Pietism (eusebismos)

The phenomenon of pietism has had a great impact on the Christian church from the very beginning.^[1] This phenomenon usually finds expression in a suffocating and rigid system of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ which does not reflect the Gospel of Jesus – unfortunately, however, for most people it is the only Gospel they will ever hear. For pietism, salvation is viewed in legalistic terms as a kind of justification, conferred on an individual because she has lived up to her religious duties and the moral commandments, thereby imitating the ‘virtues’ of Christ. The church, in the eyes of the pietist, is seen as an assembly of morally ‘reborn’ individuals, a gathering of the ‘pure’, a complement and an aid to individual religious feeling. And theology, in pietism, is regarded with indifference, for what is important is not doctrines and theories, but the practice of piety. As Christos Yannaras observes, “Pietism presents itself as a mystical piety, and ultimately as a form of opposition to knowledge; as ‘adogmaticism’ in the sense that it ignores or belittles theological truth, or even as pure agnosticism cloaked in morality.”^[2]

Pietism first rose to prominence within the Lutheran church under the leadership of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), quickly becoming a major reform movement during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (some Pietists, in fact, saw themselves as participating in the second phase of the Reformation). The movement is difficult to precisely characterize, though it does have some distinguishing traits, the most obvious of which is its emphasis on a practical, active piety (praxis pietatis) rather than on doctrine. This involved, among other things, an emphasis on the performance of good works, the scrutinization of daily life, the diligent study of the Scriptures with particular reference to its moral teachings, a conviction in the centrality of forming a personal and experiential relationship with God that would issue in intense but pleasant emotions or feelings, and disassociation from worldly practices such as dancing and non-religious reading, this of course inevitably leading to separatism and a sense of exclusivity.

In Roman Catholicism, by contrast, autonomous groups or movements of pietists are rarely to be found.^[3] Nevertheless, forms of pietism have often been adopted by the various orders and societies of the Catholic church. Thus one finds a pietistic spirit running through Carmelite mysticism, at least as expressed by Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and John of the Cross (1542-1591), and the same spirit can be detected in the Brethren of the Common Life, particularly in its one great product, The Imitation of Christ, authored by Thomas à Kempis (ca.1379-1471).

Pietism, however, has also made a great impact on the life of the Orthodox church. The pietistic movement in Greece, for example, has been active since the turn of the last century, although it is somewhat in decline at present. The first major Greek pietistic brotherhood, known as ‘Zoe’ (meaning ‘Life’), was founded by Eusebios Matthopoulos in 1907 and drew its inspiration from German and Anglo-Saxon prototypes. In the late 1950s, a conservative faction within Zoe – led by the influential theologian, Panagiotes Trembelas – accused Zoe of deviating from the original principles outlined by Matthopoulos and therefore decided to split from Zoe, founding a new brotherhood, named ‘Soter’ (meaning ‘Saviour’). These and other like-minded brotherhoods (and sisterhoods) within Greece follow in the footsteps of their Protestant predecessors in ignoring theological doctrines, replacing them with the a strong emphasis on puritanical ethics. In addition, lay private worship divorced from the life of the parishes is encouraged; a strong sense of conformity and discipline is fostered in the members; and a zealous missionary spirit to gain followers is cultivated.^[4]

Although (in some respects, at least) a part of the official church, these pietistic movements usually develop into closed, autonomous religious groups, entry to which can be secured only by objectively recognized criteria of ‘suitability’. And when the distorted morality nurtured by such groups comes into contact with the traditional sacraments of the church, the results can be alarming. As Yannaras points out,

Ultimately, even participation in the sacraments takes on a conventional, ethical character. Confession turns into a psychological means of setting individual guilt-feelings at rest, and participation in holy communion becomes a moral reward for good behavior – when it is not a scarcely conscious individual or family custom bordering on magic. Baptism becomes a self-evident social obligation, and marriage a legitimization of sexual relations without regard to any ascetic transfiguration of the conjugal union into an ecclesial event of personal intercourse or communion.^[5]

This superpower of our times, which is also the most powerful and important factor in the operation of the world capitalist system, has its roots in the principles and the spirit of pietism. The successive waves of Anglo-Saxon Puritans and pietists who first emigrated to America with the millenarian vision of a Puritan “promised land” identified trust in God with the power of money and religious feeling with the economic efficiency of work (work ethics), and ultimately hallowed as ethics whatever ensured individual security and social prosperity.^[7]

The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its ‘cure’ is castration. It never asks: ‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’ – it has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of revengefulness). – But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life…^[9]

No one is free to become a Christian or not to do so; one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity – one must be sufficiently sick for it…. We others, who have the courage for health and also for contempt, what contempt we have for a religion which teaches misunderstanding of the body! which does not wish to get rid of the soul-superstition! which makes a ‘merit’ of eating too little! which combats health as a kind of enemy, devil, temptation! which has persuaded itself that a ‘perfect soul’ could be carried about in a cadaver of a body and to do so needed to concoct a new conception of ‘perfection’, a pale, sickly, idiot-fanatic condition, so-called ‘holiness’ – holiness itself merely a symptom-syndrome of the impoverished, enervated, incurably corrupted body!…^[10]

Piety (eusebeia)

‘Piety’ is a very vague term, covering a diverse range of meanings. In the ancient Greek world, for example, various interpretations of this term existed side by side. Indeed, one of Plato’s most famous dialogues, the Apology, can be seen as a struggle between two competing conceptions of eusebeia: according to one conception, one’s religious duties are integrated with one’s duty to the traditional values of the city in which one lives, while according to the conception espoused by Socrates, one is to follow at all times whatever divine orders one believes one is receiving.

In the Old Testament, by contrast, piety denoted conformity to the Law. The Pentateuch (i.e., the first five books of the Old Testament) lists various rules of conduct said to be given by God to Moses. These rules, known as the Law of Moses, regulated every aspect of the lives and actions of the chosen people, the Jews. The Book of Leviticus, for example, includes laws for animal sacrifices (chs 1-7), regulations for priests (chs 8-10), and purity laws (chs 11-15) such as the following:

If an animal that you are allowed to eat dies, anyone who touches the carcass will be unclean till evening. Anyone who eats some of the carcass must wash his clothes, and he will be unclean till evening. Anyone who picks up the carcass must wash his clothes, and he will be unclean till evening. (Lev 11:39-40, NIV)

The person with [such] an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp. (Lev 13:45-46, NIV)

The New Testament writers attempt to avoid such a moralistic and legalistic understanding of piety. In fact, because the term ‘eusebeia’ had become synonymous with pietism, ‘eusebeia’ is rarely used in the New Testament to refer to the religious way of life. The apostle Paul, for instance, preferred to speak of faith and love rather than piety, for in his view, we are no longer living in the age of the Law, but in the age of the grace of Christ (Rom 6:14-15). As Paul notes elsewhere, Christ has replaced the Law as the way of salvation, and so if righteousness could be gained through the Law, then Christ would have died in vain (Gal 2:21).^[11]

Legalistic morality is also firmly repudiated in the Gospels. Keeping the Law does not insure a right relation to God (Lk 15:25-31). The answer lies not so much in obedience to the Law, but in repentance. Jesus himself states, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:13; cf. Lk 19:10). Those who become citizens of the Kingdom are not those who are ‘all right’ in their own private religious conscience, nor those who are superficially respectable. They are the sinners, those who are not afraid to recognize their daily failures and the resistances put up by their rebellious nature. These people alone have the capacity to accept the call to repent, to seek refuge in the life-giving grace of God.

Repentance, however, cannot be reduced to a psychological feeling of guilt. Rather, it is a sense of failure, a sense of ‘having missed the mark’ (harmartanô originally meant ‘to miss the mark’, ‘to fall short’). God does not want to create within us psychological guilt-complexes. Nor does he want us to simply improve our behaviour. He calls us to a ‘change of mind’ (meta-noia), a change in our entire attitude and existential stance, that we may lead a life of personal communion with him and our fellow men and women.

The church, unfortunately, has often found it easier to adopt a juridical understanding of the relationship between humanity and God. The relationship is envisaged as a business deal, with human achievements and divine rewards conferred in return. This is even indicated by recent work in biblical scholarship, according to which Jn 8:3-11 is lacking in many of the original manuscripts of John’s Gospel. This is only to be expected, for this is the scene where the Pharisees bring to Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery. People find it difficult to accept that Jesus should assure this woman, who had shown him no external sign of repentance, that he did not condemn her. Jesus is confronted with someone who had committed a grave sin – a sin which the Law of Moses punished with death. Yet he does not pronounce any indictment, but disarms and shames those who accuse the woman by reminding them of the universality of human failure and sin: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Arguably, the best exemplar of piety is the saint. As John Chryssavgis states, in an excellent study of the relation between piety and pietism,

The saint is the one in whom piety is an essential act, a fundamental part, a way of life that is made his very own and that does not remain merely on the surface… In this way, true piety, theology and spirituality, is saintliness, and in the world of sanctity, there is room for the entire world; for saintliness is all-embracing, all-inclusive, loving. The saint, however, has a different way of behaviour, a different mode of existence.^[12]

This ‘different mode of existence’ is beautifully expressed in a lengthy quote provided by Chryssavgis from Archimandrite Vasileios. In an article entitled “Dying and Behold We Live”, Vasileios offers what Chryssavgis calls “the most dissecting description of a saint that I have come across”.^[13] With this judgement I must agree. Although Vasileios is referring to a particular monk he had encountered on Mount Athos, what he has to say is clearly generalizable to all exemplars of genuine piety:

One finds nothing superhuman in him, nothing which astonishes or makes one giddy, but rather something deeply human and humble, something which brings peace and new courage… He pours out strength and comfort. In his presence one feels boundless peace and security. Near him everything is filled with light. Uncertainties vanish; one begins to love Christ, and to love life. One no longer fears death.

He literally overflows. That is an expression which gives some idea of the truth about him. He has a treasure of inexpressible joy hidden in an earthen vessel, small and fragile. And this joy overflows and spreads all around him, filling his surroundings with its fragrance. Light shines from his being. His inner rejoicing sometimes goes beyond his endurance, breaks his heart, shows itself in tears and cries and gestures. And whether he speaks or whether he is silent, whether he sleeps or whether he is awake, whether he is present or whether he is absent, it is always the same thing that he says, the same thing that he is, the same grace and the same power. His presence or the memory of him, the feeling that he is near, or simply that he exists, of itself conveys something other, something uncreated, tranquil, penetrating. It is something which renews man, calms his nerves, extinguishes his anger, enlightens his mind, gives wings to his hope and prepares him for a struggle that gives quiet and peace to a whole people.^[14]

[2] Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), p.120. Much of what I say in the present paper is indebted to chapter 8 of Yannaras’ work, which provides an insightful, if sometimes overly harsh, assessment of pietism as it has been expressed in the Catholic, Protestant as well as Orthodox traditions.

[3] The Jansenist movement, however, is an important exception. As Dale Brown notes, “In its period of greatest influence, Jansenism was contemporaneous with German Pietism, and the strict moral standards and conventicle-like position of the Jansenists within French Roman Catholicism were similar to those in strict Puritanism and Pietism” (Understanding Pietism, pp.25-26).

[4] For further details on the development of pietism in the Greek Orthodox church, as well as an overview of pietism in the Russian and Romanian Orthodox churches, see Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, pp.132-36. On pietistic organisations in Greece, see also Demetrios J. Constantelos, “The Zoe Movement in Greece,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 3 (1959): 11-25, and Vasilios N. Makrides, “The Brotherhoods of Theologians in Contemporary Greece,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 33 (1988): 167-87.

[5] Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, p.125, emphasis in the original. It is no surprise, then, to find Yannaras castigating pietism as an ‘ecclesiological heresy’ that “undermines or actually denies the very truth of the Church, transferring the event of salvation from the ecclesial to the individual ethos” (p.126). Indeed, Yannaras goes so far as to call pietism “the great heresy of our age” (p.126), and he later remarks that:

If the witness of an ecumenical council of the Church were to have any meaning in our day, its chief purpose would be to denounce this torture of man, this imprisonment in an adulterated and falsified idea of Christian piety: the corrosion and destruction of the truth of salvation and the reality of the Church by generalized pietism. (p.131)

[7] Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, p.130. The fact that ‘In God we trust’ is the inscription on every American coin and dollar note also does not pass unnoticed by Yannaras (see The Freedom of Morality, p.130, fn.14). The Protestant work ethic continues to hold sway in the United States, as Stephen Kalberg points out:

Americans’ dedication to work and success is still influenced by the ascetic Protestant tradition. This nation [i.e., the USA] is frequently described today as a work-obsessed society. In 1999 the United States replaced Japan as the worldwide leader in number of hours worked per person per year; Europeans, in contrast, work approximately two-thirds as many hours per year as Americans. (“Introduction”, in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Stephen Kalberg, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001, p.xii.)

[9] Nietzsche, Twighlight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), p.52.

[10] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), §51, p.180.

[11] For a good analysis of the use of ‘eusebeia’ in the New Testament, see the entry for this word in Gerhard Friedrich (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971), vol. 7, pp.175-85, esp. pp.181-84.

[12] Chyssavgis, “Piety – Pietism: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 32 (1987): 149.

[13] Ibid., p.150.

[14] Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, “Dying and Behold We Live,” in Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), pp.125-27.