The Faith of the Orthodox, the Faith of Blachernae

And to the same Bechus, Melatonyotes and Medikites, who say that the Father is, through the

Son, the cause of the Spirit, who cannot conceive the Father as the cause of the apostases

of the Spirit, giving it existence and being, except through the Son, thus according to

then the Son is united to the Father as joint calls and contributor to the Spirit's existence.

This they say is supported by the phrase of St. John of Damascus.

The Father is the projector through the Son of the manifesting Spirit.

He himself, that is, the Father then, is mined the depth of reason, begetter of the Word,

and through the Word, projector of the manifesting Spirit.

This, however, can never mean what they say, inasmuch as it clearly denotes the manifestation

for the intermediary of the Son of the Spirit, whose existence is from the Father, for the

same John of Damascus would not have said the exact same chapter, that the only cause

in the Trinity is God the Father, thus denying by the use of the Word only, the cause of

the principle to the remaining two apostases.

Nor would he have again said elsewhere, and we speak likewise of the Holy Spirit as

the Spirit of the Son, that we do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son.

For both of these views to be true is impossible, to those who have not accepted the interpretation

given to these testimonia by the fathers, but on the contrary perceive them in a manner

all together forbidden by them.

We pronounce the above recorded resolution and judgment, we cut them off from the membership

of the Orthodox faith, and we banish them from the flock of the Church of God.

That is again from the Thomas of St. Gregory II, the Thomas of the Council of the Black

or Knife, 1285.

I'm also Professor Cyril Gary Jenkins, and you're listening, light through the past.

Light through the past, a survey of church history, Dr. Cyril Gary Jenkins examines the

course and development of the Orthodox Church.

It struggles with heresy, the empire, and relations to other Christian bodies.

Here's Dr. Jenkins.

Greetings, everyone.

We are again continuing on in our look at the sysm, and looking at this sonotal response

to the Latin doctrine, and this time in the case of the attempt to use the phrase through

the son with respect to the spirit, as well, from the son.

That is, the spirit proceeds from the father and from the son.

And so today, as we look at this, a couple things to make note of, first is most of you

can tell.

I have not much of a voice, but I shall try to get through this and be as judicially

quick as possible.

But first and foremost, I need to note, on April 16th, Father Stephen Andrew Damick and

Father and Dr. Joshua Moritz are giving lectures at the Maryman Art Gallery at the Templeton

Honors College Building of Eastern University.

Festivities begin at 7, they will wrap up by 8, and all of this information is forthcoming

very shortly, but save the date.

I should have this up by the time, of course, this is up and going.

I will have an event, bright page for the tickets, and I will also have a flyer out that

will go as well.

This will be on our website as well as on our Facebook page for the St. Basil Center.

And now back to this, well, back to this incident.

And so I shall give butter recap, because I need to save my voice.

I have to teach all day tomorrow.

And so therefore, sorry to short-trift all of you, my good and noble listeners.

So first and foremost, what is happening here, that we have this council, of course,

initially we see that when Gregory of Cypress becomes patriarch, and John Bechus is deposed,

Bechus comes out and basically declares himself to be against the Union, but eventually his

conscience got the better of him.

And he claims that no, he embraces the Union, and he basically wants to accept, I don't

really need so much embraces the Union as he accepts the Catholic doctrine and the statement

that through the Sun and from the Sun are used equally.

And he will go back to scripture, because there are places where from and through are basically

used synonymously.

The problem is, as we can see from the condemnation, is that this was not at all how John

of Damascus would have used the phrase, because he appeals to John of Damascus.

And John himself, while he uses the word, he adds persistently to it in the whole notion

about the manifesting spirit.

Bechus basically makes his grievances known late in 1284, and thus the Emperor, and Dronecus

II summons him to a public debate, first at the Comedian monastery, but then eventually

it will be held at the Black and I palace complex, which is different than the palace complex

down near the shore, at the tip of Constantinople, but Black and I is in the northwest corner

up near the walls.

And so among the people at the debate, Theodore Musilon, who essentially was, as it were,

the co-chair of the debate along with Andronicus, but also, as someone we had met before, manual

holobolus, the retribution of the church, he opens up the proceedings.

Holobolus, if you remember, is the man who had been humiliated by Michael VIII, right,

having intestines wrapped around his neck and beat about the head with a sheep's liver.

Joining Bechus is the previously mentioned Melatoniotes and Medichytes, Constantin Melatoniotes

and Georgian Medichytes, and everything was there to address their basic.

And so holobolus basically wants to know, why did you retract what you had said?

And Bechus responds, because I wanted to keep the peace of the church.

And everything in the discussion now really centers around this question about the cause

of the Holy Spirit, and all three of these individuals denied that the sun in any way

was a coke-aws, and they said such idea was anathema.

And so given this, they're already showing that they're not exactly in agreement with

the Western Church about this, because the Western Church says that the sun is a cause,

they would use the phrase, as from one cause to causes.

And so in these things, in these debates, there are several different people who stay in fourth,

George Moskebar, as we've already mentioned, theodore Moselon and Manuel Holobolus.

But the main person is going to be Gregory, the second.

I should also note that the patriarch Athanasius, the third of Alexandria, is present.

He is ill, he has to be carried in.

He seems to have been with some sort of couch, but he's well enough to actually interject

and say, you know, the simplicity of the faith of the creed is what we need to defend,

and not begin pushing ourselves into these extraneous corners that the faith of the Church

does not embrace, nor does it give us license to pursue.

Now, the synod itself, this disputation, as it were,

ah, it does break down into acrimony, and beckus basically appeals to Andronicus, the second.

Oh, you need to dismiss Gregory, you need to dismiss Gregory, all of which,

um, Andronicus, the second saw simply as another door, another opening for what would be,

well, more sysm, right, because he was still suffering under the problems with the arsonite sysm,

and in the end, the synod condemns beckus. He is essentially, he,

and his two co-ajuitors, Melatoniotes and metachitis, are confined into, in the Cosmidian

monastery. Eventually, they are, ah, sent to the fortress of St. Gregory, away from the city,

and kept rather under strict confinement, they're given relief by the later patriarch

Athanasius, the second, who becomes patriarch in 1289. The upshot of all of this, of course,

is the issuance of the tomb of the tomb in condemnations. This comes after the synod,

and, now, the synod itself produces the tomas, though it is written essentially by

Gregory, the second, and this is where I'm going to, ah, some things up, and the summation is in two

parts, the first part, the tomas itself, the document of what was said, and it goes back to how

the third, ah, condemnation in it, the third anathema which I read to begin.

It goes back to this repeated phrase from John Damascus, about through the sun, the manifesting spirit

comes, and Gregory takes this, ah, along with several other bits, but it's largely from John

of Damascus, though if we wanted to talk about it, we could find this easily in other fathers,

and it has to do with this, that for Gregory the second, what we see in the procession of the spirit,

from the father, the generation of the son from the father, are there causes, this is how God

exists, eternally in himself, but we also know going back to the fathers, back to St. Maximus,

this, back even to Athanasius, back to St. Gregory the theologian, St. Gregory of Nissa,

that the trinity is where we begin, we thus begin the one God within distinction.

And if we think about the one God, we are actually thinking about the father, I believe in one God,

the father, right, that's where we start, and so there is a great deal of consternation,

because essentially this, the distinctions that the East has pointed out, beginning with Fautius,

the West basically admits to having embraced, and this is clearly seen by a man, a French theologian,

Catholic theologian, Theodore De Renion, and Renion wrote a multi-volume history of the trinity,

in which he basically said, and this is simplifying De Renion, and this is one of the difficulties,

that De Renion says essentially the West starts with the one substance, the East starts with the

three persons, and essentially both the East and the West will say that neither these are going to be

illicit, as long as we stay within the confines of the faith, what the East says is that the

West by doing this has basically made the trinity, a product of the one nature,

if we wanted to start with the one nature, we do this by proclaiming that we start with the

father, that the father possesses the nature of divinity, and from the person of the father

is begotten the son, and the spirit proceeds, this is what we mean by the unity of the trinity,

and the one divine nature, the one divine nature doesn't make the unity of the trinity,

the unity of the trinity is made by the person of the father, but if we wanted to go through

all sorts of statements about this, we can easily dig them up from the Latins, beginning with a

gustan and moving forward. Now a few years ago there were two very brilliant Catholic historical

theologians, Lewis Ayers, A-Y-R-E-S, and Michelle Barnes, Michael Barnes, Michelle Barnes,

who rejected derinuals thesis, and basically said that his thesis arises not out of his historical

reading of the texts, but very much out of a systematic theological approach to these questions,

now, and what's more they say that derinuals thesis has infected many Orthodox,

let us look at Losky, right, among others, and that therefore doesn't really take a

cow to what is going on, it misreads a gustan, and therefore is not an apt thing, it very much

they would say. Professor Aristides Papadoccus, Aristides Papadoccus's take on this question,

when we come to look at Gregory II, and of course this is where I started with all of this,

that is with Professor Papadoccus. Again, he was my MA advisor at Maryland,

and both of his books I own, he signed them both for me very kindly, back in 94,

32 years ago, I was just looking at them last night at the signatures, and so

but Papadoccus is also quite pointed on the matter, it doesn't matter if they start with the

substance, this isn't the real issue, and so it's not the issue of derinual, but the question is

is the one substance, the source of the trinity, and therefore many in the West will become

equivocal about this, and one of the really good books to read on this, and it's not an old book,

meaning it's a recent book, right? Is Russell Friedman's medieval trinitarian thought from

a clinus to Arkham? I mean, this book is really, really good, and it's basically the division

that occurs between the Franciscan theologians on the one hand and the Dominican theologians on

the other, and their tussle about what is the nature of the trinity, and from what is the source

of the divinity of the divinities of the trinists is an interesting point, and ultimately Friedman

points out, and this is very true of the Dominicans, the Dominicans basically see the beginning

thought of God has to do with the unity of God, and that essentially what the trinity is is

origins of relations or relations of what, relations of simplicity relating to itself.

The Franciscans, the Franciscans were a bit more circumspect, and in fact the Franciscans get

accused by some of the Dominicans of opening the door to the Greek doctrine of the Filioque,

and so meaning the denial of the Filioque, that the one source of the deity being the father

basically means that the relations are based on the relationship to the apostacies of the father,

so Friedman's book, it's not difficult book, it's a very good book, it's only about 140 pages,

it's not a big book, Cambridge University Press, but Friedman basically points out, and you can

go through all these other things, and well, yes, if Day Ring Yon in his several volumes,

kind of overplayed his hand, the critics have all come out and basically said that in one sense

both Barnes and Heirs have overplayed their hands, right, and the overplaying of the hands is

the idea that what we can call the pro-Nicene position, the pro-Nicene position

in the early church, ends up looking exactly like the Latin West, the doctrine, this may be

oversimplifying on my part, but when we look at the theology of the capidotions, I mean I actually had

a Catholic historian say to me, you know, when did we canonize the trinitarianism of the

capidotions, and of course for the East, well, this is basically canonized by the creeds,

and more importantly, it's interesting that even though Gregory of Nissa is not a doctor of the

church in the Catholic church, Gregory the theologian is, St. Basil of Cessaria is, St. Athanasius

the great is, and all of them are adamant about the one essence that we talk about is the father

that we do not go beyond the father, and even Hillary of Paucus says this, we do not go beyond the father.

So because it is the father that is the principle of divinity, to say that the son is another

principle of divinity, even if we want to try to massage this as saying from one, so as from one

source, we still end up with two sources. So this is the one thing, and what Gregory of Cypress says

is that in this, what we find is that the spirit is eternally manifested, and this goes back to

the essence, energies, distinctions. In Gregory the theologian, he makes the statement about the

unknowability of God, that if God in his glory is unknowable, how much more his essence is

unknowable. This is said against unomias, who basically said that we could know the nature of

God, but he's saying the glory is ineffable, the glory is incomprehensible, and therefore what we

see is we see this assertion in Gregory of Cypress, Gregory the second, that the glory of God

is also eternally present with God, even if there is no one there to see it, it is still there.

The love of God between father, son, and spirit is eternally there.

This is right all prior to Gregory Polybos, and Gregory is already stating this. Now this is the

beginning, I will point out, of an excellent website, I will point you to, there's not a lot published

there for some time now, but energetic procession, that the procession of the Holy Spirit from the

Father through the Son is done by way of the energies, the eternal energies of God, and this is how

we become participants in the divine nature. So that's the one thing, this is the defense that

Gregory the second makes, the second is this, and to be very sure. In the aftermath of this,

while there are a few overtures that are made, in the end there is no attempt really on the part

of the Church of Constantinople to unite itself back to Rome, and I will talk about this next

week in the lead up to the Council of Florence. So with my voice giving out, this is where I shall end,

and I thank you all for your support, and I pray that your lead continues, and that you all

reach the feast of our Lord's resurrection with joy. Christ is among us, through His grace and

love for mankind. Our proper music is still by Bach, and you have been listening to a listener

supported podcast of ancient faith ministries. Like through the past, a survey of church history,

Dr. Cyril Gary Jenkins is the director of the Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture,

the editor of the Bessillian Journal, the co-editor in chief of the Rule of Faith Journal,

and a member of St. Paul Orthodox Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This has been a listener-supported

presentation of ancient faith radio.