What Is Grace in the Orthodox Tradition?
The theological controversy that occurred in the fourteenth century helps to refine and further clarify the Orthodox Christian teaching on grace. It provides a good background for us to begin to comprehend the Church’s teaching on this topic and to compare and contrast with the ideas and formulations of other Christian traditions. Since, as the Scriptures tell us, we are saved “by grace,” it is imperative to have an accurate understanding of what grace is and is not and of how it is acquired.
Grace Is Natural
After the Lord formed the first man, Adam, from the earth, we are told He then breathed into him the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). Sometimes this breath of life is misinterpreted to mean the creation of Adam’s human soul. But the teaching of the Church is that Adam’s soul was created by God from the dust of the earth concurrently with his body, just as the saints also teach that the soul of every subsequent human being is created at the time of his or her conception.
If the breath of life is not the soul, then what is it? St. Seraphim of Sarov addresses this issue directly in his famous conversation with Motovilov. He tells his friend and disciple that what God blew into Adam at the time of his creation is His life-giving Spirit, the Holy Spirit. This teaching harmonizes with the post-Resurrection account in the Gospel of John in which the Lord breathed into the faces of the apostles, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). The word for “spirit” in both Hebrew and Greek can also mean “breath.”
The Holy Spirit is not the soul itself but rather the life of the soul. The life of the body is the soul, but the life of the soul is the Holy Spirit. It was the very life of God that Jesus breathed into the apostles after His Resurrection. Without this grace and energy of the Holy Spirit, the soul is, spiritually speaking, dead. Therefore, in the Orthodox understanding, if one is to be an authentic and truly living human being, one must have the grace of God. And the more grace one has, the more truly human one becomes. In Orthodox anthropology (our understanding of man) we understand the indwelling of grace not as a supernatural phenomenon but as the most natural and normative condition of man.
This is particularly important because much of the theology of the West works from the assumption that grace is essentially foreign to human nature and certainly to fallen human nature. For instance, the Calvinist teaching on the total depravity of man, and likewise Luther’s insistence that the image of God in man was completely destroyed after sin, are symptoms of this tendency. For all practical purposes man, in this view, is by nature a creature devoid of grace. Grace then becomes either an unnatural addition to human nature or a juridical release from condemnation independent of the condition of man’s nature. And, in fact, Roman Catholic theology calls the holiness associated with the likeness of God donum superadditum, a super-added gift, while many Protestants understand salvation by grace as a legal release from guilt.
Much of this tendency was inherited by the Reformers from Roman Catholicism and had its roots in the doctrine of original sin. In the West, following certain writings of St. Augustine, the understanding of Adam’s sin, or “original sin,” came to include not only the consequences of Adam’s sin, but the guilt of Adam inherited by everyone born into the world. This condition of guilt, which was seen as a sentence of eternal damnation, makes one incapable of receiving God’s grace. The “hereditary stain”* of original sin, it is taught, can only be washed away through baptism. Following this reasoning, the Roman Church deemphasized the Old Testament saints in their official liturgical calendar of commemorations. For how could the Old Testament righteous participate in grace before the saving work of Jesus Christ?
This same problem became the impetus for the modern doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. In order to allow for her sanctification before the death and Resurrection of her Son, it was necessary, following the logic above, that she be exempted from “all stain of original sin . . . by a singular privilege and grace granted by God.” **
By contrast, the Orthodox and early Church teaching is that the guilt of our first ancestors belongs to them alone. Those of us who come after them do not inherit their personal guilt. Rather, what we receive is a fallen, death-bound human nature, infected with the contagion of unnatural sinful passions, along with all the other consequences of the Fall.
Even in our fallen condition, however, grace is not something foreign to our nature. With the remnant of grace inherent to our nature and the image of God darkened but intact, a man may still choose to do good, to do God’s will. The Old Testament righteous were not bereft of God’s grace. The Holy Prophets and other Old Testament figures experienced the grace of the pre-incarnate Christ as He revealed Himself to them in manifold ways. The grace they experienced has no qualitative difference from the grace that came after the Incarnation. Yet they could not be “made perfect” (Heb. 11:40), nor can anyone else, apart from the perfecting of human nature accomplished by Jesus’ Incarnation, death, and Resurrection.
Source: Shanbour, Michael. Know the Faith: A Handbook for Orthodox Christians and Inquirers (pp. 54-57). Ancient Faith Publishing.
* Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312a.htm).
** Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm).
