St. Sophia’s Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Kiev, Ukraine

To gain a deeper understanding of our Greek-Catholic faith, we must first attempt to determine what it considers to be its most basic beliefs. I believe that these basic beliefs are made manifest in its spirituality. I would preface my thoughts by reminding my readers that our Church is an unique Slavic adaptation of the Byzantine Church and is noticeably different from that of the Mediterranean Byzantines around Greece, Syria and Lebanon. Nonetheless, one common thread that runs through Byzantine spirituality is its Trinitarian focus. In other words, it begins with the human experience of Jesus who reveals the Father and sends the Spirit. By contrast, Roman Catholic spirituality tends to being with the notion of one God and from there proceeds to the Trinity.

Byzantine Trinitarian spirituality is reflected in its anthropology and in its worship. Unlike the West, which speaks of a “natural state” as a morally neutral one alongside supernatural and unnatural states for human beings, we Slavic Byzantines admit only two human conditions. What Byzantines refer to as the natural human state is actually equivalent to what the West means by the “supernatural”. That is, for us, human nature is truly human only inasmuch as it is in communion with God by the indwelling of the Spirit. The other possibility for the human person is to be in an unnatural state, that is, our  communion with God. This Trinitarian principle is absolutely fundamental to the Slavic Byzantine understanding of human existence and human expression, including prayer and worship. Salvation is viewed primarily as participation and communion with God through the Word by the Spirit. And so a majority of Byzantine theologians prefer to speak of the human person as a trichotomy of body, soul and spirit (or mind) rather than the body-soul dichotomy of the West. This image better serves to facilitate an understanding of the human person’s participation in God through the Trinity.

St. Athanasius points out that the Son and the Spirit are inseparable in the work of salvation. He points to the Annunciation as the working model for salvation because the Spirit and the Son entered Mary together