By Fr. David McCready
This paper was originally given as a talk, and retains the style of an oral presentation.
Introduction
It is my understanding of what our Vicariate should be, an understanding which I believe is that also of His Eminence the Metropolitan, that we should seek to revive, as much as is possible, the patristic west, the patristic west to which the notion of merit clearly belongs.
But, that said, merit, is not simply something Latin and western, but with something taught by the unanimity of the Fathers, and rooted deep in scripture and in the writings of the Second Temple period. That is why, the more I have studied this issue, the more I am convinced that it is one of the highest importance.
Some maybe would like to compromise and keep the word merit in our liturgical books, but put it in parentheses, making its mention merely optional, but this, I think, would be a grave mistake, because, to my mind, merit is an integral part of the tradition of the church, an integral part of the revelation given to us by God in scripture.
1. The Consensus Patrum.
I think I have heard it said (although I cannot quite believe it) that no Orthodox theologian has spoken about merit: but who are the Orthodox theologians if not the holy and God-inspired Fathers, whom I would prefer, and I trust all of us would prefer, to any theologian of the 20th or 21st centuries. To be for a moment hyperbolic, I don’t care what was said in the 1950s or the 1990s, I care what was taught by the Fathers. And what was taught by the Fathers was the concept of merit.
And not just the Latin Fathers, but the Greek Fathers, too, as you will have seen if you have read, for example, the homilies of our great Antiochian saint, St John Chrysostom on repentance.
But not only is merit a concept which appears in the Latin and the Greek Fathers, but in the Syrian tradition as well – witness the hymns of St Ephrem on the church and on paradise. In fact, one might suggest that, with the semitic background of the Syrian church, it served as a conduit of merit language from Second Temple Judaism to early Christianity.
Be that as it may, what matters for the moment, my first main point, is that merit is not something taught by this Father or that, nor by a particular group of the Fathers, but that it belongs to the consensus patrum, to the consensus of the Fathers as a whole.
2. Findings of Modern Scholarship
Second point, because they read the Fathers and know them, modern scholars agree with this assessment. The thesis I am putting forward is not my own idiosyncratic opinion; it is a proposition supported by serious academic research.
I refer you to Gary Anderson’s Sin, A History; also, to Anderson’s Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition, published by Yale University Press in 2013, which explores the idea of charity as a ‘loan to God,’1 a loan by which we amass ‘treasure in heaven,’ an idea which Anderson argues to be anchored in the Old Testament and in Second Temple Judaism, from whence it was inherited by the earliest Christians, including the authors of the New Testament, and, after them, the Fathers.
David Downs in his book, Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity shares Anderson’s conclusions. He provides a detailed examination of almsgiving and the rewards associated with it in the Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and in the New Testament, then looks at how the theology of almsgiving was developed by the earliest Christians, up to Cyprian, his conclusion being:
[I]t is impossible to avoid the frequency with which discussions of and appeals to merciful care for the poor in both the New Testament and Christian literature of the second and third centuries indicate that those who show mercy to the needy will be rewarded for their compassion. The provision of alms in early Christianity was often framed as an “interested” exchange in the sense that donors would receive a return for their investment.2
‘The idea that caring for the needy can erase or in some way reckon with human sin is widely attested in the literature of early Christianity,’ Downs contends,3 quotes: 2 Clement 16, 1-4; the Didache, 4, 5-8; Barnabas 19, 8-11; as well as: Clement, Origen, Cyprian, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine, ‘amongst others.’
So, for us to remove ‘merit’ from our prayers is not only to go against the consensus patrum; it is to go against modern scholarship, which presents us with the very deep roots that this concept has, stretching back to the New Testament and beyond.
3. What is Merit?
So just quickly three more things.
First, perhaps the question we should have asked a long time ago: what does merit mean? What does merit mean? So, merit can be a verb or a noun. And as I understand it, and such, I believe is the understanding of the Fathers, to merit means, first of all, to do something which God recompenses, and then, by extension, to be recompensed by God for something we have done. The same for the substantive. Merit means, first, some action which God recompenses, and then the recompense God gives for some action.
A recompense, which, when it is good, we call a reward. And, to those who have difficulty with merit, maybe a help would be to think of it in terms of reward, μισθός, a deeply scriptural and evangelical word, found a total of 29 times in the New Testament, not least in the semitically- backgrounded Gospel according Matthew (remember the influence of the Old Testament and second temple Judaism on the formation of the concept of merit). For example:
5:12, Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward (μισθός) in heaven.
Matthew 6, where the word μισθός is repeated three times, together with the word treasure, θησαυρός also repeated three times, together with the verb θησαυρίζετε, thesaurizete twice, ‘store up,’ ‘treasure up’ (vv 19-21).
So, if merit means reward, then let us be assured that it is a scriptural concept!
4. Merit and Prayer
Next point: the phrase ‘merits and prayers,’ which occurs numerous times in the Roman Missal from which ours is drawn, in the orations, and, above all, in the canon, in the Communicantes, the composition of which Mgr. Callewaert ascribes to St Leo the Great. He’s wrong. No one accepts his conclusions, but what is incontestable is the similarity of the language and ideas of the Communicantes with those of St Leo in his sermons, including his conjunction of ‘merits and prayers.’ So:
Sermon 13: cujus suffragantibus meritis quae poscimus, impetrare possimus /By whose interceding merits we can obtain what we ask for
Serm 86: cujus suffragantibus meritis ab omnibus tribulationibus mereamur absolvi /By whose interceding merits may we merit to be delivered from all tribulations
Serm 88: Cujus meritis et orantionibus confidimus nobis per omnia misericordiam Dei nostri esse praestandam /By whose merits and prayers, we are sure God’s mercy will be vouchsafed to us in all things
Sermon 92: Cujus nos et orationibus suffragabuntur et meritis /Both by whose prayers and whose merits we are helped
Sermon 94: Cujus nos meritis et orationibus credimus adjuvandos /By whose merits and prayers we believe we will be helped.
To which we may add the phrase of the Leonine Sacramentary – not from Leo, but the earliest surviving document of the Roman rite: apostolicis suffragantibus meritis/ by the helping apostolic merits
Now, we might fudge the issue and say that ‘merits and prayers’ can be rendered ‘by the merits of x’s prayers,’ and so just means ‘prayers’ and thus can be omitted, but this is not what St Leo is saying. The merits themselves of the saints plead for us: suffragantibus meritis.
And, I would contend, all Orthodox implicitly believe this; they implicitly believe that there is a link between merits and prayers. For why, otherwise, do we ask the saints to pray for us?
Let me ask you a question. Does anyone think that their prayers are equal to those of the Mother of God? Does anyone think their prayers are equal to those of the holy apostles Peter and Paul? Surely not! Surely, we believe the prayers of the Mother of God and of the apostles and of all the saints to be more puissant than our own.
And why? Is it not because there is something in them which makes them more pleasing to God, some ‘merit’ may we dare to say? This is why in Greek the word for intercession is πρεσβεία.
And we all know what this means. Tomorrow, the next day, we will all line up according to πρεσβεία, those with – with most merit, can we say, again? – closest to the metropolitan: the hierarchs, the archimandrites, and so on – which is how the Greek tradition conceives of intercession: those closest to Christ have greater audience with Him, beginning with His Most Holy Mother, to whom we cry: Ταῖς πρεσβείαις τῆς Θεοτόκου, Σῶτερ, σῶσον ἡμᾶς. Through the intercessions of the Theotokos, O Saviour, save us!
As Leena Mari Peltomaa and Andreas Külzer put it in their book Presbeia Theotokou (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2015): ‘For Byzantines, the native Greek speakers, the formula “through/by means of the intercessory prayers of …” (presbeiais…) implied intercessors’ status;’4 and they quote a homily of St John Chrysostom, where he speaks about: ‘the prayers and intercessions [on our behalf] of those acceptable to God.’5
And we have this, of course, also in the Bible, in Job 42, where God accepts the prayer of Job above that of his three friends.
5. The Transfer of Merit
Everything I have said hitherto is, I believe, absolutely incontrovertible. What I am going to say next may be more controversial, but I am going to say it anyway, because it is true.
I am going to speak about the transfer of merit. And this has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic doctrine of the treasury of merits, which was not promulgated until 1343!
1343! Nothing to do with the Fathers; nothing to do with this topic about which we are talking, which is the doctrine of the holy Fathers.
That said, the Fathers do teach that the merits of one person can be transferred to another. We see this in three Latin saints especially venerated in the east: St Cyprian; St Leo, whose teaching we have already quoted; and St Gregory the Great, whose Dialogues are full of this idea of the transfer of merit, as I have shown in my little booklet.
And these Dialogues were very popular in the east, thanks to their translation by Pope Zachary, who rendered the Latin ‘merits’ by such words as δικαιοσύνη and ἁγιότης, by the righteousness of x, y was helped; by the holiness of a, b was blessed.
But the example I want, very briefly, to focus on is that of St Basil the Younger, whose Vita comes to us from mid-tenth century Byzantium.
This Life was, as the French, say ‘un best-seller,’ with 24 manuscripts extant, as well as translations into Slavonic, and, in the seventeenth century, into Arabic – so not an obscure text, but one which Vasileios Marinis, Professor of Christian Art and Architecture at Yale, calls in his seminal book Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium: ‘[T]he most complete [Byzantine] account of a soul’s fate after death.’6
Marinis also notes, as Downs and Anderson have done, the antiquity of the ideas expressed in the text: ‘Theodora’s account’ – we will come to Theodora in a moment- ‘is a synthesis of various theologies, narratives, and traditions that ran throughout Late Antiquity, ultimately deriving from the Old Testament and Intertestamental Jewish literature.’7
Basil is probably a fictitious character – but that doesn’t matter for our purposes; what matters is the text, which tells us that he had a woman servant, Theodora, who died. She had enough merits of her own to get some way through the tollhouses; as she says in the text:
If ever I did a good and just deed while in that world below, they [the toll -house demons] selected and weighed these deeds against the sins by which I transgressed of old and redeemed them one by one.8
But then, her merits run out! Fortunately, as she tells us, before departing this world, Basil had come to her, and:
… taking from the fold of his garment a scarlet bag full of pure gold, he gave it to the two young men [angelic psychopomps] and said to them, “Take this and use it to redeem this woman as you proceed through the tollhouses of the air; for by the grace of Christ I have great spiritual wealth. And having accumulated this wealth by my own toils and sweat, I bestow it on her, so that you may use it to free her from the debts which she will incur from the spirits of evil.”9
And this gift of Basil’s ‘accumulated wealth’ is what Theodora uses when her own merits fail, or, if she needs to supplement her own. There are numerous examples of this: I have included them in the handout, but to quote just two for now:
They [the angelic psychopomps] gave the [demons] appropriate compensation, not from my good deeds (for these were already used up), but from the divine gift of spiritual gold furnished to me, as aforementioned, by our holy father Basil.10
And, again:
Therefore those holy youths, taking from a small pouch some of the gifts which my all-holy father and Christ’s servant Basil had given them for the redemption of my soul, gave the demons corresponding weight for the charges they truthfully brought against me, as I have often also described previously.11
The word merit is never used, but that is, clearly, the concept: the excess (so to say) of Basil’s righteousness avails for Theodora. And when she gets to heaven, what does she find? Reward according to merit! ‘Each division of saints had a separate place for its domicile prepared for it, according, that is, to the individual deeds of each.’12 As she concludes her narrative:
For those in the world who endure toils and afflictions for God and the fulfillment of His holy commandments inherit and enjoy such blessings here [that is, in heaven] from the just Rewarder, as they rejoice unceasingly and happily, as the Divine Scripture says somewhere, ‘You shall eat the labors of your hands,’ for ‘Each shall receive as his wages according to his labor;’ and ‘If a person sows there, this he will reap.’13
So, clearly, our text shows the idea of merit and of the transfer of merits in tenth century Byzantium, ideas, as we have said, rooted deep in the Old Testament. To quote again from Downs:
[The doctrine of] [m]eritorious almsgiving … frames the provision of material assistance to those in need as a means of accumulating some reward or treasure, usually for the donor, but sometimes as a reward for someone else.14
And, as examples of this in scripture, we may cite Genesis 18, where God says He will spare Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the righteous who dwell therein; and Ezekiel 14, where He says: ‘Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in [the land], they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness. … Though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness,’ clearly implying the possibility that their righteousness could have been transferred to the inhabitants of the land.
Conclusion
I think it is Fr Florovsky who says that too often we as Orthodox use Protestant arguments against Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic arguments against Protestants. What we should use is Orthodox arguments; the arguments of scripture and of the holy Fathers.
If we speak of the project of Orthodox theology as a neo-patristic synthesis, the emphasis should be on the patristic, on what the Fathers teach, not on what some modern theologians might want to argue out of the sole desire to distinguish us from Rome. Quod et ego accepi, trado. That should be our motto: that which I have received I teach, received from the Fathers. As St Genadios Scholarios expresses it: ‘We should love only the church and what is pleasing to her,’ and, by them, by the Fathers, it is that the voice of the church is heard. And by them, to adapt an ancient phrase, on this topic of merit, plainly, very plainly, ecclesia locuta, causa finita.
1 Anderson, Charity, p. 33.
2 Downs, Alms, p. 276.
3 Downs, Alms, p. 4.
4 Peltomaa and Kulzer, Presbeia Theotokou, p. 13.
5 Homily 9 on Genesis.
6 Marinis, Death and Afterlife in Byzantium, p. 4.
7 Marinis, Death and Afterlife in Byzantium, p. 33.
8 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 207.
9 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 207-208.
10 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 215.
11 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 243.
12 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 255.
13 Denis F. Sullivan, Alice-Mary Talbot, Stamatina McGrath, The Life of St Basil the Younger, p. 271.
14 Downs, Alms, p. 7.