Procedit

As part of his barn-stormingly successful visit to Lebanon, and following a photocall that he himself had organised, the Holy Father has held a private meeting with the Catholic Patriarchs of the Middle East. He and they should hotfoot it to Gaza, even if they made it only to the Erez Crossing, and refuse to leave until there was peace. The other Christian leaders in the region would be invited to join them.

Only the Pope could do this, just as, a thousand years ago, only the Pope could have resolved the filioque dispute that by 1014 was 600 years old liturgically, with the first use having been in the East, and nearly 900 years old theologically. Like the Pope, the Patriarchs who stood with him today head communities that are defined by their acceptance of that resolution, with everything that it entails. The rejection of it depends upon the teaching of Photius of Constantinople, which was not simply the Creed sine filioque, although that is how his followers have continued to recite it, but the Monopatrist position most fiercely propounded in recent decades by John Romanides. From Photian Monopatrism arose Hesychasm, and from Hesychasm arose Palamism, the dogma of Orthodoxy since the fourteenth century.

In urging what were then still his fellow Anglicans to eschew Freemasonry, the future Fr Walton Hannah pointed out that because the original Masonic rituals in this country had drawn heavily on the Book of Common Prayer, itself drawn heavily from Medieval and earlier sources, but had later been redacted to exclude expressions of orthodox Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, then they were now unconscionable to those who continued to adhere to that orthodoxy. That argument is unanswerable, and it includes the omission of the filioque by those who had previously recited it and indeed, like 1950s Anglicans with the Prayer Book, had every intention of doing so again.

The Orthodox maintain the transcendality of Divine Revelation in relation to human understanding, the definitions of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, the dogmatic principle and corpus as the context of day-to-day faith and life, the sense that salvation is more than temporal alone, a classical liturgical life, individual and collective devotion to the Mother of God, individual and collective devotion to the Angels and the Saints, the Threefold Apostolic Order, that Order’s essential maleness, the monastic heart of the Church’s life in the world, and the ascetic heart of all true spirituality. But those have all been widespread within the Latin Church, they are undergoing something of a revival, and they have always characterised the Eastern Catholic Churches such as gathered around Peter today. Such is the work of the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son.