Included in the wider Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canon beyond the Trent-era Roman Catholic deuterocanon, affirmed at the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.
Included in the wider Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canon beyond the Trent-era Roman Catholic deuterocanon, affirmed at the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Almsgiving is bound closely to the fasting seasons, what is not spent on food being given away.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Holy Unction is one of the seven mysteries and is administered to the living faithful in general, most publicly on Holy Wednesday, and not to the dying alone.
Theology proceeds by denial as well as by affirmation, and the denials operate on the affirmations rather than cancelling them. The order is inherited from the Cappadocians and from Pseudo-Dionysius.
The episcopate is held to run in unbroken succession from the apostles, and it is the bishop rather than the see that carries it. This is the ground on which this church recognises its own orders and those of the other Orthodox churches.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Baptism is by threefold immersion, and is followed immediately by chrismation and communion in the same service.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Baptism, chrismation and first communion are given together in one rite, so the baptismal life begins in infancy and is not deferred to an age of discretion.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Orthodoxy ordains married men to the priesthood but requires that bishops be monks, so celibacy shapes the episcopate rather than the parish; Mount Athos remains the tradition's monastic centre.
Kept on December 25 under the revised calendar, while Pascha stays on the older reckoning.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The churching of a mother and the presentation of a child on the fortieth day is kept as a living rite here, not as a survival.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Orthodox confess standing beside the priest before an icon rather than through a grille, the priest understood as a witness rather than a judge, and confession is ordinarily expected before receiving communion.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Chrismation is given with baptism, in infancy, by a presbyter using chrism consecrated by a bishop. The rite completes initiation here rather than following it years later.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Prayers of exorcism are read over every candidate as a fixed part of the baptismal service, before the renunciation and the anointing.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Orthodox fasting means abstinence rather than hunger: no meat, dairy, eggs, fish with backbones, wine or oil on the strictest days, kept through Great Lent and three further fasting seasons and on most Wednesdays and Fridays, which is roughly half the year.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The washing of feet is performed on Holy Thursday by a bishop, the Niptir, in the cathedral and in the great monasteries.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The funeral service, the Panikhida and the memorial services on the third, ninth and fortieth days form one continuous set of offices for the dead.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Jesus Prayer belongs to Orthodoxy, defended by Gregory Palamas against the charge that its practitioners claimed to see God's essence; monks and increasingly laypeople repeat it alone on a knotted woollen cord, and teachers warn against the breathing technique without direction.
Kept in the Church of Greece. A married man may be ordained deacon or presbyter, though not bishop, and a man may not marry after ordination. This is the settled difference from Latin practice.
Received in the Chalcedonian form: one person known in two natures, without confusion, change, division or separation. Receiving Chalcedon is what places this church in the Eastern Orthodox communion rather than the Oriental Orthodox one.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Held in the terms the Council of Chalcedon set in 451, which this church receives as the fourth of the ecumenical councils.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Infants are baptised, chrismated and communicated in one rite, so initiation is complete before the child can speak.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Communion is given in both kinds together, the consecrated bread having been placed in the chalice and administered to each communicant from a spoon. The result is the same as intinction and the manner is not, and the practice here is ancient rather than adopted for convenience.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The marriage service is the Crowning, and the priest is the minister of the sacrament rather than a witness to a contract the couple make, which is the opposite of the Roman analysis.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Tonsure is the rite of monastic profession itself, performed in degrees, and is not a preliminary to it.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Monastic profession is made in degrees, the rassophore, the stavrophore and the great schema, rather than as a single set of three vows.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Ninth Hour is prayed daily from the Horologion and precedes Vespers, so that the liturgical day turns on it.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Sunday is kept as the day of the Resurrection and the day of the Divine Liturgy, and Saturday retains a liturgical character of its own that the West largely lost.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Byzantine rite as kept across the Eastern Orthodox churches.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Kept across the Eastern Orthodox churches.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Pilgrimage to Mount Athos, to Jerusalem and to the shrines of local saints is a settled devotion of this church.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Prayer here is weighted toward the fixed cycle of the services and toward the short repeated prayer of the heart rather than toward extempore petition.
Included in the wider Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canon beyond the Trent-era Roman Catholic deuterocanon, affirmed at the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
This church is autocephalous and governs itself. It accords the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople a primacy of honour as first among equals, which is not a jurisdiction over it.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The First Hour is prayed daily from the Horologion, appended to Matins, and was never suppressed here as Prime was in the Roman rite.
Included in the wider Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canon beyond the Trent-era Roman Catholic deuterocanon, affirmed at the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Orthodox perform the same rites but have never treated seven as a fixed count, calling them mysteries; chrismation follows infant baptism at once and communion is given to infants from then on, where the West defers both.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Sixth Hour is prayed daily from the Horologion and is joined to the Third in ordinary parish use.
Sin is described in medical rather than forensic terms: Christ the physician, the church a hospital, the passions the disease, and confession a treatment rather than a sentence.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Third Hour is prayed daily from the Horologion and carries the commemoration of the descent of the Holy Spirit.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The anaphoras of St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great are used according to a fixed calendar, the longer Basil on ten days of the year.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The epiclesis follows the institution narrative and is held to be the moment of consecration, which is the central Eastern difference from Western eucharistic theology.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Lamb is broken into four particles marked IC XC NI KA, one placed in the chalice, one for the clergy and two for the communion of the people.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Orthodox call it the Divine Liturgy, most often that of John Chrysostom, sung throughout behind an icon screen, with leavened bread and communion given in both kinds from a spoon after preparation by fasting and confession.
The liturgical books name the Theotokos ever-virgin at every service, which is where the doctrine is carried here rather than in a dogmatic definition of its own.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The institution narrative is recited within the anaphora, but the consecration is not located in it.
Salvation is framed as participation in the divine life rather than as a debt discharged. The Palamite distinction between God's unknowable essence and his uncreated energies is what lets union with God be affirmed without the creature being absorbed into the divine essence.
Affirmed at Ephesus in 431 and repeated in the Chalcedonian Definition. The title is a statement about Christ before it is a statement about Mary: she is God-bearer because the one she bore is God.
Confessed in the words of the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople as this church recites it, without the later Western addition to the article on the Spirit.
Kept in the Church of Greece. Orthodoxy defended images at the seventh council and keeps them central: an icon is kissed on entering, censed, carried in procession, laid on a stand for the feast of the day, and kept in a corner of the home. It is written to a received pattern rather than invented, and generally unsigned.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Orthodox honour Mary as Theotokos, God-bearer, and glorify saints by decision of a synod rather than through a Roman-style process; they reject the Immaculate Conception as answering a doctrine of original sin they do not hold, while keeping the Dormition.
Kept in the Church of Greece.
Kept in the Church of Greece. The Byzantine churches reserve the Lamb through the year for it.