The nomadic Hebrew nation experienced liturgical worship in this sojourning way. Sacrifice and temple worship have been deeply connected to the problems of human nature and social behavior in general. In Psalm 50, David wrote that God does not desire, nor does He really require, the blood of animals, nor our own blood, but a hymn of praise and humility with a “broken spirit.” Some rabbis referred to the Psalter as the Tehillim, “Songs of Praise.” 

There were different kinds of sacrifices offered on the altar: burnt offerings of animals, peace offerings, and sin or guilt offerings. 2 Samuel recounts that King David wanted to build God a temple, but the Lord did not wish to have such a place to dwell. David made Jerusalem the political center of the Judean kingdom. King Solomon, David’s son, took unprecedented amounts of labor and resources to build the first temple. Animal sacrifices filled the temple yearly with immense blood and burnt flesh. It became a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews. The prophets often warned that sacrifices and rituals were pointless if the priests and the people did not throw away their idols and cease from mistreating and abusing others. The prophets warned that the Temple would be destroyed completely if they did not repent. The history of the Hebrew people is inseparably from the Temple. The Babylonian empire took it around 586 BC, as Ezekiel prophesied. The Jews returned to the Temple in 538 BC and began the period called the Second Temple in 516 BC with the help of King Cyrus of the Persian Empire. Ezra prophesied its destruction and it fell in 164 BC to Antiochus Epiphanes, the Hellenistic king of the Seleucid Empire. The Pharisees, the scholars and “spokesmen” for the people and the religion, approached the scriptures with hermeneutical liberty and promoted worship separate from the Temple. They viewed the nationalistic Zealots and animal sacrifices performed by priests as less important, and they invented the synagogue as the center for Jewish study and worship. Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee much in favor of Roman culture and rule, is an example of the progression of later Judaism.

But for the most part, the Temple in Jerusalem was still central for Jewish worship and identity. It once contained the Law, the Ark of the Covenant, God’s presence, the sacrifices, the offerings, and the kingdom. It stood against many empires of the world until Rome. The Temple became deeply connected to Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. He cherished it and He was often there worshipping and teaching about His Father. In the New Testament, Jesus identifies the Temple with His own body, which became the universal, “worldwide temple” of all humanity. Christ Himself became everything and He crucified all these earthly human relations to teach us to walk this path to God the Father again. The desires of mankind, the scapegoating, the violence, the powers hidden in religions and civilizations are unveiled. Christ, the King of Glory, crucified this fallen reality. Because of Christ’s resurrection, the people of God cannot ever be limited or consolidated into one locale, be it Corinth, Jerusalem, or Rome. Wherever Christians are, Christ is there too, just as the Hebrews followed the Lord in the Old Testament with the tent of the glory of the Lord. The building of a temple, then, seems to have been an inborn search to find and worship the Good Father. The religious authorities in the first century, before and after Christ, had lost sight of this sacred sojourning, and they had tragically made the physical type higher than the prototype. The Book of Acts records that the protomartyr Stephen boldly stated to the religious leaders, “the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands.” Christians and Jews soon, with the Temple having been destroyed finally in 70 A.D. by Titus, dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. The kingdom of God, however, found now in the bodies of Christians and manifested at the Eucharistic communion, entered the empires of the world with these bodily, spiritual, indestructible temples of Christ united in the Eucharist, specifically in Orthodox Christian temples. The Church relies on persuasion. It does not, like many other kingdoms, operate based on fear, an elaborate system of punishments, however necessary those may be, and bloody sacrifices. The veil of that reality has been torn. The Orthodox temple is modeled on this history and theology, and it influenced the way that the Byzantine culture traditionally built churches, especially after Constantine’s rule.