By Fr. Theodosios Martzouchos
“But even at his final moment he dared to ‘set fire’ even to his own earthly remains: he took care that the place where his bones would rest should remain unknown… And his bones were lost, according to his command, in the forest of Kerasia.”
Archimandrite Vasilios Gontikakis,
Elder Porphyrios as an Athonite, p. 78.
“When Abba Arsenios was about to depart this life, his disciples were troubled; and he said to them: ‘The hour has not yet come. But when the hour does come, I tell you this: I shall be judged with you before the fearful tribunal if you give my relics to anyone.’ They said to him: ‘What then shall we do, since we do not know how to bury you?’ And the elder said to them: ‘Do you not know how to tie a rope to my foot and drag me up the mountain?’”
The Gerontikon, Abba Arsenios, 40.
A television persona died and chose (whether personally or through relatives — it makes no difference) cremation instead of the customary burial.
This event became the spark for a “social conflagration” over an issue that has long been smoldering beneath the surface, precisely because it is unclear how many people actually accept such a practice and, when the time comes, how many will choose it.
Much emotional and psychological commentary was written, and there was even an appeal to the… magisterium — not to persuade, but to silence.
Yet commands must persuade and must be well-founded. If they lack these elements, the fault lies not with those who do not obey them, but with those who hasten to issue judgments.
Modern man, faced with all this, will think:
“So what? Can’t I choose how my body will decompose? Don’t I have the right?”
Living in an age obsessed with rights, contemporary society reacts negatively to objections — especially when those objections, to be meaningful, must first be rational and only then theological, since we are first human beings and only afterward, by free choice (as it ought to be), Christians — on a matter that it quite rightly evaluates as procedural and secondary.
Christ Himself, after being taken down from the Cross, was buried “as is the custom of the Jews to bury” (John 19:40).
Three forms of burial existed in Christ’s time:
a) placing the dead in a pit-grave and covering with earth, a custom of the poor and simple people and of foreigners who died away from home;
b) rock-hewn tombs, consisting of a chamber or chambers sealed with a rolling stone, the common practice among the wealthy;
c) luxurious tombs or mausoleums, expressions either of foolish and costly vanity or of honor given to holy and eminent persons (Abraham, David, etc.).
Christ’s body was placed in a rock-hewn tomb — not by His own choice. Indeed, it was placed in a borrowed tomb — He who was truly “the Stranger.”
For the Jews, customs were a defining element of identity. Sadly, we too preserve customs that have ended up as… empty names.
That is why they feared that “Jesus of Nazareth… will change the customs which Moses delivered to us” (Acts 6:14). What was this fear? An expression of anxiety over the cohesion of their collectivist society.
“Custom” had become an element of the collective body of Jewish self-consciousness and identity. Repetition and ritualism, however, had rendered these customs empty of content.
Christ mocked many of them. He criticized “your tradition” and already in the Old Testament God says through the prophet: “Your new moons and your Sabbaths My soul hates.”
The Jewish reverence (whitewashing…) of tombs — which were sometimes abandoned and used by the poor or travelers as dwellings (Saint Anthony himself had a similar “cell”) — was not accepted by Christ, who condemned such customs as superstition and rebuked the Pharisees as “whitewashed tombs.”
What does this mean?
Customs, Christ taught, cannot constitute your essence when they are mere repetitions of habit that have come to function in conscience as expressions of authenticity — which they are not.
Antiquity and habit do not sanctify. The new is not inherently unacceptable or alien.
The expression of faith through forms and habits must be tested against the ancient teaching: “Christ is the truth, not habit.” This rests on Christ’s teaching in Matthew 13:52, “bringing out of his treasure things new and old,” which Saint Cyril of Alexandria interprets thus:
“He brings forth new and old, transforming the shadow of the Law and the power of legal worship into the form of evangelical life.”
“Tradition in the Church is not the continuation of human memory nor the permanence of rites and customs. The Church is not bound by the ‘letter’ but moves steadfastly by the Spirit. ‘Following the Holy Fathers’ is not a reference to an abstract tradition, to formulas and propositions.” (Fr. Georges Florovsky, Holy Scripture, Church, Tradition, pp. 145–146)
In other words, for the Church and for Fr. George Florovsky, lifeless positions such as “this is how we always did it” or “this is how we found it and this is how we will leave it” simply do not hold.
In our time, boundaries have not merely been lost; even the definition of who is Christian has become subjective. In the Greek context, the illusion that every baptized person is a Christian allows for profound confusion, and we clergy speak as if… Yet today “each one walks in his own way and does what seems right in his own eyes.” The ecclesial body is numerically measured, not existentially lived.
Faith becomes not the faith of the Church, but a self-satisfied subjectivism (C. S. Lewis, The Poison of Subjectivism). As our blessed father Meletios once said, “we bless Arians,” that is, people who do not believe in the divinity of Christ.
Further distortions arose from the near-identification of Church and State in the past and from the naive illusion of ecclesiastical authority that imagined it possessed exclusive legislative power. This led the Church of Greece to issue an official announcement stating:
“2. Our Church has no objection to the cremation of the dead for heterodox and non-Christians…”
Things like this give every careless person an excuse to write about… ayatollahs in Greece! God forbid… that the Church should even have an objection regarding people who are not within the Church!! When discussing such a matter, do we not at the same time realize that it is also discussing… environmental consequences, historical and social arguments… ecological burdens, and that it is listening to presentations on “The cremation of the dead and the Constitution”!
And while making assessments and outlining perspectives “for a better pastoral handling of the issue,” it then proclaims that the Church does not accept cremation of the body for its members, because the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), an element of the hypostasis of the human being created in the image and likeness of God… and an expression of faith in the common Resurrection of all!
For the Church, the body is not the sēma (= tomb) of the soul. It is the “half” of the human person. The two together (body and soul) are the human being.
The soul without the body is naked, and the body without the soul is dead. The Apostle writes:
“Do you not know that you are the temple of God (not only the body but the human person), and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him” (1 Cor. 3:16–17).
But caution! He is not speaking about the deterioration of the body due to circumstances!
He speaks in the sense explained by Origen: “If someone destroys [it] through licentiousness or sin”! It is not the hardship of a harsh way of life, nor the ascetic struggle of monks, nor even the life of an ordinary Christian, that constitutes the destruction of the human person and the body, but spiritual degradation — when a person evaluates his body as… an egocentric lollipop, as an expression, ultimately, of psychological imbalance.
“God will destroy him,” that is, “He will destroy him. This is not the language of cursing, but of prophecy.”
“It is not the body that destroys the soul, but sin. For nothing in this world is fearful except sin alone” (St. John Chrysostom).
The prohibition of cremation claims to be grounded in the rejection of the Resurrection! And this, of course, because the mere invocation of tradition does not provide a theological or logical foundation for such a position. As George Seferis said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
“Tradition does not mean habit. [Our comment: Habit is a personal disposition; tradition exists on the basis of ‘exchange.’ One person possesses the treasure and hands it over to another — just as parents pass on their property to their children.] On the contrary, what interests us is its ability to break habit: this is how it proves its vitality.”
The logical and philosophical argument argumentum ex silentio (argument from silence) — a logical fallacy whereby a conclusion is drawn from the absence of information or the lack of refutation (in this case, the dead person does not… speak), assuming that silence means agreement, ignorance, or guilt — is the banner under which opponents of cremation march, supposedly on the grounds that cremation implies rejection of the Resurrection!
Such a position is flimsy and theologically groundless. Faith in the Church of Christ is confessed only “with the mouth”; the rest — the depths of the human heart — are known only to its Creator, He who searches hearts and reins.
We allow a person to receive Communion, to participate in the Mysteries, without any “requirement” that he confess his faith — and when he chooses to be cremated, then we suddenly remember to ask whether he believes or not!
But beyond all this, since theological thought is not expediency or legalistic maneuvering to defend predetermined positions, we (the clergy and the Church’s administration) bear responsibility to think pastorally and with theological economy for the salvation of the flock. Let us assume, for the sake of discussion (though it is by no means secure), that everyone who chooses cremation rejects Christ and the Resurrection.
Do we really believe, then, that all those who are not cremated believe in Christ and the Resurrection? That those who do not disturb the formalism of traditionalism (since, as we said, tradition is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT framework of thought and life) are God’s beloved children? How quickly we forget Christ’s parables!
“Which of the two did the will of his father?” (Matt. 21:31).
How is it that He says “I do not know you” to… preachers? (Luke 13:25, 27).
In this case, what measures do we take? We conduct funerals for atheists, God-fearingless individuals, provocatively sinful people, and hypocrites of every sort, resting on the “pillow” of “God knows”! “Very well”… Does God not know here as well? And for that reason we decide to act ourselves?
Christian communities, without placing special weight on the matter, used to bury their dead around the church building, where the living brethren celebrated the Eucharist.
The Church knows that all live, since Christ is not the God of the dead but of the living. After the passage of three years from death, the bones were exhumed and placed on the shelves of a special area in the church, or thrown into the common ossuary.
As the years passed, the question of the hymn of the Funeral Service prevailed:
“…who then is it?… king or soldier? rich or poor? righteous or sinner?”
The knowledge remained only in the mind of God.
After all, this is salvation: Remember me, O Lord…
Many brethren object, saying: “…why should I hasten to reduce the body to nothing through burning and crushing?” Do not do it, brother. But do not seek to impose your own “I want” upon others, since the matter is one of custom, not dogma.
Respect the sensitivities — or, if you wish, the idiosyncrasies — of your brother, since you both believe in the Holy Trinity as the God of your life, you both believe in the Person of Christ as the Firstborn Brother, and you both await from Him the reconstitution of the Resurrection and eternal life in His embrace, since you jointly affirm the saying of Saint Gregory of Nyssa:
“Resurrection is the restoration of our nature to its original state” (On the Soul and the Resurrection).
The Orthodox Church has “widened her heart” and tolerates (and rightly so) the baptism of nearly all Slavs by the pouring of water upon the head of the one being baptized — thus overturning even the very name of the Mystery! Is there no room for condescension when it comes to burial or cremation?
What is needed is teaching — catechesis — about faith in the Person of Christ and the Resurrection (when such matters enter public discourse), not unpsychological prohibitions, especially on issues that are theologically unfounded.
What is needed is discernment, not prohibitions as bulldozers; nor the delusion that the desired conclusion has already been secured (“they are Christians”); and certainly not a pastoral “care” that comes alive only at the end of life and only for the dead — while causing the living to lose their faith.
The Resurrection is re-creation, not the mechanical reassembly of matter. This is Pauline, Patristic, and Orthodox theology and anthropology.
Whoever imagines the Resurrection as a “return to the biological corpse” has understood nothing of “it is sown corruptible, it is raised incorruptible.”
Turning theology into a traffic violation, reducing pastoral care to prohibitions and threats, and using burial as a “certificate of orthodoxy” is a grave pastoral failure.
People today do not ask “What should I do?” They ask “Why?” Whoever answers only with directives has already lost.
Burial is not, in itself, a confession of faith. Cremation, as a fact in itself, does not nullify the Resurrection. If the body of a martyr was reduced to ashes, if the relics of saints were burned, if people were lost at sea or in wars, God does not “struggle” or lack the power to raise them — and certainly not the lost or the burned! Whoever links the power of God to the integrity of the corpse has already — without realizing it — slipped into magical thinking.
To all of the above there will obviously be objections, even to the point of rending garments! Yet we are not finished. Few, of course, will claim that God will have difficulty raising those who were burned, and will associate resurrection with the condition of a person at the moment of death — an unborn embryo, a person with physical or psychological disabilities, an elderly person with dementia, and so on, and so on.
A marginal theology circulates the idea that God will raise us at the age of thirty-three (despite the absence of time in eternity), yet this pious thought says something significant.
It says that Christ will free us from corruption and will raise us in a state of responsible maturity, as we came forth from His hands. But let us set this aside.
Let us consider: is the funeral service a Mystery? Is participation in rites unconditional? Did not our forefathers (Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian and others) read prayers even over Muslims?
Is this not written in the life of Saint Arsenios by Elder Paisios? Is the funeral an act of propitiating God — or the prayer of the Christian brethren of the deceased for his release from egocentric fixations, and a filial response to the love of God?
The Church does not save through techniques. The issue is not “to impose” or “to permit.” The matter of faith is not resolved before the dilemma… grave or crematorium!
When our blessed father Meletios performed the funeral of a man who had contracted a civil marriage, and some reproached him (of the familiar mentality of the “over-zealously Orthodox”), saying that the deceased might not have believed, that great man replied:
“That is known now only to God! But it had to be known to the parish, the local church!”
So then — what about those whom you commune without knowing their faith, on Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday? How do you get past that?
Sadly, we Christians — and especially we clergy — do not inspire by our lives a growing love for the Crucified in the hearts of believers.
In light of all this, the above was written, with the words of Christ constantly echoing in mind:
“Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations” (Rom. 2:24).
Forgive the boldness.
Pray, brothers and fathers, with the final petitions at the Plerotika.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
