Project Canterbury
Anglican Disunity and the Idea of Western Orthodoxy
Address given by H. A. Hodges, S.C.M. in 1957 to the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius
Transcribed by Ian B. Pitt
AD 2001
III The Idea of Western Orthodoxy
The problem of the Ecumenical Movement is a twofold problem: to reassemble the scattered fragments of the Body of Christ, and to recover the fullness and integrity of the Faith. Neither half of the problem can be truly solved with-out the other. The Church of England as a dialectical Church is rightly trying to solve them together, preserving an interim unity between men who are not at one in faith, in order that they may grow together into a true integration both of the Faith and of the Body. Such a standpoint, such a Church, should give rise to a characteristic interpretation of the process by which Christ endom became divided. The process will naturally be seen as a deterioration at one and the same time in the Faith and in the Body, nor will it be possible to say that either of these is wholly the cause of the other. If the parts of Christendom had not grown apart from one another, would they have lost the integrity of the Faith? But would they have grown apart at all if they had kept the full Faith, especially as regards the nature of the Body itself? Thought and life run parallel both in health and in sickness. Such is, or should be, the starting-point of any Anglican approach to the problem. Let us look in this spirit at the matter which most concerns us in this Fellowship, the estrangement between the Christian East and West. There is no difficulty in accounting for this if we are prepared to accept that the main responsibility for it lies with the West. The healthy pattern of Christian thought and life became dislocated in the western Church and remains so to this day. Nor are the causes of this dislocation hard to find. When the Roman imperial government lost control of the western provinces of the Empire, the Church of those provinces was left for several centuries in a cultural and political vacuum, with no strong and enlightened civil power to keep her company. She had to use all her spiritual prestige to establish even a minimum standard of order and decency in public life. We can therefore understand why she began more and more to magnify her authority, claiming first a full measure of independence over against the civil power and ultimately a right of supremacy over it. We can understand too the gradual concentration of power within the Church herself into one centre, the medieval Papacy. In this way the Church became an effective striking force which was used, not once but many times, for ends which we can only applaud. But this was achieved at a price. It meant that the Church was slowly transformed from a free society into an army, from a fellowship of the Spirit into a power-organisation, and the fundamental relationships within the Body were henceforth conceived too exclusively as relations of authority and obedience. Unhappily, while the power of the Church in the world, and of the hierarchy in the Church, and of the Pope amid the hierarchy, went on increasing, there was for centuries no effective force to counter-balance it. The masses of the people, ill-educated, unfamiliar with the Bible and even with the language of worship, came to look upon the Church as a great machine which went on working independently of them, performing spiritual functions for their benefit, but not needing or inviting their active participation. The clergy themselves from their own point of view could hardly avoid seeing matters in a similar light. There was for centuries no body of educated lay opinion which was capable of discharging the function of the laity as an order in the Church. It was from the monasteries and the clerical order that all spiritual initiative had to come, and the great body of the faithful could be regarded as a docile flock whose only business in the Church was to follow their spiritual guides. The inevitable result followed. The unity of the Body was lost to view, and the word ‘Church’ began to be used as if it meant the hierarchy and the religious orders in contrast with the people. The Spirit was thought of no longer as moving freely through the Body, but as canalised through the sacraments, and therefore through priestly hands. The liturgy came to be thought of as something done for the people by the priest, not as something done by the whole congregation with and through their priest. Christ was sought and recognised in the Pope, who was His vicar, and (quite rightly) in the eucharistic Presence, but not in the whole body of His baptised members. Scripture, the Word of the Spirit which witnesses of Christ, could no longer fulfil its functions as the touchstone for the life and teaching of the Church, because the understanding and interpretation of it were reserved for the hierarchy. The ‘Church’ therefore, in this restricted sense in which it was identified with the hierarchy, was no longer effectively under judgment. On the contrary, the Roman see, the pinnacle of the whole structure, could now say of itself that it ‘judges all and is judged of none.’ The spiritual life of the individual, thus robbed of his true place in the Body of Christ and deprived of that responsible autonomy which should be his, could hardly fail to suffer distortion. The witness of the Spirit, absolving and reconciling the soul to God, was forgotten, and the soul was caused to rely on priestly ministrations in a sense and to a degree which could sometimes become unhealthy; until in part of western Christendom a revolt broke out which did away with the priest (as distinct from the pastor) altogether. We may also point to the individualism in devotion which has been so widespread in recent centuries on the Catholic side as well as the Protestant, and to the subjectivism and sentimentalism which have so often gone with it. There is no real cure for all this without a recovery of the true sense of liturgy as the corporate action of the Church; and this recovery, now at last beginning in the western world, cannot come to completion without bringing back a proper understanding of the office and work of the laity in the Church as a whole. On such lines as these one can trace weaknesses in the spiritual life back to a dislocation in the life of the Church, and that again to the external circumstances in the Dark Ages which provoked such a dislocation. But on the other hand we can ask: would these circumstances have produced this result if the Church had not already been thinking on wrong lines? Cannot the whole process be regarded as the working out in practice of an initial error in thought, a false view of man in his relation to the world and to God? I should say that it can, and I should find the root of the error in the failure of the Roman genius fully to apprehend and bow to the Christian teaching. It is characteristic of Rome (I mean the spirit of Rome, whether ancient or modern, imperial or ecclesiastical) to conceive life in terms of government, and government in terms of authority, and authority again in terms of power. Thus, in society at large, justice is sought through law and administration, wherein a few control the many; and the Roman genius in government has always tended towards centralisation and been suspicious of the diffusion of power. Similarly in the individual life, man is seen as subject to the moral law, and working out his own merit by self-control and self-government in obedience to that law. Such a philosophy can be a call to high effort and achievement, and therefore the name of Rome will always stand as a fascinating symbol of human grandeur. But there is also a tendency to see things mechanically and impersonally, and a distrust and fear of free initiative, which to the Roman mind implies insubordination and potential anarchy. God Himself is apt to be thought of as the Ruler of the universe, the supreme Authority which guarantees all earthly authority. Will, whether human or divine, will as manifested in law and government, is the answer to all questions, the object of interest and admiration. Such I believe was the spirit of imperial Rome, and the Roman Church in the decisive days of its life, between (say) A.D. 400 and 1100, seems to have faced its problems in the same spirit. That is why the problems received so masterful and at the same time so equivocal a solution. Such is the analysis which I should make of the developments which have separated Latin Christendom from the Orthodox world and provoked the Protestant revolt against Latin Christianity itself. And from this analysis it follows that the estrangement and schism between East and West is chiefly the fault of the West. No equally convincing case can be made out for holding the East responsible. The most plausible foundation for such a case would of course be that on which Rome in fact argues, namely the Petrine claims. If these claims were justified in the sense in which they are made, it would follow that the East, as well as the non-Roman West, stands convicted of disobedience and rebellion. I shall not, however, spend time here arguing about the Petrine claims. Those for whom I am now writing, Anglicans and Orthodox, are at one in rejecting them. I will only point out that if these claims are in fact ill-founded, the making of them and the policies which have been pursued in con-sequence of them must be added to the account of western responsibility for the schism. If the case stands thus, important consequences follow. The ecumenical problem takes on a more definite shape. It is now seen quite simply as the problem of bringing back the West - Peter himself if he would, and all those whom he has in past times led or provoked into schism - to a sound mind and a healthy life, and that means to Orthodoxy. It is essential that we should face the full meaning of this. It means that, although the Ecumenical Movement, and this our Fellowship as a part of that movement, exist to promote an exchange of ideas, a traffic in many directions between their participants, this exchange is not one which can properly proceed on a footing of equality. It means that in meetings between eastern and western Christians the West is always in the weaker position, since it has to begin with a confession of error. When we of the West go to meet the Orthodox, we must go as seeking enlightenment and healing, submitting to judgment and learning to judge ourselves from a new point of view. The whole western tradition must be systematically called in question-not only those developments in it which have taken place since the schism (outside the Roman communion as well as within it) but also earlier western peculiarities in which some of the roots of the schism may lie. And since this is bound to be a lengthy process, the sooner we begin on it the better. This statement, thus baldly made, is open to misinterpretation. Let me explain and amplify it. I am not idealising the Orthodox Church as it now exists, or saying that its day to day life at the present time is necessarily healthier or more vigorous than ours in the West. I should hesitate to say such a thing even if I had had the opportunity (as I have not) of seeing Orthodoxy at close quarters in a country where it is at home. The Orthodox world presumably has its good and bad spots, as has the West, and all of us, East and West, live an ambiguous life which partly exemplifies our faith and partly betrays it. Such is the condition of human existence, including even Christian existence in this world. I am not now speaking on this empirical level. I am speaking on the level of doctrine, and saying that the Orthodox Faith, that Faith to which the Orthodox Fathers bear witness and of which the Orthodox Church is the abiding custodian, is the Christian Faith in its true and essential form, to which we all aspire and by which we are all judged. Nor does this mean that all Orthodox theologians are individually wiser or sounder than their western colleagues. It is a question of principles, not of persons, and the wind of the Spirit, bringing the gifts of wisdom and understanding, blows where it will. The Orthodox Faith is not the same thing as Byzantine civilisation, and an interest in Byzantine things is not necessarily evidence of an Orthodox mind. Today such an interest is growing among our contemporaries, and it is easy to see why. A society which is conscious of living amid great and growing dangers from without, and is passing under the control of a benevolent bureaucracy within, will naturally take an interest in the record of a previous society which lived under similar conditions. We of this generation can enter into Byzantine thought and experience far more fully and sympathetically than could our great-grandfathers in the heyday of liberalism. In one great point we differ from the ‘Romans’ of the Byzantine period - in the absence today a common faith such as bound them together and gave meaning to their life and their struggles. But if today the age of private enterprise in art, literature and philosophy is not yet at an end, a growing number of people begin to foresee its ending, and the attempt is made to reknit the broken threads of tradition. Here again it is not surprising that some should look to Byzantine precedents. Yet again, the growing importance of Russia in the world can lead to an interest in her history and culture, and so to thc Byzantine tradition of which she is an heir. All these are good reasons for being interested in Byzantine history and culture, but they do not of themselves lead to an apprehension of Orthodoxy. They even involve the danger that Orthodoxy may come to be thought of as one element among others in the Byzantine complex, and so imprisoned in a period and a country; whereas the true Christian Faith is timeless and universal. The Christian Faith does not belong to or depend upon any nation or language or civilisation. It sanctifies and transfigures them all, if they will let it, and it stands in judgment on them all. The Bible knows no chosen people but one, no holy city but one, and the promises of God, as St. Paul says, are irrevocable. It was from the stock of Israel that God took flesh, that Flesh into which all the faithful are incorporated and on which they are fed. But the failure of Jerusalem to recognise the time of her visitation became in the divine strategy the occasion for setting the sacred community free from all further attachments to a particular place and nation. Henceforward the city of God is thrown wide open to the world, and all the nations may bring their treasures into it. The Greeks indeed were suffered to bring the language which the Spirit used in Scripture and the Creed; and, next to the privilege of the flesh-giving, this is the highest honour that could fall to any people. But it does not mean that the Christian Faith is a Greek faith, or that the Greek civilisation of a particular period is at all necessary to it. Still less, of course, is Latin civilisation, whose spirit has contributed towards bringing about the western dislocation, or the civilisation of north-western Europe, which has first mutilated the Faith, then secularised it, and finally denied it. Yet it is the Latins and the western European Christians, perhaps, who are most in need of this warning, affected as they are apt to be by the self-complacency with which the western world regards itself. The nations of western Europe and North America include among themselves the wealthiest and most powerful nations at present in the world. They can look back upon a long history of brilliant achievement, and today they consider themselves to be politically and culturally in the world’s vanguard. Their Christianity has been closely interwoven with their life and thought, and they believe it to have inspired much that is best in their way of life. Must not the Christianity which has inspired a progressive and enlightened civilisation be a progressive and enlightened Christianity? So they pardonably think. And there is not a little in the history of western Christianity to support the claim. Christian history in the West has certainly been eventful and exciting. The Church was kept constantly on the alert by external stimuli resulting from the busy, changeful social life of the West; and to these were added internal strains resulting from that dislocation in the Church’s life of which I have already spoken. Under these mingled influences there arose in the West religious institutions, forms of religious association and forms of Church government, which have no parallel in the East. Distinctive forms of worship arose and spread, especially in connection with the Eucharist and (in the Protestant world) with the preaching of the Word. Theological questions were raised, for example in connection with the doctrine of grace and the doctrine of he sacraments, which had never been discussed on the same level of urgency in the East, and conclusions of faith were arrived at which stand outside the range of eastern thought, even where they are not openly in conflict with it. This colourful history of western Christendom masters the imagination. The Roman Catholic, conscious of the rich variety of life and thought in his own communion, blind to its fundamental weaknesses but open-eyed to those of Protestantism, seems to see in his own Church the continuing action of the Spirit in the Body of Christ, while Protestantism is error and division, and Orthodoxy is stagnation. The Protestant, looking back as he does to the Reformation as a great liberation of the Christian soul, a great blow struck for the freedom of the Spirit and the sovereignty of the Word of God over all human teachings and institutions, sees himself as standing in the succession of the Old Testament prophets, and therefore as the true bearer of the continually-unfolding revelation of God. The history of eastern Christendom, even when the westerner knows about it, cannot compete with the spectacular quality of these western movements. To many western minds it appears to be hardly a history at all, since there is no ‘progress’ in it but rather a marking of time, a living on the past, an abdication of the responsibilities of life. It is the unquestioned assumption of the western secular mind that life means change, diversity, exploration and invention, and that these things are inherently good. The fascination and impressiveness of the history of western Christendom arises from our making this same assumption as we contemplate it. But the assumption, though fashionable, is not self-evident. Suppose we question it. Suppose we ask how far the western changes and explorations and inventions have in fact been a good thing. At once the scene alters. We see that the diversities of doctrine and organisation, which seem at first sight to enrich our western life, are really an impoverishment. For each sect or confessional group has a partial view of the truth, and owes its distinctness to the fact that others also have partial views. Each is right when it points out what the others lack; but each is open to a similar criticism from the others. And where each has some things and is wanting in others, no one has the fullness of Christian faith and life. That is the true meaning of the fragmentation of the West. It does not follow from this that, wherever a group of western Christians has said or done something which the East- has not said or done, the westerners must be wrong. The points of divergence need to be considered separately, each on its own merits, and it is not always obvious today what the final judgment will be. Even in the matter of Filioque, I would argue, the final judgment is not yet in sight. No doubt the West is in the wrong by virtue of the high-handed way in which the clause was adopted; and there can be no fruitful discussion where the western spokesmen have not begun by acknowledging this and making an act of penitence. But from the fact that the clause was wrongly introduced it does not follow that the substance of it could never be so explained as to be found tolerable. That question, I would contend, has never been discussed in conditions which gave any hope of a true conclusion. What form would the doctrine take, what meaning would it bear, if defended by westerners who were really chastened in their attitude to the schism? In saying this I am not prejudging the issue; on the contrary, I am saying that we must no prejudge it. The same applies to other doctrinal points Judgments made and positions taken up at a time of estrangement must be reviewed when the estrangement begins to give way to mutual confidence and openness. So too with our different forms of worship and devotional habits. Our western habits in connection with the Eucharist for example, are not necessarily wrong or unhealthy because they originated in a Church which had drifted into schism and on the other hand, for the eastern Orthodox to admit their legitimacy would not imply that they must adopt them themselves. The freedom of the Spirit in the unity of the Body allows for wide divergences of practice, and things which in a divided Christendom are the badges of division, and therefore are regarded with suspicion by those who do not wear those particular badges, would appear differently if the unity of the Faith and of the Body were restored. We suffer from the fact that, in present-day experience, ‘Orthodox’ and ‘eastern’ go together. The only Orthodox nations now in the world are eastern nations, and the only Orthodox Churches are eastern Churches or the offspring of eastern Churches carried by emigration into western lands. This state of affairs is of course accidental and should be transitory. The Orthodox Faith must be capable of expression in terms of the life and thought of western peoples; and the elicitation of this western Orthodoxy, at present latent among us, is our great problem for the future. Western Orthodoxy cannot be constituted merely by planting colonies of Orthodox people from the East in western countries. Even if after a generation or two these colonies become absorbed into the civil life of the people around them, even if they begin to speak and think in the western languages and enact the liturgy in these languages, they will still be people whose ecclesiastical memories and traditions are eastern. True western Orthodoxy is to be found by bodies of western people, members of the western nations, coming with all their western background, their western habits and traditions, into the circle of the Orthodox Faith. Then we should have an Orthodoxy which was really western because its memory was western-a memory of the Christian history of the West, not as the West now remembers it, but purged and set in perspective by the Orthodox Faith. If this were to come about it would be an enrichment and a liberation for the eastern Orthodox themselves, for it would set Orthodoxy free from its merely local associations and exhibit its universal and catholic character. So we return to what I said before-that the whole western tradition needs to be re-examined and reassessed, in order that the Orthodoxy which is latent in it may be sifted out and separated from what is sectional and false. It is the westerners themselves who must do this; it is the natural heirs of the tradition who must rethink and reshape it; though in doing so they will need the continual stimulus and co-operation of the eastern Orthodox who dwell in their midst. No doubt in the process we shall have to dethrone some ancestral idols and abandon some inherited pieties. No doubt it will sometimes be a wrench. Yet on the whole I am convinced that it is not a question of shedding our inheritance and facing the east wind like shorn lambs, but of learning to possess it in a new way, to see critically and in perspective what we have hitherto taken for granted, to discriminate the vein of error in what we have hitherto found wholly convincing, and to possess the whole in thankfulness and penitence-thankfulness for the truth and grace which have remained with our fathers and with us until this day, in spite of errors and divisions, and penitence for the manifold ways in which we have obscured and adulterated the truth that was granted us. In particular the Protestant must disown the fears and suspicions which condition his approach to so many Catholic ideas and practices, his basic scepticism and his idolatry of private judgment. He must take courage to believe that in the flesh-taking of Christ, and in the sacrificial offering and glorious rising of that Flesh, all nature and all human nature is in deed and in truth redeemed, and that we who are in the Spirit are in deed and in truth His Body, with all that that implies. And the Catholic must learn to lean less trustingly upon St. Thomas, brilliant though he undoubtedly is, and upon the high Middle Age in general. He must learn to see in that period not the fine flowering of a homogeneous Catholic culture, but the sifting time when all that was still Orthodox in the West contended against the new ways of thought and life, and was defeated. He will find that this adjustment of view, however hard to make at first, has the merit of making late medieval history and the outbreak of the Reformation a good deal more intelligible. And what of the Anglican amid all this readjustment? What special problems has he, and what advantages, in the quest for western Orthodoxy? How must he interpret his Anglicanism if he is to see it as a way of pursuing that quest? It is a peculiarity of the Church of England that she claims to speak with authority, as the Catholic Church of this land, and yet is in a weak position for doing so. I will not labour the question of orders. I do not doubt that there is a real sense in which the Anglican hierarchy has inherited the apostolic commission and authority from the hierarchy of medieval England. But anyone not blinded by party zeal or Latin legalism must acknowledge that an apostolic commission and authority which by far the greater part of Christendom refuses or at least hesitates to recognise as such in the sense in which it is claimed is something of a paradox. Nor is there any doubt whence the denials and hesitations arise. On the Roman Catholic and Orthodox side they are due to Anglican flirtations with Protestantism at and since the Reformation. But in that case the question of orders becomes dependent on and subordinate to the question of the purity and integrity of the Faith. How plausible is the claim of the Church of England to be an authoritative exponent of the true Faith? The Church of England does not and obviously cannot claim to be infallible. She has undergone a ‘reformation’, and in so doing she has made public confession of past error. She fell into this error while she was still part of an undivided western Christendom, upheld and guided, one might suppose, by the life of the whole body to which she belonged. Now in comparative isolation she says she has erred. That may be; but if so, how well can we trust her judgment now? Very many Christians agree with her in saying that the Roman system from which she withdrew herself was and is wrong, but very few would agree wholeheartedly with what she has put in its place. As a critic of Rome she is one of a crowd, but as an exponent of the true way she is one of many discordant voices. This would not matter if the Church of England were a Protestant sect of the ‘gathered Church’ type. These sects do not pretend to be continuous, as organisations, with the ancient and medieval Church, and can therefore disclaim responsibility for the errors of the past; while their conception of the ‘Christian Faith’ and the ‘Christian Church’ is one which allows for diversities of the kind and magnitude which in fact exist among them. They face no problem. But the Church of England claims to be the Church of St. Augustine, the one and only Catholic Church of this land, and to hold and preach the one and only Catholic Faith in its purity and in its entirety. It would be easier if the Church of England could claim, in leaving Rome, to have discovered or rediscovered the proper ground of authority and truth, presumably in the Bible, and to have elicited from it a body of doctrine which carries conviction by its clarity, its consistency, and its completeness. Such is the claim made by the Lutherans, who carry one great principle through into every corner of theology, and the Calvinists, who have a summa theologiae fit to challenge comparison with that of St. Thomas himself. But the Church of England has neither a single ruling principle nor a coherently worked out dogmatic system. Her Reformation documents are the record of compromises, the doctrine set forth there is incomplete, inconsistent, or deliberately vague, while the tradition of Anglican theology since that time has always been a divided tradition. The Church of England in fact is not held together by a definite doctrine at all, but by the abiding will of the Anglicans to live and worship together, to keep an open forum among themselves, a living memory of the past and a free mind towards the future. If there is anything which really deserves to be called ‘Anglican doctrine’, it is not that which is printed in the Prayer Book and Articles, but that which is implicit in and gives meaning to this steady pattern of Anglican behaviour. (It is because the theology of F. D. Maurice comes so close to doing this that he is increasingly recognised as the important Anglican theologian that he is.) It is here that we find the truest interpretation and justification of the Anglican claim of ‘catholicity’. If the Church of England is really ‘catholic’ in a sense in which the Protestant Churches are not, it is not because many beliefs and practices which those Churches have abandoned are current in the Church of England; nor is it because of any special perfection in Anglican doctrinal standards; nor again because the Church of England has kept the continuity of the episcopal succession. Tactual continuity of course there is, but what is the spirit and intention which alone can give meaning and efficacy to this physical fact? It lies, I would contend, in the last analysis precisely in the will to be catholic, the will not to become a sect, not to become identified with any special form of doctrine over and above that of the whole undivided Church, and not to let the Papal autocracy be replaced by an oligarchy of Biblical theologians and preachers of the Word. The Church of England at its best might take for its motto the words of the young French priest in Robinson Crusoe: ‘I know not what they would do in Spain or Italy, but I am sure there is no heresy in abounding with charity.’ It is this too which makes the Church of England the likeliest place for the rebirth of western Orthodoxy. What better preparation for it could there be than this spirit of fellowship and mutual forbearance, this readiness to wait and think and pray, this recognition that the fullness of the Christian Faith can be revealed only to those who seek it in charity and in penitence? The longing to press forward and apprehend the fullness of the Faith is strong in many Anglicans, and it usually drives them towards Anglo-Catholicism--for fullness, of course, is just what Catholicism promises. But western Catholicism, Roman and sometimes also Anglican, is liable to a kind of rigidity, an authoritarianism and an exclusiveness which prevent it from altogether fulfilling its promise. In search of a higher and more ultimate authority than the scholastics one may well look towards the Bible, and of course the claim to make the Bible supreme in every sphere is a characteristically Protestant claim. But Protestantism too has its own kind of rigidity and exclusiveness, more vicious and more impoverishing than the Catholic kind. One seeks to escape from both into an atmosphere of freedom, flexibility and openness of mind. These are the liberal virtues, and surely, one thinks, where these are truth must be. One is not so sure of it when one sees what becomes of these qualities when divorced from the authority of Bible and tradition. Between these three points the mind of the Church of England moves, and never finds a stable synthesis. But the meaning of the Church of England is to strive and pray for that synthesis; and if it were found, what would it be but western Orthodoxy at last made visible? Because of this hope, to be an Anglican is an adventurous thing. But it is also an act of supernatural faith; for ordinary human calculation shows small likelihood that things will in fact move as I have indicated they should. Too many established habits and traditions stand in the way, and above all the dead weight of the psychological Protestantism which is the real religion of most English people. The same of course may be said of the whole Ecumenical Movement, to which so much Anglican energy has been and is being devoted. It is most unlikely on any human calculation that the Ecumenical Movement will issue in real steps towards the reunion of the Body of Christ. A general confederation of Christian bodies, yes; local institutional unions as in South India, yes; but real reconciliation of minds in the sincere profession of a common faith which is also the Catholic Faith, no. The weaknesses and limitations of view which have made the schisms appear plausible, the very mixed motives which have provided so much of their driving power, the dead weight of indifference and misunderstanding-all this is as real today as it ever was. And therefore to go on with the Ecumenical Movement, or with the Church of England, is in effect to declare one’s faith in miracles. That of course is as it should be. Christians do believe in miracles. C’est leur mŽtier. What I have tried to do in this paper is simply to obtain clearer light on the nature of the miracle for which Anglicans in particular ought to hope and pray, and the hope of which gives meaning to our activities in this Fellowship. May it soon be granted to our prayers, and to those of our Orthodox friends, and of all who pray for the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God, and the union of all mankind.