“Command!”: a Reflection on the Contemporary Ordination Practice

At the ordination of a priest or deacon the following ritual is observed:  some of the serving clergy take the candidate to be ordained into the nave (in the case of a diaconal candidate, two subdeacons; in the case of the priestly candidate, two deacons), assist him in making a prostration toward the assembled congregation and they then say “Command!”  They then raise up the candidate, turn him around so that he is facing the altar, have him make another prostration and again say “Command!”  Having raised him up again, they take him through the Royal Doors into the altar.  The candidate is then received by another clergyman (a deacon if the candidate is to be ordained deacon; a priest if the candidate is to be ordained priest) and then brought to the bishop who is seated by the altar table. He is then helped to make a prostration to the bishop as the assisting clergy say, “Command, right reverend Master!”  No response is given to these words; the requests for a command are met with silence.

       What, we may ask, is going on?  The three requests for a command are addressed to the assembled people, to the clergy present, and to the bishop.  As a note in the famous “Hapgood book” explains, “In the early days of Christianity the people and the clergy of the local church had a voice in the election of bishops, priests and deacons, in the sense that the choice made by the bishops was announced to them with the object of obtaining their testimony in regard to the qualities of the candidates and of giving them an opportunity to declare for or against the choice.”  

       In other words, the repeated request for a command or response was intended to elicit the verdict of the people assembled.  Given that this opportunity for the liturgical expression of their opinion would hardly have been the first time their opinion would have been asked, their liturgical response to the invitation to “command” was simply their setting a liturgical seal upon their already received verdict.  But please note:  their opinion was sufficiently important that a liturgical expression of it was required.  Presumably if a bishop decided to bull ahead with an ordination to which the people objected the assembled congregation would have shouted not “axios!” (i.e. “worthy”) but “anaxious!” (i.e. “unworthy!) with the result that the whole thing would immediately have ground to a halt.

       As Dom Gregory Dix reminded us long ago, this free election of the candidate was considered as important as the actual ordination itself.  In his essay “Ministry in the Early Church” Dix wrote, “A multitude of passages can be cited which emphasize the extreme importance attached in pre-Nicene times to the bishop’s proper and free election… A genuine election by his own Church and the free acceptance of him by all its members as their bishop were as much a sine qua non for the episcopate as consecration itself…The prayerful choice of a man by the ‘Spirit-bearing’ Body of Christ is a choice by the Spirit”.  Dix was writing of episcopal candidates but given that the command for a response of axios! is solicited for diaconal and priestly candidates as well, presumably the same importance was attached to congregational acceptance of them too.

       This makes the complete lack of local congregational acceptance all the more troubling.  In fact, the views of the local congregation and local clergy are almost never really consulted or given much weight prior to ordination.  The cry of axios! is solicited by the bishop only after the ordination and it functions therefore not as a verdict concerning the candidate’s fitness for office but as a kind of mazel tov or happy congratulations. 

Presumably some parish priest somewhere put forward the candidate as suitable by suggesting that he go to seminary or take courses with a view to ordination.  But one parish priest can hardly substitute for the kind of local unanimity and consensus envisioned in the early Church.  And of course the ordaining bishop presumably had some confidence in the candidate or he would not be there ordaining him.  But to a hammer everything often looks like a nail and in times of clergy shortage every candidate can look like a solution.  That is, one imagines, why a wider consensus was considered necessary in the pre-Nicene church.

       Hapgood, scholarly soul that she was, acknowledged the change from early church to contemporary practice in her note: “Later on, owing to difficulties, the influence of the people upon the selection of their bishops was restricted”.  One cannot but admire her gift for understatement.  In fact, given that bishops are increasingly no longer the local pastors of their town or village but administrators with oversight over a wide area, the present real influence of the people upon the selection of their bishops is precisely nil. And if the new bishop is imported from afar, this is even more so the case.

       The elimination of the local laity from the selection of their clergy (whether episcopal, presbyteral, or diaconal) is of a piece with the effective desacralization of the laity in general.  In many places, far from being considered “the Spirit-bearing Body of Christ” whose view represented the divine choice of a candidate, the laity are regarded as almost profane:  they are spoken in some Orthodox literature as “kosmikos” (i.e. “of the world”); they do not hear the silent prayers to which they expected to seal with their “Amen”; they do not exchange the Peace even though the deacons bids them to do so, and they commune sometimes only once a year.  Indeed, I once heard a bishop (not my own!) defend a floor to ceiling iconostasis barrier on the grounds that the Eucharist “must be protected from profane gaze”— i.e. the gaze of the assembled laity. Kosmikos indeed!

       I suggest that the Church should again recognize the role of the laity as indeed the Spirit-bearing Body of Christ and that this be expressed liturgically in the services and that the laity be given a real and effective role in the vetting and choosing of their clergy.  Given the impending clergy shortage in the Orthodox West, the temptation will be to gloss over difficulties and ordain any man so long as he has the requisite pulse.  But the temptation to lay hands suddenly upon candidates— a temptation St. Paul warned us about in 1 Timothy 5:22— should be resisted.  The office to which the candidate aspires is too important and the cost to the holy laity too great should we err in ordaining him. 

The invitation to command given in the ordination service should be heard afresh and responded to appropriately.  The Church should seek out the local voices which know the candidates well and give those voices the appropriate weight before deciding to ordain.  And the local church should encourage suitable candidates in their midst to pursue Holy Orders, doing all they can to train, encourage, and support them in their journey.  Then the church’s axios! will truly mean something as it responds to the invitation to command and make its will known.

The bishops, upon whom the responsibility for ordination ultimately devolves, have a very difficult job, one that they strive to fulfill with great energy, integrity, and devotion.  Adding some congregational involvement to the total process will help them as they fulfill this important role. To the cry of axios! for the candidate we should also cry eis polla eti, Despota! to our bishops.