To be taught on March 14th:
It may seem odd to begin a chapter summary of a book on Orthodoxy with a quote from a Protestant, but the famous G.K. Chesterton describes the struggles on the early Church in a most delightful and graphic manner. From chapter 6 of Chesterton’s book, Orthodoxy (referring to “right belief”):
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
You should read the full opening of Chesterton’s chapter. It will give you the full sense of what Metropolitan Hilarion describes in the first part of this week’s reading.
There is simply too much information in these first eleven pages to adequately summarize. Metropolitan Hilarion moves through the first 4th through 7th centuries of Christianity with great speed.
With Constantine’s Edict of Milan (AD 313), which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire came wave after wave of heresy. He introduces us to the earliest controversies over the trinitarian nature of God. The ink was not yet dry on the Nicene Creed (from the 1st and 2nd Ecumenical Councils, AD 325 and 381, respectively) when controversy arose over the nature of Christ: Is He man? Is He God? Neither? Both? The 3rd Ecumenical Council was convened in Ephesus in 431 to answer the question. We would recognize their concluding dogmatic statement of Christ’s two nature’s, but the controversy refused to go away (recall Jesus’ central question: “Who do you say that I am?”).
In 451, the 4th Ecumenical Council was convened in Chalcedon and attended by 630 bishops. They affirmed the two natures of Christ in one person. And here we encounter the first major schism of the Church when churches in Egypt (today’s Copts), Syria, and Armenia refused to accept the Council’s wording. The schism continues today.
As controversy continued, the 5th Ecumenical Council was held in 553 at Constantinople. This Council, among other things, reviewed writings of earlier authors, such as Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius. It continued the anathema against them and condemned others who were then dead. The controversy over the nature of Christ continued and a 6th Council was held in 680-681. Participants again affirmed the dual nature of Christ, and the Emperor—in one of many interventions by an Emperor in the history of the Councils—signed the closing statement. With the conclusion of this Council, the question of Christology within the Orthodox Church finally appeared settled.
Next week we will learn about the final and greatest debate within the Church: Iconoclasm.