Why Orthodoxy

A fully-sourced case, claim by claim, with traceable citations

Chapter 09 of 12 · The case for Orthodoxy

The Christian Life: Mysteries, Fasting, Marriage, Celibacy

The faith is not only confessed; it is lived, and the concrete disciplines of Orthodox life — the Mysteries, the fasts, the feasts, married clergy, infant communion — each has a history, a canon, and a source. This chapter documents them so that the reader can see that Orthodoxy's 'peculiarities' are the oldest practices of the Church, not innovations.

The form. This article concerns not a dogma but the disciplines in which the faith is lived — and precisely therefore it is dogmatic, for the Church's practice confesses her faith ("the law of praying is the law of believing"). The objections are the West's justification of its own changes; the sed contra is the ancient practice and the canons; the determination and replies follow.

Whether the ancient practice of the Church — the baptism, chrismation, and communion of infants; the communion of the laity under both kinds with leavened bread and the invocation of the Holy Spirit; the fasts; and the married western-undisputed priesthood — may lawfully be set aside by a part of the Church and replaced by innovations imposed after the separation.

Objections to the Orthodox position

  1. Obj. 1 — From the power of the keys. Christ gave the Church the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 16:19; 18:18) and the apostles' successors the care of souls. The Western changes were pastoral acts of that authority, made for good reasons: communion at the age of reason to ensure reverence and understanding; communion under one kind to prevent the spilling of the precious Blood; clerical celibacy for the freedom of the ministry. What the Church binds, the Church may loose.1
  2. Obj. 2 — From legitimate diversity. Discipline varied by region from the beginning: the Synod of Elvira (c. 305), canon 33, already required continence of Spanish clergy; the East required it of bishops; Apostolic Canons 5 and 17 regulate marriage without making it a dogma; and the Council in Trullo itself was never fully received by the West. Paul VI's Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967) defends celibacy as a charism of the Latin church, not as a revealed article. There is no single "ancient discipline" binding everywhere; each church ordered its own house, as it had the right to do.2
  3. Obj. 3 — From the distinction of discipline and dogma. These are matters of order, not of faith: whether a babe is communed or a man ordained married does not touch the articles of the Creed. To make discipline a ground of schism is to confuse the commandments of men with the commands of God.3

On the contrary

The Apostle makes "husband of one wife" a qualification of the bishop and elder (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6), and the churches of the first millennium ordained married men without dispute: the Council in Trullo (692), in canon 13, preserving "the ancient rule of exactitude and apostolic order and discipline," decreed that the lawful marriages of deacons and presbyters "shall from henceforth stand firm" and shall not be dissolved — against the Roman rule then arising.4 And the earliest teacher of the Church, the Didache, fixes the Wednesday and Friday fasts ("do ye fast on the fourth and the preparation") — the very fasts the West has since abolished.5 And the Church baptized whole households from the beginning (Acts 16:33), and gave the one Bread and the Cup to all the baptized, infants included, invoking the Holy Spirit upon the Gifts — the very things the Encyclical of 1848 enumerates as abandoned in the West: "not anointing baptized infants, or their not receiving the Eucharist… denial of the divine Cup to the Laity, the use of wafers, unleavened instead of real bread… the exclusion of married men from the Priesthood."6

I answer that

Before the determination, the question must be separated into its parts: what was the ancient practice, what changed it, when, and why the changes are not indifferent.

On the facts — which are not in dispute among historians. The Church of the first millennium baptized, chrismated, and communed infants; she gave the Cup to all communicants; she consecrated with leavened bread under the invocation of the Holy Spirit; she observed the fasts; and she ordained married men to the diaconate and the priesthood while reserving the episcopate, in the East, to monks or celibates. Each of these is documented in the sources cited below — the canons of Trullo (692), the Didache, the letters of Paul, the ancient anaphoras, and the universal liturgical practice — and no serious historian of any confession denies that the West's later practices (postponed confirmation, communion at the age of reason, communion under one kind, unleavened wafers, the suppression of the epiclesis as the moment of consecration, universal clerical celibacy) were later innovations relative to that record.7 What is in dispute is only whether the changes were lawful; and here the East's position is not "no change is ever lawful" but "a change made by one part of the Church, against the practice of the whole, must be justified to the whole — and the whole, which never made the change, has never ceased to be the standard." The Church did not receive the Cup-denial (she rejected Constance and Trent in the person of the East); she did not receive the abolition of the fasts; she did not receive the invalidation of clerical marriage. Non-reception, on the principle of Chapter 3, is the Church's judgment.

On why these are not indifferent. The West's own categories call these disciplines, not dogmas — but the Church's practice is her confession (lex orandi, lex credendi), and each contested practice touches the faith. The Cup. "Drink ye all of it" (Matthew 26:27) and "whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily" (1 Corinthians 11:27) are commands to the whole Church; the withholding of the Cup from the laity (Constance, 1415; upheld by Trent, 1563) was an innovation the West itself felt obliged to justify, and the East read it, in 1848, as a mutilation of the Mystery.8 Infant communion. The exclusion of baptized infants from the Eucharist — unknown to the first millennium — contradicts the unity of the Mystery with baptism ("in one Spirit are we all baptized into one body… and have been all made to drink into one Spirit," 1 Corinthians 12:13), and it was the West, not the East, that severed it.9 The married priesthood. 1 Timothy 3:2 makes marriage a qualification; Trullo canon 13 binds the rule; the West's invalidation of clerical marriages (Lateran II, 1139) was the act of a part against the canons of the whole — a fact Rome itself concedes, for the Eastern Catholic churches, under Rome's own jurisdiction, still ordain married men.10 The epiclesis and the bread. The consecration by the invocation of the Holy Spirit and the use of the one leavened Bread (1 Corinthians 10:16–17) belong to the Church's confession of the Mystery; the West's substitution of a juridical consecration-moment and its unleavened wafers are, in the East's judgment, the same error at the altar that the treasury is in the ledger.11

And on the meaning of it all. The East's refusal of these innovations is not the "confusion of discipline with dogma" the Objection alleges (Reply to Obj. 3); it is the conviction that the boundaries of the Mystery are themselves dogma, because the Mystery is the Gospel enacted. A church that changes how the Lamb is received changes what is received; a church that abandons the fasts abandons the ascesis that guards the faith; a church that invalidates what the Apostles authorized dissolves the order it claims to hold from the Apostles. The ancient practice is not a museum; it is the therapy by which the Church keeps the faith, and the Church that kept it — the Church of the Seven Councils — kept the faith whole with it.

Replies to the objections

  1. Reply to Obj. 1. The keys are given to build, not to remodel; and a change from the universal practice carries a burden the pastoral rationales do not meet. "Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted" (John 20:23) is a power of the Kingdom, and the Church of the first millennium exercised it by keeping the ancient practice, not by altering it. Where a pastoral reason is real (reverence, practicality), the East honors it — but the change must be received by the Church, and the Church's strongest pastoral instinct, expressed for a thousand years in every rite and every canon, was to give the whole Mystery to the whole baptized people. The West's "reasons" were Western reasons; the East weighed them and declined them, and on the principle of this site, the East's decline is the Church's verdict.12
  2. Reply to Obj. 2. Diversity of custom within the rule is one thing; the dissolution of the rule is another — and the "diversity" cited cuts against the Objection. There is, and may be, legitimate variation in language, calendar, and minor rite within Orthodoxy; what the East denies is variation in the essentials it received. And the Objection's own examples prove it: Elvira was a local Spanish canon of c. 305, not the universal rule — Rome's own Gregory VII had to impose celibacy by decree in 1074 against massive resistance, and Lateran II (1139) had to invalidate clerical marriages because they existed. Trullo's partial reception by Rome is itself the evidence: the East received Trullo whole; Rome received from it what it chose — which is exactly the method (Chapter 1) by which Rome later handled the Creed.13
  3. Reply to Obj. 3. These are not commandments of men, and the East has never made mere rubrics a ground of schism; it has refused acts that touch the Mystery and the ministry. The Cup, the infant communion, the epiclesis, the fasts, and the married priesthood are not the details of a rubricist; they are the practice of the apostolic Church, commanded or canonized in Scripture and the canons (Matthew 26:27; 1 Corinthians 11:27; 1 Timothy 3:2; Trullo 13; Didache 8), and the changes to them were imposed — after the separation, by one part, on the whole — as the price of communion (Chapter 1). Rome's own recovery in the twentieth century (the restored use of the vernacular, the growing return of the Cup, the married Eastern Catholic priesthood) concedes, generation by generation, the justice of the East's refusal.14

Citations for this chapter

  1. Matthew 16:19; 18:18 (KJV): Matthew 16:19; the pastoral rationale of the Western changes is stated in the Council of Constance (1415) and Trent, Session 21 (1562), cited in fn. 8.
  2. Synod of Elvira (c. 305), canon 33: Wikipedia: Synod of Elvira. Apostolic Canons 5 and 17 (ANF 7). Paul VI, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (24 June 1967): vatican.va. Paul VI, Paenitemini (17 Feb 1966), on the Latin penitential discipline. Trullo: OrthodoxWiki: Quinisext Council.
  3. The discipline/dogma distinction is the standard Roman and Protestant line since the Reformation.
  4. 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6 (KJV): 1 Timothy 3:1–5. Council in Trullo (692), canon 13, trans. Percival, NPNF2-14: newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm.
  5. The Didache, ch. 8 (on the Wednesday and Friday fasts): earlychristianwritings.com (Lightfoot trans.).
  6. Acts 16:33 (KJV): Acts 16:33; the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §5.xii: Fordham Sourcebook.
  7. The antiquity of infant baptism and communion, the Cup for all, and the married priesthood is documented in the sources of fns. 4–6 and 9; the lateness of the Western changes is conceded in Roman historiography (see the papal documents themselves, e.g., Trent Session 21's defense of one kind, which is itself an admission that the practice was not universal: hanover.edu).
  8. Matthew 26:27; 1 Corinthians 11:27 (KJV): 1 Corinthians 11:27. Council of Constance (1415), Session 13; Trent, Session 21 (1562), Doctrine concerning the Communion under Both Species: hanover.edu.
  9. 1 Corinthians 12:13 (KJV): 1 Corinthians 12:13. Infant communion in the ancient Church and its loss in the West after the Middle Ages: documented in the liturgical and conciliar record (see also the 1848 Encyclical, fn. 6).
  10. Trullo canon 13 (fn. 4); Lateran I (1123) and Lateran II (1139), which invalidated clerical marriages: Wikipedia: First Lateran Council; Wikipedia: Second Lateran Council; married clergy in the Eastern Catholic churches: Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (1990), canons 373, 758, 804–805.
  11. 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 (KJV): 1 Corinthians 10:16–17; the epiclesis and leavened bread in the ancient anaphoras, with the 1848 Encyclical's complaint (fn. 6).
  12. John 20:23 (KJV): John 20:23; the principle of reception: Chapter 3 of this site.
  13. Elvira canon 33; Gregory VII's decree of 1074; Lateran II (1139): Wikipedia; the partial reception of Trullo: OrthodoxWiki.
  14. The modern Western recoveries (vernacular liturgy, restoration of the Cup in some uses, married Eastern Catholic clergy) are documented historical facts; the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (fn. 10) is the juridical proof of Rome's concession on celibacy.