Antiochian Innovation
Are you aware of the innovations about fasting and women that have been passed by the Antiochian
Bishops? If so, could you comment on this in your magazine? (Fr. J.S., IL)
The Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Antioch,
meeting in Syria from May 26-May 27, 1997, at the Patriarchal
Monastery of St. George, decided, among other things: 1) to
abolish fasting during the post-Paschal period from Bright Week
to Ascension; and 2) to allow women to commune at any time and to
remove from the Church’s "liturgical texts" any
reference to women as "unclean" or "tainted."
(A report on these and other decisions can be found in the
September, 1977, issue of The Word, the official
publication of Antiochian Christian Archdiocese, the Exarchate of
the Antiochian Patriarchate in America.)
These innovations, which are contrary to Holy
Tradition, clearly demonstrate the extent to which the modernist
Orthodox Churches have lost any understanding of the spiritual
foundations of our Church or of its ascetic theology. Patriarchs,
Bishops, or local Synods do not have the right to act
unilaterally against the established traditions of the Church.
Not only are their pronouncements of no significance, when they
act in such a way, but the fabricated religion which they thereby
produce—of which the ultra-modernist Antiochian Archdiocese
is an egregious example—clearly risks cutting itself off
from the Body of the Church through innovation and deviation from
Holy Tradition. When the Church administration acts against the
spiritual integrity of the Church, the question of the
authoritative nature of its decisions is neither here nor there.
The Church derives from the spirit of prophecy and not from the
presumed prerogatives of administrative order.
The decisions in question simply codify
deviations from Orthodox practice that the Antiochian Church has
long tolerated. They are not decisions, as such, but concessions
to a watered-down version of Orthodox spiritual life. It is an
ancient and established tradition, for example, to return to the
normal Wednesday and Friday fasts after bright Week, allowing
wine and oil on these days, as a sign and symbol of the
enduring joy of the Paschal Feast and freedom from fasting. Deviation
from this practice is an endorsement of the violation of the
Wednesday and Friday fast, which is set forth in the sixty-ninth
Apostolic Canon. It is also, once more, a concession to those who
wish to ignore the spiritual practices of the Church and make
what is difficult "easy"—a road to spiritual
peril.
An equally ancient and important aspect of the
Eucharistic life of the Church is that of proper preparation,
such that we approach the life-giving Mysteries in a state of
spiritual and bodily purity. Thus, women normally avoid Holy
Communion during their periods, while men likewise usually avoid
communing for one day, following a nocturnal emission (see the
seventeenth canon of St. John the Faster, and the fourth Canon of
St. Dionysios of Alexandria). We do this in recognition of the
fact that, as fallen human beings, we are unclean and tainted;
that is, ill with sin. It is in the reception of the Body and
Blood of Christ that Divinity enters into us and renews in us the
Divine image with which we humans are imprinted, restoring us to
spiritual health through the therapeutic Mysteries of the Church.
We approach the Chalice with a sense of our unworthiness, spotted
by sin, as we are; and we draw away from the Holy Eucharist
renewed in Grace. Our action, in all of this, entails the ascetic
preparation of ourselves for this restorative process. And thus,
it is unthinkable that anyone would take offense—whether man
or woman—at seeing in himself the impurity which separates
us from God, cleansing himself by ascetic practice (fasting,
prayer, watchfulness over the body), and thus approaching the
Holy Chalice to take into himself Divinity Itself: the Body and
Blood of Christ.
It is not, in implementing its innovations, the
liturgical books which the Patriarchate of Antioch must change;
rather, it must abolish the teachings of the Fathers, the
provisions of the Holy Canons, and the ascetic witness of
countless Saints, male and female alike, who have, through an
acute awareness of their tainted, unclean, and fallen selves,
found restoration, through the Grace of God, becoming "sons
of God" and "small Jesus Christs within Jesus
Christ." Antioch’s innovations are a move towards a new
religion of ease, superficiality, and platitudes and away from
the profound glorification and divinization of man that the
ascetic practices and traditions of our Faith have as their very
aim. The spirit of the Antiochian Church, one of innovation and
disregard for the ascetic dimensions of our Faith, clearly
reflects its alienation from the Orthodox ethos.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XV, No. 1, 34-35.
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