Excerpts from
“The Orthodox Church”
By Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov (1871-1954)
Note: Because of some non-Orthodox ideas that Fr. Sergey Bulgakov promoted, we avoid publishing the works of this prolific writer and well known religious philosopher. However this particular book, after some editing we have done, appears to be a good introduction about the Orthodox Church.
Bishop Alexander (Mileant).
Content:
The Orthodox Church
The Church.
The Church as Tradition.
The Hierarchy.
The Unity of the Church.
The Sanctity of the Church.
Orthodox Dogma.
The Sacraments.
The Virgin Mary and the Saints in Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox Church Service.
Icons and their Cult.
Orthodox Mysticism.
Orthodox Ethic.
Orthodoxy and the State.
Orthodox Eschatology.
Orthodoxy and Other Christian Confessions.
The Church.
Orthodoxy is the Church of Christ on earth. The Church of Christ is not an institution; it is a new lifewith Christ and in Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. Christ, the Son of God, came to earth, was made man, uniting His divine life with that of humanity. This divine-human life He gave to his brethren, who believe in His name, although He died, rose again and ascended into heaven, He was not separated from His humanity, but remains in it. The light of the resurrection of Christ lights the Church, and the joy of resurrection, of the triumph over death, fills it. The risen Lord lives with us, and our life in the Church is a mysterious life in Christ. “Christians” bear that name precisely because they belong to Christ, they live in Christ, and Christ lives in them. The Incarnation is not only a doctrine, it is above all an eventwhich happened once in time but which possesses all the power of eternity, and this perpetual incarnation, a perfect, indissoluble union, yet without confusion, of the two natures — divine and human — makes the Church. Since the Lord did not merely approach humanity but became one with it, Himself becoming man, the Church is the Body of Christ, as a unity of life with Him, a life subordinate to Him and under His authority. The same idea is expressed when the Church is called the Bride of Christ; the relations between bride and bridegroom, taken in their everlasting fullness, consist of a perfect unity of life, a unity which preserves the reality of their difference: it is a union of two in one, which is not dissolved by duality nor absorbed by unity. The Church, although it is the Body of Christ, is not the Christ — the God-Man — because it is only His humanity; but it is life in Christ, and with Christ, the life of Christ in us; “it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). But Christ is not only a Divine Person. Since His own life is inseparable from that of the Holy Trinity, His life is consubstantial with that of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Thus it is that, although a life in Christ, the Church is also a life in the Holy Trinity. The body of Christ lives in Christ, and by that very fact in the Holy Trinity. Christ is the Son. Through Him we learn to know the Father, we are adopted by God, to Whom we cry “Our Father.”
The love of God, the love of the Father for the Son and that of the Son for the Father, is not a simple quality or relation; it possesses itself a personal life, it is hypostatic. The love of God is the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from the Father to the Son, abiding upon Him. The Son exists for the Father only in the Holy Spirit which rests on Him; as the Father manifests his love for the Son by the Holy Spirit, which is the unity of life of Father and Son. And the Spirit itself, being the love of two persons, in keeping with the very nature of love lives, so to speak, in Its personal existence outside Itself in the Father and the Son.
The Church, in her quality of Body of Christ, which lives with the life of Christ, is by that fact the domain where the Holy Spirit lives and works. More: the Church is life by the Holy Spirit, because it is the Body of Christ. This is why the Church may be considered as a blessed life in the Holy Spirit, or the life of the Holy Spirit in humanity.
The essence of this doctrine is revealed in its historical manifestation. The Church is the work of the Incarnation of Christ, it is the Incarnation itself. God takes unto Himself human nature, and human nature assumes divinity: it is the deification of human nature, result of the union of the two natures in Christ. But at the same time the work of assimilating humanity into the Body of Christ is not accomplished by virtue of the Incarnation alone, or even by the Resurrection alone. “It is better for you that I go (to my Father)” (John 16:7). That work required the sending of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, which was the fulfillment of the Church. The Holy Spirit, in the form of tongues of fire, descended on the Apostles. The unity of these, the unity of the twelve presided over by the Blessed Virgin, represents the whole of mankind. The tongues of fire remained in the world and formed the treasure of the gifts of the Holy Spirit which reside in the Church. This gift of the Holy Spirit was conferred in the primitive Church by the Apostles after baptism; now the corresponding gift, the “seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit,” is accorded in the sacrament of confirmation.
The Church, then, is the Body of Christ. Through the Church we participate in the divine life of the Holy Trinity, it is life in the Holy Spirit by which we become children of the Father and which cries in our souls: “Abba, Father,” and which reveals to us the Christ living in us. That is why, before attempting any definition of the Church as manifested in history, we ought to understand the Church as a sort of divine fixed quantity living in itself and comparable only with itself, as the will of God manifesting itself in the world.
The Church exists, it is “given” in a certain sense, independently of its historic origin; it took form because it already existed in the divine, superhuman plan. It exists in us, not as an institution or a society, but first of all as a spiritual certainty, a special experience, a new life. The preaching of primitive Christianity is the joyous and triumphant announcement of that new life. The life is indefinable, but it can be described and it can be lived.
There can thus be no satisfactory and complete definition of the Church. “Come and see” — one recognizes the Church only by experience, by grace, by participation in its life. This is why before making any formal definition, the Church must be conceived in its mystical being, underlying all definitions, but larger than them all. The Church, in its essence as a divine-human unity, belongs to the realm of the divine. It is from God, but it exists in the world, in human history. If the Church is considered only in its historic development and if it is conceived only as a society on this earth, its original nature is not understood, that quality of expressing the eternal in the temporal, of showing the uncreated in the created.
The essence of the Church is the divine life, revealing itself in the life of the creature; it is the deification of the creature by the power of the Incarnation and of Pentecost. That life is a supreme reality, it is evident and certain for all those who participate in it. Nevertheless, it is a spiritual life, hidden in the “secret man,” in the “inner chamber” of his heart; in this sense it is a mystery and a sacrament. It is above nature — in other words, it exists apart from the world; still it is included within the life of the world. These two attributes are equally characteristic. From the viewpoint of the former, we say the Church is “invisible,” different from all that is visible in the world, from all that is the object of perception among the things of the world. One might say that it does not exist in this world, and, judging by experience (in Kant's use of the term), we encounter no “phenomenon” which corresponds to the Church; so that the hypothesis of the Church is as superfluous for experimental cosmology as the hypothesis of God for the cosmology of Laplace. Thus it is correct to speak, if not of a Church invisible, at least of the invisible in the Church. Nevertheless, this invisible is not unknown, for, beyond the scope of the senses, man possesses “spiritual vision,” by means of which he sees, he conceives, he knows. This vision is faith, which in the words of the Apostle, is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1); it lifts us on wings to the spiritual realm, it makes us citizens of the heavenly world. The life of the Church is the life of faith, by means of which the things of this world become transparent. And, naturally, these spiritual eyes can see the Church “invisible.” If the Church were really invisible, completely imperceptible, that would mean simply that there were no Church, for the Church cannot exist solely in itself apart from mankind. It is not altogether included in human experience, for the life of the Church is divine and inexhaustible, but a certain quality of that life, a certain experience of the life in the Church, is given to everyone who approaches it. In this sense everything in the Church is invisible and mysterious, it all surpasses the limits of the visible world; but still the invisible may become visible, and the fact that we may see the invisible is the very condition of the existence of the Church.
Thus the Church in its very being is an object of faith; it is known by faith: “I believe in one holy Catholic and ApostolicChurch.” The Church is perceived by faith, not only as a quality or an experience, but also quantitatively: as an all-embracing unity, as a life unique and integral, as universality, after the pattern of the oneness of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. Only the infinite subdivision of the human species is accessible to our sight, we see how each individual leads a life egotistical and isolated; the children of the same Adam, although they are social creatures, altogether dependent on their brothers, do not perceive their essential unity, but this unity manifests itself in love and by love, and it exists by virtue of participation in the one divine life of the Church. “Let us love one another that in the same spirit we may confess” proclaims the Church during the liturgy. That unity of the Church reveals itself to the eyes of love not at all as an exterior union — after the fashion of those we meet in every human society — but as the mysterious, original source of life. Humanity is one in Christ, men are branches of one vine, members of one body. The life of each man enlarges itself infinitely into the life of others, the “communio sanctorum,” and each man in the Church lives the life of all men in the Church. In God and in His Church, there is no substantial difference between living and dead, and all are one in God. Even the generations yet to be born are part of this one divine humanity.
But the Church universal is not limited to humanity alone; the whole company of the angels is equally a part of it. The very existence of the world of angels is inaccessible to human sight, it can be affirmed only by spiritual experience, it can be perceived only by the eyes of faith. And thus our union in the Church becomes even larger through the Son of God, in that He has reunited things earthly and things heavenly, has destroyed the wall of partition between the world of angels and the world of men. Then to all humanity and to the assembly of angels is added all nature, the whole of creation. It is entrusted to the guardianship of angels and given to man that he may rule over it; it shares the destiny of man. “All creation groaneth and travaileth together” (Rom. 8:22-3), to be transfigured in a “new creation,” simultaneous with our resurrection. In the Church man thus becomes a universal being; his life in God unites him to the life of all creation by the bonds of cosmic love. Such are the boundaries of the Church. And that Church, which unites not only the living, but the dead, the hierarchies of angels and all creation, that Church is invisible, but not unknown.
It may be said that the Church was the eternal end and the foundation of creation; in this sense it was created before all things, and for it the world was made. The Lord God created man in His image, and thus made possible the penetration of man by the spirit of the Church and the Incarnation of God, for God could take upon Himself only the nature of a being who corresponded to Him and who in itself contained His image. In the integral unity of humanity there is already present the germ of the unity of the Church in the image of the Holy Trinity. Thus it is difficult to point to a time when the Church did not exist in humanity, at least in the state of design. According to the doctrine of the Fathers, a primordial Church already existed in Paradise before the fall, when the Lord went to speak with man and put Himself into relation with him. After the fall, in the first words about the “seed of the woman” the Lord laid the foundation of what may be termed the Church of the old covenant, the Church wherein man learned to commune with God. And even in the darkness of paganism in the natural seeking of the human soul for its God, there existed a “pagan sterile church,” as some of the songs of the Church call it. Certainly the Church attained the fullness of its existence only with the Incarnation, and in this sense the Church was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ and realized at Pentecost. On these events, the foundation of the Church was laid, but its fullness is not yet attained. It is still the Church militant, and it must become the Church triumphant, where “God shall be all in all.”
It is impossible, then, to define the limits of the Church in space, in time, or in power of action, and in this sense the Church, although not invisible, is not completely comprehensible; nevertheless that does not make the Church invisible in the sense that it does not exist on earth under a form accessible to experience, or even in the sense that it is transcendent only, which would in reality mean its non-existence. No, although we do not comprehend its whole meaning, the Church is visible on the earth, it is quite accessible to our experience, it has its limits in time and space. The life invisible of the Church, the life of faith, is indissolubly connected with the concrete forms of earthly life. “The invisible” exists in the visible, is included in it; together they form a symbol. The word “symbol” denotes a thing which belongs to this world, which is closely allied to it, but which has nevertheless a content in existence before all ages. It is the unity of the transcendent and the immanent, a bridge between heaven and earth, a unity of God and man, of God and the creature.
But if the Church as life is contained in the earthly Church, then this earthly Church, like all reality here below, has its limits in time and space. Being not only a society, not comprehended in or limited by that concept, still it exists exactly as a society, which has its own characteristics, its laws and limits. It is for us and in us; in our temporal existence. The Church has a history, just as everything that exists in the world lives in history. Thus the existence eternal, unmoved, divine of the Church, appears in the life of this age as an historic manifestation, has its beginning in history. The Church was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ; He has ordained that the profession of faithof Peter, spoken in the name of allthe Apostles, is the corner-stone of His Church. After the resurrection He sent the Apostles to preach His Church; it is from the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles that the Church of the New Covenant dates its existence — at that time there rang from the mouth of Peter the first apostolic appeal inviting entrance into the Church: “Be ye converted, and let each one be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ — and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38): “And there were in that day nearly three thousand persons added to the Church” (Acts 2:41). Thus was laid the foundation of the New Covenant.
The Church as Tradition.
Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition.
NOT all human race belongs to the Church, and not all Christians belong to the Church — only the Orthodox. Both these facts give rise to problems which concern the searching reason of religious faith. Both problems have exhausted the theologians. How can it be, if Christ took upon Himself a whole humanity, that the Body of the Church, His Church, comprehends externally only that part of humanity which is in the Church? And how is it that of that section of humanity called to the love of Christ by baptism, only a portion live the true life of the Church, elect from among the elect? The Lord has given us no understanding of the first problem, and only a partial comprehension of the second, which we shall consider later. The salvation of mankind through entrance into the Church is not a mechanical process, independent of the will of man, but it presupposes the voluntary acceptance or rejection of Christ (Mark 16:16). Thus by faith one enters the Church; by lack of faith one leaves it. The Church, as an earthly society, is first of all a unity of faith, of the true faith preached to the world by the Apostles after the descent of the Holy Spirit. Since this faith must be expressed in words, confession, preaching, the Church appears as a society joined by its unity of religious, dogmatic consciousness, containing and confessing the true faith. This concept of the true faith, of orthodoxy, cannot be conceived as some abstract norm. On the contrary, true faith has a definite content of dogmatic teaching, which the Church confesses, demanding of its members the same confession. Thus a departure from the true faith means separation from the Church: heresy or schism.