Other Controversies.

Photius in his encyclical of 867 also had criticized several liturgical and canonical practices introduced by Prankish missionaries in Bulgaria (opposition to a married priesthood, confirmation performed only by bishops, fasting on Saturdays), but his criticism was directed at the fact that the missionaries were requiring from the newly-baptized Bulgarians complete abandonment of Greek usages. He did not yet consider diversity in practice and discipline as an obstacle to Church unity. The Latin interpolation of the creed and the doctrine of which it reflected were the only doctrinal issues, which, according to Photius, were leading to schism.

This attitude will generally predominate among the best theologians of Byzantium. Peter of Antioch (ca. 1050) and Theophylact of Bulgaria (ca. 1100) explicitly state that the Filioque is the only issue dividing East and West. And even at a later period, when the separate development of the two theologies was bound to create new problems, one finds many prominent Byzantines failing to raise any issue in their anti-Latin treatises other than that of the procession of the Holy Spirit.

On the less enlightened level of popular piety however polemics took a sharper tone and were often oriented toward peripheral issues. When well-intentioned but ill-informed, Prankish reformers in Bulgaria under Photius, or in Italy under Michael Cerularius, attacked the practices of the Greek Church, the Church often answered with a counterattack on Latin discipline and rites. Thus, the schism of the eleventh century was almost exclusively a dispute about ritual practices. In addition to the issues quoted by Photius, Michael Cerularius mentions among “Latin heresies” the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the leniency of the Latin fast, baptism by one and not three immersions, and other similar issues.¹¹

Cerularius’ list of heresies was frequently repeated, and often expanded, by later polemicists. Of the problems mentioned in the list however the only one to be viewed consistently by the Greeks as a theological issue — and even sometimes placed on a level of importance comparable to that of the Filioque — is that of the azymes, the use of unleavened bread in the Latin Eucharistic celebration. Thus, in the late Middle Ages, Greek and Slavic peoples often characterized the Latins as azymites.

The arguments brought against the Latin practice by Cerularius’ friends and contemporaries — Leo of Ohrid and Nicetas Stethatos — and repeated by their successors can be reduced to three: (1) the use of unleavened bread is Judaic;- (2) it contradicts the historic evidence as recorded in the Synoptics (Jesus took “bread”); and (3) its symbolic value is that of “death,” not of “life,” for yeast in the dough is like the soul in the body. The second point in particular implies the solution of several exegetical and historical problems: Was the Last Supper a paschal meal? In that case unleavened bread would have been used. Or did Jesus deliberately violate the law in order to institute a “new” covenant? Can the word artos, which normally designates ordinary bread, also mean “unleavened bread”?

The third argument was also raised by Greek polemicists in the Christo-logical context of anti-Armenian polemics. Nicetas Stethatos himself was involved in arguments against the Armenians, who after the conquests of the Macedonian emperors of the tenth century were in close contact with Byzantium. The Armenians were using unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and the Greeks drew a parallel between this practice and the Monophysite — or, more precisely, Apollinarian — Christology of the Armenians: bread symbolizing Christ’s humanity in order to reflect Chalcedonian orthodoxy must be “animated” and dynamic in full possession of the living energies of humanity. By imitating the Monophysite Armenians in their use of the “dead” azymes, the Latins themselves were falling into Apollinarianism, and denying that Christ, as man, had a soul. Thus during the Middle Ages and afterward in Greek and Slavic countries, Latins were considered as having fallen into the “Apollinarian heresy”: the charge appears, for example, in the writings of the monk Philotheus, the famous Russian sixteenth-century ideologist of “Moscow, the third Rome.”

After the late-thirteenth century, the growing Scholastic precisions, which appeared in contemporary Latin theology, concerning the fate of the souls after death and purgatory fire, were reflected in the various encounters between Latin and Greek theologians. The unionist Profession of Faith, which had to be signed by Emperor Michael VIII Paieologus (1259-1282), included a long clause affirming that the souls, before enjoying the fruits of repentance in heaven, “were purified after death through the fire of Purgatory,” and that prayer for the departed was able to alleviate their “pains.”¹² Although the Byzantine tradition had always acknowledged that prayers for the dead were both licit and necessary, that the solidarity of all the members of the Body of Christ was not broken by death, and that, through the intercession of the Church, the departed could get closer to God, it ignored the notion of redemption through “satisfaction” of which the legalistic concept of “purgatory pains” was an expression. On this point, most Byzantine theologians were more puzzled than Impressed by the Latins, and they never succeeded in placing the issue in the wider context of the doctrine of salvation, the only level on which a successful refutation and alternative could be found. Even in Florence, where, for the first time, a prolonged dialogue on the issue took place, the discussion was limited to particulars and was never concerned with the notion of redemption as such.¹³ It ended with the weary acceptance, by the Greek majority, of a detailed and purely Latin definition of the issue.

In the decades preceding the Council of Florence, the growing knowledge among Byzantines of the Latin liturgical practices led to the emergence of another issue between the churches, that of the relationship in the Eucharist canon between the words of institution and the invocation of the Spirit, or epiclesis. Reproaching the Latins for the absence of an epiclesis in the Roman canon of the Mass, Byzantine polemicists pointed out the fact that all sacramental acts are effected through the Holy Spirit. Nicholas Cabasilas († before 1391), the famous spiritual writer, in his Explanation of the Divine Liturgy¹⁴ invokes in favour of this point the authority of the Latin rite itself whose Christian authenticity he thus explicitly recognizes. He recalls that an invocation of the Spirit is part of the Latin rite of ordination and that the Roman Mass includes in the oration supplices te rogamus a prayer for the gifts, which follows the words of institution, a fact which, according to Cabasilas, means that the words of institution are not consecratory in themselves. Whatever the strength of this last argument, it is clear that the Greek insistence on an explicit invocation of the Spirit is very much in line with the traditional patristic theology of the sacraments, especially when it considers the epiclesis not as a “formula” of consecration, opposed to the Latin one, but as the normal and necessary fulfilment of the Eucharistic prayer of which the words of institution also constitute a fundamental part.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 559