The Mysteries Across the Tradition

A synthesis and an assessment: what the several mysteries hold in common, where the Orthodox understanding diverges soberly from the Latin West and the Reformation, and what the whole collection has shown about the Orthodox theology of the sacramental life. This file gathers the East–West divergences named throughout the collection into one sober survey and offers a concluding judgment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Mysteries Share

For all their variety, the mysteries treated in this collection share a common grammar, set out at its beginning (see Sacramental Theology) and confirmed in every section:

  • They are acts of Christ in His Church, not powers the clergy wield or signs of an absent grace; the minister acts as the instrument of Christ and the Spirit (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 1; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II).
  • They are epicletic — accomplished by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, whom the Church asks the Father to send upon water, oil, bread, wine, and persons — rather than by a formula pronounced with legal exactitude (see The Mystery of the Body and Blood).
  • They are ecclesial — events of the whole Body, not private transactions; the mysteries make and manifest the Church (Schmemann, The Eucharist, SVS Press, 1988).
  • They truly convey what they signify — real participations in divine grace, effective and not merely symbolic — while remaining genuinely mysterious, their manner hidden in God (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).
  • They are ordered to theosis — one economy with a single end, the deification of the human person and, through him, the transfiguration of creation (see The Mysteries and Theosis).

The East–West Divergences, Named Soberly

Throughout this collection specific East–West divergences have been noted. Gathered in one place, and stated without polemic, they form a coherent pattern — the Orthodox reserve toward the juridical and analytic cast that Western sacramental theology took on in the scholastic period:

  1. The number seven. The fixed count of seven sacraments is a medieval Western systematization (Lombard, Florence 1439, Trent 1547) that entered Orthodox usage late and was never given the status of dogma; the authentic Orthodox understanding knows the mysteries as the whole sacramental life (see The Mysteries and the Number Seven) [Disputed: the older Orthodox school theology and the symbolic books of the 17th century do teach seven as received doctrine; the dispute is over the status of the number, not the reality of the rites — Meyendorff, *Byzantine Theology*, Fordham, 1974, ch. 14; Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II].

  2. The change of the eucharistic gifts. The Orthodox confess the real change (metabolē) as a mystery, and are reserved toward making “transubstantiation,” with its Aristotelian analysis of substance and accidents, a required dogmatic explanation — even though the term entered some authoritative Orthodox texts [Disputed: the *Confession of Dositheus* (1672) uses *metousiōsis*; the patristic revival treats it as non-obligatory — see [The Mystery of the Body and Blood](../04-the-eucharist/the-mystery-of-the-body-and-blood.md)].

  3. The consecratory moment. The East locates the change at the epiclesis and refuses to isolate a “moment of consecration” in the words of institution; the classical West located it in the priest’s recitation of “This is my Body” (see The Mystery of the Body and Blood; Cabasilas, Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 29–30).

  4. The integrity of initiation. The East keeps baptism, chrismation, and communion together as one act given even to infants; the West severed confirmation and first communion from baptism and deferred them (see Chrismation and Reception into the Church).

  5. The anointing of the sick. The East never restricted unction to the dying; the medieval West made it “extreme unction,” a reform Rome itself later reversed toward the Eastern understanding [Corrected: the identification of Orthodox unction with "last rites" — see [The Mystery of Anointing](../08-holy-unction/the-mystery-of-anointing.md); Paul Meyendorff, *The Anointing of the Sick*, SVS Press, 2009].

  6. Marriage and indissolubility. The East, holding the ideal of one lifelong marriage, tolerates by oikonomia the dissolution of a dead marriage and remarriage, celebrated penitentially, up to a limit of three; Rome denies divorce and remarriage while a spouse lives and instead examines validity through annulment (see Marriage, Divorce, and Oikonomia).

Against the Reformation the divergence runs the other way: where much of Protestantism reduced baptism and the Lord’s Supper to symbolic ordinances testifying to a grace received by faith alone, the Orthodox insist on the real, effective conveyance of grace in the mysteries (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; see Orthodoxy: The Holy Mysteries). The Orthodox position thus stands between a Western tendency to over-define the mechanism of grace and a Protestant tendency to deny its sacramental conveyance altogether — affirming the reality while guarding the mystery.

A Caution on the “Latin Captivity”

Honesty requires a further note, for the divergences are not simply “East versus West.” Much of Orthodox sacramental theology in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries was itself heavily Latinized — the “Western captivity” of Orthodox theology, in Florovsky’s phrase — importing the count of seven, the language of matter and form, and even metousiōsis through the school manuals and the symbolic books (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the pseudomorphosis of Orthodox theology; Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology). The twentieth-century patristic revival — Florovsky, Lossky, Schmemann, the Meyendorffs — was in large part a recovery of the older, more genuinely Eastern understanding from within Orthodoxy, against this captivity. The divergences named above are therefore best understood not as ancient and unchanging confessional walls but as the fruit of a long recovery still in progress: the Orthodox tradition returning to its own sources and distinguishing what is authentically hers from what she had borrowed. This is why the disputes flagged throughout this collection are so often internal to Orthodoxy as well as between Orthodoxy and the West.

An Assessment

What, in sum, does the Orthodox understanding of the mysteries hold and guard? Above all, it guards the mystery — the refusal to reduce the encounter with the living God to a mechanism, a formula, or a legal effect that can be exhaustively defined. The Orthodox mysteries are real, effective, and objective; grace is truly given; the bread truly becomes the Body. But how remains hidden in God, accomplished by the Spirit invoked, received in faith and repentance, and ordered to a transformation — theosis — that exceeds all analysis (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988). This is the deepest thing the collection has shown: that the Orthodox theology of the sacraments is finally a theology of the whole life of the Church as the place where the hidden God gives Himself in visible things, and of the whole human person and, through him, the whole creation, as called to be deified in that self-giving.

The number seven, the analysis of matter and form, the pinpointing of a consecratory moment — these are, for the Orthodox, at best serviceable teaching devices and at worst distractions from the reality. The reality is that in the mysteries the risen Christ, through the Spirit, incorporates persons into His Body, feeds them with Himself, restores them when they fall, and carries them toward the Kingdom where they will see Him as He is. To confess the mysteries rightly is to live them — for, as the whole tradition insists and as this reference cannot supply, the theology of the mysteries is finally learned not by study but by baptism and communion, confession and anointing, within the praying Church (see the caveats in the master README, on the limits of a reference guide).

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993, Part II.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988; and For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973.
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, chs. 29–30. Trans. Hussey and McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960.
  • Paul Meyendorff. The Anointing of the Sick. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2009.
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology (on the “Western captivity” of Orthodox theology). Collected Works, vols. 5–6.
  • Dositheus of Jerusalem. Confession of Dositheus (1672); Councils of Florence (1439) and Trent (1547) — the Western and Latinizing enumerations.