Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 41

Byzantine Theology.

Following the development of ecclesiastical structure, a characteristically Byzantine evolution took place in Orthodox theological tradition. Here Constantinople long lacked a personality of its own — its own school, like Alexandria or Antioch. It was either under the tradition of one of the competing tendencies or obliged to occupy a position of compromise because of its imperial interests. Chalcedon was the first step in a theology specifically Byzantine, in that it overcame the extremes of the two main traditions and combined them in a creative synthesis. Byzantine theology developed further along this same road. The main stages were marked by the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, the theme of which was the deepening, the more precise definition, and the assimilation of the Chalcedonian dogma.

Yet while Chalcedonian orthodoxy was at first a sort of synthesis between Alexandria and Antioch, the conclusions resulting from this synthesis were a specific feature of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A reference to the past and to tradition has always had fundamental importance in the Church.
Thus the early Christian writers made much use of the adjective “apostolic”: for example, the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, and the later Apostolic Constitutions and Apostolic Canons. This did not mean to convey the idea of original apostolic authorship, but only that the writer regarded the proposed doctrine as stemming from the apostles, as part of the same unchanging and eternal tradition of the Church. After the fourth century a similar meaning attended reference to the Fathers, those theologians and teachers whose teaching was finally accepted by the Church as an expression of its experience and tradition, and hence became normative.

After the Council of 381, Emperor Theodosius in a special law pointed out to his subjects certain bishops, communion with whom should be de facto an outward sign of orthodoxy. He did this to bring order out of the chaos that reigned as a result of the Arian dispute. In the fifth century St. Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa, were recognized unconditionally by everyone, and the argument that something “came from the Fathers” acquired increasing importance. The Christological disputes again raised questions as to the orthodoxy of whole theological traditions; we have seen that the Fifth Ecumenical Council was forced to condemn theologians who had already died and had been revered in their regions as Fathers. The Fifth Council furnished a sort of review and re-evaluation of local traditions, and it was natural that a list of “Selected Fathers,” undisputed bearers of orthodox tradition, should be composed there for the first time. It included St. Athanasius the Great, Hilary of Poitiers (a Western opponent of Arianism), Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Chrysostom, Theophilus and Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, and Proclus. Not one “Father” was from Constantinople. Proclus had been patriarch in the capital but expressed the Alexandrian tendency in his theology. Byzantine theology began by summing up, overcoming contradictions, co-ordinating words and concepts.
Therefore it was in Byzantium that the cycle of tradition was first outlined and the “patristic testaments” defined which would forever remain the foundation of Orthodox theology. The pre-Nicene Fathers and almost all the “Eastern” teachers remained outside this cycle. In content Byzantine theology was limited to two themes: the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the God-Man.
These were the themes of the great dogmatic disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries, and all the resources of the Byzantine ecclesiastical mind went into developing and assimilating them.

 

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