Chrismation and the Seal

“The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit”: with these words the newly baptized receives personally what the Church received at Pentecost. This file treats the seal pneumatologically — what the gift is, why it is given once and yet must be acquired continually, what the anointing has to do with the name Christian, and why the Eastern refusal to separate the seal from baptism carries a doctrine and not merely a custom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Personal Pentecost

Baptism is birth; chrismation is the coming of the Spirit upon the one newly born. Immediately after the immersion the priest anoints with the holy myron on brow, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet, saying at each anointing: “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The rite itself, the composition of the myron, its consecration by the primate of each autocephalous Church, and the anointing of the several senses are treated in the collection on the mysteries and are not repeated here (see The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit). What belongs here is the pneumatology.

The apostolic language is that of sealing and earnest: God “hath anointed us, who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Corinthians 1:21–22); in Christ the Ephesians “were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:13–14). A seal (σφραγίς) marks ownership and authenticates; an arrabōn is a down-payment that binds the giver to complete the transaction. Both images say the same thing about the gift: it is real, it is now, and it is not yet everything.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem draws the parallel that gives the mystery its name:

“As Christ, after his baptism and the descent of the Holy Spirit, went forth and vanquished the adversary, so likewise you, after holy baptism and the mystical chrism, having put on the whole armour of the Holy Spirit, are to stand against the power of the adversary.”
(Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis 3.4; trans. NPNF II/7.)

And he draws the consequence in the names: Christ means the Anointed; Christian means one who shares his anointing; “having been counted worthy of this holy chrism, you are called Christians, verifying the name also by your new birth” (Mystagogical Catechesis 3.5). The Jordan and the font are one pattern. The Spirit who descended upon the Son and remained (John 1:32) descends upon each member of his Body and remains.

What the Gift Confers

St. Nicholas Cabasilas gives the classic Byzantine account of the difference between the two mysteries. Baptism confers being — existence and subsistence in Christ. Chrismation confers energy and activity: it sets the newborn powers in motion and distributes to each person the particular operations of the Spirit according to his need and calling (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 3; trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974).

The distinction is exactly the one the doctrine of the Spirit needs. Baptism unites to Christ’s death and resurrection — a Christological act; chrismation gives the Spirit personally to this person — a pneumatological one. The pattern of the two hands appears in the two mysteries, which is why the Church has refused to collapse them and equally refused to separate them (see The Two Hands and the Order of the Economy).

Two further consequences of the seal are apostolic and not merely liturgical.

The chrismated are a royal priesthood. “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9). The anointing that in Israel was given to prophets, priests, and kings is given in the Church to every member. This does not make every Christian a presbyter and does not abolish the ordained ministry; what it establishes is that the whole body, and not a caste within it, is anointed, and that the ordained serve within a priestly people rather than in place of one (see Charism and Institution).

And the chrismated have a capacity to know. “But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things”; “the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you” (1 John 2:20, 27). This verse is the scriptural root of the Orthodox conviction that the guardian of the faith is the whole people of God — the claim made in the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848, that “the protector of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves.” The verse is also, read carelessly, a charter for anyone to set his private illumination against the Church; St. John’s own letter forecloses that by making the confession of Christ come in the flesh the test of any spirit (1 John 4:1–3). The tension is real and is worked out in section 08 (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits).

Once Given, Continually Received

The obvious question is how a gift given once at the font relates to a life described as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.

The New Testament itself puts the two together without embarrassment. Timothy, who has received the gift by the laying on of hands, is told to “stir up the gift of God, which is in thee” (2 Timothy 1:6). The Ephesians, who were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, are told not to grieve him (Ephesians 4:30). The Thessalonians are told, “Quench not the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). The gift is not a deposit that sits inertly; it is a fire that can be banked or fanned.

St. Seraphim of Sarov’s teaching that the aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit is therefore not an alternative to the seal but its unfolding: the Spirit given once is to be received ever more fully, through prayer, the mysteries, and the keeping of the commandments (see The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit). St. Symeon the New Theologian made the same point far more sharply in the eleventh century, and made himself unpopular by it: to have received the sacraments and to remain unaware of any working of grace is not the normal Christian condition but a defect to be repented of (see Experience of Grace).

The pastoral shape of the doctrine is therefore neither of the two easy positions. It is not “you received the Spirit at chrismation, so nothing further is to be sought” — which would make the whole ascetic tradition pointless. And it is not “you must seek a second and distinct bestowal of the Spirit” — which is the doctrine of subsequence the Church has not received, and which is examined in The Charismatic Question. It is that the same Spirit given once is to be lived in continually, and that the measure of a Christian’s life is how much of what he already has he has actually let take effect.

The Seal Beyond Persons

The myron seals more than people. Churches are consecrated with it: the holy table is anointed with chrism at the dedication of a temple. In the Byzantine and Russian traditions emperors and tsars were anointed with it at their coronation. And the same chrism is used in the reception of certain converts (see below).

The unifying logic is that the myron is the tangible vehicle of the Spirit’s seal, consecrated by the head of each autocephalous Church and distributed to every parish, so that the humblest chrismation in a village church is bound through the chrism to the whole episcopate. That ecclesiological consequence is drawn out where it belongs (see Chrismation and Reception into the Church).

The Divergence from the West

In the Orthodox rite baptism, chrismation, and communion are administered together, to infants as to adults, in one service. In the Latin West the same three were originally one; the separation of confirmation from baptism developed as the practice of reserving the anointing to the bishop met the growth of rural parishes he could not visit, so that the episcopal act was postponed — first by months, eventually by years — and confirmation became a distinct rite administered at an age of discretion, and communion likewise deferred.

The historical account of that development belongs to the liturgical and sacramental literature; what belongs here is the doctrinal consequence. The Eastern practice preserves the pattern of Christian initiation as a single movement in which the Spirit is given with, and not after, incorporation into Christ — the pattern of Acts 2:38, where repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Spirit are one promise. It also entails that infants are Spirit-bearers and communicants, which is the sharpest practical difference between the traditions and the one most visible in a parish.

The Orthodox solution to the loss of the bishop’s presence was different from the Latin one: rather than postpone the anointing until the bishop can come, the East consecrates the chrism episcopally and lets the presbyter apply it. The bishop is present in the myron. Which is a way of saying that the East solved the same problem by making the seal portable rather than by making it later.

[Disputed: the historical relation of the Eastern chrismation and the Western confirmation. (a) The older Orthodox polemical account treats the Latin separation as a straightforward corruption of the apostolic pattern. (b) The scholarly account is more complicated: both East and West originally had a post-baptismal rite reserved in some sense to the bishop, and the divergence turns on how each solved the problem of episcopal absence in an expanding church — see Paul F. Bradshaw, *The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship*, 2nd ed., Oxford, 2002, and the treatment in Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II. The doctrinal point at issue — whether the gift of the Spirit belongs to the one movement of initiation — is not settled by the historical question, and this collection states the Orthodox practice and its rationale without asserting a simple narrative of corruption.]

The Reception of Converts

Chrismation is also the form in which converts from certain non-Orthodox confessions are received, being anointed rather than baptized. This is a pneumatological act, and it is regularly described in a way that outruns what the Church has actually settled: the practice has varied by time and by jurisdiction and continues to vary, and the canonical basis, the range of practice, and the theological questions belong to the canonical literature and to the treatment of the Church’s boundaries, not here (see Reception of Converts; Chrismation and Reception into the Church).

What can be said here without trespassing is the pneumatological form of the act: what the convert receives is the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, given in the same words and with the same chrism as to a newly baptized infant. Whatever else reception involves, it terminates in the Spirit.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catechesis 3. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Book 3. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Bradshaw, Paul F. The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17.
Scripture: Acts 2:38; John 1:32; 2 Corinthians 1:21–22; Ephesians 1:13–14; 4:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:19; 2 Timothy 1:6; 1 Peter 2:9; 1 John 2:20, 27; 4:1–3.