The Antiochian Innovation

Q: Are you aware of the innovations about fasting and women that have been passed by the Antiochian Bishops? If so, could you comment on this in your magazine? (Fr. J.S., IL)

A: The Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Antioch, meeting in Syria from May 26-May 27, 1997, at the Patriarchal Monastery of St. George, decided, among other things:

1) To abolish fasting during the post-Paschal period from Bright Week to Ascension; and

2) To allow women to commune at any time and to remove from the Church’s "liturgical texts" any reference to women as "unclean" or "tainted."

(A report on these and other decisions can be found in the September, 1977, issue of The Word, the official publication of Antiochian Christian Archdiocese, the Exarchate of the Antiochian Patriarchate in America.)

These innovations, which are contrary to Holy Tradition, clearly demonstrate the extent to which the modernist Orthodox Churches have lost any understanding of the spiritual foundations of our Church or of its ascetic theology. Patriarchs, Bishops, or local Synods do not have the right to act unilaterally against the established traditions of the Church. Not only are their pronouncements of no significance, when they act in such a way, but the fabricated religion which they thereby produce—of which the ultra-modernist Antiochian Archdiocese is an egregious example—clearly risks cutting itself off from the Body of the Church through innovation and deviation from Holy Tradition. When the Church administration acts against the spiritual integrity of the Church, the question of the authoritative nature of its decisions is neither here nor there. The Church derives from the spirit of prophecy and not from the presumed prerogatives of administrative order.

The decisions in question simply codify deviations from Orthodox practice that the Antiochian Church has long tolerated. They are not decisions, as such, but concessions to a watered-down version of Orthodox spiritual life. It is an ancient and established tradition, for example, to return to the normal Wednesday and Friday fasts after bright Week, allowing wine and oil on these days, as a sign and symbol of the enduring joy of the Paschal Feast and freedom from fasting. Deviation from this practice is an endorsement of the violation of the Wednesday and Friday fast, which is set forth in the sixty-ninth Apostolic Canon. It is also, once more, a concession to those who wish to ignore the spiritual practices of the Church and make what is difficult "easy"—a road to spiritual peril.

An equally ancient and important aspect of the Eucharistic life of the Church is that of proper preparation, such that we approach the life-giving Mysteries in a state of spiritual and bodily purity. Thus, women normally avoid Holy Communion during their periods, while men likewise usually avoid communing for one day, following a nocturnal emission (see the seventeenth canon of St. John the Faster, and the fourth Canon of St. Dionysios of Alexandria). We do this in recognition of the fact that, as fallen human beings, we are unclean and tainted; that is, ill with sin. It is in the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ that Divinity enters into us and renews in us the Divine image with which we humans are imprinted, restoring us to spiritual health through the therapeutic Mysteries of the Church. We approach the Chalice with a sense of our unworthiness, spotted by sin, as we are; and we draw away from the Holy Eucharist renewed in Grace. Our action, in all of this, entails the ascetic preparation of ourselves for this restorative process. And thus, it is unthinkable that anyone would take offense—whether man or woman—at seeing in himself the impurity which separates us from God, cleansing himself by ascetic practice (fasting, prayer, watchfulness over the body), and thus approaching the Holy Chalice to take into himself Divinity Itself: the Body and Blood of Christ.

It is not, in implementing its innovations, the liturgical books which the Patriarchate of Antioch must change; rather, it must abolish the teachings of the Fathers, the provisions of the Holy Canons, and the ascetic witness of countless Saints, male and female alike, who have, through an acute awareness of their tainted, unclean, and fallen selves, found restoration, through the Grace of God, becoming "sons of God" and "small Jesus Christs within Jesus Christ." Antioch’s innovations are a move towards a new religion of ease, superficiality, and platitudes and away from the profound glorification and divinization of man that the ascetic practices and traditions of our Faith have as their very aim. The spirit of the Antiochian Church, one of innovation and disregard for the ascetic dimensions of our Faith, clearly reflects its alienation from the Orthodox ethos.

From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XV, No. 1, 34-35.