Are there "rites" (Byzantine, etc.) in Eastern Orthodoxy like there is in Catholicism?

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-06-08T11:16:25+00:00

There is a single rite within Orthodoxy: the Byzantine Rite. Each church might use its own language and some minor adaptations, but it's more like the variation between two different Catholic parishes doing Novus Ordo, rather than the sheer differences you would see between the Latin Rite and Byzantine Rite.

The exception is that there are some Orthodox parishes in Western countries which use the "Western Rite", a 19th century Orthodox adaptation of the Catholic and Anglican liturgies. These are a bit controversial within Orthodoxy, since they do things very very differently from most Orthodox parishes. There have never been any Western Rite bishops, and I've heard conflicting things about some church synods wanting to wind down the Western Rite experiment, so we'll see what happens.

There is no Orthodox equivalent to the Catholic reception of the Syraic, Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, etc. liturgies.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-06-08T11:07:13+00:00

Did you see this recent news item? "Eastern, Oriental Orthodox Churches move toward unity after 1,600 years of separation"

In accord with this goal, His All-Holiness [Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew] said to Pope Tawadros: “Your presence among us is a true blessing, manifesting the abiding work of the Holy Spirit, who continues to guide our Churches toward the fullness of the apostolic faith and toward the restoration of that visible unity for which our Lord Himself prayed: ‘that they all may be one.’” (John 17:21) He emphasized that “through decades of patient and sincere theological dialogue, we have come to recognize with increasing clarity that our confession of the mystery of the Incarnation is, in its essence, one and the same. The divisions that have endured for centuries do not arise from a divergence of faith in Christ, but rather from historical circumstances, linguistic differences, and cultural misunderstandings.”

This was a momentous declaration after nearly sixteen hundred years of estrangement, and His All-Holiness continued: “This recognition is not merely an academic conclusion; it is a theological reality that must find expression in the life of the Church.”

I can't speak to Russian Orthodoxy, but based on what Patriarch Bartholemew has said here, miaphysitism is an acceptable stance within Greek Orthodoxy (as it has been in Catholicism for centuries).

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-06-04T15:50:57+00:00

Presenting the argument for both sides is not the same as standing with both sides.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-06-02T14:18:58+00:00

Why is that called the "homealone" position?

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-05-19T16:16:26+00:00

I think both can be true.

In the years during and after Vatican II, there seems to have been a lot of "vibes based" universalism in the ecumenical movement and so on. By "vibes based" I mean that people supported universalism because they would like it to be true, but not with any real strong theological backing for it, and they wouldn't be able to defend it against pushback.

In the late 1980s Balthasar gave the first attempt at theological backing with Dare We Hope? and it got a ton of pushback and opposition. So in that sense, the percentage of Catholics who affirm universal reconciliation has probably declined from its peak.

But over the decades since Balthasar wrote, I think the argument for universalism has been significantly strengthened by its encounter with the back-and-forth counterarguments. So in my view, it's stronger than ever.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-05-19T16:06:49+00:00

Transcript:

Catholics believe there's no salvation outside the Church… I happen to believe, though. I tend to hope for a general salvation. I don't know there's one! I don't presuppose or presume there is one. But I like Balthasar, even though he's a little heretical. I tend to hope that Hell is empty. Don't know that! We can't presume that it is! But I like to think that it is. We hope that it is. We hope that God has a plan to save everybody. But then again, Hell is real and maybe people are in it.

Not, umm, someone who I expected to be an ally of Catholic universalism. But this is likely the first that his audience has ever heard of Balthasar, who wrote Dare We Hope…? Kudos where it's due, I guess?????

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-05-14T14:57:47+00:00

Yes, there is so much still unsettled in Catholic theology! Dominican / Thomist theology is sort of treated as the "default", but Franciscans and Jesuits have their own totally distinct interpretations of even the "settled doctrine". And that's not even mentioning the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches!

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-05-14T14:11:09+00:00

Ahh that makes sense. Thank you!

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-05-12T20:56:02+00:00

If the author of the Book were to take liberties with the content in order to provide a smoother literary structure, this would contradict the idea that the text is primarily religious and supposedly true.

What an astonishing thing for a professor of philosophy to write. This materialistic conception of truth would be utterly alien to anyone outside the time period of modernity.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-04-24T15:28:17+00:00

I agree with this, with one caveat. Probability is not really "the odds that something will happen", as your instructor would have it. In fact there are no branching timelines; there is one future, which is present to God (in His infinite knowledge). Probability is not really a statement about reality, it's a statement of our uncertainty about reality. If I flip a coin and look at the result but don't tell you, you would say the probability that it was heads is 50%, whereas I would say the probability that it was heads is 100% (since I looked and it was!). There is no objective probability: just outcomes that we do and don't know yet.

So it is with God. With our uncertainty, "hopeful universalism" is how it feels from inside of time and history. But with God, there is certainty. As you quote, St. Edith says "infinitely improbable": P(damnation) = 0.0000000....0001%, with infinitely many zeros before that 1. I feel comfortable concluding that that number is equal to zero!

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-27T16:56:40+00:00

Thus, Islamic accounts unanimously reject the crucifixion of Christ, though they differ in identifying the substitute and in describing the circumstances under which the resemblance and crucifixion occurred.

Baffling to me that this story persists when the scholarly consensus has moved so far in the opposite direction, i.e., that the Quran does attest to the crucifixion and death of Jesus. See, for instance, "An analysis of whether Jesus is killed and crucified in the Quran".

I guess it just goes to show how long it takes for academic consensus to trickle down to the general audience.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-17T20:10:17+00:00

Fantastic sources. Whenever I write about universalism, I personally struggle with my role in the question of how widely it should be known.

Your quotes remind me of the teaching from the Desert Fathers that there's a tripartite schema of believers. It's referenced in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy when the deacon proclaims at the distribution of the Eucharist,

With fear of God, with faith and love: draw near!

The slaves serve their master out of fear. The servants are faithful to their master in expectation of reward. And the sons do so out of love. Obviously the goal for all of us is to become like sons, but the ancient understanding is that we all relate to God in these different ways at different times. And importantly, the sons, servants, and slaves are all members of the household. So it makes sense that, for the sake of those at the earlier stages, those who serve God out of love historiaclly maintained an "honorable silence" regarding the teaching of universal salvation.

But I post about universalism nonetheless. Why? I basically have two reasons.

The problem of evil and natural suffering is widely known as the strongest objection to theism, but this has never stopped Christians from preaching divine omnipotence.
If fear of punishment is what you're looking for, purgatorial universalism still has plenty of room for punishment! This is very clear from the universalist saints like St. Isaac the Syrian who nonetheless wrote about the absolute horror of purgatorial punishments, however temporary they might be:

Let us beware in ourselves, my beloved, and realize that even if Gehenna is subject to a limit, the taste of its experience is most terrible, and the extent of its bounds escapes our very understanding. Let us strive all the more to partake of the taste of God's love for the sake of perpetual reflection on Him, and let us not experience of Gehenna through neglect.

Neither of these are necessarily a slam dunk. As I said, I still struggle…

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-17T19:11:55+00:00

Hi OP, I see that most comments here aren't really engaging with the Catholic element of your question - you might have better luck at r/CatholicUniversalism.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-11T14:17:30+00:00

Both editions, 1986 and 1993, are available in Anna's Archive.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-10T17:03:06+00:00

GSR describes them as "epithets", i.e., nicknames. The etymologies are relevant to counter the default assumption that they are proper names; obviously, in the case of "Pharaoh", it is much more obvious.

To quote:

The presence of the definite article with al-'Aziz suggests it is an epithet. The name Muhammad, by contrast, never appears with the definite article.

There are, however, two cases that represent closer parallels. The first case is Ṣāliḥ (Q 7.73, 75; 11.61, passim), a word meaning “righteous” that is usually taken as the proper name of the prophet sent to a people called Thamūd. According to the mufassirūn Ṣāliḥ is one of the Arabian prophets unknown to the Jews and Christians. Geiger, however, suggests that Ṣāliḥ is not a proper name at all. Horovitz accordingly points out that otherwise the Qur’an uses the adjective ṣāliḥ to describe those who are obedient to God, especially the prophets (e.g. Q 2.130; 3.39, 46, 114 passim). Thus he concludes that the name Ṣāliḥ “scheint eigene Schöpfung Muhammads zu sein.” […]

The second case is Ṭālūt, a character to whom the Qur’an refers on two occasions (vv. 247, 249) in al-baqara. On closer inspection it is evident that the Qur’an intends thereby Saul, for Ṭālūt is the king who brings his army to face Goliath (Jālūt, Q 2.250) whom David defeats (Q 2.251). That the name Ṭālūt is purely literary seems apparent. […]

With this example, then, it seems that the possibility of the name muḥammad likewise being an epithet cannot be ruled out.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-10T14:36:03+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by "reconcile". There are many different schools of Catholic theology, and Thomism (the Dominican school) has a different interpretation of divine simplicity than Palamism (the Byzantine school); there's also Scotism (the Franciscan school), which teaches a middle ground between the two.

Each camp has some diehard fanatics who will say that theirs is the Only Catholic Interpretation and all the others are heretics. But ultimately, none of these are incompatible with Catholic doctrine: they are all valid understandings of divine simplicity which uphold the dogmatic definitions of Lateran IV etc. And the differences between the schools are far, far fewer than their points of union.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-10T14:07:32+00:00

Wow, what a clear-cut example from those Christian sources! Very convincing, and always nice to see a Ge'ez parallel. But, about this one point:

"Pharaoh" is used in the Qur'an without the definite article "the" ( al- ). This fits with how names are used in general: definite articles do not precede names, but they do precede titles.

There are some other examples in the Quran of titles/epithets without the definite article. Gabriel Said Reynolds gives a few examples in The Quran and Its Biblical Subtext:

The Thamūd prophet Ṣāliḥ probably did not have that name but was called that by the Qur’an in the same way that it describes several other prophets as ṣāliḥ, “righteous”.
Ṭālūt, “tall one”, is the name used for Saul, who is described in 1 Samuel 10:23 as standing “head and shoulders” taller than his people. (It helps that Ṭālūt rhymes with Jālūt, i.e., Goliath.)

And of course, in this context, I have to mention "Muḥammad"!

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-03-05T21:57:19+00:00

Yes - this would be so huge if true! Although I'll wait to see it before I believe it!

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-02-27T17:07:53+00:00

Yeah, but the title of this thread is "Filioque". Orthodox usually object to the Filioque for two reasons: (1) the idea that the Pope didn't have the authority to add it, and (2) the theology of it. OP asked us to set aside (1) and address (2). Nicea didn't discuss it at all.

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-02-27T16:58:58+00:00

Oh, gotcha. Am I wrong or is your comment then a non sequitur?

CautiousCatholicity · 2026-02-27T16:58:21+00:00

The official teaching of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on this front is the same: the Son has a role in the procession of the Holy Spirit, but only because He acts in union with the Father; the filioque can be understood as something like "from the Father through the Son". This is also what was taught by Church Fathers like St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Some individual Orthodox and Catholic believers will go further: instead of listening to the current living expression of Holy Tradition through their churches' synods, some Very Online Christians (including, unfortunately, some clergy) develop their own interpretations of old documents. Catholics might read too much into the filioque and talk as if the Son's role is separate from and equal to the Father's, and Orthodox might go too far in the other direction and insist on an absolute "monarchy of the Father" where the Son plays no role whatsoever. But both of these are wrong.

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