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I have often thought that, when people ask us, what’s new in the Orthodox Church, we should always reply, ‘nothing, thank goodness!’ One of the things we are grateful for is the way in which our Orthodox understanding of Christianity never changes; what we believe is intrinsically the same as that which was proclaimed by the Apostles. In writing about this faith, the Fathers of the Church worked with the same proclamation, guarding and expounding a great treasure: the pearl of great price; the very secret of the kingdom of heaven itself. Entrusted with the same deposit of belief, our bishops are teachers, ‘faithfully dividing the Word of Truth.’ In this way, through the ages, the sources of Holy Tradition have been guarded from heterodoxy in all its guises.

What we call Holy Tradition is not the dead repetition of what has gone before, as if we lived in some ecclesial version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormanghast, where everything once done, had to be recorded and repeated in the same fashion, according to the books. Having said that, however, there have been dangerous times in the history of the Orthodox Church, when the loyal, ritualised repetition of the formulae have at least preserved the collective memory of the faith, like a grain of seed buried in the earth which, in due course, has borne fruit in times of renewal. One might think, for example, of remarkable survival of the Russian Church after decades of Communist persecution. There were often times when she could do little else but serve the Liturgy – yet, what fruit that prayer has brought! Neither is Tradition a kind of chain letter, endlessly copied out and passed around to all we know. Rather, from the same staring point, God the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth. It has rightly been said that Holy Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Holy Tradition also has growth, yet remains the same thing. Like expanding ripples from a stone dropped in a pond, or like a Russian doll, essentially the same at the centre as at the very outside. This tradition of faith is not confined to one element only: it is multiform yet each form contains the essential truth of all the others. It is not just Scripture for example, as is claimed by classical Protestantism, yet the Holy Scriptures proclaim and bear witness to the tradition. In fact, when the Orthodox Church uses the term Tradition it is not talking, at heart, about anything human at all; this is not the traditions of men but the very essence of the Gospel itself. It is the very work of God the Holy Spirit, who activates the collective memory and ‘mind’ of the Church, preserving its faith pure from all heterodoxy.

So, Orthodox Christianity works with a very clear idea of itself. It is not a private confession or version of the faith linked, historically, to an individual thinker of teacher. It was unaffected by the Scholastic Movement of the Mediaeval Western Church or by the later Reformation, as occurred in Western Europe. It avoided the Modernism that affected the Roman Church in the 19th and 20th centuries. It knows nothing of the so-called Post-Modern Movement that has so greatly influenced many liberal Protestant denominations today. This, though, is not to say that, from time, Orthodoxy had not been infiltrated by contact with western Christians or that their ideas did not influence Orthodox thinking and practice. Tsar Peter the Great certainly brought western ideas into his realms. Yet renewal in Orthodox experience has always been a revolution by Tradition; a rediscovery of what it truly was and should be from its very foundation.

It is no wonder, therefore, that those western Christians who come across Orthodoxy react with startled horror or sighs of refreshment. Most of all, we cannot be surprised at the anonymity of Eastern Christianity in Britain in particular and the profound ignorance about Orthodoxy among even the educated Christian public. There is also to be detected, perhaps, among some who encounter our faith and our Church for the first time, a type of embarrassment, following the realisation that this is where they come from, like a fugitive child finding, after many years, the mother who bore it! Whether Roman Papalism or the other 25,000 Protestant denominations, they can all, ultimately, trace their origin from us. Indeed, to their minds, they might think of us as an engine that stalled about a thousand years ago; an ossified megalith that has shown no signs of life since then! It is not unusual, to judge from books on ecclesiastical history written from the western perspective, to find that we disappear from view sometime after the year 1054, to be consigned forever to scholarly oblivion. True, world political events have begun to alter this tunnel vision but the steady and very quiet growth and consolidation of Orthodox Christianity in Britain, still remains a well-kept secret on the religious scene here.

This rather prolix introduction serves, though, to lead us to consider the origins and sources of the true version of Christianity. There will be those, influenced by the modern heresy of ecumenism, who maintain that no particular Christian ecclesial body can possibly possess the fullness of all Gospel truth; that, in fact, we human beings have still to build the true Church on earth, if only we could forget our histories and find the lowest common denominator. It is not hard to see how such a view, albeit perhaps, an exaggeration of the position, can be seen as dangerous to Orthodox eyes. For us, there is no argument, though it hurt us to appear to some as arrogant: The Eastern Orthodox Church is the Church that Christ founded. We say in the Creed that we believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; there is no other and for it to be real it has to subsist here in actually form as well as substance. There is no ‘coming’ Great Church of the future, no more than we build the kingdom of heaven on earth by our own Pelagian effort and work. The Church of God is not an invisible entity waiting to be revealed at the end of time. No doubt, the sons of light will be, the righteous will be but the Church is here and now, for it is the very sacrament of the kingdom and is here to proclaim bulwark and foundation of the truth in Christ. [The real clash of course comes with our dissident sister, the Roman Catholic Church, which also makes the same historic and spiritual claim to be the-one-and-only.]

To explain this idea further it is worth considering the historic as well as spiritual source and foundation of the faith we proclaim today. To this end, one example will illustrate what I mean. Our part of the Lord’s vineyard, the Church of the Patriarchate of Antioch, is actually called in its original Arabic title: The Roman Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. When the word ‘Roman’ is translated in English the word ‘Greek’ substituted. Surprised? Well, the answer is partly to avoid confusion with the Roman Catholic Church but, interestingly, it is not used when translated in German – there, the word ‘Rum’ is used. The actual historic reason for this is that the ‘Roman’ in the title refers to The New Rome – Constantinople. The people of the old Christian city of Constantinople, Byzantium, to give it its original name, referred to themselves as ‘Romans’ because the Eastern half of the Roman Empire continued down to the year 1453. They saw themselves, with an understandable sense of civic pride, as being in a long, continuous line, starting in the eighth century BC. It was St. Constantine the Great who transferred the imperial capital to the ancient Greek settlement of Byzantium at the beginning of the fourth century AD. Right up to and beyond the Great Schism of 1054, Byzantium (Constantinople) guarded the same Apostolic faith without any essential change. Rome, once the senior patriarchate and a co-guardian of the tradition, fell into dissidence. The cities of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and other centres of the historic faith, gradually fell under the political control of Islam through its aggressive expansion. Byzantium alone was left free as the champion of the ancient deposit of faith and was thus left ‘first among equals’ of the ancient Orthodox churches. Those Eastern Orthodox Christians, living under the yoke of Islam, could still look to their fellowship with Byzantium as the guarantee of their own authenticity.

If, therefore, we look to the Byzantine tradition as the protector still of the truth of the gospel and the source of our inspiration, it is no surprise. Our theology, our Liturgy, our spirituality, our iconography, our music, is all described as Byzantine. This is not say that nothing comes from elsewhere, that would be patently false. Our liturgy, for example, is largely Antiochian, both in form and custom; it was introduced into the Byzantine Church by none other than St. John Chrysostom. The monastic traditions of Jerusalem greatly influenced the Typikon – the rules by which the services are celebrated. Yet it was Byzantium that gathered these treasures old and new, like the householder in the gospel parable and recognised them as her own and of her own.

The proverbial time traveller from fifth-century Western Syria would feel generally at home at a Liturgy in any of our churches, though the music might be rather strange to his ears sometimes. One even from Gaul or Britannia might find the rites different in many ways, but the ethos and the teaching would be essentially the same. Of what other Christian denomination in the world today could that be said?

There is nothing foreign in this idea that the Byzantine tradition is the paradigm of what Christianity truly is. If we are told it lies elsewhere, then how would we know it? If no one possesses the whole truth of the gospel, then how do we gather in this amalgam scattered abroad and how do we know when we have enough? There can only be one Church or how else can we be assured of salvation? If naïve Ecumenism is a modern heresy, then the re-emergence of Orthodoxy in Western Europe is the rediscovery of a treasure – not the pearl of great price itself but the map of where to find it buried us. Something that used to be part of the very religious fabric of our own land, the faith of our ancient fathers before the Norman Conquest, is now reviving among us.

There is a view that would propose the city of Jerusalem as the centre of Christian unity. Of course, the faith began to be proclaimed there; it was the site of Our Lord’s death and resurrection. The faith went out from there, received and guarded by The New Rome, spreading to the whole Orthodox world. It is not, however, the old Jerusalem for which we are striving through our ascetic and synergetic struggle, but the new, the heavenly Jerusalem above which is free (Galatians.4:26). Our journey, though, begins figuratively from Constantinople; we walk in her faith. The Byzantine Empire was not, itself, the kingdom of God. If it had not eventually fallen, however, many might have been tempted to believe just that! The old city was taken in 1453 by a foreign invader with an alien and aggressive faith. But the real treasure of Byzantium was not her plundered gold and silver or her priceless works of art, stolen by the Venetians and others in 1204. Her real treasure is still with us and we are its guardians who, by a singular paradox, keep it by sharing; we possess it by giving to others.

Our Orthodox faith is like the consecrated ‘Lamb’ at the communion which is ‘divided yet never disunited; eaten yet never consumed.’ The name we give this faith: ‘Greek Orthodox’ is, of course, a theological term and not an ethnic one referring to any nation. We could just as well be called ‘Roman Orthodox’ or even – as our faith is perfectly catholic according to the Creed – ‘Roman (i.e. new Rome) Catholic’ but that really would be confusing, now, wouldn’t it!

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