Eastern Orthodox Church Beliefs

1. Who the Eastern Orthodox Are

The Eastern Orthodox Church is a communion of self-governing Churches that trace their bishops in unbroken succession to the apostles and hold the faith of the first seven ecumenical councils. Orthodox Christians describe their Church as the continuation of the undivided Church of the first millennium, keeping the Greek and Byzantine theological tradition that developed around Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. They are in full communion with one another and out of full communion with Rome, a separation usually dated to 1054 and in fact built up over centuries.

The Pew Research Center estimated roughly 260 million Orthodox Christians worldwide in its 2017 report on Orthodoxy, with the largest single population in Russia and substantial communities in Ethiopia, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Georgia, plus a large diaspora in western Europe and the Americas. The same study found the Orthodox share of the world's Christians has fallen over the past century as Christianity has grown fastest in Africa and Asia.

Population figures above are from the Pew Research Center report Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century (2017). Pew's totals include the Oriental Orthodox Churches, notably the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which are a separate communion from the Eastern Orthodox.

Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Catholic

Three families are easily confused, and the distinction matters for anything said about them. The Eastern Orthodox accept seven ecumenical councils and are the subject of this guide. The Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Malankara) accept three councils and parted over the Christological language of Chalcedon in 451, a division that a series of modern joint statements has narrowed considerably. The Eastern Catholic Churches, twenty-three self-governing (sui iuris) Churches, keep Byzantine or other Eastern rites while remaining in full communion with Rome.

2. What Orthodox Christians Believe

Orthodox belief is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as the councils left it, held with the conviction that doctrine is settled by the whole Church rather than by any single see. An Orthodox Christian confesses one God in three persons, the Son as consubstantial with the Father, the Incarnation, the Virgin Mary as Theotokos (God-bearer), the bodily resurrection of Christ and of the dead, and the life of the world to come. A Catholic reading that list will find nothing to correct.

The Seven Councils

Orthodoxy recognizes seven ecumenical councils as the standard of the faith: Nicaea I in 325, Constantinople I in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680 to 681, and Nicaea II in 787. Catholics accept all seven and count later Western councils as ecumenical too, which is one of the concrete forms the authority question takes. Orthodox theologians generally hold that a council becomes ecumenical when the whole body of the faithful receives it, so no later Western assembly qualifies in their reckoning.

Scripture and Tradition

Orthodoxy reads Scripture inside the Church's living Tradition, with the Greek Septuagint as the received Old Testament. The Orthodox canon is somewhat wider than the Catholic one, including in many editions 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh alongside the books Catholics call deuterocanonical. On the principle that Scripture is read within Tradition, Rome and Orthodoxy agree against the Reformation, a point set out in our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture.

The Sacraments, Called Mysteries

Orthodox Christians celebrate the same seven sacraments, usually called mysteries, and administer several of them differently. Baptism is normally by triple immersion, followed at once by chrismation (the Eastern form of confirmation) and by the reception of Holy Communion, so infants commune from the day of their baptism. Confession is practised with a warmly pastoral emphasis on healing. Parish clergy may be married if they married before ordination, while bishops are chosen from monastics. Divorce and remarriage are permitted in limited cases by oikonomia, a pastoral discretion the Eastern canons allow.

Sin, Grace and the Last Things

Orthodox theology speaks of ancestral sin: humanity inherits mortality, corruption and a will bent toward sin from Adam, without inheriting personal guilt. Grace is understood as God's own uncreated life communicated to the believer. On the state of the departed, Orthodoxy prays for the dead at every Divine Liturgy while declining the Latin framework of purifying fire and satisfaction for temporal punishment, a position we treat at length in our guide to purgatory and the Orthodox third position rather than repeating here.

3. Orthodox Worship: Liturgy, Icons, Fasting

Orthodox worship centres on the Divine Liturgy, most often the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, with the longer Liturgy of St Basil the Great on ten days of the year. The service is sung throughout, usually without instruments, and it is understood as the participation of the earthly assembly in the worship already going on in heaven. Length, incense, repetition and standing are all deliberate: the liturgy trains the body along with the mind.

Icons and the Seventh Council

Icons are integral to Orthodox worship because of a doctrinal decision, settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 after the iconoclast crisis. The council taught that images of Christ and the saints may be venerated (proskynesis, honour) while adoration (latreia) belongs to God alone, and it grounded the argument in the Incarnation: the invisible God has taken a visible human face, so he can be depicted. The Catholic Church holds the same council and the same distinction, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats sacred images in paragraphs 1159 to 1162.

Fasting and the Jesus Prayer

Orthodox fasting is stricter and more frequent than the modern Latin discipline, with four fasting seasons in the year and the traditional abstention from meat, dairy, fish, oil and wine on many days. The spiritual tradition of hesychasm cultivates inner stillness through the repeated Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", and many Catholics now pray it. Pope John Paul II commended the Eastern monastic and contemplative tradition to the whole Church in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen. Catholics who want the Eastern rhythm without leaving the Latin rite often find it in the daily prayers that carry the same shape.

The Calendar Question

Orthodox Churches differ among themselves on the calendar. Most now keep the revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts, so Christmas falls on 25 December in civil reckoning, while the Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem Churches and the monasteries of Mount Athos keep the old Julian calendar, putting Christmas on 7 January. Nearly all Orthodox Churches calculate Pascha (Easter) by the Julian reckoning, which is why Orthodox Easter usually falls after the Western date.

4. Autocephaly: How Orthodoxy Governs Itself

Autocephaly is the structural principle of Orthodox governance: a Church is autocephalous when it elects its own primate and governs its own affairs without reference to any higher bishop. There is no Orthodox equivalent of the Roman curia and no bishop with jurisdiction over the whole communion. Unity is held by shared faith, shared sacraments and mutual recognition among the primates.

The Order of Honour

The autocephalous Churches are ranked in an order of honour (the diptychs) headed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, followed by the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, then Moscow, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia, then Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The Ecumenical Patriarch is primus inter pares, first among equals: he convenes pan-Orthodox meetings and he does not govern another Church. Constantinople also claims a right to receive appeals from other jurisdictions, reading canons 9 and 17 of Chalcedon that way, and the Moscow Patriarchate rejects that reading. The extent of the first place is itself disputed inside Orthodoxy.

Where the Structure Strains

Autocephaly places real strain on Orthodox unity when jurisdictions disagree, and Orthodox writers say so themselves. The Holy and Great Council held in Crete in 2016 was intended as the first pan-Orthodox council in centuries, and the Churches of Antioch, Russia, Georgia and Bulgaria did not attend. In 2018 the Moscow Patriarchate broke eucharistic communion with Constantinople over the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, formalized by a tomos in January 2019. The status of the Orthodox Church in America, autocephalous in Moscow's reckoning and not in Constantinople's, is a similar unresolved case.

5. Theosis and the Essence and Energies Distinction

Theosis, or deification, is the Orthodox account of salvation: God became man so that man might share in the life of God, and salvation is that participation rather than a change in legal standing alone. The whole person is drawn into God, body and soul, beginning at baptism, deepened through the sacraments, prayer and ascetic struggle, and completed in the resurrection. Orthodox writers habitually quote Athanasius and Irenaeus on this, and the language is patristic property shared by East and West.

What Gregory Palamas Argued

Gregory Palamas, a monk of Mount Athos and later Archbishop of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, gave theosis its classic Orthodox formulation during the hesychast controversy. Barlaam of Calabria argued that the light the hesychast monks reported in prayer could only be a created effect, since God's own being is beyond reach. Palamas answered by distinguishing the divine essence, which stays forever unknowable and cannot be shared by any creature, from the divine energies, which are uncreated, are truly God, and are the way God gives himself to be known and shared. Councils held at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld him, and Palamism has been standard Orthodox theology since.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching affirms deification in the same terms. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 460 quotes Athanasius, "the Son of God became man so that we might become God", and 2 Peter 1:4 carries the same weight in both traditions. Where Latin theology has hesitated is over the distinction itself, since the scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity resists any real distinction within God, and Latin thought accounts for the same reality with the categories of created grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church has never condemned Palamas, several twentieth-century Catholic theologians read him as compatible with Aquinas, and the point is not on the list of formal obstacles to communion.

6. How the Schism Happened, and What 1965 Changed

The separation of East and West was a slow estrangement that hardened into schism, with 1054 as its symbolic date rather than its cause. Language divided the two halves of the Roman world once Greek faded in the West and Latin in the East. Political division followed, with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 setting a Western empire against Byzantium. Liturgical and disciplinary differences, over leavened or unleavened bread, clerical marriage and fasting rules, were argued as though they carried the weight of doctrine.

1054

In July 1054 a papal legation led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia against Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who then anathematized the legates in return. Pope Leo IX had died some months before the legates acted, which is one reason canonists have questioned the legation's standing. The excommunications were personal, they bound named individuals rather than whole Churches, and contemporaries did not treat 1054 as the end of communion. What made the breach permanent was the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the Latin occupation that followed, an event that Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for in 2001 and again to the Ecumenical Patriarch in 2004. Our guide to the Crusades covers 1204 in detail.

Attempted Reunions

Two councils tried to restore communion and both failed on reception. The Second Council of Lyons in 1274 produced a union that the Byzantine Church rejected as imposed by the emperor. The Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 produced a more substantial agreement on the Filioque, purgatory, the Eucharist and papal primacy, signed by almost all the Greek delegates, and Mark of Ephesus refused. Constantinople repudiated it within a few years, and the fall of the city in 1453 ended the effort.

7 December 1965

On 7 December 1965, the day before the close of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I published a joint declaration removing the 1054 excommunications from the memory of the Church. The text was proclaimed simultaneously in St Peter's Basilica in Rome and at the Phanar in Constantinople. The declaration cancelled the sentences and expressed regret for the words and acts that surrounded them, and the two men were explicit that it did not by itself settle the differences or restore communion. It removed the anathemas from between the Churches so that the theological work could begin, and that work is now carried by the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue.

The two patriarchs had already embraced in Jerusalem in January 1964, the first meeting of a pope and an ecumenical patriarch since Ferrara-Florence. Every pope since has continued the contact, and the Ecumenical Patriarch or his delegate attends the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome while a Roman delegation attends the feast of St Andrew at the Phanar.

7. Open Question 1: The Filioque

The Filioque is a single Latin word, meaning "and the Son", that the Western Church added to the clause of the Nicene Creed confessing that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father". The Orthodox objection has two distinct parts, and treatments that mention only one of them misrepresent the dispute. One part is theological, about what the addition says of the Trinity. The other is canonical, about who has the authority to alter a creed that an ecumenical council settled.

The Canonical Objection

The Creed in its received form was set by the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 forbade the composition of another faith to rival the Nicene one. The Filioque entered Western usage locally, appearing in Spain around the Third Council of Toledo in 589 and spreading through the Frankish churches under Charlemagne. Rome resisted it for a long time: Pope Leo III, while accepting the doctrine, declined to add the words to the Creed and had the unaltered Greek and Latin texts inscribed on silver shields at St Peter's. The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that the Filioque did not appear in the Creed at the Roman liturgy until 1014 (CCC 246 to 248). The Orthodox point is that a text agreed by a council was changed by one part of the Church acting alone, and that this is a question of order and authority whatever the theology turns out to be.

The Theological Objection

Orthodox theology holds the monarchy of the Father: the Father alone is the source and cause within the Trinity, begetting the Son and breathing forth the Spirit, and this is what secures the unity of God without collapsing the persons. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, argued in his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit that saying the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son gives the Spirit two causes and either divides the divine unity or makes the Spirit subordinate to the other two persons. Modern Orthodox theologians add that the Filioque tends to subordinate the Spirit to the Son in the life of the Church, producing an over-institutional ecclesiology in the West.

The Catholic Answer

The Catholic Church teaches that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, defined at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, and holds that the doctrine is a legitimate development of what Scripture says about the Spirit being sent by the Son (John 15:26, John 16:7). The most useful modern Catholic statement is the 1995 clarification from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit. It affirmed that the Father alone is the origin without origin of both the Son and the Spirit, and it observed that the Greek verb ekporeuesthai, used in the Creed, denotes origination from the ultimate source in a way the Latin procedere does not, so on the Catholic reading the Latin formula does not assert what the Greek objection takes it to assert.

8. Open Question 2: Papal Primacy and Jurisdiction

Papal primacy is the hardest of the four questions, because it concerns the structure of the Church rather than a single doctrinal formula. Orthodoxy grants the Bishop of Rome a primacy of honour as first bishop of the universal Church. What Orthodoxy denies is that this primacy carries ordinary, immediate and universal jurisdiction over every diocese and every believer.

The Orthodox Position, Stated in Its Own Terms

Orthodox ecclesiology begins with the local church gathered around its bishop at the Eucharist. Each such church is fully the Church, and the wider communion is a communion of these churches rather than a subdivision of one global body. Primacy exists at every level, in the province, the patriarchate and the universal Church, and its function is to convene, to preside and to speak for the whole once the whole has agreed. The Orthodox reading of the first millennium is that Rome held exactly this kind of primacy and exercised it through appeal, mediation and witness, and that the medieval papacy converted it into a form of monarchical government the East never received. The ranking canons that Orthodoxy appeals to, canon 3 of Constantinople in 381 and canon 28 of Chalcedon in 451, place Constantinople second because it is the new imperial capital, a logic that treats the order of sees as an ecclesiastical arrangement rather than a divine institution.

The Catholic Position

The Catholic Church teaches that Christ made Peter the rock and gave him the keys (Matthew 16:18-19) and the charge to feed the sheep (John 21:15-17), that this office passes to the Bishop of Rome, and that the pope holds full, supreme and universal power over the Church which he can always freely exercise. That was defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870 in the constitution Pastor Aeternus, and the Second Vatican Council set it inside a doctrine of episcopal collegiality in Lumen Gentium 22 to 23, teaching that the bishops with the pope form one college with care for the whole Church.

Where the Dialogue Actually Is

In the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, John Paul II asked church leaders and theologians to help him find a way of exercising the primacy that is open to a new situation while renouncing nothing essential to its mission, an invitation Orthodox theologians took seriously. The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue issued the Ravenna Document in 2007, which agreed that primacy exists at the universal level and that the Bishop of Rome held the first place among the patriarchs, and recorded continuing disagreement about what that first place involved in the first millennium. The Moscow Patriarchate delegation withdrew from the Ravenna session over the seating of the Estonian church and has not accepted the text, which measures how hard the question is inside Orthodoxy as well as between the two Churches. The Chieti Document of 2016 carried the first-millennium study further, and the 2023 Alexandria Document addressed synodality and primacy in the second millennium. The disagreement is now much better defined than it was, and it is not resolved.

9. Open Question 3: Vatican I and Infallibility

Papal infallibility, defined at the First Vatican Council on 18 July 1870, teaches that when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he is preserved from error by divine assistance, and that such definitions are irreformable of themselves and not by the consent of the Church. That last clause is the one Orthodoxy cannot accept.

What Orthodoxy Holds Instead

Orthodox theology locates infallibility in the Church as a whole. The Holy Spirit preserves the entire body of the faithful from final error, and that preservation becomes visible in the doctrinal decisions of ecumenical councils once the whole Church has received them. The 1848 encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, replying to Pius IX, made the point sharply: the guardian of the faith is the body of the Church, the people themselves. On this reading a definition that is valid apart from the consent of the Church removes reception from the process altogether, and reception is the mechanism by which Orthodoxy knows a council was truly ecumenical.

The Catholic Response

Catholic theology answers that papal infallibility is the same infallibility Christ gave the Church, exercised in a particular way, and that its conditions are narrow. A definition binds only when the pope speaks as universal pastor, defining a matter of faith or morals, and intending to settle it definitively. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sets this out in paragraphs 891 to 892, and it places alongside it the infallibility of the whole body of the faithful in believing, the sensus fidei (CCC 92). Catholic theologians also note that the two doctrines a pope has defined in this solemn way, the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950, both concerned Mary, so the practical distance between the two Churches on this question is narrower than the formula suggests.

10. Open Question 4: The Immaculate Conception

The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in the bull Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854, teaches that the Virgin Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace given in view of the merits of Christ. Orthodox Christians honour Mary at least as highly as Catholics do and decline this definition, which surprises many Catholics who assume the objection is a lower view of Mary.

How the Orthodox Honour Mary

Orthodox liturgy calls Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, defined at Ephesus in 431, and addresses her as Panagia, the All-Holy, ever-virgin, more honourable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim. Her name recurs in every Divine Liturgy. The Orthodox keep the feast of the Conception of St Anne on 9 December and celebrate her Dormition on 15 August. Most Orthodox theologians hold that Mary committed no personal sin, and Orthodoxy has never defined the point.

Why They Decline the Definition

The Orthodox objection is mainly that the definition answers a problem Eastern theology does not have. Because the East speaks of ancestral sin as inherited mortality and corruption without inherited guilt, there is no stain of original guilt at conception from which Mary would need preserving, and the definition looks like a solution built on Augustine's particular account of original sin. A second objection is procedural, that a pope defined a dogma binding on the whole Church without a council, which brings the question back to primacy and infallibility. Some Orthodox writers add that the definition risks separating Mary from the rest of the human race whose condition she shared and redeemed within.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic Church holds that the definition states in Western terms what Eastern liturgy has always sung about the All-Holy Mother of God, and that the grace involved is entirely Christ's, applied to Mary in anticipation of the Cross. On the Catholic account the East and the West are describing the same person with different anthropologies, and the Catholic dogma preserves the Eastern insistence that Mary is wholly holy from the beginning. This is the open question on which the two traditions are most often said to be closer in substance than in language. For the Catholic doctrine of inherited sin that stands behind the difference, see our guide to original sin.

11. Why Rome Recognizes Orthodox Orders and Eucharist

The Catholic Church recognizes Orthodox bishops, priests, Eucharist and other sacraments as valid because the Orthodox Churches have kept apostolic succession unbroken and celebrate the sacraments the apostles handed on. The Second Vatican Council said this formally in the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, in the sections on the Eastern Churches (14 to 18). The recognition is a statement about what the Orthodox Churches genuinely possess.

What the Council Actually Said

Unitatis Redintegratio 14 opens by recalling that the Churches of East and West lived for many centuries in communion, that the Eastern Churches have their own discipline, liturgical usage and theological patrimony, and that these traditions belong to the full catholic and apostolic character of the Church. Section 15 is the decisive one for sacramental recognition: the Eastern Churches, though separated, possess true sacraments, above all the priesthood and the Eucharist, held through apostolic succession, and by the celebration of the Eucharist in each of these Churches the Church of God is built up. Sections 16 and 17 affirm the Eastern Churches' right to govern themselves by their own discipline and describe their theological tradition as a complementary expression of the same faith. Section 18 asks Catholics to pray and work for reunion with them.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 summarizes the position: the Church knows herself joined in many ways to the baptized who are not in full communion, and with the Orthodox Churches this communion is so profound that it lacks little of what a common celebration of the Lord's Eucharist would require.

What That Means in Practice

The Catholic column follows Unitatis Redintegratio 14 to 18, the 1983 Code of Canon Law canon 844, and the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism. The Orthodox column describes common practice across jurisdictions and binds no autocephalous Church, since each governs its own discipline. Ask the local parish rather than assuming.

Uniatism Is Not the Method

One historical sore point deserves naming. Orthodox Churches have long objected to uniatism, the practice of receiving groups of Eastern Christians into communion with Rome as separate Eastern Catholic Churches, which they experienced as proselytism. The Joint International Commission addressed this directly at Balamand in 1993, agreeing that uniatism is not an acceptable method for seeking unity, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic Churches that already exist have a right to exist and to care for their faithful. Both halves of that statement matter.

12. Where Catholics and Orthodox Stand Today

Catholics and Orthodox stand nearer to one another than either stands to any other Christian body, and a common Eucharist is still out of reach. The anathemas of 1054 are gone. The theological dialogue has produced agreed statements on the Church, the sacraments, conciliarity and primacy. The four questions in sections 7 to 10 remain, and the practical obstacles of jurisdiction, memory and national politics are heavier than the doctrinal ones in several regions.

What Progress Looks Like

Progress in this dialogue is slow and real. The 1965 lifting of the anathemas, the return of relics of St Gregory Nazianzen and St John Chrysostom to Constantinople in 2004, the joint declarations signed by successive popes and ecumenical patriarchs, the Ravenna, Chieti and Alexandria documents, and the annual exchange of delegations on the patronal feasts all form a pattern of steady contact. The 1995 clarification on the Filioque and the invitation of Ut Unum Sint show Rome willing to distinguish what is essential to its faith from the form its expression has taken.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Speak accurately about the Orthodox, which means learning their positions from their own writers before answering them. Pray for unity, which Christ himself asked for in John 17:21, that they may all be one. Visit a Divine Liturgy and stand through it. Respect the Orthodox discipline on communion by not presenting yourself where you have not been invited. Read the four open questions carefully enough to hold the Catholic position without caricaturing the other. For the wider Catholic approach to Christian unity, see our guide to ecumenism, and for the separate story of the sixteenth-century divisions in the West, our guide to the Reformation.

Related Topics