2010-5
26

When bishops brawled: An interview with Philip Jenkins

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Philip Jenkins

Have you ever had a fist fight about the natures of Christ? If you have, you would fit right in among ancient Christians, says this church historian.

Christians today may take it on faith that Jesus has both human and divine natures, but any church historian will tell you that in the early church the question sparked a wild and even deadly debate that lasted for centuries, centering on three church councils in the mid-400s.

Professor Philip Jenkins, who studies Christianity both ancient and modern, devotes a whole book to the story, but there’s more to it than just airy theological questions. Scheming bishops, monastic militias, and the imperial court all played their parts, along with a healthy dose of chance.

“When you look at history, you realize that what we think of as orthodoxy gets established only gradually by a long series of events, which seem to be almost random,” says Jenkins of the story he tells in Jesus Wars (HarperOne, 2010). “Is it pure chance or, looking at it in a good Old Testament way, is it providence?”

Theological questions aside, Jenkins argues that ancient conflict among Christians contributed to the rapid spread of Islam in the seventh century in what had been the heartland of Christianity. “Where did Islam come from? You cannot understand how Islam appears in the seventh century unless you understand the world of the divided churches,” he says. “A lot of problems that we think about as modern actually go back 1,500 years or more.”

Your new book is called Jesus Wars. Why would you describe the debate over the natures of Christ as a war?

For several hundred years, especially in the 400s and following centuries, the whole world revolved around literal and figurative wars over who Jesus was. That basic question ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people during the fifth century.

What were they fighting about?

The basic question was: Who is Christ? Today we have the phrase “fully God and fully human.” But when you think that through, you end up with a lot of questions, which maybe we don’t pursue logically anymore.

For example there’s the common belief that Mary is the mother of God. Does that mean that Mary was literally and directly the mother of the God who created the universe? Does that mean when Jesus was a toddler crawling around on the floor, he was God?

If you worship Christ, what are you worshiping? If Christ is God, then you worship him as you worship God, but he’s not really somebody you can identify with. If Christ is just human, then you’re worshiping a man, and you do not have access to the full power of God.

This sounds like a debate for theologians. Did common people really care?

Back then, good Christians understood that if your bishop believed something that was flat wrong, you would pay for it in direct terms. There would be floods and famine and earthquakes. Why was there an earthquake that killed 10,000 people, as there was in ancient Antioch? Well, it’s obviously because the bishop believed this weird nonsense about Christ.

It mattered to the politicians, too. The Roman Empire was in crisis in the fifth century: This was the time of the great barbarian invasions. Everyone’s wondering which part of the Roman Empire would collapse next. How did you know you’d done something wrong? You lost your next battle with Attila the Hun.

Theological ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. The toughest thing to explain to people in the fifth century would be the difference between politics and religion. They would see the distinction as meaningless. Religion was about God and how God took care of the world, including how God rewarded and punished states.

So people talked about this on the streets?

Famous passages from Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries claim that if you asked the baker for a couple of loaves, you’d get a lecture on whether the Son is greater than the Father in the Trinity. If you went to a bank and asked for the exchange rate, they would explain that the Holy Spirit comes forth from the Father and from the Son.

How much understanding people had, we don’t know. But they certainly knew the slogans.

How did Christians line up?

There were basically two parties, which I call “one-nature” and “two-nature.” The one-nature believers emphasized the divine character of Christ. Some of them just said simply that Christ is God, though there are variations. We generally call these people Monophysites.

The two-nature believers argued that divine and human both exist within Christ but are not fully merged. These people tend to get called “Nestorians” after a bishop named Nestorius, who was condemned as a heretic, though he would probably be considered orthodox today.

Both sides tended to exaggerate how weird the other was. The two-nature believers looked at the one-nature folks and said they believed that Christ is God merely visiting earth as a tourist. The Monophysites said that two-nature believers must think Christ has multiple personalities, divine and human.


How did people show what side they were on?

This sounds very modern, but it was like being a fan of a particular sports team. The big social events in the Roman cities, especially Constantinople, were chariot races, and people started wearing different colors. You were either a blue (two-nature) or a green (one-nature).

These groups were basically like soccer hooligans or street gangs, but were also connected with political factions. Sometimes tensions erupted and people were killed in riots and protests.


Were there any religious “weapons”?

Christians at this time had strict rules that people had to share the same beliefs to be part of the same church. If they weren’t, they were heretics and you couldn’t share Communion with them. If the bishop had a different view from his people, nobody would take Communion with him.

Ancient Christians would be appalled that bishops today are not excluding more people from Communion. Denying Communion was a standard tactic.

Sometimes Communion was even forced on people. In one story soldiers grabbed nuns of one faction in Constantinople and basically forced Communion into their mouths. The nuns literally took Communion kicking and screaming. One man became famous as Cyrus the Spitter, because he spit out the host, which then got him tortured to death.

Interestingly that is how the fight is taking place today in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and the role of women. Many African bishops are refusing to share Communion with bishops of churches they disagree with because the Africans do not see the other bishops as orthodox.

Why were these questions arising at this point in history?

A large part of it was connected with establishment. Christianity received toleration in 313, but then the empire had to decide which particular part of Christianity it was going to tolerate. In the fourth century the Roman Empire got more specific about who it recognized as legitimately Christian. There was a lot at stake, because once you said that somebody was not legitimately Christian, they didn’t have the right to have church buildings and would have to operate secretly.
The world became a lot less tolerant as the fourth century went on. In 385 the Roman Empire executed its first heretic, and by the 430s people talked about burning heretics quite regularly. By the year 500 your life depended on whether you were the right kind of Christian.


Was there more than just a theological debate going on?

A large part of this was power politics. Today we are used to a Christian world that has two main historical “centers”: Rome (Catholic) and Constantinople (Orthodox). That’s how it’s been since the 800s. But in the fourth century the bishops of cities like Antioch and Jerusalem and Alexandria in Egypt were also powerful and important. So there was a lot of jockeying about for power.

The Alexandrian bishops can be compared to the Soprano crime family. Their greatest representative was Cyril, but there was a series of powerful, savvy Alexandrian bishops. The patriarchs conspired especially against Constantinople, the imperial capital, but also against anyone who stood in their way.

How do we know about the politics?

Nestorius, who was bishop of Constantinople, shows up in most seminary training as the fall guy for something called the “Nestorian heresy,” even though he was almost certainly not a heretic and would have been very much in tune with modern Catholics.

In the year 431 he’s condemned at the First Council of Ephesus and thrown out of power. Sources written by his enemies say his tongue rotted out and he died, but he actually went into exile and wrote a juicy autobiography, which didn’t turn up in the West until the 19th century.

In it he almost literally tells where the bodies are buried. It’s like he’s writing live from a couple of big church councils: who’s bribing whom, who’s on whose side. It makes for great reading, though he’s certainly not unbiased.

What about the bishop of Rome?

The pope at the time, Leo the Great, is an interesting one. Two years after the Council of Chalcedon (451), which decided the question of the natures of Christ based on a treatise he allegedly authored, Leo wrote a wonderful letter asking if someone could tell him what happened at the council. He couldn’t get anything he could read. He didn’t understand a word of Greek, and all the theological debates were in Greek.

Rome was a heavyweight name, but when the Romans showed up at the councils, they didn’t speak the language and had to rely on bad translations.

Rome was on the make at this time. From the 370s to the 440s, everything that we think of in terms of the papacy was coming into existence. That’s when popes really emphasized being the heir of Peter. One reason they pushed so hard was because they were in a distant corner of the Roman world. Power was in Constantinople, and Rome could fall any day to the barbarians. Papal claims escalated as the pope’s real power declined.

You point out in your book that monks also played an important role.

Monasticism was fairly new at this point. It emerged in the third and fourth centuries, and by the fifth there were literally large armies of monks, especially in Egypt, fanatically devoted to the church and willing to be turned out as clerical militias at a council. An Islamic militia in Iraq or Somalia today is a good analogy. And that doesn’t mean they were out-of-control monks; they were doing what they should have been doing, literally fighting for the church.

The monks also reflected a turning point in social history. The Roman Empire was clean and well-washed; people took baths. But by the fifth century a lot of Christians started thinking that cleanliness was the opposite of godliness. The less you washed, the holier you were.

Imagine what an ancient council must have been like on a hot August day on the Mediterranean, with several hundred monks who had never washed. The smell must have been unbelievable.

How did church councils work?

Think of the U.S. Congress. When you have a debate in the Senate you know exactly how many senators there are, exactly what the rules are, how many senators you need to avoid a filibuster.

In church councils you knew none of the above. Councils didn’t meet regularly, so there was often nobody around to remember what happened last time.

There’s no set number of bishops at a council. In the ancient world nobody even knew how many bishops there were. The standard guess is 1,200, but nobody really knew, then or now, because in North Africa you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a bishop.

It was also the ancient world, so not everyone could get there; there were Huns and other barbarians on the road. If you got 200 or 300 bishops, you were doing pretty well.

There were no formal voting procedures either. Things were done in a kind of ritualized acclamation, more like North Korea than the U.S. Congress. Some of the shouts actually are more like cheers: “Glory to the great Bishop Cyril, the Holy Spirit speaks through him! He’s the 13th apostle, let’s hear it for Cyril!”

Any council was likely to spawn a dissident minority, which was going to put in its own report. Then everything went to the emperor, and both sides would lobby and bribe him furiously.

How did all this result in a resolution? We’re obviously not fighting about the two natures of Christ today.

The issue came to a head in 428, when Nestorius became bishop of Constantinople. Between 428 and 431 he gave a couple of sermons that basically divided the Christian world in a mere three years.

He infuriated the Alexandrians, and in 431 they called the First Council of Ephesus to condemn Nestorius. The Alexandrians, who were Monophysites, said Nestorius leaned too far toward two-nature thinking, though later Nestorius agreed to what we today would call orthodox Catholic doctrine.

In 431 the council started, but a large chunk of the bishops, 50 or 60, didn’t turn up from Antioch and the other eastern cities, where two-nature theology was strongest. One theory is weather; another is they were afraid of being beaten up by monks. So they took a leisurely couple of months to make a trip that should have only taken them about a week.

Meanwhile, in Ephesus on the Mediterranean, it was very hot. Bishops were starting to die regularly from heat. So they condemned Nestorius, sending a friendly letter to him which they began, “Dear Judas.”

Finally the other bishops showed up, and they excommunicated the bishops who excommunicated Nestorius. After a while you needed flash cards to figure out who excommunicated whom. The controversy migrated to Constantinople, where everyone was trying to lobby the emperor.

Finally the Cyril faction brought out a famous one-nature holy man, Dalmatius, a monk who hadn’t left his cell in years, and paraded him through the city, which caused a riot and basically forced the emperor to give in. Nestorius was out of office.

So Alexandria won?

For the moment. Over the next few years, the Monophysites became more and more extreme until finally some of them claimed Christ is just God and not human. There was a fight over this that led to the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, where a large group of monks showed up to intimidate anyone who opposed the bishop of Alexandria. If any bishop or priest on the other side tried to write an accurate account of the proceedings, a bunch of monks would take the pen out of his hands and break his fingers.

It was so violent and dangerous that the monks actually beat the patriarch of Constantinople to death. Today it’s called the Robber Council or the Gangster Synod.

The Egyptians basically moved the ecclesiastical world away from Rome and Constantinople. It looked like it was going to be a Monophysite world based in Alexandria.

How is it that we’re not following the pope of Alexandria today?

It seemed like nothing could go wrong until one day the emperor, Theodosius II, was out riding and his horse tripped and the emperor died. If you were a good medieval Catholic Christian, you absolutely believed that God made that horse trip. There was a new emperor, and more to the point, a new empress who happened to believe some very “blue,” two-nature ideas, very Roman ideas.

What role did the new empress play?

Her name was Pulcheria, and she was the sister of the emperor who fell off the horse. And for about 30 years she was the guiding force in preserving what we today call Catholic Christianity.

As a teenage girl, Pulcheria was very pious and wanted to be a nun. She ran a whole cult of holy virgins around herself, as if she was the Virgin Mary. People addressed hymns to her. If any woman did this sort of thing several hundred years later in Christian Europe, she probably would have been burned at the stake as a witch.

Pulcheria was the one who did all the behind-the-scenes battling first against Nestorius, whose theology of the Virgin Mary wasn’t exalted enough for her, and finally against Cyril and the Monophysites. She came to power in 450 and ended up as the standard bearer of Catholic Christianity.

Under Pulcheria’s influence, the new emperor, her husband, Marcian, called the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which defined the orthodox doctrine of the two natures of Christ. The formula was allegedly written by Pope Leo in “Leo’s Tome.” Chalcedon reversed the results of the Gangster Synod. Nestorius was still out of favor, but the Egyptians also lost.

That’s very important in lots of ways. For one thing it meant that the heart of the Christian world would be Constantinople and Rome, not Alexandria. If these things had worked out differently, the heart of Christianity would have moved back to Alexandria.

So a nasty accident led to an amazing revolution. No one in Alexandria could believe it, because they held all the wealth and power. I’m surprised that Rome doesn’t have a statue to the imperial horse that tripped, because that accident preserved the papacy.

What happened after Chalcedon?

Over the next 100 years all the oldest, most established churches, all the churches with the most direct links to the apostles, went in different directions as separate churches.

One set of churches became what we call Nestorian, which for several centuries were among the most sucessful Christian missionaries. They went to India, China, and Central Asia. Between 800 and 900 they were by far the most successful branch of Christianity in the world.

The Monophysites took a large chunk of Syria and Egypt. They had the greatest scholarship, the greatest connections with the New Testament, but they were all labeled heretical.

What was left was a rump, a small portion, and that’s what becomes European Christianity.

What if that horse hadn’t tripped?

Let’s pretend that Emperor Theodosius had lived and Chalcedon had not happened. What it would have meant is that most of the Middle Eastern churches-Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia-would have stayed at the heart of the Roman Empire; maybe Italy and France would have peeled off, but nobody would have cared because they were so marginal to the story. It’s quite possible that the center of the church would have moved to Alexandria.

And if the empire still held the Middle East, it probably would not have succumbed to Islam. But when the Muslims came in the seventh century, the Nestorians and Monophysites, who were oppressed by the Catholic emperors, welcomed them as liberators because the Muslims preached and, until the 13th century, practiced religious toleration. As long as you paid taxes they didn’t care what you believed.


What are the lessons from those ancient fights for Christians today?

When you actually pin down what the two sides disagreed about in the fifth century, so much of it depended on a few words or even letters. One huge debate is over a single Greek letter, which determined whether Christ was “in” two natures or “from” two natures. Christians literally were killing each other over it, and they didn’t realize that Islam was about to overtake them.

I do not mean that Christians should unite against other religions or feel that Islam is a particularly dangerous threat in that way; that was just the particular historical circumstance. What I mean is that people should recognize the great deal they have in common before they start seeing each other as enemies.

The other lesson is probably how you see your enemies in debates like this. There is a danger in so exaggerating them that you create monsters. Your “enemy” is someone you may not necessarily have that much against when you really think about it.

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of U.S. Catholic (vol. 75, no. 2, pages 18-23).

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2010-5
25

St. Glyceria – Virginmartyr at Heraclea

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St. Glyceria suffered as a martyr for her faith in Christ in the second century during the persecutions against Christians under Emperor Antoninus. She came from an illustrious family, and her father, Macarius, was a high-ranking Roman official. Later, the family moved to the Thracian city of Trajanopolis.

St. Glyceria lost both her father and mother at an early age. Befriending some Christians, she converted to the true Faith and visited the church every day. Sabinus, the prefect of Trajanopolis, received the imperial edict ordering Christians to offer sacrifice to idols, and designated a certain day for the citizens to worship the idol, Zeus.

St. Glyceria made firm her decision to suffer for Christ. She told her fellow Christians of her intentions and begged them to pray that the Lord would give her the strength to undergo suffering. On the appointed day, St. Glyceria made the Sign of the Cross on her forehead and went to the pagan temple.

The saint stood on a raised spot in the rays of the sun, and removed the veil from her head, showing the holy Cross traced on her forehead. She prayed fervently to God to bring the pagans to their senses and destroy the stone idol of Zeus. Suddenly, thunder was heard, and the statue of Zeus crashed to the floor and smashed into little pieces.

In a rage, Sabinus and the pagan priests ordered that St. Glyceria be pelted with stones, but the stones did not touch her. St. Glyceria was then locked in prison, where the priest Philokrates came to her and encouraged the martyr in the struggle before her.

In the morning, when the tortures had started, an angel suddenly appeared, and they torturers fell to the ground in terror. When the vision vanished, Sabinus, who was hardly able to speak, ordered that St. Glyceria be thrown back into prison.

They shut the door securely and sealed it with the prefect’s own ring, so that no one could get in. However, angels of God brought St. Glyceria food and drink. Several days later, Sabinus came to the prison and removed the seal. Going in to the cell,, he was shaken when he saw that Glyceria was alive and well.

Setting off for the city of Heraclea in Thrace, Sabinus gave orders to bring St. Glyceria with them. Bishop Dometius and the Christians of Heraclea came out to meet her and prayed that the Lord would strengthen the saint to endure martyrdom.

At Heraclea, St. Glyceria was thrown into a red-hot furnace, but the fire was extinguished at once by an invisible force. The prefect then gave orders to rip the skin from St Glyceria’s head. She was then thrown into a cell with sharp stones. She prayed incessantly, and at midnight an angel appeared and healed her of her wounds.

When the jailer, Laodicius, came for the saint in the morning, he did not recognize her. Thinking that the martyr had been taken away, he feared he would be punished for letting her escape. He tried to kill himself, but St. Glyceria stopped him. Shaken by the miracle, Laodicius believed in the true God, and he asked the saint to pray that he might suffer and die for Christ with her.

“Follow Christ and you will be saved,” the holy martyr replied. Laodicius placed upon himself the chains with which the saint was bound, and at trial told the prefect and everyone present about the miraculous healing of St. Glyceria by an angel, and confessed himself a Christian. For his belief in Christ, Laodicius was beheaded by the sword. Christians secretly took up his remains, and reverently buried them.

St. Glyceria was sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts. She went to her execution with great joy, but the lioness set loose upon the saint meekly crawled up to her and lay at her feet. Finally, the saint prayed to the Lord, imploring that He take her unto Himself. In answer, she heard a Voice from Heaven, summoning her to heavenly bliss. At that moment, another lioness was set loose upon her. It pounced on St. Glyceria and killed her, but did not tear her apart. Bishop Dometius and the Christians of Heraclea reverently buried her.

St. Glyceria suffered for Christ around the year 177, Commemorated on May 13. Her holy relics were glorified with a flow of healing myrrh.

St. Glyceria, whose name means “sweetness,” now rejoices in the unending sweetness of the heavenly Kingdom.

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2010-5
24

Met. Athanasios of Lemesou (Cyprus) Speaks Out of Upcoming Visit of Pope to Cyprus

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UPDATED VERSION

Metropolitan Athanasios of Lemesou

In an interview published on, May 23, 2010 in the Cypriot Newspaper “Phileleftheros” the Metropolitan distances himself from the Archbishop’s decision to host the Pope in Cyprus.

The following are excerpts from the interview:

“For us Orthodox, the Pope is a heretic, outside of the Church, and, hence, not even a bishop”.

“He [the Pope] has been outside of the Church for ten centuries now, he is not a canonical bishop, he has no relation whatsoever to the reality of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ. It is one thing to receive him as a canonical bishop and quite another to speak to him as [being] a heterodox in order to reveal to him the truth of the Orthodox Faith and Tradition.”

“Dialogue is not a bad thing when it is carried out based on correct presuppositions. However, it is wrong to say to these people that we recognize them as a Church, that we recognize the Pope as a Bishop, as our brother in Christ in the priesthood and in [the] faith. I cannot accept this, because we are lying [when we say this], since all of the Holy Fathers teach exactly the opposite. Papism is a heresy and the source of many other heresies which trouble the entire world today. A contemporary Saint of the Church, Saint Justin Popovich, said that in the history of the human race there have been three tragic falls: of the first-formed Adam, of the disciple of Christ, Judas, and of the Pope, who, when he was the first Bishop of the Church, fell from the apostolic faith, was cut off from the canonical Church and lured away a host of people with him until today.”

“God is one and the Church of God is one, and that is why we say in the Symbol of Faith [that we believe] “in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” This is the Orthodox Church, there do not exist many Churches.”

“When I say to the other that it doesn’t matter that you are catholic and that we all belong to the same Church, I am playing with him [or mocking him] since all of the Holy Fathers teach that the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ is one.”

“The Orthodox Church preserves the faith of the Apostles and the experience of the prophets unshakeable up until our own days. The Papists, unfortunately, from the time when they were cut off from the Church added many heretics dogmas to their [confession of] faith, changed the Symbol of Faith [the Nicene Creed] and above all elevated the Pope to the level of being the eminent and unique representative of God on earth.”

“When you add things to the Symbol of Faith that the Holy Fathers did not write, and many other false teachings, this is heresy. This is the reality of things.”

Q: Why would the Church and her flock be scandalized by the impending visit to the island by Pope Benedict XVI ?

I believe that the Pope’s visit to Cyprus will cause several problems to the conscience of many pious Christians. It would be better if he did not come, because I believe that it will not benefit us in any way, given that I have not seen any positive intervention by the Vatican until now, with regard to our national issues. Enough unrest has already been caused, which was not something we needed at this point in time.


Q: Are we in danger from something?

I am not saying that we are in danger with the arrival of the Pope, or that we will betray our Faith or that the Orthodox Church will be subdued. It has merely given rise to various circles of (schismatic) Old Calendarists to accuse us of being compliant, of having lapsed from the principles of the Orthodox Faith and quite a number of questions have been raised in many people. Of course the Pope was invited by the President of the Republic and the Archbishop gave his consent.

Q: Did you discuss this with the Holy Synod?

In the last Synod, the matter of our presence -or not- in events with the Pope was brought up. I had refused to participate and said that we knew nothing. We learnt about the Pope’s arrival from the newspapers.

Q: Do you usually learn the news from the newspapers?

The Archbishop of Cyprus has increased privileges and we definitely do not want him to interfere in our affairs. We do however preserve our personal right to say that we did not know that the Pope was coming, and that if asked, I would personally have declared “no”, because it would have caused a scandal in the souls of innocent pious Christian Orthodox, the way we are seeing it happening.

Q: Shouldn’t there be any communication between the Churches? We are living in the 21st century; we are in the European Union.

We can have dialogues with any person, even more so with the heterodox and those of other religions. But it is one thing for a dialogue to take place, and another to receive the Pope as a canonical Bishop, who, for us Orthodox, is a heretic, outside of the Church, and, hence, not even a bishop .


Q: On account of the Schism?

He [the Pope] has been outside of the Church for ten centuries now, he is not a canonical bishop, he has no relation whatsoever to the reality of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ. It is one thing to receive him as a canonical bishop and quite another to speak to him as [being] a heterodox in order to reveal to him the truth of the Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

Q: The Ecumenical Patriarch has met with the Pope and a dialogue has already begun between the Churches.

As I said, dialogue is not a bad thing when it is carried out based on correct presuppositions. However, it is wrong to say to these people that we recognize them as a Church, that we recognize the Pope as a Bishop, as our brother in Christ in the priesthood and in [the] faith. I cannot accept this, because we are lying [when we say this], since all of the Holy Fathers teach exactly the opposite. Papism is a heresy and the source of many other heresies which trouble the entire world today. A contemporary Saint of the Church, Saint Justin Popovich, said that in the history of the human race there have been three tragic falls: of the first-formed Adam, of the disciple of Christ, Judas, and of the Pope, who, when he was the first Bishop of the Church, fell from the apostolic faith, was cut off from the canonical Church and lured away a host of people with him until today.

Q: What does the Pope say about the Orthodox?

The Pope said that we Orthodox are a deficient Church…

Q: God is One…

Yes, God is One and the Church of God is one, and that is why we say in the Symbol of Faith [that we believe] “in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” This is the Orthodox Church, there do not exist many Churches.


Q: Isn’t it egotistic, to regard that it is “only us”?

It is not egotistic. When, for example, you say that “Italians aren’t Greek” – which is a truth – you do not offend the other. By saying to the other that it doesn’t matter that you are Catholic and that we all belong to the same Church, I am playing with him [or mocking him] since all of the Holy Fathers teach that the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ is one.


Q: Why is that one Church ours, and not the Papist one?

Because the Orthodox Church preserves the faith of the Apostles and the experience of the prophets unshakeable up until our own days. The Papists, unfortunately, from the time when they were cut off from the Church added many heretic dogmas to their [confession of] faith, changed the Symbol of Faith [the Nicene Creed] and above all elevated the Pope to the level of being the eminent and unique representative of God on earth. They claim that the Pope is infallible, and that whoever has no communion with the Pope has no communion with God. They teach these things officially, from within their Synods.

When you add things to the Symbol of Faith that the Holy Fathers did not write, and many other false teachings, this is heresy. This is the reality of things.


Q: How does the Orthodox Church encounter/deal with heretics?

With much love. We love the Pope, we love the papists just as we love every person; we do not despise them, we do not reject them as persons, but we do not accept [their] heresy, we do not accept the false teachings, we do not accept [their] delusions. It is because we love them that we must tell them the truth.

Q: Of course each one has his own truth…

That is why the dialogue takes place – to prove on the basis of historical sources which Church has preserved the apostolic faith and the apostolic experience of the Saints.

Q: Do you think that the Dialogue can produce results?

It can, if it is done properly and based on the right presuppositions. Unfortunately, as it is carried out today, it does not produce results, and that is why they have carried on discussions for so many years without coming to any conclusions.

Q: Each one listens only to himself?

They should have embarked on the dialogue by securing themselves behind the Holy Bible with humility and love, and with the aim to prove Christ’s Truth. That way, things would be much easier.

Q: Isn’t the dialogue taking place with humility and love?

I don’t know, I am not participating in the dialogues, but I haven’t seen any significant results coming out of the decisions being reached. There is a movement which circulates books opposing the Pope and they are preparing protests. None of these things finds me in agreement. There should be no displays of unseemliness, no rudeness, no bad behaviour; it is another thing to express our opinion – after all, we are living in a democratic polity – and another thing to resort to ugly measures. Frankly, and before all, I disagree with the coming of the Pope to Cyprus and I say with my whole soul that the Pope is a heretic, he is not a bishop, he is not an Orthodox Christian and this is what the Holy Fathers say. If I am wrong, I am ready to be corrected, but on the basis of the Holy Fathers, not based on the mindset of globalization. Just because I disagree does not mean that I am being disorderly and am outside the Church [as some have claimed].

Q: With these statements of yours, aren’t you kindling a flame in those who are already being scandalized by the Pope’s visit?

Whatever we have to say, we say it with every responsibility and sincerity; we are not setting fires, because I do not wish to otherwise be presented as agreeing and lightheartedly accepting the Papal presence in Cyprus. The Archbishop confronted our differences in a very democratic manner during the Synod.

Q: Did you agree to the Archbishop’s visit to the Vatican?

We weren’t asked, but neither is he obliged to ask us. We were informed by the newspapers. What did his visit to the Vatican result in?


Q: I don’t know. Didn’t he inform you?

He informed us, but I personally didn’t have any special interest. The Pope always speaks in a formal manner, says things which are customary [to his position], as he will say now that he will come to Cyprus, but he will do nothing of essence, because he is not the leader of the Church but a political person who cannot come into conflict with the political establishment and system. Did the Pope ever speak up for the Orthodox Church? We have had so many conquerors – when did he ever defend us? Not to mention that during the Frankish rule we suffered under the Popes and the Papal Bulls that wanted to exterminate us. This evening we had celebrated the 13 holy martyrs of Kantara, who were killed by order of the Vatican. We spent 400 years in cruel slavery during the Frankish reign… But I will not go back [to the past]. The reasons I am reacting today are purely theological. When I was consecrated a bishop I pledged to preserve the Orthodox Faith.

Q: Aren’t the priests who will be receiving the Pope preserving the Orthodox Faith?

The Apostle Paul said that those who eat idol-offerings should not censure those who do not. So do I not judge those who will participate, but I likewise do not want to be censured because of my non-participation.

Q: Last Sunday an encyclical by the Holy Synod was read in the churches and it made an impression on the people, when the names of the Conciliar hierarchs were cited, one by one.

All of us decided to issue an encyclical addressed to the people exhorting them to remain joined to their Church, to not listen to the (schismatic) Old Calendarists who want to break them away from the canonical Church. What was not clarified in the encyclical was that not all of us were informed and in agreement with the invitation towards the Pope.

Q: Why do you think that the Pope is coming to Cyprus?

As you can understand, the Papists are going through a serious crisis with all the scandals that have seen the light of publicity.

Q: Pederasty (child molesting)?

…I don’t wish to name them, but every day the Press does publish very sorrowful things… I am not censuring, but the Pope is under the impression that he is the first and only Vicar of Christ on Earth, and that is why he is on such missions.

Q: The Pope said that he wants to make a pilgrimage following the steps of the Apostle Paul.

Except that the Apostle Paul didn’t move about in a bulletproof car which cost 500,000 euros, which, I read, was to be purchased by the Cypriot government for the Pope to travel around Cyprus for the two days he will be here. I was personally quite scandalized by this news and said that a bulletproof car does not befit a Vicar of Christ…. And for the people to have to bear such a cost, in the midst of an economic crisis…

Q: The announcement from the representatives of the Pope says that he is coming to Cyprus in order to promote human and Christian values and principles, and that he wants to walk in the steps of the Apostle Paul and in a spirit of the brotherhood meet the Orthodox Church with a good disposition.

We do not doubt his good intention – may it be that this is the case. May it be that he resembles the Apostle Paul and acquaints himself with the wealth of the Orthodox Church. We pray that he returns to the Orthodox Church and becomes once again an Orthodox Bishop as he was before the Schism. This alone is the proper path to unity.


Q: What do you think is the hidden agenda?

The Vatican does not perform random actions or make naive moves. Every tour of each Pope has as its aim to present him as the worldwide leader of Christianity. At the moment, however, he is neither a canonical Bishop, nor Orthodox, so that he is not in a position to present himself as having first place as a Bishop.

Q: Could there be hidden political interests here?

I don’t know; I believe that we [the Cypriot people] have nothing to gain politically from the visit of the Pope – only a lot of expenses and an immense upheaval in the conscience of the faithful.

Q: The Archbishop said that all those who disagree will be placing themselves outside the Church.

I am not aware of the Archbishop’s statements, but I don’t think that whoever disagrees with the coming of the Pope places himself outside the Church. I disagree, and I am stating it boldly, and I am not outside the Church.

Wait!

The Church, like the Archbishop himself stresses, has a democratic polity; it is a different thing to argue in a dignified manner and another, to resort to unbecoming behaviour.

Translation: P.H. & A.N.

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2010-5
23

Evangelical Worlds Apart

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Frank Schaeffer

By:
BILL SHERMAN World Religion Writer

5/22/2010

The son of Francis Schaeffer, one of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last century, is now a sharp critic of the evangelical world in which he was raised.

Best-selling novelist Frank Schaeffer grew up in the shadow of his father in L’Abri, a Christian community in Switzerland that drew thousands of young seekers from around the world.

His father’s fame brought him into contact with top Christian and political leaders, and he went on to become a poster child for the evangelical movement.

Then, in his 30s, he left the evangelical world, later joining the Eastern Orthodox church.

He tells the story in his book, “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.”

Schaeffer spoke Thursday night at the annual meeting of the Tulsa Interfaith Alliance, held at All Souls Unitarian Church. Below is an edited version of an interview earlier that day:

Do you consider yourself a born-again Christian?

I grew up in a family where the quote-unquote, born-again experience was minimized. Dad did not preach the born-again experience in the way some evangelicals do. He would have said that is a very typically American frontier religion, something new to Protestant Christianity. Martin Luther and John Calvin would not have known what you were talking about. That said, I was a very sincere believer as a child.

What is your position on the authority of Scripture?

I believe that the holy mysteries are really holy mysteries and one of them is the balance between the revelation of God through Scripture and the fact that we can’t actually make an intellectual construct of who God is.

Most theology, to be perfectly honest, is just people making excuses for a God they don’t fully understand and trying to figure out how things work. Which is fine, but let’s not mistake our words about God for actually knowing about God.

Do you still agree with your father’s theology?

People think that I’ve shifted my opinion, and in some ways I have, but in other ways, I’m still very much my dad’s son.

I find his cultural analysis very pertinent. For example, the bankruptcy of the extreme left he saw very clearly, with people like Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and others.

He was a better man than his theology. For example, on the issue of homosexuality, he had a right-wing position. In practice, gay people were completely welcomed in L’Abri. He treated them with tremendous compassion and openness.

He could never be identified with the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons and the Anita Bryants.

When Anita Bryant came to his house for lunch to enlist his help in her campaign to ban gays from teaching in schools, he actually threw her out of the house because he thought she was so uncompassionate and un-Christ-like.

Only on the issue of abortion did his views overlap with the religious right. On every other issue, he was a progressive.

Why did you begin to doubt the validity of the evangelical world view?

My own journey away from my background in some ways has a lot less to do with faith than it has to do with politics. In the latter part of my father’s life, we got lumped into what came to be known as the religious right because of our involvement in the Protestant pro-life movement, which he and I were very instrumental in beginning through book projects like, “How Then Shall We Live.”

I was the keynote speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Religious Broadcasters convention. Jerry Falwell lent me his jet to fly around the country.

In the mid-1980s, I realized I didn’t really belong there. I’d seen the inside of the machine.

When I got out, it was not a theological statement, saying I no longer believe this. It was actually to save my soul, in that I was going to become one of these flakes who is chasing power and money. It wasn’t where my heart was at.

I just left. I said, I’m a Christian. I’m trying to follow Christ. What I’m not going to be is an evangelical leader. This is not my deal. Whatever this is, it is wrecking my life. For me, the path to atheism was Christian leadership.

Are you still pro-life?

Yes and no. Yes, in that I believe that a human life is a sacred thing. No, in that I don’t think the answer to having fewer abortions is necessarily a legal and political one. I think it’s one where we create a climate that appreciates life and helps women and helps families in a practical sense.

I voted for Barack Obama believing that some of his social programs would actually do more to help people not have abortions than all the talk from pro-life Republicans, who in 35 years of dominating American politics, never actually did much for people other than say they were against abortion.

Why did you join the Eastern Orthodox Church?

For a while I did nothing, but eventually I realized I was a religious person, a believer, and I wanted to go to church somewhere on Sunday.

I felt more comfortable with a more liturgical, less personality-based form of worship. I like the noncommercial, nonentertainment culture. Quieter, less rationalistic. A lot of that is just personal taste. I don’t say anybody else is wrong.

You’ve called today’s religious right dangerous. More than half of Oklahomans self-identify as evangelicals. Are you calling them dangerous?

No, not at all. Where evangelicals are dangerous is not as individuals but as a bloc, voting for the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

They’re dangerous because they simplify politics down to a couple issues.

I think the evangelical community, in terms of politics, has really painted itself into a corner. It’s very dangerous to have a series of moralistic litmus tests that you apply to people on the basis of voting.

For instance, having had a son in the Marine Corps getting shot at in Afghanistan, I look at who the commander in chief is, and I have a lot more at stake than how he votes on gay rights and abortion. I’d like to know, is he competent? Is he intelligent? Is he decent? Is he honest? Will he govern well? Is he going to make a good commander in chief?

I fault the evangelical leaders like James Dobson, who so narrow their focus to a few moral issues that we have consistently voted for some very mediocre or worse leadership.

I’m not saying the left doesn’t do the same thing. Both have their litmus tests. But evangelicals give it that religious fervor, which has really hurt our country. It’s just crazy.

Are you still happy with Barack Obama?

Yes I am. I think health-care reform is necessary. I think he has conducted the war far better than George W. Bush. He’s a much better commander in chief than Bush. I think the Republicans are in for a nasty surprise in November.

Are you concerned about the tea party movement?

No. I’m just concerned when people vote with religious fervor on nonreligious issues. Not everything is a moral crusade.

I’m concerned about nonfact-based discussions. Barack Obama is not the anti-Christ. He was not born on a different planet. If policy gets discussed in those kinds of crazy terms, we’re in real trouble.

There’s just been too much nonsense coming from the far right, which reminds me, by the way, of the tone and debate that came from the left during the ’60s and ’70s. We’re living in an age of right-wing radicalism that is just as anti-American, if not more so, fundamentally hating this country, as what came from the left in the late ’60s. It’s that same shrill demonizing of the opposition.

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2010-5
22

Ecumenical Patriarch on Theotokos

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The sweet victory of Mary

It is considered the most beautiful Marian hymn of all time. For fifteen centuries the Christians of the Churches of Byzantine tradition have recited it in thanks to the Virgin and to ask her to safeguard them in the faith of the Apostles. 30DAYS asked Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, to comment on the Akathist.

An interview By Gianni Valente

When the barbarians laid siege to Constantinople, its citizens invoked the help of Mary, to whom the city was consecrated. And after enjoying her protection, they thanked her with songs and vigils in her name. All night long the people sang the Akathist, the great hymn to the Mother of God, by an unknown author. When finally the Byzantine Empire fell, the patriarch George Scholarios addressed Mary and told her that the faithful would no longer importune her to save the city, but would continue to invoke her so that she safeguard them always in the faith of the Fathers.

Still today the Christians of the Eastern Churches of Byzantine tradition address their entreaties and thanks to Mary through the Akathist. For fifteen centuries, individual and communal recital of the hymn has worked as a precious means of safeguarding them in the simple faith of the apostles. The only worthwhile treasure, even today when there are no Christian empires.

In the interview that follows 30Days asks Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, to comment on what many consider the most beautiful Marian hymn of all time. In which all the mysteries that the liturgy proposes at Christmastime are contemplated.

Your Holiness, what does the Akathist mean to you?

Bartholomew I: It is one of the most beautiful and most frequently used hymns in the Orthodox Church, one that deeply moves the soul of every believer. It is read each day in the holy monasteries during the office of Compline, and the majority of monks and many devout lay people know it by heart and recite it to themselves, in the happy or painful circumstances of life. It is above all a prayer of praise and forcefully expresses the feelings of awe, devotion, hope, faith and charity of every soul toward the All-holy Mother of God.

What the Akathist hymn is for every Orthodox believer, it is also personally for us. It doesn’t have a character limited in time. It’s true that, according to Tradition, it was composed and sung for the first time at a concrete historical moment, during a vigil, by the people of Constantinople standing on their feet (akathistos means precisely “not sitting”), as an act of thanksgiving because the city – then dominant – had been saved from enemy invasion. But the devout heart of every believer feels that this prayer is valid for every happy or sad event, whether personal or communal. And it is recited every day with a feeling of awakened relevance. For the soul of believers, who place all their faith in the help of the All-holy Mother of God, the historical juncture for which the hymn was written is not important, but only belief in the help that comes from the Ever-Virgin Mary and the certain hope that, as happened then, so also now the same help is granted to those who invoke Her. Indeed, in the last series of tropes of the Akathist, the faithful fiercely beg the All-holy to deliver them all from all evil. Thus trust in her efficacy for the believers of all periods is clearly expressed.

What is the Akathist hymn shaped on?

Bartholomew I: The Akathist belongs to the category of hymns called “Kontakia”. It’s composed, as is known, of twenty-four units known as “Oikoi” (stanzas), with an alphabetical acrostic. Half of them – the odd numbered ones – begin with a poetic exposition, that describes an event, and is followed by thanksgivings to the All-holy Mother of God, full of marvel and of praise for Her, that end with the doxological exclamation: «Hail, Virgin and Bride!».

The other half of the stanzas – the even numbered ones – are composed by a series of tropes that ends with the exclamation of praise «Alleluia!»

Each stanza has as its starting point an event in the life of the All-holy Mother of God or also, on occasion, happenings in the life of Jesus Christ, born of Her, or in that of other people connected with them, so as to highlight the part played by her or Jesus Christ in that episode and her importance for the salvation of mankind.

Everything begins with the Annunciation to the Mother of God by the Archangel. Then the wonderment of the All-holy is described and her dialogue with him. The conception of the embryo in Her womb through the workings of the Holy Spirit is proclaimed. Then the visit of Mary to Elizabeth is recounted, Joseph’s doubts, the adoration of the shepherds, the visit of the Magi, the offering of gifts and the praise of the Magi to the Virgin Mother, the flight from Herod…


The shepherds and the Magi are the first witnesses to the birth of Jesus from the womb of that Jewish girl. How is the story reported?

Bartholomew I: The seventh stanza introduces us to the accomplished birth of Christ in the cave in Bethlehem, testified by the hymn of the angels that amazed the shepherds. The shepherds, according to the hymn writer, thinking in a human way, hastened to see the incarnate God as a majestic shepherd, but instead of seeing him in the guise of shepherd, they see him as spotless Lamb feeding at Mary’s breast, and they exalt Her in these words: «Hail, O you through whom death was despoiled».

The eighth and ninth stanzas refer to the journey of the Magi following the star, and to their offering of royal gifts to the Word of God who has taken on the form of servant. The hymn writer puts words of great marvel at the Mother of God on the lips of the Magi: «Hail, O Mother of the Star Without Setting»; «Hail, O you who saved us from the mire of pagan worship»; «Hail, O you made cease the cult of fire». In the tenth stanza we are told that the Magi, ignoring foolish Herod, returned to Babylonia and there began to proclaim Jesus Christ.

«So the like called upon the like». As one reads in the eighteenth stanza of the hymn. How is the attraction aroused by the humanity of Jesus Christ described in the Akathist?

Bartholomew I: There are two references to it in the Akathist. The first is in the fourteenth stanza and says that the Most High God has manifested himself on earth as humble man, wanting to lift on high «those who joyfully acclaim him: “Alleluia!”» The second comes in the eighteenth stanza and says: «Desiring to save the world, the Creator of All came down to it of His own will. Being at the same time our Shepherd and our God, He appeared among us. And so the like called upon the like, and as God He heard:“Alleluia!”»

We believe that the composer of the Akathist, with the Orthodox Tradition in mind, expressed in these words the belief that the God Word became incarnate and made himself man to lead mankind back to God, given that mankind was incapable through its own efforts of repairing the relation it had with God before the fall. We don’t believe that it gives us a sentimental notion of man, deriving from the human element of Jesus Christ. Rather it expresses an ontological reality: Jesus, the Jesus God-Man, by taking on the human element, healed its every imperfection, made it reborn, become a new Adam, and whoever unites with Him renews himself, becoming free of the hereditary corruption that comes from original sin, and so passes «from death to life». Since death is the main consequence of hereditary corruption, to which all mankind is subject, after their life-giving relation with God was broken by the disobedience of our first parents.

Noteworthy in the fourteenth stanza is the way the hymn writer calls upon us to raise ourselves above worldly things to celestial ones, because that is why God came into the world: to attract, that is draw to himself, to his loftiness, those who believe in him, through a grace that makes his attracting presence on the earth a felt experience, giving to those who welcome it faith and the experience of the spiritual life.

Again in the eighteenth stanza the hymn writer stresses that God, according to his will, came into the world as man to save the world, offering his invitation through the God-Man, like to men, who is capable of accomplishing what simple men could not achieve. Certainly those who love Christ feel in his person a tenderness and a beauty freighted with attraction, but we believe that the hymn writer – in tune with his times, which were very fond of dogmatic debate – expresses dogmatic truth, and not sentimentality.

At Christmas, the Mystery that makes all things becomes a child, helpless as all children. The child Jesus needed Mary and Joseph, two creatures also humanly helpless in the face of Herod and the wickedness of the world. What mention does the Akathist make of the story of the flight into Egypt?

Bartholomew I: The escape in Egypt isn’t mentioned directly and to any extent in the Akathist. In the eleventh stanza we are reminded that in Egypt Christ made the light of the truth blaze, and those who through the Savior were freed from idols acclaim the Mother of God, participant in the Divine Economy, with various salutations full of admiration and praise. The majority of these salutations allude to events in the history of the Jewish people in Egypt, who symbolize or prefigure the contribution of the Mother of God to the Divine Economy. Thus, the greeting «Hail, O Sea who drowned the symbolic Pharaoh!» alludes to Hebrews’ crossing of the Red Sea and to the drowning of the Egyptians pursuing them. It is believed that the event prefigures the Mother of God because – as a trope puts it «after the passage of Israel the sea closed again; the Immaculate, after the birth of the Emanuel, remained intact».

The salutation «Hail, O Rock who quenched those who thirst for Life» alludes, instead, to the rock in the desert from which life-giving water sprang for the Hebrews, thanks to Moses’ prayer, and also to the word of the Lord who told the Samaritan woman he had living water. As from the rock sprang life-giving water, so from the Virgin came Christ, as living and life-giving water. In the same way, the salutation addressed to the Mother of God as «Pillar of Fire who guided those in darkness», and that in which she is exalted as «Shelter of the world, wider than the clouds», liken the All-holy to the pillar of fire and to the cloud that guided the Hebrews in the desert, as told in the Book of the Exodus (Ex 13,21). Finally, the «rejoice, O food who took the place of Manna», and the «Hail, O Land of promised good, you who flow with milk and honey», refer to the known facts of the Old Testament.

In this way, many episodes in the history of the chosen people prefigure, according to the composer of the Akathist, as also to other great poets of Byzantium, the later potent action of the All-holy Mother of God.

In response to the event of Christmas and to the mystery of Mary’s motherhood the Akathist hymn depicts two attitudes, two different reactions. On the one hand there are the shepherds, the angels, the Magi. On the other those who are described as mythmakers or sophists («for you dried up the inventors of myths… you ripped the Athenians’ meshes»). Those who think themselves in command of the Mystery…

Bartholomew I: The shepherds, the angels, the Magi and believers in general marvel at and acknowledge the event of the Divine Economy and glorify God and the All-holy Mother of God His co-operatrix in it. The wise people of the world – who want to subdue the actions of God to human reasoning – are unable to marvel and trust. They are concerned to explain and understand the events of the Divine Economy, which however go beyond the knowledge of the wise, while they shine before the hearts of believers, as the third stanza tell us. We then, the faithful, «marveling at the mystery of the incarnation of God, we sing with faith»: «Hail, O you Reproof of foolish philosophers; Hail, O confusion of speechless wise men» (stanza 17). What is incomprehensible for the mind, the faith brings close – substance of hoped-for things, proof of things not seen – that makes the heart certain of their real, and not imaginary, existence.

Jesus is fount of life and of pardon for sinners, gives them the grace lost. But in this work Mary, too, is involved, «indulgence of many who have fallen», «stole for those who lack freedom to speak», because it was her who gave him flesh. How is the work of Mary in this unimaginable succour to the human condition, lapsed after original sin, expressed in the Akathist?

Bartholomew I: In fact, the sublime love of God for mankind chose a way of salvation that could not be foreseen by the mind of man, accustomed to conceive God in his immensity. Kenosis, that is the emptying out of God, his manifestation as man, was unimaginable. Even more inconceivable was, and is, his conception in the womb of a woman, and the very existence of a woman worthy of welcoming the divinity in her own body and to become Mother of God incarnate. That constituted scandal or foolishness, and for many it is still so today. Human logic attributes to God the qualities that it imagines the great man must or does possess; so not humility, abasement, love to the point of self-sacrifice.

Despite that, the unimaginable – though it was also prophesized – did happen. On the one hand, a woman was found of such purity to be worthy of conceiving, giving birth to and rearing the God-Man Jesus Christ. On the other, God emptied himself of the glory of his magnificence and manifested himself on earth as «humble man». This happening fills with wonder and awe the author of the Akathist, who thus throughout the whole hymn shows his boundless wonderment both toward God, and towards the All-holy Mother of God, through extraordinary poetic expressions such as: «Hail, O Message unsure to men without faith; Hail, O Glory most certain to those who believe!». «Hail, O you who reconciled opposites; Hail, O you who combined maidenhood and motherhood»; Hail, O you through whom transgression was erased; Hail, O you through whom Paradise was opened».

In phrases like these salvation is not attributed to the Virgin Mary, but her cooperation is exalted to her, through the bounty of God. The fact is hymned that God, who wants mankind to be saved, sought – and in the person of the Mother of God, found – the unconditioned and immediate collaboration of mankind. After the corruption of the human race through the sin of our first parents, God incarnated himself in the new man, the God-Man Jesus, he who is extraneous to corruption, and calls on all to embody themselves in Jesus Christ so as to partake of the incorruptibility and eternity of his life and truth. And this incarnation came about through a woman. Indeed very great and magnificent is the work of God and the participation of the All-holy in it, hymned in the Akathist.

As the Epistle to the Hebrews says, after the unique and perfect sacrifice of Jesus, there is no need for other sacrifices. The Akathist also speaks of the participation of Mary, Mother of God, in this work of liberation: «Hail, O Light of those who search the Trinity». «Hail, O you who cleansed us from the stain of pagan worship». «Hail, O you who exposed the fraud of idols». «Hail, O Downfall of the Demons».

Bartholomew I: One can’t quote all the multitude of references in the Akathist to the contribution of the Ever-Virgin Mary to the salvific work of Jesus Christ. Beginning from that «Hail, O you, through whom Joy will shine forth; Hail, O you, through whom the curse will disappear», put into the mouth to the Angel. These and all the other epithets of the Mother of God, that fill the whole Akathist hymn, are fine poetic ways of presenting the participation of the All-holy in the mystery of salvation. Thus the All-holy is called: kingly throne, renewal of creation, mother of the Creator, star that manifests the sun, forecast of the prodigies of Christ, celestial ladder, by whom God came down, bridge leading earthly ones to heaven, yielder of abundant mercies, she who has quenched the flame of error, she who threw down the oppressor, wound ever-hurting to the demons, she who gave birth to the guide of the lost, source of life of the captives’ release, indulgence of the fallen, and so on.

The Church recognized from the beginning that in Mary’s virginity is manifest the resplendent beauty that enamored God and drew him to us. How is God’s predilection for the virgin beauty of Mary expressed in this hymn?

Bartholomew I: The virginity of the Mother of God, as deep, existential, free and total absorption of her love in God, as spiritual situation during which her mind and heart were not turned towards another earthly being, is continually sung in the Akathist hymn, along with God’s predilection for this virginal devotion of the All-holy toward Him. One line even says that the Lord who dwelt in her womb, he who contains all things, «sanctified and glorified» her. Another says that the Creator of heaven and earth shaped the All-pure, dwelling then in her uterus.

The Catholic Church this year celebrates the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. How does the Eastern Christian and Byzantine Tradition celebrate the Conception of Mary and her full and immaculate holiness?

Bartholomew I: The Catholic Church found that it needed to institute a new dogma for Christendom about one thousand and eight hundred years after the appearance of the Christianity, because it had accepted a perception of original sin – a mistaken one for us Orthodox – according to which original sin passes on a moral stain or a legal responsibility to the descendants of Adam, instead of that recognized as correct by the Orthodox faith – according to which the sin transmitted through inheritance the corruption, caused by the separation of mankind from the uncreated grace of God, which makes him live spiritually and in the flesh. Mankind shaped in the image of God, with the possibility and destiny of being like to God, by freely choosing love towards Him and obedience to his commandments, can even after the fall of Adam and Eve become friend of God according to intention; then God sanctifies them, as he sanctified many of the progenitors before Christ, even if the accomplishment of their ransom from corruption, that is their salvation, was achieved after the incarnation of Christ and through Him.

In consequence, according to the Orthodox faith, Mary the All-holy Mother of God was not conceived exempt from the corruption of original sin, but loved God above of all things and obeyed his commandments, and thus was sanctified by God through Jesus Christ who incarnated himself of her. She obeyed Him like one of the faithful, and addressed herself to Him with a Mother’s trust. Her holiness and purity were not blemished by the corruption, handed on to her by original sin as to every man, precisely because she was reborn in Christ like all the saints, sanctified above every saint.

Her reinstatement in the condition prior to the Fall did not necessarily take place at the moment of her conception. We believe that it happened afterwards, as consequence of the progress in her of the action of the uncreated divine grace through the visit of the Holy Spirit, which brought about the conception of the Lord within her, purifying her from every stain.

As already said, original sin weighs on the descendants of Adam and of Eve as corruption, and not as legal responsibility or moral stain. The sin brought hereditary corruption and not a hereditary legal responsibility or a hereditary moral stain. In consequence the All-holy participated in the hereditary corruption, like all mankind, but with her love for God and her purity – understood as an imperturbable and unhesitating dedication of her love to God alone – she succeeded, through the grace of God, in sanctifying herself in Christ and making herself worthy of becoming the house of God, as God wants all us human beings to become. Therefore we in the Orthodox Church honor the All-holy Mother of God above all the saints, albeit we don’t accept the new dogma of her Immaculate Conception. The non-acceptance of this dogma in no way diminishes our love and veneration of the All-holy Mother of God.

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2010-5
22

The New Martyr Soldier Evgeny of Chechnya

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Below is a story of the courage and faith of a young man in Post-Soviet Russia whose memory we celebrate on May 23rd and August 20th.

Evgeny Aleksandrovich Rodionov was born thirty minutes after midnight on May 23, 1977 in the village of Satino-Russkoye near Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union. According to his mother, as a boy in this small village, all he really wanted was to be a cook. When he was eleven years old, Evgeny Rodionov received from his grandmother a little Cross on a chain. He wanted to wear it to school, but his mother, then an atheist, warned him against it, since the communist authorities frowned on such things. Evgeny wore it anyway and refused to ever take it off.

In 1995 Evgeny turned eighteen and was drafted into the Russian armed forces as is required for all Russian men. Right before being drafted, Evgeny was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church on his own accord seperate from his parents who were still atheists. For his duty he was chosen to work in a frontier guard unit (something of a mix between the US Border Patrol and the National Guard) and sent for training in the Kalingrad area of what was formerly East Prussia. After training he was sent to the border of Chechnya and posted near the town of Galashki. This was towards the end of the controversial First Chechnyan War. On the night of February 14, 1996, just six months after he started his service, Evgeny and three comrades were captured by a force of Muslim Chechen guerillas who were disguised in an ambulance while the Russian soldiers were manning a checkpoint.

According to a report in Pravda from 2003:

“They [Evgeny and the soldiers with him] patrolled the border between the republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Their control and registration post was located some 200 meters far from the security detachment. The post was just a small cabin, without any light or wire communication. The cabin did not even have a military support, in spite of the fact that it was a single cabin on the mountainous road, which was used for carrying weapons, ammunition, captives, drugs and so on. The border guards stopped an ambulance vehicle to check it. More than ten armed Chechens got out of the vehicle. Needless to mention that it was very easy for them to cope with young inexperienced soldiers. The guys showed as much resistance as they could, but the outcome of the fight was evident before it even started.”

Upon capture they were held in the cellar of an abandoned house for 100 days as ransom demands were sent to their families. Kidnapping and demanding ransom was almost a cottage industry in Chechnya during that time period. They kept Evgeny hanging by his wrists in a basement. They starved and beat him. Rodionov’s ransom was reported to be 50 million rubles (1.6 million dollars) – at the time an impossible sum. Another report says it may have been in the $10,000 range. Whatever it was, the ransom was not met.

Chechen field commander Rusland Haihoroev (also spelled Khaikhoroyev in some sources) eventually beheaded Evgeny with a rusted saw that took over an hour to complete on May 23, 1996 (his 19th birthday) near the settlement of Bamut. His body, along with four other Russian prisoners were placed in a bomb crater outside the village of Alexeevskaya and covered up with lime and dirt. Haihoroev stated later in an interview that he only killed Rodionov after the soldier denied conversion to Islam and refused to give up his Orthodox Cross, while two others with him had converted to Islam. Russian troops occupied the village where Evgeny was murdered the following day after the execution.

Evgeny’s mother, Lubov Rodionova, was informed that her son had deserted the army. She did not believe the news and went to look for him in Chechnya. She stayed there for ten months chasing down leads and questioning anyone who would talk to her. It was months before she found out that he had in fact been killed. This news came when she found the Chechens who had held her son prisoner and then killed him. Rusland Haihoroev, the leader of the Chechen gang, told her seventeen times over the course of seventeen seperate meetings, that she had born a bad son who refused to adopt Islam and join the separatists in their fight against Russia. “Your son had a choice to stay alive. He could convert to Islam, but he did not agree to take his Cross off. He also tried to escape once,” said Haihoroev to Evgeny’s mother. She finally agreed to pay Haihoroev some 100,000 rubles (about $4000 US) to take her to his gravesite in the forests outside of Alexeevskaya.

This was money she did not have, so she had to sell her apartment to finance the deal. Chechens in Moscow handled the deal and when all was done Haihoroev showed her where his body was. There late at night, with the assistance of the military, she was able to exhume his body. She found her sons headless body together with the Cross he wore and died for among his bones and stained with small drops of blood. The head was discarded in another place. According to Evgeny’s mother, this event took place in the following way:

“When I came to Chechnya in the middle of February, a living private cost ten million rubles. This price was 50 million in August. A friend of mine was told to pay 250 million rubles for her son, since he was an officer. It was nighttime when I and some sappers digging the pit, in which the bodies of four Russian soldiers were thrown. I was praying all the time, hoping that my Evgeny was not going to be there. I could not and did not want to believe that he was murdered. When we were taking out the remnants, I recognized his boots. However, I still refused to accept the fact of his death, until someone found his Cross. Then I fainted.”Lubov took Evgeny’s body away along with the bodies of his murdered friends. She returned to Moscow with the aide of the Russian Orthodox Church and buried him. When Lubov Rodionova came back home, Evgeny’s father died five days after the funeral. He could not stand the loss of his son.

“We know that he had to go through horrible, long-lasting sufferings that could be compared to the ones of great martyrs in ancient times. They were beheaded, dismembered, but they remained devoted to Jesus Christ anyway,” priest Alexander Shargunov said during the requiem in Evgeny Rodionov’s memory.

Evgeny was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage by the Army. Lubov Rodionova later returned to Chechnya on a second trip and recovered her sons head.

Haihoroev himself and his bodyguards were killed on August 23, 1999 in a fight between his group and a rival Chechen band.

The soldier’s fate would have probably been forgotten, if a Central TV film crew had not come to the village where Evgeny’s relics now lie six years later to shoot a short report on a Cross being set on a restored church. Parishioners told the reporters about the heroic deed of the son and the courage of the mother, who had buried him in his homeland. They filed the story as a separate report. A year later a huge devotion spread throughout Russia and the entire world.

The New York Times reported in 2003:

“In pamphlets, songs and poems, in sermons and on Web sites, Private Rodionov’s story has become a parable of religious devotion and Russian nationalism. The young soldier, it is said, was killed by Muslim rebels seven years ago because he refused to renounce his religion or remove the small silver Cross he kept around his neck…

“As his story has spread, pilgrims have begun appearing in this small village just west of Moscow, where his mother, Lubov, 51, tends his grave on an icy hillside beside an old whitewashed church. Some military veterans have laid their medals by his graveside in a gesture of homage. People in distress have left handwritten notes asking for his intercession. In a church near St. Petersburg, his full-length image stands at the altar beside icons of the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Michael, Jesus and Nicholas II, the last of the czars, who was canonized three years ago.

“Aleksandr Makeyev, a paratroop officer who heads a foundatioion to assist soldiers, said he had seen soldiers kneeling in prayer before an image of Private Rodionov. ‘The kids in Chechnya, they feel they’ve been abandoned by the state and abandoned by their commanders,’ he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. ‘They don’t know who to appeal to for help, but they understand that Zhenya is one of them,’ he said, using Private Rodionov’s nickname. ‘You can say he is the first soldier-saint.’

“Among the photographs of her son that Mrs. Rodionov spreads on her kitchen table are laminated cards that she says some soldiers carry with them for luck. They bear his image along with a prayer:

“Thy martyr, Evgeny, O Lord, in his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God, for having Thy strength he has brought down his torturers, has defeated the powerless insolence of demons. Through his prayers save our souls.”

Icons and pictures of this young man Evgeny spread around Russia very quickly and he was hailed as a New Martyr for Christ. In these icons sometimes he wears a uniform, sometimes a red robe (which is a way he appears in visions to the faithful, especially soldiers and children), sometimes armed, sometimes holding a Cross of martyrdom, but always with his halo. The picture distributed of him shows Evgeny wearing the Cross around his neck for which he died. Miracles have been occurring in connection with Evgeny’s relics as well. During a religious procession in commemoration of Martyr Evgeny on November 20, 2002 the icon with the image of the soldier started secreting sweet-scented myrrh.

A sign in memory of the brave Evgeny was put at the entrance to the school where he studied. There was also a documentary released about him. People’s donations made it possible to put a two-meter (6 ft.) high Orthodox Cross on his grave which is located in the village of Satino-Russkoye, near Podolsk, in the Moscow region. People come to visit his grave from the most distant parts of Russia. A WWII veteran once came to visit Evgeny’s grave and he took off his military decoration – the Bravery Medal – and put in on the tombstone. The writings on Evgeny’s grave Cross run: “Russian soldier Evgeny Rodionov is buried here. He defended his Fatherland and did not disavow Christ. He was executed on May 23, 1996, on the outskirts of Bamut.”

His own Cross, the one that he refused to give up, his mother has donated to St. Nicholas Church in Ordinka, Moscow.

Because of the huge devotion to the New Martyr Evgeny, the pious faithful sought official canonization from the Moscow Patriarchate. Initially they refused and this divided the Orthodox in Russia. Maksim Maksimov, secretary of the canonization commission, explained the Synod’s position in Tserkovny Vestnik (Church Bulletin), the official publication of the Russian Orthodox Church. His arguments can be summarised in three points: the only evidence that the soldier was executed for this faith is the testimony of his mother, who in her love made a god of her son; the Russian Orthodox Church has never canonized anyone killed at war; the period of new martyrs ended with the collapse of the Bolshevik regime. However, he emphasised, the deceased can be honoured without canonization. Patriarch Alexy of Moscow personally blessed the popular account of Evgeny’s life, but worried that his cult would balloon into anti-Muslim rage.Opponents of the decision, including well-known priest Alexander Shargunov, argued that an outbreak of people’s love is enough for the truth; that Evgeny’s grave works miracles, curing the sick and reconciling enemies. They also point out that the solider did not die at war but in captivity, and that to say that the time of martyrs is over is near heresy.Evgeny was officially declared a Saint on August 20, 2002. A Church in his name was built in Hankala, near Groziniy. It is the only Orthodox Church in Chechnya.

Evgeny’s mother, who never before set foot in a church, is now an Orthodox Christian believer, saved by the example of her son, the Holy Martyr Evgeny Rodionov. Eventually the faithful helped her to raise enough money to buy a new home.

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2010-5
22

Martyrdom of Saint Ahmed the Calligrapher

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Saint Ahmed the Calligrapher

The holy New Martyr Ahmed was born in the seventeenth century to a Muslim family in Constantinople. By profession he was a copyist in the Great Archives. In accordance with Ottoman law, since he did not have a wife, he had a slave instead, a Russian woman. Another captive from Russia lived together with her, an old woman, also a slave. Both these women were very pious.

On feast days the old woman would go to church. Taking the blessed bread or antidoron, she would give it to the young woman to eat. The old woman would also bring her holy water to drink. Whenever this occurred and Ahmed was close to her, he would smell a beautiful and indescribable fragrance coming out of her mouth. He would ask her what she was eating to make her mouth smell so fragrant. Not realizing what was happening, the slave would say that she was not eating anything. However, he persisted in asking. Eventually she told him that she was eating the bread which had been blessed by the priests, which the old woman brought her whenever she returned from church.

On hearing this, Ahmed was filled with longing to see the Orthodox church and how Orthodox received this blessed bread. Therefore he summoned a priest and told him to prepare a secret place for him, so that he could go when the Patriarch was serving the Liturgy. When the appointed day arrived, dressed as an Orthodox, he went to the Patriarchate and followed the Divine Liturgy. While he was in church, he saw the Patriarch shining with light and lifted off the floor, as he came out of the altar and through the holy doors to bless the people. As he blessed, rays of light came from his finger tips, but though the rays fell on the heads of all the Orthodox, they did not fall on Ahmed’s head. This happened two or three times and each time Ahmed saw the same thing. Thus, Ahmed came to the faith. Without hesitation he sent for the priest, who gave him rebirth through baptism. Ahmed remained a secret Orthodox for some time, concealing his baptismal name, which is why it has not come down to us.

However, one day Ahmed and certain noblemen were eating together. Afterwards they sat talking and smoking, as is the custom. In the course of the conversation they began to discuss what the greatest thing in the world. Each gave his opinion. The first guest said that the greatest thing in the world was for a man to have wisdom. The second maintained that woman was the greatest thing in the world. And yet a third said that the greatest thing in the world, and by far the most delightful, was good food – for was this not the food of the righteous in paradise?

Then it was Ahmed’s turn. They all turned to him, asking him for his opinion on this matter. Filled with holy zeal, Ahmed cried out that the greatest thing of all was the Faith of the Orthodox. And confessing himself to be a Christian, he boldly censured the falseness and deception of the Muslims. At first, on hearing this the Muslims were aghast. Then, filled with unspeakable rage, they fell on the holy martyr and dragged him to a judge, so that he could be sentenced to death. He was beheaded, receiving the crown of martyrdom on the orders of the ruler on 3 May 1682.

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2010-5
20

Robin Hood & Orthodoxy

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MYSTAGOGY Article

[Since Robin Hood is being released today(14/5/2010), I thought it worthwhile to reflect on what Fr. John Romanides had to say about this interesting legend and the value it has for Orthodox Christians. Since the complete story of Robin Hood will no doubt be overlooked as it always is in film, as well as the historical backdrop which makes the story so fascinating, this brief historical reflection will no doubt be of some interest to movie-goers this weekend. The question to ponder is whether or not the Robin Hood legend is a historical parable of the Frankish takover of Roman Britain, initiated under the blessing of the new Frankish Pope?

I have kept the number of the footnotes from the original article which can be found linked under the source of the pericope for reference. The information presented can be examined alongside this website: http://www.robinhoodloxley.net/default.htm. - J.S.]


The Frankish Papacy of 1046 and Norman Britain of 1066

As we already noted, the population of France in 1789 included 2% nobility, 13% franchised middle class and 85% vilains and serfs.[34] The latter 85% were enclosed within slave camps and guarded from escape by some 40,000 castles. These serfs and villains had been isolated from each other for so many centuries that they ended up speaking their own local patois of which some 35 are recorded and still spoken locally. This reality forced the 85% of the population to learn and adopt the language of their former oppressors. This clearly means that there had to have been a very serious reason why the Frankish military kept so much of the population isolated from each other. It seems that the best explanation of this phenomenon of so many slave camps up to 1789 is to be found in the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals which appeared in 850.[35] These tampered with and thus forged documents, supported a Church structure which put the Frankish bishops directly under the control of the Pope of Rome and his curia, both of which were still Roman nationals, and therefore under the rule of the Roman Empire and its Roman Emperor in Constantinople New Rome. At the time the Franks accepted these Decretals as genuine and argued that they were valid locally only within the Roman Empire, a difficult argument to maintain when a small number of Franks were ruling over a far superior number of Romans. So the Franks made their final decision to act decisively which resulted in their final takeover of the Papacy by putting on the Papal throne their own lackeys from 1012 to 1046 when they permanently got rid of Roman Popes and their curia and became themselves the Pope of Rome and his curia.

However, this New Frankish Papacy began consolidating power in the West by means of the Norman invasion of England 1066. While the Norman Franks were in process of expelling the Roman army from Southern Italy and of helping the Italo-Franks wrest the Papacy from the Franconian emperors, their Duke William of Normandy invaded England with Pope Alexander’s blessing in 1066. He had his Lombard friend, the “Blessed Saint” Lanfranc, the pope’s teacher, installed as the first non-Roman /Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, and together they replaced all native bishops with Franco-Latins. All Celtic and Saxon bishops and abbots were dismissed en masse[36] and sentenced to prison to die premature deaths by torture and starvation.[37] The new noblemen bishops from the Frankish Empire were in turn killed by the people whenever opportunity presented itself.[38] Indeed the Saxons and Celts celebrated the death of Lanfranc in 1089 by launching their third and most severe revolt against the foreign intruders.[39] The most famous of the Saxon revolutionary leaders against the Normans was Robin Hood. He had become ill and was taken by Little John to a nunnery where someone recognized him. The Norman nun who was curing him by bloodletting converted this cure into an assassination by letting him bleed to death. Little John and his men escaped to Ireland to continue their war against the Normans.[40] That Robin Hood and his men were fighting against bad King John in favor of good King Richard is an interesting and clever fable indeed. In any case such Norman reforms by military might became crusades in both East and West. They ultimately provoked the Protestant Reformation and met with little success among the East Romans and some among the Slavs.

This tradition of killer bishops, clergy and monks was given its near final theological foundation by “Saint” Bernard of Clairvaux in his sermons “De Laude novae militiae ad milites Templi”[41] in which he argues that the religious Knight Templer “who kills for religion commits no evil but rather does good, for his people and himself. If he dies in battle, he gains heaven; if he kills his opponents, he avenges Christ. Either way, God is pleased.”[42] Its final form was given by the Inquisition which condemned to death but usually turned executions over to laymen.

Robin Hood — Orthodox Martyr?

The most famous of the Saxon revolutionary leaders against the Normans was Robin Hood. He had become ill and was taken by Little John to a nunnery where someone recognized him. The Norman nun who was curing him by bloodletting converted this cure into an assassination by letting him bleed to death. Little John and his men escaped to Ireland to continue their war against the Normans.[96]

So many Saxons made their way to Constantinople New Rome after the Norman conquest to join the Roman Emperor’s Varangian army that they displaced the Scandinavians as the majority.[97] One of the great generals of this Varangian army had been King Harald III Hadrada of Norway (1015-1066). This means that Norway was still Orthodox. He had become the head of the Varangian army under Emperor[98] Zoe (1042-1056). General Harald led his Varangians “to frequent victory in Italy, Sicily and North Africa, also penetrating to Jerusalem. In Italy and Sicily he was fighting Franks and Normans at the time they were getting ready to rid themselves of the facade of Tusculan Roman Popes (1014-1056) in favor of real Franco-Latin Popes. It is very probable that his attention had been turned for some time to the beginnings of the penetration of the Carolingian heresy into Scandinavia which may explain his frequent attempts to subjugate Denmark. In 1064 he gave up this attempt and made peace with Denmark. His invasion of England in 1066 at Eburacum was evidently an attempt to defeat the Pro-Franco-Norman party which was trying to get the upper hand among the Saxons. Evidently it was not only at the instigation of the Pro-Roman Orthodox Saxon Earl of Tostig that he undertook the invasion of England since he also had Orthodox Scots, Irish and Ebor (Yorkshire in Norman) allies who supported his invasion of England.

There can be no doubt that the Orthodox Christians of England knew very well that their Roman Papacy had been struggling against a Frankish takeover in 983-984, in 996-999, in 999-1003 and finally in 1009-1046 when turncoat Tusculanum Romans were forced upon the Papacy by the German Emperors until it became finally Franco-Latin by 1046. It is within this context that the Norman invasion of England took place with the blessings of the Lombard Pope Alexander II (1061-1073).

In any case the Saxon King Harold of West Essex met the Norwegian army at Eburacum (the Norman York) and in the ensuing battle the King of Norway was killed. However, while celebrating his victory Saxon King Harold learned that an Norman army had just landed. Without waiting for his observers to get a good look at this Norman foe, King Harold rushed with his army, fresh from his victory over the Norwegians, to meet the Normans only to be confronted with the new type of heavily armored horse and men. A phenomenon which they had yet not heard of nor could imagine.

William landed on the shores of Britain carrying the papal banner at the head of what was essentially the army of the first Crusade. Francophile Harold was quite stunned when he learned that the Lombard Pope Alexander II had given his papal blessing to William’s invasion. He took very little and very poor defensive action in the field at Hastings that day and he and his men were completely crushed.[99]

Surely Norwegian Harald was never aware that he was fighting for a so-called “Greek” or “Byzantine” emperor. He had been living and working for the Roman Empire and its Roman Emperor Zoe knowing that she and her people were Romans. With the battle of Hastings it was the turn of the Saxon, Welsh, Irish and Scot Romans to become the slaves of the Franco-Latin noblemen who were now plundering their land. All these real “Roman Catholic” Christians of England had still been praying in their Churches for the Imperium Romanum whose Roman Emperor and capital were in Constantinople-New Rome which was also the headquarters of the Varangian Army in which their boys were serving.

The name “Greek” for the Eastern part of the Roman empire was inaugurated by Charlemagne in 794, as already noted. But the term “Byzantine” was established by Great Britain, France and Russia as part of their plans to break up and divide up the Ottoman Empire among them. The first plan was evidently drawn up during the meeting between Emperors Napoleon I and Alexander I floating on a raft in the river at Tilsit, Germany in 1806. The core of Napoleon’s plan was the liberation of the ancient Hellenes, now called Romans, from both their Roman conquerors and from their Turkish conquerors with one cannon shot. In other words the Neo-Hellenes will end up being slaves from the time they were conquered by the Romans and liberated by the Turks. The very same plan would be multiplied to convert all Balkan peoples who called themselves Romans.

Part of this same plan was to convince Orthodox peasants that the ancient Romans did not speak Greek, like the Romans of Patriarchate of Constantinople, but Latin. Therefore the Church of New Rome cannot be Roman. So it is in reality a Greek Church and nation just like Great Father Charlemagne always said.

In this way the agents of Russia, Britain and France swarmed over the European part of the Ottoman Empire, called the “Land of the Romans” (the Balkans), telling all who for centuries have been calling themselves Romans and getting their education in Greek, that their ethnic enemies are those from the Phanar who also call themselves Romans, but are in reality a bunch of Greeks.

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2010-5
18

Saint Yared of Ethiopia

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Yared annd His Disciples Singing A Song In Front Of King Gebreme Skel

In The Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit in One God Amen!

Yared was born in Aksum in the first half of the sixth century. His father was called Inberem and his mother was Rewleya. Aksum was not only the Capital City of the Empire but also center of learning. One of the scholars who disseminated the culture of the day was Abba Gedewon,the uncle of yared.

This man was taught in the courtyard of Aksum Zion Church. He attended the school run by his uncle, Gedewon.

After that he become a deacon and served at Aksum Zion Church where he later on become a married priest who succeeded to the position of his uncle, Abba Gedewon known as the first composer of the Ethiopian Church music.

According to his life story, his music was not a result of learning only, but a matter of inspiration, he was made to enjoy the company of, and listening to the singing of inspiring birds and then he was taken up in spirit to the heavenly Jerusalem where he could learn the song of the twenty four priests to heaven. When he returned to himself, he went into the church of Aksum at the third hour of the day and he began to cry out loud voice saying “Hallelujah to the Father, Hallelujah to the Son, Hallelujah to the Holy Sprit.”

The important event, which occurred during the reign of King Gebre Meskel, was the rise of Yared, the author of the Digwa, the Ethiopian Hymnary, and the composer of Ethiopian church music. The music of Yared has impressed the Ethiopian people’s as whole even up to this day.

n the life story of Yared we are told all about him. In connection with this, there is an episode which took place at that time. One Day while Saint Yared was singing by the foot stool of the king, the king was so deeply observed in listening to his voice, that he drove his spear into that flat part of Yared’s foot with such force that much blood spurted out, but St.Yared did not know of it until he had finished his song. Finally saint Yared left Aksum with his followers and settled in the mountains of simmien, where he was taken to heave alive on 11 Ginbot, 571 A.D (19 May, 579 A.D)

Courtesy:
Yonas Garedew
(OBL Forum Advisory Broad Member)

Source:
Saints and Monasteries in Ethiopia by Rev.Kefyalew Merahi

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2010-5
16

Fr.Paul(Pavel)Sawabe

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Fr. Paul Sawabe

Paul (Pavel) Sawabe was the first Japanese student and catechumen of St. Nicholas of Japan after he had arrived in Hakodate, Japan in 1861. Paul was the first Japanese to embrace Orthodox Christianity and was an ardent disciple of the future St. [Nicholas and was an active missionary. Through his efforts the Japanese mission drew many new Christians and in time he became the first Japanese to be ordained to the priesthood.

Takuma Sawabe was born in 1833 in Kochi prefecture. His original name was Yamamoto Kazuma. He was a student, with a cousin, of the samurai art of Ken-do (Japanese swordsmanship) and philosophy. In 1857, while walking off some heavy drinking, Yamamoto ended up with two watches stolen by his cousin, but which he tried to sell. Yamamoto fled to Hakodate to escape the police who had identified him as having stolen the watches. In Hakodate, Yamamoto married the daughter of a Shinto priest named Sawabe. Yamamoto, after marrying the priest’s daughter, became an adopted son of the priest and changed his name. Under his new identity Takuma Sawabe did not participate in the Shinto priesthood, but led a group that reverenced the Emperor and demanded expulsion of the foreigners. The Russian Consulate in Hakodate became a target of their plan for assassinations.

One night in 1865, armed with a sword, he confronted the Hieromonk Nicholas with the intent of killing him before he did any preaching. In the exchange of words that followed, Nicholas questioned why Sawabe would kill him without hearing about what Nicholas would have to say. So, Sawabe asked Nicholas to tell him about his Christian religion. As the young missionary talked, his words softened Sawabe’s heart, his interest increased, and he began to study the Christian doctrine. Soon, Sawabe was joined by a doctor friend, Sakai Tokurei, in a discussion group. They in turn were joined by two more friends, Urano and Suzuki, and so the group of catechumens grew. They themselves began teaching about Orthodox Christianity to other Japanese people. Yet at this time, the Japanese policy was still to persecute Christians and forbid conversion to Christianity.

Then in April 1868, with the Reader Bissarion Sartoff guarding the consulate office door, Nicholas baptized Sawabe, Sakai, and Urano with the baptismal names for Paul, John, and James respectively. They had become the first Japanese people to accept Orthodox Christianity. With their baptism Paul and his friends went on to preach their new religion more fervently.

As the threat of imprisonment and perhaps even execution increased in the Hakodate area, Hieromonk Nicholas sent Paul and his friends to travel else where in Japan to preach their new faith, but ultimately to gain greater safety for them. Not hearing from Paul for some months, Hieromonk Nicholas was very glad to receive news from Paul of his successes in Sendai, in northern Honshu. In time the opposition to Christianity subsided, and the now Archimandrite Nicholas began to look to expanding his missionary work to Tokyo.

It was Paul Sawabe whom Nicholas sent to Tokyo to review the situation for missionary work in the Tokyo/Yokohoma area and advise him of the potential for such work there. Paul’s report was one of optimism, and Paul advised Nicholas to come to Tokyo as soon as possible. So, in late January 1871, Archimandrite Nicholas arrived in Yokohoma and proceeded to Tokyo to set up his headquarters.

Local opposition to Christianity was still present. In February 1872, Paul Sawabe and many of his co-workers in Christ were arrested by the local police in Sendai. The officials were amazed that even among the children their answers to questioning showed a deep conviction to their Christian beliefs. Even though many had not been baptized none changed their position but were strengthened in their faith.

On July 12, 1875, at the second General Council of the Japanese mission, Archimandrite Nicholas decided that there was a need for native clergy, and named Paul Sawabe to be the first priest, and that John Sakai would be a deacon. A month later Bishop Paul of East Siberia came to Hakodate for the first sacraments of the Holy Orders in Japan and ordained the new priest and deacon.

Paul Sawabe continued to service his new faith as his church grew over the following decades. He was to survive his mentor and bishop by a year, dying in 1913.

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