§ 66. Fundamental Conditions for Entering the Clergy

According to the importance of the service entrusted to members of the clergy, church legislation has established in detail the conditions under which a person may enter the clergy, and likewise the qualities he must possess in order to be able to receive ordination. Of the qualities of candidates for the clergy we shall speak in the following paragraphs; here we speak of the fundamental conditions for entering the clergy. By fundamental conditions we mean those which must be unconditionally preserved, in order that a person may be enrolled among the members of the hierarchy.

Of such fundamental conditions there are two, and both rest upon the prescriptions of divine right. The practice of the apostolic Church, and the church legislation of every age, have established for all time the significance of these conditions.

Among these fundamental conditions the first is Baptism. He who wishes to become a member of the sacred clergy must be properly baptized, that is, his baptism must be recognized as valid in the Orthodox Church. In view of this, the Church does not recognize ordination performed in a religious community whose baptism it does not recognize as valid; and, conversely, it recognizes ordination performed in individual religious communities which are not in unity with the Church, but whose baptism it holds to be valid.[1] In the Church of the first centuries, catechumens too were reckoned among Christians in the broader sense, and we have examples of some among these catechumens being chosen for sacred ministry and ordained after their baptism.[2] But these were exceptional cases, and could occur only in view of the position of the Church in the world at that time; and the weight that was placed upon it is proved by the zeal with which, in general, the matter was handled.

The second fundamental condition for receiving ordination canon law holds to be that the person be male. The Church has never recognized in women any inner authority in church affairs; rather, they are, by the command of Holy Scripture, obliged to keep silence in the churches and to be obedient, nor may they perform any inner church service.[3] There existed, in the Church of the older period, certain women in church service—namely deaconesses[4] — but they held no independent authority whatever; they only performed certain services, for the sake of which the bishops, with the prescribed prayers, laid hands upon them, as upon clerics of the lower degrees.[5] Moreover, already by the middle of the 4th century the Church forbade the appointing of deaconesses as a special church office,[6] and afterward they disappear altogether, so that by the 12th century mention is made of them only as of something that had existed in antiquity.[7]