Fresco depicting the First Ecumenical Council in the narthex of the Church of Saint Athanasius the Athonite in the Great Lavra on Holy Mount Athos. Photo: United European Christendom.
My dear ones, today the Holy Church has ordained that we talk about the First Ecumenical Council of the holy fathers, which took place in 325 in the city of Nicaea. And this is because we are essentially talking about our Faith, our Church, and our salvation. After all, the main fruit of the labors of the First Ecumenical Council is the Creed, which we confess to this day.
The first seven of its components, confirming the faith in the One God the Father and in the One Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, were first heard and expressed with the utmost precision at precisely this Council of the Holy Fathers.
The One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church—the pillar and confirmation of the truth—is that saving ark in which, nourished by divine grace, the seed grows and matures unto Life Eternal. And the Holy Church has shown forth prophets and apostles; and from the time of its birth to this day, it has fostered fathers and teachers of the Church who feed God’s people. In this ark is everything and everyone needed for life: both learned scholars, and the simple but profoundly wise; God lacks nothing. God gives wisdom to the simple at the proper time. And through obedience to the Mother Church, God protects the learned from the seeds of corruption, from pride. As long as a person is in the bosom of the Church, he is saved. The Holy Spirit preserves both the Church itself and us within it, through divine wisdom.
And the Holy Church preserves its history from the days of its foundation; it cherishes the memory of the names and deeds of those holy fathers who received the truth from the apostles, who laid it down in dogma, preached it with their own lives, and confirmed the whole world in it for all ages—in the only truth that makes man free and gives him Life Eternal.
The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Holy Fathers are the seven pillars of Christ’s Church. And the Church renders honor to and celebrates the memory of each of them, for they wrought a great divine work over the entire history of the Church, during different times and under varying circumstances, creating the unerring conciliar mind of the Church.
Today we glorify the memory of the God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council.
After persecution and martyrdom during the first centuries of Christianity, when the enemy of all righteousness, the devil, who ever rebels against the truth, tried to destroy the Church using the terror of death and torments, not only did the Church survive, it was strengthened through sufferings, and gave birth to a whole host of holy martyrs and confessors of the Christian faith, who became the seed for new Christians.
Beginning with the fourth century, the enemy has invented new and more terrible methods for subverting faith and the Church, perverting the truth and tearing apart the unity of faith in Christ—heresies and schisms appeared. The servants of darkness began to usher in treachery under the guise of faith, antichrist under the name of Christ, hiding a lie behind credibility, trying to destroy the truth. The wolves in sheep’s clothing entered the Church gates, hiding their predatory essence with citations from Holy Scripture.
One of the first heresies that shook the Church and struck it for a long time was the heresy of Arius, a priest of the Church. His prideful human mind first attempted to create a horrible fake: He said that the God-man Christ was the Man Jesus from Nazareth. But our recognition of the divinity of Christ the Savior is inseparably bound to faith in the Church. And the Church with great effort stood up for this truth, that the Son of God is of one essence with God the Father. After all, the mind of the Church through the Holy Spirit has always affirmed that Christ is not just a Great Teacher; He is the Savior of the world, Who gave mankind new strength, and renewed it.
We received from Christ the Savior not only teaching, but life itself—life not according to the elements of this world, where pride and selfishness rule, but life according to Christ, with the image of His self-denial and love.
Faith in God the Savior is inseparably connected with faith in the salvific nature of the Church, and this faith is given by Christ Himself: I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).
From the words of Jesus Christ Himself can be seen the unbreakable connection between the true Church and His true nature as Son of God. God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him (1 Jn. 4:9). Christ, the incarnate Son of God, renewed human nature, created the Church, sent down the Holy Spirit, and thus placed the beginning of new life.
With one voice and one heart the holy hierarchs of God proclaimed the truth upon which those madmen had trampled, and raised it to dogma of the Church for all time.
I will tell you several living examples from the acts of the great First Ecumenical Council. 318 spirit-bearing fathers were present at it. At the Council were sage theologians, as well as the unsophisticated yet spirit-bearing, but they manifested to all of us the ideal of a united ecclesiastical society—the Church of Christ, where there is one spirit, one faith, one mind of Christ—that they may be one, even as we are one, as Christ foretold of the Church (Jn. 17:22).
St. Athanasius of Alexandria defended the truth with theological treatises. St. Spyridon of Tremethius defended the truth with his living faith. To prove the unity of the three hypostases of the divinity, he picked up a brick and squeezed it so that water trickled downward, fire darted upward, and earthen dust remained in his hand.
“Here are three elements, but the brick is one,” said the saint of God. “So it is with the Most Holy Trinity: three Persons, but One Divinity.” God’s wisdom simply and convincingly put human error to shame.
But the saint continued, addressing his opponent. Listen also, my dears. Hear and heed the words of the holy man of God from the fourth century, directed to you and me of impoverished faith. “Listen, philosopher, to what I shall say to you: We believe that the Almighty God created heaven and earth, man and the entire visible and invisible world from nothing by His Word and Spirit. The Word is the Son of God, Who came down to earth for the sake of our sins, was born of a Virgin, lived with people, suffered, died for our salvation, and then was resurrected, redeeming by His sufferings the original sin and co-resurrected mankind with Himself. We believe that He is One in Essence and Equal in Honor with the Father, and we believe this without any deceitful invention, for this mystery is impossible to fathom with human reasoning.”
And the Arian philosopher heard—or rather felt, suddenly saw—the magnificent truth contained in the simplicity of these artless words and exclaimed with amazement, “Listen! As long as the contest was carried on with me through arguments, I countered them with other arguments and with my rhetorical skills deflected everything that they gave to me. But instead of arguments a special power began to proceed from the mind and lips of this elder, and arguments became powerless against it, because man cannot resist God. If any of you can think as I do, then let him believe in Christ and follow along with me after this elder, by whose lips God Himself has spoken.”
Archimandrite John (Krestiankin). Another active zealot for divine truth at this Ecumenical Council was the saint beloved and honored by all of us, St. Nicholas of Myra and Lycia. His hand lifted to strike the face of the blasphemer and heretic, Arius.
The fathers of the Council wanted to punish St. Nicholas for his abundant zeal, deprive him of his hierarchical rank, and shut him up in a dungeon. But the Lord, through His Holy Spirit present in the acts of this Council, immediately restored the prisoner to his former glory. Many participants in the Council saw a vision at the same time, in which the Lord Himself gave St. Nicholas a Gospel, and the Mother of God placed upon him a hierarchical omophorion.
But what was the fate of the heresiarch and his heresy?
The Church suffered a long time from this sickness. Although Arius was deposed at the Council, through divine longsuffering and mercy the Lord left him ten more years of life for repentance.
But he did not change his brutish character, and persisted in his heresy. He drew those of like mind with him into splitting from the Church. They formed their own independent councils, their own confession of the faith. The heretics also had highly-placed protectors among those in power, but nothing could return life to the heresy—it split apart, and new sects arose in its midst.
These were its death throes; the Church at the Council had stricken off the incurably sick branch. Cut off from the Church, not feeding upon the living juices of divine truth, it died. Arius its founder died an impious death in 336, and his contemporaries, struck by God’s clear punishment manifest in his death, compared his death with the death of Judas. Apparently such is the lot of all betrayers of the truth, the Judases of all times, including our own.
The death of sinners is evil... (Ps. 33:22). God shall not be mocked (Gal. 6:7).
Arius died. But the one who placed the evil into the mind, heart, and mouth of the wretched apostate, didn’t die. The devil did not die—that indefatigable father of lies and all falsehood. And he is still doing his business to this day. He cannot influence heaven and the Heavenly Church and so he strives to wound on earth, stalking the earthly Church.
It is not easy to incline people towards total godlessness and blasphemy; his demonic visage is repugnant to man. But this path tried by the enemy of mankind is not without success. Seventy years of godlessness in Russia—and we are now reaping its fruits. We needn’t say much about them. We see them with our own eyes and feel them on ourselves.
The enemy walks devious paths, directing all his strength precisely at destroying the true Church of God by separating Christianity from the Church. He knows that without the Church, people will eventually reach godlessness all the same, losing their salvation; and their death will bring them eternal torments.
Let’s take a look, my dear ones, at the current state of the Church and at the spiritual state of people in our times. Let’s assess these days and tell ourselves, will the world will be saved, or does destruction await it? Are we in God’s true Church, or does the spirit of deceitfulness have its part in us? For just look at what floodwaters have come upon the world today. One church, another, a third, and one can simply lose count. And supposedly they’re all true, each one is the most right.
But how could this be? After all, there can’t be two truths. And Christ witnessed of Himself, I am the way the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6).
But which Church has Christ? Or has He divided Himself? Which Church does He prefer now? None of them! He created the Church one and undivided once and for all, during the days of His earthly sojourn, for all times and to the end of the world. And He abides only in it, living and working. And there can be no other Church.
So which one is it? My friends, the only church is the one that preserves Christian teaching pure and unharmed. Man is a poor guardian. Only God is trustworthy and constant, and only He can preserve the truth unchanged for ages in the stormy sea. And only our Church, rightly glorifying Righteousness and Truth, is called by everyone in the world—both Christian and other confessions—Orthodox [from Greek, “right glorifying”]. The enemies of the Church themselves, gnashing their teeth at it and doing everything to destroy it, also witness to it by calling it the Orthodox Church.
Remember how Pilate, when judging Christ, testified truly concerning Him that He is the King of the Jews; and the high priest who headed the lawless Sanhedrin, prophesied divine truth: it was expedient that one man should die for the people (Jn. 18:14).
And it is the same always and in everything. It is impossible to bury the truth. God preserves it and witnesses it to the world even through its opponents.
The apostolic succession preserved by the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is the successive grace and power of God in the Sacraments of the Church, is yet another exceedingly sure sign of the trueness of our Church.
The apostles received all this from Christ and passed it on to their disciples by the laying on of hands. And it is all the same to our days. In the Orthodox Church we now see the fulfillment of the words of Christ’s high priestly prayer: That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us (Jn. 17:21).
And the final, and for us most comprehensible sign of the trueness of our Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church is its sufferings. They are given to the Church by Christ, they are commanded by Him of the Church: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Matt. 16:24).
A man rejects earthly blessings and accepts beatings, buffeting, mockery, being spat upon; he accepts persecution not only for a day but for as long as the Lord sends it—and he is God’s.
He rejects fleeting human wisdom, accepts the conciliar mind of the Church and begins to see the mind of God—then heresies turn away by themselves, they can’t even reach him. Divine love preserves him from schism, and he is God’s, without a doubt.
One more important question, my dear ones, children of God. Perhaps it is difficult for a person to discern which Church is the true one? Perhaps he is lacking in knowledge, sense, or even faith.
What is truth, where is it, in what? How can we see it if now in the world, like at the marketplace, everybody is touting his own wares, vying with each other in noise and draw? It’s hard for a person, but not for the devil. He is the enemy of truth, he always recognizes it unerringly, finds it and hounds it relentlessly. Just look—what church can compare in this regard to the Orthodox Church?!
Persecution was replaced by attacks of heresy, heresy allowed for schisms, schisms fed into to complete unbelief and godlessness. But the Holy Orthodox Church is still alive—at times completely without strength and tormented, persecuted by the enemy, but not abandoned by God, for it lives by Him. And it will live by Him to the end of the days of the world.
We won’t look too far into the past; let’s take today and the recent yesterday of our Church.
And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple from him, and put his own clothes on him, and led him out to crucify him (Mk. 15:20).
Don’t we see in these words how our Church is faithfully following after its Christ?
The persecutions of the twentieth century by theomachists surpassed all persecutions before them in their cruelty. They killed more Christians than all previous persecutors taken together. They dishonored the Church, as they dishonored Christ in His time, doing violence to the consciences of its hierarchs and of God’s people.
And now that the already “little flock” has become even littler, and our people are no longer God’s, having arrived at atheism and the rejection of all spiritually to the utmost, they are now terrified at the stench of corruption and death breathing upon them from the future and they run back to the faith, to God; but that same man-killer the devil stands on watch. At his command a whole bouquet of different faiths and an assortment of various churches and sects are waiting to take in those thirsting for salvation.
Here are Roman Catholics, rich in money and deceit. Will someone who goes to them make the effort to find out who they are? Will he be put on his guard by the fact that until the eleventh century they were with us, but they left us; and that is how everyone knew that they are not with us, for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us (1 Jn. 2:19). Yes, they are called Christians but they have not preserved faithfulness, they have violated the dogmas. So the Church cut them off, and God abandoned them. Having fallen away from the Church, Latinism fell away from God’s love.
Here is also the Protestant Church, which was born in the sixteenth century from schism with Rome. For the Protestant, the truth is only what he likes, what he himself considers the truth.
Here are also Uniates, who paint themselves Orthodox.
And there are Christian sects: Baptists, Pentecostals, and others, who talk about Christ but have left His Church.
But having grown unaccustomed over these long years to thinking according the Church, Russian people have now lost the thought of the Church as being new life. Their view of the faith as no more than a mentally apprehended teaching pits the Gospel and Christ against the Church, and makes their faith lifeless.
There is the Gospel, there is Christ, but there is no Church—and that means there is no salvation.
Once again the enemy of the Church is laughing as he laughed at Christ being reviled, and the Church continues on its path to Golgotha. They are saddling the shoulders of the exhausted, bloodless, depopulated Russian Orthodox Church with the same cross that they will use to persecute it further. They will give back, even force on it the edifices of churches and forgotten monasteries that were destroyed to their foundations, the paths that lead to them completely overgrown. At the same time the enemy will sow his chaff—disagreements and strife—even within the unity of Orthodox Christians. And to everyone’s ruinous example, brother drinking of the same Chalice with brother and partaking of the same Table of the Lord will demand his own part of God’s inheritance.
We weep before the Lord over the hardness of our brothers abroad, we weep over our elder and dear, always especially beloved Orthodox Church in the Ukraine. After all, there, on the Dnieper River, the first candle of Orthodoxy was lit in Rus’. The waters of the Dnieper became the waters of the Jordan for us. And the labors and prayers of the Kiev Caves ascetics enlightened all of pagan Rus’ with the light of Orthodoxy.
But now, brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers says the Holy Gospel to us reproachfully (1 Cor. 6:6). But who will hear it?
The devil is performing his outrage now by the hands of the faithful, the hands of the Orthodox.
And how can a person gone spiritually feral resist the even more seductive teaching of, “There is one God, come to Him and tomorrow you’ll become God.”
The young people want to be God, they want to rule and own. So they go to the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Krishnaites to learn spirituality, and Eastern cults come to take over Orthodox Russia. The mindless attraction to occultism is a voluntary association with demons out of curiosity, which first becomes a tragedy, and then ends in the destruction of the one who was seduced.
How many are alive in body but dead in soul, crippled by life, who now come into the Church’s enclosure; how many lie on the Church’s threshold, having no strength to enter in with understanding; for many have already been stricken by spiritual death. And the demons, appearing as angels of light, whisper thoughts, speak from the tribunal, and shout through all the media: “Man—that is our god”, “Be as gods! Be higher than God!” And the story of the fall starts over again. Our fore-parents fell from paradise to earth; modern gods fall from earth to hell.
On deaf ears does the warning now fall: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ... (Col. 2:8).
For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil (1 Jn. 3:8).
But who will destroy them now, these terrible things, if the Son of God is cast out and forgotten by people? Instead of worship and gratitude for His great sacrifice, idol worship has returned, which serves the flesh and the demons.
My dear ones, we must not live mindlessly in our times.
All of us, even those who have been in the Church for a long time, are being tested today by the power of various temptations, including the power of a new religious consciousness of false Christian spirituality. And in all of this appears the apocalyptic image of the “great apostasy”, which will encompass the entire human race before the end of the world, about which the Lord now reminds us every day.
Do you think that the Lord accidentally allowed the great shrine on Golgotha in the Church of the Lord’s Sepulcher to be desecrated?[1] Doesn’t this foreshadow that the decisive final period of the devil’s war with God and with His Christ is near?
Beware then my dear ones, that no one seduce you! Hold fast to Orthodoxy. Carefully preserve the grace given to us by God! Be vigilant and pray. Work quietly for your salvation according to the Lord’s commandments, and the guidance and knowledge of the holy fathers. Do not forget, but contemplate and understand the Lord’s words: If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed (Jn. 8:36).
This is where freedom is! This is where salvation is!
The mind is bound with the bonds of ignorance, error, superstition, and perplexity. It wrestles but cannot break free of them. Cleave to the Lord, and He will illumine your darkness, and break all the bonds in which your mind is languishing.
The passions shackle the will and don’t give it the space to act; it flails like one bound hand and foot, but cannot break free. But cleave to the Lord, and He will give you the strength of Samson, and tear asunder all shackles of falsehood that bind you.
Constant anxieties besiege the heart and give it no rest. But cleave to the Lord and He will give you rest. Then, at peace with yourself and seeing all around you brightly, you will walk unhindered with the Lord through the gloom and darkness of this life to the blessed, wide-open spaces of joyful eternity.
Glory to the Immortal God the Father, Invisible!
Glory to the Immortal God the Son, Who appeared to us in the flesh!
Glory to the Immortal God the Spirit, Who spoke through the prophets, apostles, and holy fathers!
Most Holy Trinity, glory to Thee! Amen.
