In the name of the free movement of ideas and amidst the ideological confusion observed in our time, a large number and variety of sects of religious communities and religions appear every now and then in the foreground. Of course, our homeland is a democratic country and based on the constitution there is religious freedom, what we call religious tolerance. Thus, any form of religious community when limited to its members and does not attempt to practice proselytism must be respected, this is stipulated by law. Specifically, the current constitution in article 13 paragraph 1 states that freedom of religious conscience is inviolable and in paragraph 2 that every known religion is free and that its worship is carried out unhindered under the protection of the laws.
On a global scale, this principle of religious freedom was officially established in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN, which in Article 18 states that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes the freedom to change his religion or belief, as well as the freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
And of course, this legislation has been made to limit, if not eliminate, religious fanaticism and intolerance, because these phenomena are still observed today in believers of various religions who are led into conflict with heretics and non-believers and are presented in the form of religious fanaticism, puritanism, conservatism, theocracy, religious expansionism by force, as is the case with Islamism and mainly with proselytism. As a result of religious fanaticism and intolerance in history, we have previously had religious wars, conversions to Islam, which is a basic tenet of the Quran and for which Hellenism paid very dearly during the years of Turkish rule, the holy inquisition of the Western church, and with inhuman means, not only heretics but also Christians who disagreed with the pope or were simply considered suspected of infidelity and atheism were horribly tortured and burned at the stake.
Fortunately, in the history of our Orthodox Church there have never been similar phenomena, but even when there was some deviation and some zeal was observed, the ecclesiastical hierarchy did not approve of this attitude. And this is because in the sacred texts there is nowhere any indication of violent action in defense of the Church, much less for the spread of its truths. The Apostles, the martyrs, the fathers, the Orthodox mission are always carried out respecting their audiences and they face their listeners based on the Lord’s exhortation: whoever wants to come behind me and follow me.
Fanaticism and intolerance are incompatible with Orthodox ethics. The zealous mentality is a dangerous attitude that blinds the believer and gives him the illusion that he himself has a spiritual euphoria and is the saved one, and it becomes a scandal for the church, which expects to see in the face of the believer not the furious and furious person, but the meek, the calm, the tolerant, the prudent, the long-suffering one who manifests his zeal with the holiness of his life and with his works of love, with his humble mind and his creative energy.
And of course, in the face of religious fanaticism and inhuman intolerance, religious freedom has been very rightly legislated and religious tolerance has been considered a basic human right. However, in order for this religious tolerance to function properly, certain rules and restrictions must be observed, which have also been legislated. In article 13 of our constitution, which deals with the exercise of religious rights, it is stated that proselytism is prohibited. The exercise of worship is not allowed to offend public order or good morals. All known religions are subject to the same supervision of the state and to the same obligations towards it as the practitioners of the prevailing religion. No one can, because of their religious beliefs, be exempted from fulfilling obligations to the state and refuse to comply with the laws. From these restrictive points, the conclusion is drawn that certainly since we have a democracy, religious freedom must be respected and the religious rights of citizens must be upheld within the framework of religious freedom. In order for democracy and in relation to religious freedom to function properly, the conditions that are determined, as we have seen, by the constitutional imperatives must exist.
Unfortunately, these clarity and conditions, especially after the change of government, are not being observed and the impression is given that our country has turned into a rampant vine and in a provocative manner, as if we were a missionary land, a multitude of Protestant offshoots and pillars with religious communities and parareligious movements have appeared, and proselytism is an everyday reality. The constitutional requirement to prohibit proselytism is clear and decisive and at this point all sects and all these religious communities and parareligious movements practice proselytism. The main component of proselytism is fraud, fraud can come in various forms. Today proselytism is practiced in such an ugly and deceptive way that it is not noticed. It uses plenty of money, rich and impressive printed material, modern means of communication, and at first glance avoids giving its real mark to such an extent that it leaves you with the feeling that you are dealing with an Orthodox community. In this case, the Unia is characteristic in how it is presented. It has a priesthood with an Orthodox shape and form. As if you were seeing an Orthodox priest. And this ritual of worship reminds you of the Orthodox service. In reality, however, the Unia is an organ of the papal church.
Proselytism is particularly dangerous when it is done preferentially to people who, due to age, lack of information, financial, mental and physical weakness, cannot react. They establish counseling stations for health issues, professional orientation, and family guidance. They seek communication through the telephone with short sermons. They use correspondence to solve spiritual problems and deliver biblical study courses. They organize musical events and festivals in open spaces. They provocatively and forcefully enter villages and enter Orthodox homes to find unsuspecting and ordinary people and carry out systematic proselytism, which is prohibited by the constitution. Especially now, with our accession to the united Europe, it is forced to accept pressure from foreign states for alleged respect for religious rights and thus grants privileges and makes concessions that in the future could be disastrous for our country.
Indicatively, we mention an incident with a heretic of a parareligious phenomenon. In the 1980s, Bhagwan Sri Rajnis fled to Crete, who had been declared undesirable by many European countries that are distinguished for their liberalism. Well, starting from the east, he came to shine as a new messiah. In the end, it turned out that he deified sex and drugs and was a public danger, which is why he was expelled and the bells of Crete rang for the expulsion of the false guru because this man was a common fraud. According to the Rajnis press, a large number of Hindu, Buddhist and other religious Eastern communities are currently operating in our country, posing a public danger, especially to our young people.
The incident that occurred in French Guiana, South America, on the border of Brazil, where we had the death of about thousands of followers of Gene Jones of the People’s Temple sect, is typical. This tragic event caused a global outcry and forced the federal agencies of the United States to take special measures since the victims were all American citizens. James Jones, their god, ordered them to commit suicide and they stood in line to drink the hydrogen cyanide. And he with them.
Therefore, the deception that is a basic element of proselytism can sometimes become a danger of this life as well. Let’s leave aside the fact that the mental and spiritual danger that comes from the proselytism of the many-named and multifaceted sects, movements and religious groups is common. Those who are drawn into their nets become their unwilling instruments in the game of their satanic plans, are subject to brainwashing that ends in their complete mental and physical castration, which leads to the psychosomatic collapse of the new man.
In ancient times the word heresy was used to denote a political or philosophical part of a party or a school, later in the apostolic years to denote a religious part. We have the heresy of the Pharisees, the heresy of the Sadducees, the heresy of the Nazarenes. Now when this religious perception distorts and falsifies the truth, we have the concept of heresy which we use today. Heresy is the deviation from the truth, the error and the deviation from the dogmatic truth of the church.
The Orthodox Church is called Catholic based on its mission to spread to all nations. Its quality of Catholicism is seen in its universality and ecumenism. The Lord’s command to his disciples was: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
But in parallel to the above meaning there is another that is equally important, catholicity means that the church has the whole truth and the truth in its entirety. Thus the characterization catholic means that the church reveals horizontally, we would say quantity, because its mission is to include in its bosom as many people as possible.
To come now to our topic, heresies, in contrast to the catholicity of the church that possesses all the truth, are in deviation and deviation from the truth. The word heresy is derived from the verb airomai airomai means to choose, to prefer. Exactly the heretic chooses a part from the whole truth of the church. This part is isolated, cut off from the whole truth and absolutizes it. An example of the truth of the church is the human person of the Lord. In the person of the Lord, the two natures, divine and human, were united inseparably and indivisible. Both the divinity and the humanity each retain their own characteristics in the one person of Christ. The church confesses Christ as perfect God and perfect man without any alterations or distortions in either His human or divine nature. And of course this dogmatic truth has its support in the Holy Bible and in Sacred Tradition.
In the gospels sometimes the humanity of Christ is mentioned and sometimes His divinity. Sometimes He is called the son of man and sometimes the son of God. Each one constitutes a separate truth. Orthodoxy is never based on individual truths, it possesses and confesses the universal truth. The heretic from the above example partially detaches the part, prefers and chooses what is in their interest. Thus, choosing the divinity and ignoring the humanity of the Lord, we have the heresy of monophysitism, which accepts that in the person of the Son of God there is only one nature, the divine. When again he chooses humanity and ignores the divinity of the Lord we have the heresy of Nestorius who accepts that the Son of God did not become man but only dwelt within man as a guest. We do not have a divine-human person in the person of Christ for this reason and he does not accept the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God as the mother of the God-man Christ but only as the Christ-bearer, that is, the mother of the man Christ who hosted the Son of God within her.
This division, the fragmentation of the universal truth of the church, always comes and does heresy. That is why the heretic distorts, the truth. He deviates and deviates from the truth and ends up in error.
His insistence on partial truth, which he even supports in verses of the Holy Bible, explains what a scholar of the Bible he is. We should not be impressed by his constant reference to verses of the Holy Bible, beyond their misguided interpretation, the invocation of some passages may be true, but the reference to them is one-sided, half the truth or part of the truth is chosen and other passages are immunized which together with the first ones give us the complete, the complete, the whole truth. Therefore, someone who is unsuspecting and careless about Holy Scripture is impressed by the heart-breaking proclamation of the verses and runs the risk of being influenced by the one-sidedness of the heretic who knows his lesson well.
The division and fragmentation of the truth is due to the fact that the heretic tries to approach the truth of the Holy Scripture alone with his right reason, his rationality. With his technical logic he thinks he reaches the truth. He denies the tradition of the church, he does not know what tradition means, he ignores that the Holy Scripture is also part of the entire sacred tradition. Perhaps he deliberately wants to ignore that there was a time when, while the Christian church existed, we did not yet have the texts of the New Testament. And when these began to be written in 50 AD, they were not immediately accepted as tangible revelation, but several years passed. The official recognition of all 27 books of the New Testament as absolute by the church occurred approximately in the middle of the fourth century, in the era of the great Athanasius. Until this time there is the living truth that is orally transmitted from one generation to another. The experiences of the early church are reflections of the life of the Lord and the apostles. These, like the apple of the eye, are kept and preserved in the lives of the believers. Now a part of the experiences is recorded in the texts of the New Testament, but another part, which is also great, was not possible to record.
So there were so many things that Jesus did that the whole world could not contain if they were recorded, but this experience that is not recorded in the New Testament was taken by the people of God as a legacy and passed it on from generation to generation and later recorded in the minutes of the councils in the terms and doctrines in the rules and symbols in the works of the holy fathers of our church. Today, the Orthodox student of Holy Scripture for its correct and valid interpretation always uses what we generally call tradition as a guide. He does not stay in his point of view in his mind, his subjectivity, his rationality can easily mislead him. Especially if one takes into account the Protestant world, he will find that it has split into hundreds of offshoot communities, one different from the other. This is a result of them losing their tradition, each pastor, each shepherd of a community interprets according to his point of view and often creates his own church and his own religious community. In fact, the selfish belief that he possesses the truth and that he can interpret it with his own intellect also passes, then he is arrogant and no longer recognizes any other source of truth than himself. He denies others, especially in the ancient church, and his arrogance makes him persistent and unyielding in his views, resulting in his separation from the body of the church. Egoism, arrogance, demonic conceit create a state of insanity that makes the apostle Paul say that a man is a second and a third time admonition. It is of such intensity that his perversion becomes his own guilt that he condemns himself.
Of course, it is very easy for someone to deviate from the truth and become a heretic, especially when this happens, it is not because of ignorance or a complete lack of information, often many times even Orthodox and theologians on a certain subject have weak knowledge and an opinion which becomes an error. This does not always mean heresy. Heresy occurs when someone insists on their opinion while the church draws their attention to the error, they consciously deviate and stubbornly do not move from their opinion. For this reason, in order to establish the offense of heresy, the denial or distortion of the truth is required.
There is indeed a safe limit between the personal search for truth and deviation from the truth, and this limit is the humble readiness for repentance. We are all heretics, said the late Professor Zandering. The problem is not to become heretic leaders. And the meaning of the fact that we are all heretics refers to the fact that we are all prone to error, in fact, we rely on our logic alone and we are self-sufficient insofar as we know everything. We become heretic leaders, we insist on our point of view and despite the suggestions, we support our mistaken personal positions, then the demonic comes and the heretic man with the first and second law of resignation comes into effect.
In the stories about monks in the book geronticon there is the following incident
They said about Abba Agathon that some people came to him because they had heard that he had great power and wanting to test whether he would get angry, they said to him, “You are Agathon, we hear about you that you are a fornicator and proud.” He answers them, “Yes, that is. Agathon, the talkative and gluttonous.” He answers them, “I am.” Then, “Are you Agathon, the heretic?” And he answers, “No, I am not a heretic.” They asked him, “Why did we tell you so much and you accepted it? But you did not bring up the reason, that is, that you are a heretic?” He answers, “First, I write them down for myself because accepting them is a benefit to my soul. But being a heretic is a separation from God, and I do not want to be separated from God.” When she heard him, she admired him for his discernment and left edified.
I think the of Abba Agathon says it all about the disastrous results of virtue, it is the worst sin, the only one that separates from God, and it is the most demonic. It is a coincidence that the one who wrote the hymn of love, the apostle Paul, and set love as the criterion and the essence of all virtues, spoke about heretics with a harsh and very strict language, he calls heretics dogs, evil workers, ravenous wolves, The same goes for the apostle of love, John the Theologian, who with his three letters focuses on love, since God is love. If one does not understand the gravity of heresy, these words of the disciple of love are strange and bizarre, not to say unacceptable.
A spiritual self-sufficiency that we possess the truth and that we know the truth always conceals the danger of deviation and deviation. May God the Father, through his Son, grant us in the Holy Spirit to always correct the word of truth and to always be ready to defend ourselves.
Thank you very much.
Speech of the blessed Metropolitan Dionysius of Drama during a theological conference on the topic of heresies.
Conference proceedings
