Confession of the Orthodox Faith

Initially, the treatise “Confession of the Orthodox Faith” was part of a letter to St. Gregory Palamas to Dionysius from 1343-1344, written while in custody in the palace prison. The work received a separate title after it was read at the 2nd meeting of the Council of Constantinople in 1351. This document served as an expression of faith, which became the foundation for overcoming the theological errors of Barlaam of Calabria and Gregory Akindinus. Confession begins with the affirmation of faith in One God in Three Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, emphasizing unity without fusion and difference without division. The author expounds in detail the doctrine of God the Father as the only Cause of the Divinity, of the Son, born of the Father before all ages and becoming man for the sake of salvation, as well as of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and sent through the Son. Particular attention is paid to the fullness of the Divinity in Christ, His two natures, wills and actions, united inseparably and inseparably, as well as His redemptive feat, Resurrection and Ascension. The central place in the treatise is occupied by the doctrine of uncreated Divine energies. Saint Gregory distinguishes between the absolutely incomprehensible and unparticipated Divine essence and the uncreated, participatory Divine energies - grace, power, light (including that of Tabor), kingdom, incorruptibility. It is through these uncreated energies that God communes and unites by grace with holy angels and people, without losing His simplicity. The document rejects and anathematizes those who, like Barlaam and Akindinus, divide the one Divinity into “created” and “uncreated,” attributing creatureliness to Divine energies and manifestations. Such division leads to atheism and polytheism. The Confession also affirms the veneration of icons, the Holy Cross and the relics of saints, the Sacraments of the Church (especially the Eucharist), as well as the dogma of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the next century. The acceptance of all 7 Ecumenical Councils and other Councils, including those held against Varlaam and Akindinus, is confirmed. The work is one of the symbolic books of the Orthodox Church. *Title of the work in Greek – ῾Ομολογία τοῦ μητροπολίτου Θεσσαλονίκης Γρηγορίου τοῦ Παλαμᾶ ἐπὶ τῆς θείας καὶ ἱερᾶς συνόδου εἰς εὐήκοον πάντων ἀναγνωσθεῖσα καὶ ὑπὸ πάντων ὡς διὰ πάντων εὐσεβεστάτη στερχθεῖσά τε καὶ σεφθεῖσα. There is one God before all and among all and in all and above all, believed and worshiped by us in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the One in the Trinity and the Trinity in the One, united without fusion and distinguished without division: the same Unit is identically the Trinity Almighty. The Father is without beginning, not only as timeless, but also as completely without reason; Himself the only cause and root and source in the Son and Holy Spirit of the contemplated Divinity; Himself is the only original cause of all things; not the only Creator, but the only Father of the one Son and the only ever-bearing Father and Maker; greater than the Son and the Spirit, but this is only as a reason; in all other respects he is the same as They and is of equal honor. Whose Son is one, without beginning as timeless, but not without beginning as having the beginning and root and source of the Father; from Whom alone He proceeded before all ages, incorporeally, without flowing out, dispassionately, through birth, but without division, this God is from God, not another as God, but another as the Son; the everlasting and everlasting Son, and the only Son, everlastingly present to God without fusion; not the cause and beginning of the Godhead in the conceivable Trinity, for the cause and beginning of His existence is the Father, but the cause and beginning of all created things, as all existing through Him. Whoever is in the image of God is not equal to God by admiration; but in the fullness of the ages he took on the image peculiar to us, and, exhausting Himself, by the favor of the Father and the assistance of the Holy Spirit, according to the law of nature, He was conceived and born of the Ever-Virgin Mary, together God and Man, and, as truly incarnate, becoming like us in everything except sin, remaining in what He was, the true God, uniting without confusion and change two natures and wills and actions and abiding one Son in one Hypostasis, and after incarnation, acting all Divine actions as God and everything human as man, and was subject to immaculate human passions. Passionless and immortal, and abiding like God, He freely suffered in the flesh, like a man; and having been crucified and died and buried, and rose again on the third day, He appeared to His disciples after the resurrection, and declaring power from above, and commanding them to instruct all nations, and to baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and to observe and teach as He commanded, He ascended Himself into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, making our bodily clothing equal in honor and with the throne, as equally divine, with which he will return with glory to judge the living and the dead and give to each according to his deeds. Having ascended to the Father, He sent upon His holy disciples and apostles the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, He is co-originating with the Father and the Son as timeless, but not without beginning, as having one, and He is the root and source and cause of the Father, not as begotten, but as one who came forth; for He also came forth from the Father before all ages, without expiration and without passion, not through birth, but through procession. Undivided from the Father and from the Son, as having come from the Father and resting in the Son, having together an unfused union and an inseparable distinction, He is God and He is from God, not another as God, but another as the Comforter; The Self-hypostatic Spirit, proceeding from the Father and sent through the Son, that is, manifested, the cause and He of everything created, as being accomplished in it, the same as the Father and the Son and is equal in honor, except for ungeneracy and birth. He was sent from the Son to His disciples, which means He was revealed; for in what other way could He who is omnipresent be sent? So, not only from the Son, but also from the Father and through the Son is sent, and will come, manifested from Himself, because sending, that is, the manifestation of the Spirit, is a common work. It appears not according to essence, for no one has ever seen or explained God’s Essence, but according to grace and power and energy, which are common to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each of Them is characterized by His own Hypostasis and everything that strives towards it. The general is not only the pre-existing Essence, which is absolutely nameless, unappearing and uncommunal, as if above every name and appearance and communion, but also grace and power and energy and splendor and the kingdom and incorruptibility and, in a word, everything with which God partakes and unites by grace with the holy angels and people, without depriving of its simplicity, nor the particularity and diversity of powers and energies. So, we have one omnipotent God in one Godhead. For from perfect Hypostases a composition never arises, nor can something powerful, because it has strength or powers, once because of this be sincerely called composed. Moreover, we venerate the holy icon of the Son of God, who became described as becoming human for our sake, raising our veneration from the image to the Prototype; and the honorable tree of the Cross, and all the symbols of His suffering, as real Divine Trophies against the common enemy of our race; We also honor the saving sign of the venerable Cross and Divine churches and places and sacred vessels and God-given words because of the indwelling God. We also venerate the icons of all saints out of love for them and for God, whom they sincerely loved and served, lifting our minds in their veneration to the persons represented on the icons. We also venerate the very relics of the saints, because sanctifying grace did not abandon their holy bones, just as the Divinity was not separated from the Master’s body in His three-day death. We do not know any evil in essence, nor that there would be any other principle of evil than the corruption of intelligent beings who poorly used the freedom given to them by God. We hold all church traditions, written and unwritten, and above all the secret and all-holy service and communion and communion and assembly, from which other services receive their perfection and where, in remembrance of Him who exhausted Himself inexhaustibly and became incarnate and suffered for our sake, the most divine objects, Bread and The cup becomes the life-giving Body and Blood, and is given into indescribable Communion and fellowship to those who piously approach. We reject and anathematize all those who do not confess and believe in how the Holy Spirit preached through the prophets, as the Lord commanded when He appeared to us in the flesh, as the Apostles sent by Him testified, and as our Fathers and their successors taught us, but those who invent their personal heresies or follow to the end those who taught them poorly. We accept all Holy and Ecumenical Councils: the Council of three hundred and eighteen God-bearing fathers in Nicaea against the iconoclast Arius, who wickedly impoverishes the Son of God into creation and dissects the worshiped Divinity in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit into created and uncreated; A council of one hundred and fifty holy fathers, gathered in Constantinople against Macedonius of Constantinople, the evilly impoverishing Holy Spirit, cutting through this no less than the first, into the created and the uncreated, the one Divinity; after this, the Council of Two Hundred Fathers in Ephesus against Nestorius the Patriarch of Constantinople, who shared in Christ the unity of His divinity and never wanted to call the Mother of God the Most Holy Virgin, who truly gave birth to God; and the fourth Council of six hundred and thirty fathers in Chalcedon against Eutyches and Dioscorus, who maliciously taught that Christ had one nature; and after this, the Council of one hundred and sixty-five fathers in Constantinople against Theodore and Dioscorus, who thought the same as Nestorius, and supported his teaching with their works, and against Origen and Didymus and some Evagrius, who were from the ancients, and tried to introduce some myths into the Church of God; and after this the Council of one hundred and seventy fathers in this city against Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul from the rulers in Constantinople, who took from Christ His two energies and two wills, corresponding to His two natures; and the Council of the 367 Fathers, which was again held in Nicaea against the iconoclasts. We also accept all holy Councils, held by God’s grace in their time and place for the establishment of piety in the life of the Gospel; These include those who were held in this great city in the glorious Church of the Holy Divine Wisdom (St. Sophia) against Barlaam of Calabria and against Akindinus, who was for him and thought like him, and hurried to justify him with cunning; who taught that the common grace of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the light of the future age, in which the righteous will shine like the sun, as Christ presented when He shone on the Mount, and simply all the power and energy of the Trinitarian Deity, and everything that is in some way distinguished from the Divine nature - that all this is created, dissecting thereby the one Godhead into the created and the uncreated, and those who piously confess that this The uncreated Divine Light and all the power and energy of the Divine - for nothing of everything belonging by nature to God arose recently - they call ditheists and polytheists, just as the Jews, Sabellians and Arians call us. But we expel both the first and the last as real atheists and polytheists, and we finally cut them off from the fullness of the pious - as the Holy Apostolic Church of Christ did by the Synod and Tomos of Svyatogorsk, believers in the One, Trinitarian and Almighty Divinity, never falling away from unity and simplicity because of powers or Hypostases. We combine all this with our hope for the resurrection of the dead and the endless life of the next century. Amen. You might be interested in: