Introduction
Critique is the process of analyzing texts and re-reading them, distinguishing in them the essence and the form, understanding the circumstances of their writing, and the social, political, and economic influences that affected their formulation and production. This critique applies to every product of human intellectual and even theological labor. So if the Holy Scripture (one of the three elements that are not subject to alteration, change, or addition) has been subjected to a rigorous critical process in order to understand how it was formed and constituted, and to know the sources of its writers and the thought of its authors and the way it reached its present form, then nothing is above critique; everything is subject to the mind according to the Spirit. Tertullian says that the customs in the Church must be examined under the light of the truth, because Christ our Lord did not present Himself as a custom or a convention but as the truth; and Saint Cyprian adopted this phrase, and the Council of Carthage adopted it in the year 256.
Critique is that we read the past and its production through the lens of the divine will”according to the mind of Jesus”, and it is exactly what the Scripture said: “Test all things; hold fast what is good.” (1 Thess 5:21), and the sifting of all the production of bygone ages through an understanding of the historical context in which it arose, and the uncovering of the gems and their revival. So Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says: “The age of grace did not escape the influence of human inclinations in the interpretation of the divine revelation that we received; a quick glance at our Christian world confirms that the human element often wronged, out of ignorance or weakness, this revelation that remains forever, in a way, a human discovery.”[1].
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says ” everything that comes from the past does not have equal value and is not necessarily true”, and there is a difference between holy Tradition and traditions in the sense of customs: for much of what has been handed down to us from the past is purely human and incidental, and constitutes at best pious opinions, but is not part of the one holy Tradition that bears the essential elements of the Christian message…. And it is necessary to interrogate the past. For in the Byzantine period and after, the Orthodox did not look at the past with a sufficiently critical eye”.[2]
For what is ancient, prevalent, and customary is not necessarily true, and the Church was always selective in everything ancient; and does this selectivity take place without a critical process?
For the Creed, for example, was not formulated through calm intellectual debates, but often through violent clashes that went beyond questions of dogma: personal, cultural, and regional clashes, exile, bloody quarrels, and military and police interventions. This is the background of the formulation of the constitution of the faith.[3], In this context, Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says: “We must acknowledge that the formulas of faith (the dogmas) and their limits did not come down as revelation, and the majority of them did not come out of the Holy Scripture, but rather they are the product of human thought in its tireless attempt to express the mystery of the divine dispensation as it came in the Holy Scripture; and that this attempt passed, and still passes, through a history in which civilizations, politics, and all human circumstances played an important role. Therefore, this process of crystallization was, and still is, thorny. The dogmas, even the Orthodox ones, came as the offspring of a growth or a development; for the formulas try to draw near to the faith.”[4].
The fear of critique:
And whoever fears the critique of traditions has not yet realized that the Fathers themselves carried out a critical process that produced partial or, at times, radical changes to the handed-down traditions (the forms or formulas). For example, the reform that John Chrysostom carried out of the Liturgy of Basil the Great and its abridgment, and his introduction of the spoon for communion, or the abolition by the councils of the love-feast that the apostles had established, and the adjustment of the date of Pascha: after Pascha had been with the Jews as the custom of the apostles, the Fathers separated it and set a new rule for it. And one of the prominent examples of critique is the Church’s rejection of the robber councils despite their canonical form, and its recognition of the ecumenicity of other councils not because of their worthiness but because of their charismatic character. Father Florovsky says: “The judgment of the Church was selective, ” and his saying means precisely that it was critical; for everything was placed under the microscope so as to choose the true and reject the other.
And it is important to point out that the whole critical process takes place through an appeal to the mind of the Church and not to the mind of the Fathers; in other words, not to ideas and productions, but to the way of thinking and the way of exercising their minds, and consequently the exercise of the mind according to the mind of Christ. For the production of the Fathers, too, was often subjected to a critical process in the Church, in order to choose from it what is according to the Spirit and what issued from human weakness or excess — such as the idea of Saint Gregory concerning the salvation of all, which the Church rejected.
The necessity of critique:
The necessity of critiquing the sacred inheritance to be freed from several problems:
- Rigidity, for the problem is the treatment of all our issues according to the past; we have fallen into literalism, where we project onto the present the words and forms of the past, and try to treat our problems with medicines that treated the illnesses of the early centuries.
- Conservatism, freeing ourselves from the authority of the form; that is, that the present should not be under the authority of the forms of the past, and consequently we submit to the spirit of a new Pharisaism and a new Judaism and kill the Spirit who blows where He wills.
- Isolation from reality, for the Christian discourse today is a discourse entirely isolated from reality; it is a discourse for museums and history.
- Stereotyping and repetition (a sterile theology).
- The last problem: freeing ourselves from the Ottoman mentality that shaped the present Christian thought.
As for the definition of tradition:
We must distinguish between tradition and traditions, between the form and the essence, between the vessel and the treasure, between the meaning and the expression, between the truth and the expression, and between the faith and the formulas of faith. For one of the greatest problems is the confusion between the two; if the Protestants have a problem in distinguishing, for example, between the Holy Scripture and tradition, our problem takes another face: we do not know the distinction between tradition and its forms. For the current answer to what tradition is: tradition is everything we have inherited of icons, art, prayers, thought, sermons, rituals, canons, hymns, and chants — that is, all the intellectual, literary, and legislative Christian production — whereas this is the definition of traditions or inheritances.
Father Georges Attieh says: people generally think that tradition is a set of practices and customs or opinions they inherited from the elders or the ancient founding leaders or the parishioners in their sects or their nation, etc…, and for this reason it is proper and obligatory to preserve it and defend it and boast of it in honor of them, even if they discover that it is wrong and that time has surpassed it. The true hidden defense is their desire to strengthen the community to which they belong and to consolidate its standing and its prestige.[5], Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says the following:
Let me explain with an example first: a father bequeaths a field to his son and enjoins him to take care of working the field. Tradition is working the field, and traditions are the tools of plowing with two oxen — the forms of the work and its means and its methods; whereas tradition is the work and the production. Tradition is that the work be done in the spirit of the father, resembling the father in his zeal for the field and its cultivation. But the son’s turning into a guardian of the father’s tradition, guarding the field and the tools, means that the bearing of fruit is halted. And this is what we have done as Orthodox, at best: we guarded the forms, and the spirit was halted.
Tradition is “the attempt to imitate others: that is, to walk in their manner”, and the first to live tradition is Jesus, who said: “«My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.» (Jn 4:34). But that does not mean that you plow the earth as your father plowed it with two oxen and a yoke. Father Georges Florovsky says” tradition in the Church is not merely the transmission of inherited doctrines in the Jewish manner, but the continuous life in the truth; and it was not a motionless mold or a composite of binding propositions, but an insight into the meaning of events and their effect in revealing the acting God”.[6].
And according to Saint Irenaeus, tradition is a living deposit given to the Church to be a breath of new life.[7], it is life in Christ and what the Church received at Pentecost, that is, the Holy Spirit. As for traditions, they are the human expressions of this life in the Spirit, and all human production from the first word the apostles wrote until today — of canons, rules, rituals, tones, and typika, and the Euchologion, and ecclesiastical art of icons, hymns, poems, sermons, the arrangements of feasts, and the rules for celebrating Pascha — all of it is the product of man, influenced by the history of human thought and the civilization in which he lived and the historical context in which it arose, and influenced by the age in which it was produced. And it is man’s right not to live in the forms of the community’s traditions of the past, nor in its molds; and it is our right that the Spirit work in us as He worked in the Fathers.
And we understand that the inheritance (the tradition of the community) in its diversity is the product of man’s work, influenced by the factors of human and civilizational history in the attempt to express the accomplishment of the work of Jesus; and it did not come down as revelation but developed and grew under different circumstances, and it varied according to the environments. Therefore we sometimes say: an Antiochian, or Greek, or Russian tradition. And on the other hand, we understand that the human attempts sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed in expressing the divine truth, and they recorded works that are not from the mind of the Orthodox Church nor from the mind of Christ.
And many impurities entered into it under the influence of Judaism and Islam and what remained clinging to it of the pagan religions. Therefore we preserved not only the right mind but also what clung to it of impurities; and very often the defense of these traditions (the traditions of the community), with the impurities in them, becomes a defense of the very thought that is opposed to Orthodoxy. Therefore the whole inheritance needs to pass through the furnace of critique so that the impurities are burned and the golden treasure remains.
And it is astonishing today how the Orthodox master the science of biblical criticism and strip the sacredness from it in order to study it, while they are incapable of stripping the sacredness from the handed-down inheritance in order to critique it, clarify it, and bring out the many alien tares that are in it. And the examples of the tares are many: much of the teaching about the impurity of the woman, the Jewish concept of time, the concept of the impostor Christ, the idea of Constantinople as the holy city, the chosen people, the salvation of the Orthodox alone, and the prayers of envy and the evil eye that entered under strange influences, as the theologian Alexander Schmemann says, and the idea of the visible and invisible Church that entered Orthodox thought from the Protestant John Calvin, and the Byzantine eagle as a model of heresy, etc.
And on the other hand, is it not incumbent upon us to understand the formulas of the dogmas in a new, living way? For what does the virginity of the Theotokos, or the two natures of Christ, or the two wills of Christ, mean to the man of today? Nay, what do these dogmas mean today?
Why do we Orthodox fear a critical process for the sacred inheritance? Is the sacred inheritance an infallible revelation sent down? Do the Orthodox see the inherited traditions of the community as higher than the Holy Scripture? Or does the inheritance carry a sacredness that cannot be touched? Is the production of the Fathers and the writers of the Church free from error, while the Holy Scripture needed to be critiqued?
Does our position as Orthodox today resemble, to a great extent, the position of the scribes and the Pharisees in the time of the Teacher, who criticized His disciples because they did not walk according to the traditions of the elders concerning the washing of hands, and reproached Him also because He breaks the commandment of the Sabbath, so the Lord Jesus rebuked them because they transgress the commandment of God for the sake of their tradition, for their own personal interests?
References
[1] Archimandrite Paul Yazigi, Christian Education in its Ecumenical Dimension, the Second Middle East Christian Education Conference (21/-26 Aug 2000), p. 3
[2] Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: Faith and Doctrine, the “Know Your Church” series, An-Nour Publications, 1982, p. 12
[3] Father Jean Comby, A Guide to Reading the History of the Church, Dar al-Machriq, Beirut, third edition 2014, p. 118
[4] Archimandrite Paul Yazigi, same reference, p. 4
[5] Father Georges Attieh, Orthodox Faith as Life, Tradition, and Theology, Al-Bishara Bookshop, Banias, first edition 2001, p. 59
[6] Father Georges Florovsky, Scripture, the Church, and Tradition (An Orthodox Point of View), translated into Arabic by Father Michel Najm, An-Nour Publications, 1984, p. 101
[7] Father Georges Florovsky, p. 100