Glossary
Terms
74 terms in English, Greek, Latin and Syriac. Where an English equivalent is imperfect, the entry says so — several of these words were disputed precisely because the available vocabulary did not fit.
A
- acts of a council
- The record of a council's sessions: speeches, letters read out, votes and depositions. The acts are evidence for what happened, and are not themselves the council's definition.
- akribeia
- Strictness: the application of a canon according to its full letter. Its counterpart is oikonomia. Neither is a loophole, and neither is something a reader applies to their own case.Careful. Akribeia and oikonomia describe how the Church's pastors exercise judgement. They are not tools for a private individual to grant themselves a dispensation or to judge someone else's standing.
- allegory
- A reading that finds a further sense beneath the literal one. Associated especially with Alexandria; Antiochene writers tended to prefer a reading closer to the letter, though the contrast between the two schools is often drawn too sharply.
- anagignoskomena
- The readable books: the Greek Orthodox term for those Old Testament books present in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew canon. They are read in the Church; how their authority compares with the rest has been described in different ways by different Orthodox writers.
- anaphora
- The offering: the great eucharistic prayer of the Divine Liturgy, within which the gifts are offered and the Holy Spirit is invoked.
- anathema
- A formal exclusion from the communion of the Church, attached to a stated error. An anathema names a teaching that is being excluded; it is a boundary marker rather than a verdict on anyone's eternal destiny.
- antilegomena
- The spoken against: Eusebius's term for New Testament writings that were widely used but whose place was disputed, as against the homologoumena, those universally acknowledged.
- apophatic
- Speaking of God by denial: saying what God is not, because the divine ousia exceeds every creaturely concept. Its counterpart, cataphatic theology, speaks by affirmation. Orthodox theology uses both and gives the apophatic the last word.
- apostolic succession
- The continuity of the Church's ministry through bishops who stand in an unbroken line from the apostles, understood in Orthodoxy as succession in faith and communion as well as in ordination.
- Arianism
- The teaching associated with Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, that the Son is the first and greatest of creatures, brought into being by the Father's will, so that there was a state in which the Son was not.Careful. "Arianism" is a broad label covering positions that differed from one another and from Arius. Much of the fourth century involved people who were not Arians but were unconvinced by homoousios.
- asceticism
- Training: the disciplined life of fasting, prayer, vigil and self-denial, understood in Orthodoxy as therapy for the passions rather than as punishment of the body or as earning merit.
C
- canon
- A rule or measure. Used for the Church's disciplinary rulings, for the list of received books of Scripture, and for other fixed standards. The three uses are related but distinct, and confusing them causes real errors — a canon of a council is not a book of the Bible.
- catechumen
- A person being instructed in the faith in preparation for baptism. The ancient catechumenate was a structured stage of Church life with its own place in the liturgy, not merely a class.
- Cathari
- The pure: the name taken by the followers of Novatian, who refused communion to Christians who had lapsed in persecution and to those twice married. Canon VIII of Nicaea sets terms for receiving their clergy.Careful. These third-century Cathari have no connection with the medieval Cathars of southern France, despite the shared name.
- chorepiscopus
- A country bishop: a bishop with limited authority over rural districts, an office widespread in the fourth century and later restricted and allowed to lapse.
- chrismation
- The sealing with holy chrism that follows baptism in the Orthodox Church, by which the newly baptised receives the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is administered together with baptism, including for infants.
- consensus of the Fathers
- The agreement of the Fathers, taken as a mark of the Church's faith. Individual Fathers can be mistaken; what carries authority is what the Church has received from them together.
- Creed
- A confession of faith received by the Church. The Creed recited in Orthodox worship today is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is not word for word the text issued at Nicaea in 325.
D
- deacon
- Servant: the order of clergy who assist the bishop and presbyters in worship and in the care of the poor. Canon XVIII of Nicaea addresses deacons who had begun acting beyond their order in the liturgy.
- deaconess
- A woman in an order of service in the ancient Church, whose duties included assisting at the baptism of women and ministry among women. Canon XIX of Nicaea comments on deaconesses among the Paulianists and observes that those had no laying on of hands.Careful. The evidence for what deaconesses did, and how their setting apart related to ordination, varies by region and century. Do not read one canon as a complete account.
- Donatism
- A North African movement following the persecution under Diocletian, holding that clergy who had handed over the Scriptures had forfeited their orders and that sacraments performed by them were void. The dispute was as much about the nature of the Church as about the individuals involved.
E
- ecumenical council
- A council received by the whole Church as authoritative for the whole Church. In Orthodox understanding a council is not ecumenical merely because an emperor called it or because many bishops attended: reception by the Church is what settles the question, sometimes long afterwards.
- energeia
- Activity, operation, or energy: God as he acts and can be participated in, distinguished from the divine ousia, which remains beyond creaturely knowing. The distinction was central to the fourteenth-century Palamite councils.
- epiclesis
- The invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts and the people within the anaphora.
- Eucharist
- Thanksgiving: the Church's central act of worship, in which bread and wine are offered and received as the Body and Blood of Christ.
- exomologesis
- Confession: in the ancient Church, the public discipline by which grave sins were confessed and penance performed before restoration to communion.
F
- festal letter
- An annual letter from the bishop of Alexandria announcing the date of Pascha and offering pastoral instruction. Athanasius's thirty-ninth, for the year 367, contains his list of the books of Scripture.
- Filioque
- Latin for "and the Son": the addition to the Creed's article on the Holy Spirit that came into use in the West and was not received by the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox objection is both to the addition of a word to a conciliar creed and to the theology the word carries.
G
- Gnosticism
- A modern umbrella term for a range of second- and third-century movements that generally taught salvation through a secret knowledge, a sharp distinction between the creator of this world and the highest God, and a corresponding devaluation of the body and of material creation.Careful. The label covers groups that differed considerably, and some scholars question whether it is useful at all. Where a page can name a specific teacher or text, it does.
H
- hagiography
- Writing about the saints. A genre with its own purposes — to edify, to hold up a pattern of holiness, to give the Church a memory — which are not the purposes of modern critical biography.Careful. Treating a saint's life as though it were a modern historical report misreads the genre. So does dismissing it as fiction.
- hesychasm
- Stillness: the ascetic tradition of inner quiet and continual prayer, defended theologically in the fourteenth century by Gregory Palamas and the councils of 1341–1351.
- Holy Tradition
- The whole life of the Church handed on: Scripture, worship, the councils, the Fathers, the canons, iconography, and the Church's continuing life in the Holy Spirit. Scripture is understood within Tradition rather than over against it.Careful. Tradition in this sense is not a second source of information alongside Scripture, and it is not the same as local custom, which can change.
- homoiousios
- Of like substance. A fourth-century alternative to homoousios, held by some who wanted to affirm the Son's likeness to the Father while avoiding a word they thought dangerous. The single letter that separates the two words has often been mocked; the theological question behind it was serious.
- homoousios
- Of one substance, or consubstantial: the word the Council of Nicaea used to confess that the Son is of the same ousia as the Father, not a creature however exalted.Careful. The word had a difficult earlier history and was not universally welcomed even by those who rejected Arius. Its acceptance took most of the fourth century.
- hypostasis
- A concrete, particular existence: in Trinitarian language, one of the three who are the one God. The Cappadocians settled on one ousia in three hypostases as the way to say that Father, Son and Spirit are genuinely distinct without being three gods.Careful. English "person" is a serviceable translation and an imperfect one: it carries modern associations with individual psychology that hypostasis does not.
- hypostatic union
- The union of divine and human natures in the one hypostasis of the eternal Son, so that there is one Christ who is fully God and fully man.
I
- iconoclasm
- Image-breaking: the eighth- and ninth-century movement, backed at times by imperial power, against the veneration of holy images. The Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 rejected it; the controversy resumed and was ended in 843.
J
- Jesus Prayer
- The short prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", repeated as a form of continual prayer.Careful. The tradition surrounding this prayer includes practices that the Fathers of that tradition insist require the guidance of an experienced spiritual father. This site describes it; it does not prescribe a rule.
K
- kenosis
- Self-emptying, from Philippians 2: the Son's taking the form of a servant. It does not mean the Son ceased to be God or set aside his divinity.
L
- lapsed
- Christians who denied the faith under persecution. How and on what terms they could be restored was one of the sharpest questions of the third and early fourth centuries, and lies behind several canons of Nicaea.
- Logos
- Word or Reason: the title of the eternal Son in the prologue of John's Gospel, taken up by the apologists to speak of Christ to a Greek-speaking world. In the plural, lowercase logoi is used by some Fathers for the divine intentions according to which creatures exist.
M
- Marcionism
- The teaching of Marcion of Sinope, who rejected the Old Testament and its God and used a shortened Luke and a collection of Pauline letters. He was excommunicated at Rome in the 140s.Careful. Marcion is often credited with forcing the Church to define its canon. He was one pressure among several, and treating him as the single cause overstates the evidence.
- metropolitan
- The bishop of the chief city of a civil province, with responsibility for the bishops of that province. Canon IV of Nicaea makes the metropolitan's confirmation necessary for an episcopal ordination.
- monarchia
- Single origin or single rule: in Trinitarian theology, the Father as the one source of the Son's begetting and the Spirit's procession. The Cappadocians used it to hold together the unity of God and the reality of three.
- Monophysitism
- The position that after the union there is only one nature in Christ. In its extreme form, associated with Eutyches, Christ's humanity is absorbed by his divinity; this was condemned at Chalcedon in 451.Careful. Applying this word to the Oriental Orthodox churches is contested and often inaccurate. They confess one incarnate nature of the Word in Cyril's sense and reject Eutyches; "miaphysite" is the term they generally use of themselves.
- Monothelitism
- The teaching that Christ has one will, proposed in the seventh century as a formula for reunion and condemned at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, which confessed two natural wills and two natural operations in the one Christ.
- Muratorian Fragment
- A damaged Latin list of accepted Christian writings, surviving in an eighth-century manuscript and named after its eighteenth-century discoverer.Careful. Its date is disputed: many place it in the late second century, others considerably later. Its authorship is unknown. The Ante-Nicene Fathers print it under Caius of Rome on a conjecture that is not accepted.
- mystagogy
- Instruction in the mysteries: teaching given to the newly baptised about the sacraments they have just received. Cyril of Jerusalem's mystagogical lectures are the best-known example.
- Mysteries
- The Church's sacraments, called Mysteries in Greek usage: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, confession, ordination, marriage and anointing of the sick, among the Church's other sacramental acts.Careful. The Orthodox Church has not always fixed the number at seven; that enumeration entered Orthodox usage relatively late and does not exhaust the Church's sacramental life.
N
- Nestorianism
- The position condemned at Ephesus in 431, associated with Nestorius of Constantinople: that the union of divinity and humanity in Christ is such that Mary should not be called theotokos, and, as his opponents understood him, that Christ is two subjects rather than one.Careful. Whether Nestorius himself held everything condemned under his name is disputed among historians. The Church of the East, which venerates him, rejects the charge.
- nous
- The intellect or spiritual perception, in ascetic writers the faculty by which a person knows God directly, distinguished from discursive reasoning.Careful. "Mind" is the usual English rendering and is misleading if it suggests mere thinking. In the ascetic tradition the nous is closer to the heart's capacity to see.
O
- oikonomia
- Literally household management. In canonical use, the pastoral flexibility by which the Church applies a canon in a way that serves a person's salvation rather than the letter alone. In theology the same word is used for God's saving work in history, as distinct from theologia, the eternal life of the Trinity.
- oikoumene
- The inhabited world: in practice, the Roman Empire. "Ecumenical" derives from it, which is why the word carries an imperial as well as an ecclesial sense in the ancient sources.
- ousia
- Being, essence, or substance: what something is. In Trinitarian language, the one divine essence shared by Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Careful. In the earliest fourth-century debates ousia and hypostasis were sometimes used as synonyms, which is one reason the arguments were so hard to settle. The later distinction between them was an achievement, not a starting point.
P
- parish
- In modern usage, a local congregation. In the ancient canons the same Greek word often means what would now be called a diocese, and Percival's notes on Nicaea point this out expressly.
- Pascha
- The feast of Christ's resurrection. The Council of Nicaea addressed the disagreement over when it should be kept; the Orthodox Church continues to reckon it by the Julian paschalion, which is why Orthodox Pascha often falls later than Western Easter.
- passions
- In ascetic writers, the disordered movements of the soul — anger, greed, vainglory and the rest — that distort a person's relation to God, to others and to themselves. The goal is not the absence of feeling but the healing of desire.
- Paulianists
- Followers of Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch deposed in the 260s. Canon XIX of Nicaea requires that they be baptised on entering the Church, which indicates that the council did not regard their baptism as Christian baptism.
- perichoresis
- Mutual indwelling: the way the three divine hypostasis wholly interpenetrate one another without confusion, and, in Christology, the way the two natures of Christ interpenetrate in the one person.
- physis
- Nature: what a thing is by kind. The Council of Chalcedon confessed Christ as one hypostasis in two natures, divine and human, without confusion, change, division or separation.Careful. Cyril of Alexandria and his opponents did not always use physis in the same sense, and much of the fifth-century conflict turned on that. Reading a later definition back into an earlier text produces confusion rather than clarity.
- presbyter
- Elder: the order of clergy ordained by a bishop to serve a parish community, called a priest in English. In the New Testament the vocabulary of presbyter and overseer is not yet fixed as it later becomes.
- prosopon
- Face, countenance, or the person one presents. Used in Christological debate alongside hypostasis; the two are not simply interchangeable, and part of the fifth-century argument was over how much weight prosopon alone could bear.
- prostrator
- One of the stages of ancient public penance. Penitents progressed through defined stations — weeping, hearing, kneeling or prostrating, and standing with the faithful — before being restored to communion. Several Nicene canons assign years in these stations.
- pseudonymous
- Written under a name other than the author's own. Ancient writers sometimes wrote in the name of a revered figure without intending forgery in the modern sense. A work's authorship and the Church's reception of its teaching are separate questions.
Q
- Quartodeciman
- Fourteenth-day: the practice, found especially in Asia Minor, of keeping Pascha on 14 Nisan whatever the day of the week, rather than on the following Sunday. The disagreement was serious enough in the second century to strain communion.
R
- recension
- A distinct form of a text as it has come down to us. The letters of Ignatius survive in a shorter and a longer recension, the longer containing later additions; a quotation is only as good as the recension it comes from.
S
- see
- The city of which a bishop is bishop, and the territory belonging to it. Canons VI and VII of Nicaea concern the relative standing of particular sees.
- Septuagint
- The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, made from the third century BC onwards, used by the New Testament writers and by the Greek-speaking Church, and the basis of the Orthodox Old Testament.Careful. The Septuagint is not a single uniform book with a fixed contents list. Manuscripts differ, and printed Orthodox Bibles differ in what they include and how they order it.
- simony
- The buying or selling of ordination or of spiritual office, named after Simon Magus in Acts 8. Canon II of Chalcedon forbids it explicitly.
- synod
- An assembly of bishops. Every ecumenical council is a synod; most synods are local or provincial and bind only those under their authority.
T
- theosis
- Deification: the transformation of the human person by grace into communion with God, becoming by grace what God is by nature. Orthodox theology insists this is participation in God's energeia, not absorption into the divine ousia.Careful. Theosis never means that a human being becomes a fourth person of the Trinity or ceases to be a creature.
- Theotokos
- God-bearer: the title of the Virgin Mary confessed at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Its point is Christological before it is Marian — it says that the one born of her is the eternal Son of God, not a man later joined to God.
- typology
- A way of reading in which persons, events and institutions of the Old Testament prefigure Christ and the Church. It is not the same as allegory, though ancient writers do not always separate them sharply.
V
- viaticum
- Provision for a journey: communion given to the dying. Canon XIII of Nicaea calls it the last and most indispensable provision and forbids denying it to anyone at the point of death.