Orthodoxy: The State of the Faith

As the sun began to rise high above the wine-dark Aegean Sea, the twelve bells of Great Lavra monastery on Mount Athos pealed out a welcome. In the rock-strewn bay at the foot of the 500-ft. promontory on which Great Lavra stands, a procession of five ships unloaded 1,000 visitors. Jeeps and trucks carried the pilgrims,*who were led by King Paul of Greece, up the steep road to the monastery yard. The bells of other monasteries joined those of Great Lavra in a tolling, rhythmic counterpoint to the chanting of the monks.

The stately occasion was the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of Great Lavra; there to celebrate was the most impressive gathering of Orthodox Christian leaders in the century. Athenagoras I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and by virtue of that the spiritual leader of Orthodoxy, came from Istanbul. With him were the bearded Orthodox Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, and more than 100 prelates representing Orthodox churches of Russia, Czechoslovakia, the U.S., Cyprus, Poland, Finland, and all the Near East. Guests from other faiths included top U.S. Lutheran Franklin Clark Fry, Willem Visser ‘t Hooft of the World Council, Roman Catholic Benedictine monks, and delegations from the Coptic Church of Egypt, the Nestorians of Iraq and Syria, the Armenian Catholicate of Cilicia.

“The Peak of God.” A green, mountainous finger pointed eastward into Homer’s Aegean, the Athos peninsula was thought sacred long before Jesus came on earth. Aeschylus refers to Athos as “the peak of God,” and Christians quite happily modified the belief in their own way. According to one legend, a ship carrying the Virgin Mary to Cyprus was blown to Athos by a storm. When she arrived, the pagan idols spoke to the inhabitants, ordering them to pay homage to the Mother of God, who baptized them, and claimed the mountain as a gift from her son.

Christian hermits began to settle on Athos about the middle of the 9th century. In 959 St. Athanasios, a learned monk, fled to the peace of the Holy Mount rather than accept an appointment as confessor to the Byzantine Emperor. There, he said, the Virgin appeared before him and promised her perpetual protection for the monastery he was building. Eventually, about 80 monks joined him to complete Great Lavra. Today the monastic population is about 2,000, divided into cenobites, who live, work and pray together, and idiorrhythmic monks, who have tiny cottages and apartments and gather only for the Divine Liturgy in church and common meals on great feasts.

One of the monasteries has conceded to progress by installing electricity. Otherwise, life on the mountain seems hardly to have changed in centuries. The work of Athos is prayer, and work it can be: in more than one monastery, the common recitation of the Divine Office takes between eight and ten hours daily. Some of the monks are regarded as living saints; yet among others sloth is not unknown, and the monastic love of God is often overshadowed by devotion to such pious relics—cherished by the monasteries as much as their beautifully illuminated manuscripts and rare icons—as the finger of John the Baptist and the girdle of the Virgin Mary. Many of the monasteries are dying for lack of new recruits. The Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon, once 2,000 strong, now has only 40 monks; the youngest of them is in his sixties.

Some churchmen, depressed by the decline of monastic vocations, fear that life on Mount Athos is not likely to last for another 100 years, much less a thousand. The monks themselves are unimpressed—possibly because the same dire predictions were made back in the 19th century, when the mountain’s monastic population was about a thousand. Mount Athos has always had an astonishing capacity for survival.

The Third Largest. So has the Orthodox faith that gave birth to Athos’ monasticism, and today, after centuries of persecution and trouble, the third largest branch of Christianity*is showing surprising signs of life and strength in its traditional homeland of the eastern Mediterranean.

In the West, Orthodoxy often seems to be a kind of Roman Catholicism, without a Pope but with almost too many bearded patriarchs. “We are very near the Roman Catholic Church in dogma,” explains the Rev. Anastasios Giannou-latos of Athens. “But from the point of view of feeling, we are very far. With the Protestants we are far apart in dogma and very near in feelings.”

With Rome, Orthodoxy believes in both church tradition and Scripture as the source of revelation, the seven Christ-instituted sacraments, the Trinitarian doctrine formulated by the first seven ecumenical councils, the duty of reverence toward the Virgin Mary. Although Orthodoxy does not regard Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption as dogmas of faith, both beliefs seem to be widely held among the faithful. But Orthodoxy rejects papal infallibility and allows laymen a voice in the shaping of church policy. Before they are ordained, priests may marry, but to marry is to preclude advance, because bishops must be celibate.

Despite its size and strength, Orthodoxy has not had the impact on the modern world of many numerically inferior Protestant groups. In part, this stems from the mystical, otherworldly quality of Orthodoxy, which looks upon life as a way station before eternity, and in part it stems from the bruises of history. The rise of Islam destroyed thousands of thriving Christian communities in the Near East, and turned surviving churches into conservative, defensive ghettos that held to the faith through periodic persecutions and dreamed of the lost grandeur that was Greece. The gradual rift between Rome and the churches of the East—made final in 1054 when a huffy papal legate excommunicated the Patriarch of Con stantinople—cut Orthodoxy off from the intellectual revolution that took place in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the last 46 years, Communism has turned the largest Orthodox churches—of Russia and the Balkan countries—into compliant captives of a totalitarian regime.

Still, Orthodoxy shows plenty of spiritual vigor. Many churches in Russia are still crowded on Sundays and great feast days. In the U.S., membership in the dozen Orthodox churches has grown 35% in the past few years to almost 6,000,000 communicants, and Archbishop lakovos, head of the Greek Archdiocese of North and South Amer ica, predicts that the churches will federate within a few years. Even in far-off Uganda, Orthodox missionaries have since 1920 created a thriving, growing church with 20,000 members.

A More Fervent Life. New life has also come to some of the ancient patriarchates. Says His Beatitude Theodosios VI of Antioch:*”Our church is health ier today than it has been for the last 1,000 years.” The Antioch patriarchate, fairly well supplied with funds by Syrian and Lebanese emigrants to the U.S., is busily restoring old churches and building new ones, has an active youth movement called the St. Nicholas So ciety, and can afford to give many of its new priests graduate training.

In Greece, most of the 9,000 priests are underpaid and poorly educated, and the bishops seem to be locked in continual battle with Parliament over such jurisdictional problems as the appointment of new metropolitans. But Greek Orthodoxy has also given rise to the impressive Zoe (life) and Sotir (Saviour) brotherhoods—associations of dedicat ed, theologically trained laymen and clergy who each Sunday spread throughout the country preaching evangelical sermons. “We want to create a more fervent Christian life,” says Father Giannoulatos, a leader of Zoe.

The other ancient sees are less fortunate. The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is prosperous enough to send many of its clergy to Europe for theological training, but laymen, while loyal to the faith, have a fierce dislike of their priests, who are nearly all Greek. “An Orthodox patriarchate composed of an entirely Arab lay community should have an Arab character,” complains Jerusalem Banker Anton Atallah. Since 1956, more than half of the 250,000 Greeks and Levantine Arabs who adhere to the Patriarchate of Alexan dria have been forced to leave Nasser’s Egypt because of economic pressures. And in Turkey, most of the 1,500,000 Greek Orthodox who lived there before 1922 were killed or exiled by Dictator Kemal Ataturk; Patriarch Athenagoras’ flock is now a mere 80,000, limited to the environs of Istanbul and a few Turkish islands.

Approach to the Present. Unchanging in prayer and worship, Orthodoxy seems to be slowly responding to the pressures of the modern world. The PanOrthodox Congress at Rhodes in 1961 brought representatives of twelve of the 15 main churches together for an amicable preliminary discussion of liturgical reform and greater unity. In the Near East, the threat of Islamic nationalism has brought an end to many old interfaith hostilities, and Orthodox clergy are now on friendlier terms with their counterparts in the Nestorian, Coptic and Syrian Jacobite churches—all ancient heretical offshoots of Ortho doxy. But Orthodox clergy loyal to the four traditional patriarchates are deeply suspicious of Moscow, which has scattered “missionaries” throughout the Near East, sought to elect pro-Soviet clerics to high posts in the church. With the exception of the churches in Serbia and Albania, all of Orthodoxy is affiliated with the World Council of Churches. At New Delhi in 1961, Orthodox representatives gave unqualified endorsement of stands taken by the council’s third General Assembly; at previous assemblies, they had always issued certain disclaimers.

Orthodoxy is still light-years away from any union with Rome. Athenagoras and Pope John XXIII admired each other, but Orthodoxy cannot forget that Latin Rite Crusaders sacked the famed Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople in 1204 and that previous attempts to heal the breach between East and West failed. Although the Moscow patriarchate sent observers to the first session of the Vatican Coun cil, none of the Orthodox churches in the Near East did so; there is hope that some will send representatives to the second session, which will reconvene Sept. 29.

Nevertheless, Orthodoxy’s leaders are well aware that in an increasingly secularized world, a divided and competitive Christianity is a luxury that the churches cannot afford. “Christians must realize that they have one church, one Cross, one Gospel,” says white-bearded Patriarch Athenagoras. “Every church must put its treasures into a safe-deposit box and issue common money, a common money of love, which we need so much.”

-All men, since women and even female animals are barred from Athos. -There are perhaps 150 million Orthodox Christians, compared with 558 million Roman Catholics, 264 million Protestants. -Although Theodosios appears to have the best claim to the title, there are five other clerics who call themselves Patriarch of Antioch: a Latin Rite Roman Catholic, a Catholic Melkite, a Maronite, a Syrian Jacobite and a Syrian Catholic. None of them live in Antakya, the sleepy Turkish town that now occupies Antioch’s ancient site.