The Mysteries and the Number Seven

The collection’s flagship both-sides question: whether “seven sacraments” is an authentic Orthodox tradition or a late, Western-influenced systematization. This file sets the whole sacramental life of the Church against the medieval count of seven, traces how the “seven” entered Orthodox usage through Lyons, the confessions of Mogila and Dositheus, and the school theology, and surveys the mysteries that lie beyond any list of seven — monastic tonsure, the blessing of waters, the consecration of a church, and more.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Whole Sacramental Life

The Orthodox Church has never issued a conciliar, dogmatic definition fixing the number of the mysteries at seven — a fact on which the modern Orthodox theologians who have studied the question are agreed (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, ch. 14; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II). This is not an oversight but a consequence of the theology set out in the companion file: if the Church herself is the primordial mystery, and if the several mysteries are the acts by which the one Mystery of Christ is carried into the life of the faithful, then the sacramental extends, in principle, to the whole of the Church’s life. As Metropolitan Kallistos writes, “there are many other actions of the Church, besides the seven, which possess a sacramental character,” and the number seven “has no particular dogmatic significance” but is “simply a convenient means of instruction” adopted comparatively late (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

The early Church, accordingly, felt no need to count. The word mysterion was applied broadly to the whole economy of grace and to a range of holy acts, and no Father of the first millennium produced the canonical list of seven that later Western and Eastern textbooks would treat as fixed (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 14; see Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries). The most systematic Eastern ordering of the rites before the scholastic period, Dionysius the Areopagite’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, treats six and not seven: the three rites of the “perfecting operations” — Baptism (which he calls illumination), the synaxis or Eucharist, and the consecration of the myron (chrism) — together with the three consecrations of persons: the ordination of clergy, the consecration of monks, and the rites over the faithful departed (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chs. 2–7, trans. Luibheid, Paulist Press, 1987). Notably his six overlap only partly with the later seven: he includes the consecration of the myron, the monastic tonsure, and the funeral rites, and he does not isolate marriage, penance, or the anointing of the sick as members of a fixed set.

How the “Seven” Entered Orthodox Usage

In the West the number seven was the achievement of the twelfth-century schools. Peter Lombard’s Sentences (c. 1150) enumerated exactly seven sacraments — baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and marriage — and the Sentences became the standard theological textbook of the medieval West, so that the sevenfold count passed into common teaching and was in due course defined at the Council of Florence’s Decree for the Armenians (1439) and the Council of Trent (Session 7, 1547), which anathematized any who said the sacraments were more or fewer than seven (for the Western fixing of the number, see Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, and Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries).

The seven entered Orthodox usage from that Western matrix, along three overlapping channels:

  1. The union councils. The earliest Eastern statement of exactly seven is commonly traced to the Latin-framed Profession of Faith submitted in the name of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos and accepted at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 — a document drawn up in the interest of reunion and reflecting Western enumeration (see the hub essay, Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 14).
  2. The seventeenth-century confessions. The count was consolidated in the “symbolic books” composed as Orthodoxy defined itself against Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century — above all the Orthodox Confession of Metropolitan Peter Mogila of Kiev (1640, later edited and approved) and the Confession of Dositheus, patriarch of Jerusalem, ratified at the Synod of Jerusalem (1672). Both were written in close engagement with Western theology and both list seven mysteries (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the symbolic books and their “Latin captivity”; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 14).
  3. The school manuals. Through Mogila’s Kievan academy and its successors the sevenfold scheme, and much of the accompanying Latin apparatus of matter and form, became standard in Orthodox dogmatic textbooks down to the early twentieth century.

[Disputed: whether the enumeration of exactly seven mysteries is an authentic expression of the Orthodox tradition or a Western importation. (a) The now-dominant historical view, associated with the twentieth-century patristic revival — Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, and John Meyendorff — holds that the fixed count of seven is a medieval Western systematization (Lombard, Florence, Trent) that entered Orthodox usage only from the thirteenth century (Lyons, 1274) and was consolidated in the Latin-influenced confessions of the seventeenth century; on this reading the ancient and authentic Orthodox understanding knows the mysteries as the whole sacramental life and not as a closed list, and Ware's and Meyendorff's works state the number "has no particular dogmatic significance" (Meyendorff, *Byzantine Theology*, ch. 14; Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II). (b) The view of the older Orthodox school theology and the symbolic books — Mogila's *Orthodox Confession* (1640) and the *Confession of Dositheus* (1672), and dogmatic manuals depending on them — teaches seven mysteries as the received doctrine of the Church, and this remains the enumeration used in most Orthodox catechesis to this day. The disagreement is not over whether the Church celebrates baptism, chrismation, the eucharist, repentance, orders, marriage, and unction — she does — but over the status of the *number* seven: whether it is a dogma, a convenient teaching device, or a foreign intrusion. This collection reports the count as a widely used and pastorally serviceable list while flagging, with Ware and Meyendorff, that it is neither ancient nor dogmatically fixed.]

The practical upshot, on which even the critics of the number agree, is that the seven commonly listed — Baptism, Chrismation, the Eucharist, Repentance (Confession), Holy Orders, Marriage, and Holy Unction — are indeed the principal mysteries of the Church, the ones through which most of the faithful pass and around which catechesis is naturally organized (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). To flag the number as a late systematization is not to demote these rites but to refuse to let the list become a fence.

The Mysteries Beyond the Seven

That the sacramental life overflows any count of seven is shown by the many other rites the tradition treats as bearing a genuinely mysteriological character. Among them:

  • Monastic tonsure. The rite of monastic profession is called by many Fathers and service-books a mystery and even a “second baptism,” a new death and rebirth into the angelic life; Dionysius already ranks the consecration of the monk among the sacred rites of the Church (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 6; see Orthodoxy: Monasticism).
  • The great blessing of the waters at Theophany, by which water is sanctified for the healing and blessing of the faithful and of creation — an epicletic act closely akin in structure to the blessing of the baptismal font (Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, SVS Press, 1974, on the blessing of water).
  • The consecration of a church and its altar, with the sealing of the holy table and the deposition of relics — a rite of unmistakably sacramental weight.
  • The funeral and burial of the dead, which Dionysius lists among his six rites and which the Church surrounds with prayer for the departed.
  • The blessing of the holy chrism (myron) itself — for Dionysius one of the “perfecting” mysteries, though later schemes fold it into chrismation rather than counting it separately (Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 4).
  • Lesser blessings without number — of homes, fields, and fruits, of icons and vessels, the churching of mothers and infants, and the many sanctifications of the euchologion — which extend the sacramental principle into the whole of Christian life and creation (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 1–2, on the sacramental character of the world).

The variability of the older lists confirms the point. Where Dionysius counts six and includes the myron, the tonsure, and the funeral, the later seven drop these and add marriage, penance, and unction; St. Theodore the Studite and other Byzantine writers, when they enumerate at all, give different numbers again. There was no single ancient list because the tradition did not think in terms of a list (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, ch. 14). The honest conclusion, and the one this collection adopts, is that the seven are a true and useful naming of the principal mysteries, provided they are not read as an exhaustive inventory of where the grace of God meets the material world in the life of the Church.

See Also

References

  • Dionysius the Areopagite. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chs. 2–7. Trans. Colm Luibheid, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
  • Peter Mogila. The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church (1640).
  • Dositheus of Jerusalem. Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672).
  • Peter Lombard. Sentences, Book IV (c. 1150) — the Western enumeration of seven sacraments.
  • Councils of Lyons II (1274), Florence (Decree for the Armenians, 1439), and Trent (Session 7, 1547) — the Western fixing of the number.