One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic

The four adjectives of the Creed’s third article are not a description of how the Church has turned out but a confession of what she is by the gift that constitutes her. Each has been contested, and each becomes theologically interesting only at the point where it appears to be contradicted by the facts: unity by visible division, holiness by the sins of the holy, catholicity by the smallness of a village parish, apostolicity by bishops who taught heresy in an unbroken line of ordination. This file takes them in that order and at those points.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Marks Are Constitutive, Not Descriptive

The Symbol says “in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” (eis mian, hagian, katholikēn kai apostolikēn ekklēsian). The Latin tradition came to call these the notae ecclesiae, “notes” or marks, and to use them polemically as criteria for identifying the true Church among competing bodies. That use is secondary and it distorts them. In the Creed they are not tests but confessions: they say what the Church is by virtue of Christ and the Spirit, in the article of the Creed devoted to the Spirit’s work.

The distinction matters because it changes the direction of the argument. If the marks are tests, one looks for the body that best satisfies them. If they are confessions, they say what is true of the Church because of who constitutes her, and the question becomes not “which body scores highest” but “where is that Church.”

One

The claim. There is one Church because there is one Christ, one Spirit, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:4–6). Unity is not the outcome of successful negotiation among Christians; it is a property of a body, which is not made one by the agreement of its limbs. The Eucharist is where this is enacted: “because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17).

The difficulty. Christians are visibly divided, and have been since long before 1054. If the Church is one, what are the divided bodies?

The answer the Church has given. Not the branch theory. The proposal that the one Church subsists as several branches — Orthodox, Roman, Anglican — each possessing part of the whole, was put to the Eastern patriarchs in the nineteenth century and declined. Their Encyclical of May 1848, replying to Pope Pius IX’s In Suprema Petri Apostoli Sede, treats the faith held by the Orthodox Church as the apostolic faith itself and the innovations it examines as departures from it, not as complementary developments (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, Constantinople, May 1848). The Church’s position is that she is not a part of the Church but the Church, and this is a claim she has consistently made — it is the same claim St Cyprian makes when he says the Church cannot be divided (De unitate 5), and the same one the Fathers made against the Novatianists and the Donatists.

What the claim does not settle. It does not settle the status of those outside her visible communion — what their baptism is, what their orders are, whether and how grace operates among them. That is a separate question, genuinely unsettled, and it is treated in section 06. It is a persistent error to treat the rejection of the branch theory as though it answered the boundary question. It does not; it only rules out one particular answer.

Holy

The claim. The Church is holy because Christ her head is holy, because the Spirit who animates her is holy, and because she is set apart for God. Her holiness is God’s, communicated, not an average of her members’ virtue.

The difficulty. Her members sin, and so do her bishops. This is the Donatist objection in its perennial form: a Church whose ministers have failed cannot be holy, and her sacraments must be worthless.

The answer. Two moves, both ancient. First, holiness is not moral achievement but consecration: Israel is qadosh by election, and the Corinthians whom Paul calls “sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2) are the same Corinthians he spends the letter rebuking. Second, the Church continually produces saints, and it is the saints — not the statistics — who are the evidence of what she is. The Church’s holiness is displayed in the fact that within her men and women are actually deified, which is what Theosis treats at length.

The reservation, stated honestly. The holiness of the Church is eschatological: real now, not yet manifest. Ephesians says Christ gave himself for the Church “that he might present the Church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle” — a future presentation, the result of a present sanctifying (Ephesians 5:26–27). The Church at any given moment is a body of sinners being made holy, and any account of her holiness that cannot say this plainly has moved from confession to propaganda. The Church has never taught that her members, or her hierarchs, are impeccable; her canonical literature is very largely a record of the opposite.

Catholic

The claim. Katholikos, from kath’ holou, “according to the whole,” means wholeness, integrity, fullness. The Church is catholic because she has the whole faith and the whole grace, not because she is spread over the whole earth.

The evidence. The word’s first surviving Christian use is St Ignatius: “wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church” (Smyrn. 8.2; trans. Ehrman, LCL 24). The context is decisive. Ignatius is writing about a single local assembly and its bishop, and he says that where Christ is, there — in that assembly — is the catholic Church. If katholikē meant “worldwide,” the sentence would be incoherent. It means the whole and entire Church, present in this place.

St Cyril of Jerusalem, in the mid-fourth century, gives the classic expansion, and it is worth noting that he offers four senses, only one of which is geographic:

“It is called Catholic then because it extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other; and because it teaches universally and completely one and all the doctrines which ought to come to men’s knowledge…; and because it brings into subjection to godliness the whole race of mankind…; and because it universally treats and heals the whole class of sins…” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 18.23; trans. NPNF II/7)

Three of the four senses are qualitative — the completeness of doctrine, the universality of the address, the sufficiency of the healing. The geographic sense is present and should not be denied, but it is one among four, and it is not the sense that makes a village parish catholic.

Why this matters practically. Because it settles the ecclesiological status of the local church. If catholicity is extent, a diocese is a fraction of the Church and its bishop an agent of a larger organization. If catholicity is wholeness, the diocese gathered at the Eucharist is the Church in that place, entire. The Orthodox tradition takes the second, and everything in section 03 follows from it.

The Slavonic complication. The Slavonic Creed renders katholikēn as sobornuyu, from sobor, assembly or council. The translation captures the assembled character of the Church and has been theologically productive, but it is not a transliteration and it opened the way to a nineteenth-century Russian ecclesiology built on the word. That development is treated separately in Catholicity and Sobornost, and it should not be read back into the Creed.

Apostolic

The claim. The Church is apostolic because she is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20); because she holds the faith the apostles taught; and because her bishops stand in the apostles’ office by an unbroken succession of ordination.

The two halves and why they cannot be separated. Apostolicity is succession in order and succession in faith, and the tradition insists on both. St Irenaeus, arguing against Gnostic teachers who claimed a secret apostolic tradition, makes the succession of bishops in the sees the apostles founded into a public, checkable criterion: the apostolic teaching is preserved in those churches which can trace their bishops back to the apostles, and it is preserved openly, not esoterically (Adversus Haereses III.3.1–3). But Irenaeus’ point is precisely that the succession guarantees the teaching; the succession is evidential, and its value lies in what it transmits. In the same book he writes that “where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every kind of grace” (Adv. Haer. III.24.1; trans. ANF 1).

The difficulty. Bishops in unbroken succession have taught heresy — Arian bishops in the fourth century, iconoclast bishops in the eighth, monothelite patriarchs in the seventh. If the chain of hands guaranteed the faith, this could not happen; it did happen. The tradition’s response is not to abandon succession but to refuse to isolate it: a bishop who teaches heresy has broken apostolic succession in the sense that matters, whatever the state of his ordination certificate. This is why the Church has deposed patriarchs, and why the criterion of a council’s authority is not the rank of those who convened it but the faith they confessed (see The Council and the Question of Reception).

What apostolicity does not mean. It does not mean personal descent from a named apostle. Orthodox tradition ascribes the founding of particular sees to particular apostles — Antioch and Rome to Peter, Byzantium to Andrew, Alexandria to Mark — and honours those traditions, but the theological claim is that every bishop stands in the apostolic office, not that some bishops have a superior pedigree. The use of an apostolic foundation to ground a claim of jurisdiction over other churches is a later development and one the Orthodox tradition has consistently declined; the canons rank sees by the civil importance of their cities, and Chalcedon says so explicitly of Constantinople (Chalcedon, Canon 28; and see Primacy and Synodality).

How the Four Interlock

The marks are not four independent properties but four aspects of one gift, and each is unintelligible without the others.

  • The Church is one because she is catholic: if each local church has the whole, then there is no aggregation to be performed and no fragment to be reassembled.
  • She is catholic because she is apostolic: what she possesses whole is the apostolic faith, and a body which had lost that would be whole in nothing.
  • She is apostolic because she is holy: the succession transmits a consecration, and it transmits it from Christ through the Spirit rather than as a human inheritance.
  • She is holy because she is one: her holiness is not distributed among her members severally but is the holiness of the body whose head is Christ.

A defect in any one of them is therefore a defect in all. This is the substance of the Orthodox objection to formulations that grant one mark to a separated body while withholding another — a body “apostolic but not catholic,” or “holy but not one.” The tradition has generally judged such formulations to be describing something other than the Church, without prejudging the further question of what grace may be at work in it. That further question is section 06, and this file deliberately stops short of it.

See Also

References

  • Scripture: Ephesians 2:20; 4:4–6; 5:26–27; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 10:17.
  • Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol (381), third article.
  • Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8.2; ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
  • Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 18.23; trans. NPNF II/7.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses III.3.1–3; III.24.1; trans. ANF 1.
  • Cyprian of Carthage, De ecclesiae catholicae unitate 5–6; CSEL 3.1 (ed. Hartel); trans. ANF 5.
  • Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canon 28; trans. NPNF II/14.
  • Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (reply to Pope Pius IX, In Suprema Petri Apostoli Sede). Constantinople, May 1848.
  • Florovsky, Georges. “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works I. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church, new ed. London: Penguin, 1993, part II, on the marks.
  • Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985, ch. 4 (“Eucharist and Catholicity”).