Well, it’s quite simple. The Church has defined, at the second synod of orange (accepted and promulgated by Pope Boniface II) that man cannot approach God unless God enables him by his grace. But moreover, when God acts and grants man grace to come to him, even the decision to choose the grace is a grace.
For example, in the canons of the synod we read-
Canon 6. If anyone says that God has mercy upon us when, apart from his grace, we believe, will, desire, strive, labor, pray, watch, study, seek, ask, or knock, but does not confess that it is by the infusion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit within us that we have the faith, the will, or the strength to do all these things as we ought; or if anyone makes the assistance of grace depend on the humility or obedience of man and does not agree that it is a gift of grace itself that we are obedient and humble, he contradicts the Apostle who says, “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7), and, “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:10).
Canon 8. If anyone maintains that some are able to come to the grace of baptism by mercy but others through free will, which has manifestly been corrupted in all those who have been born after the transgression of the first man, it is proof that he has no place in the true faith. For he denies that the free will of all men has been weakened through the sin of the first man, or at least holds that it has been affected in such a way that they have still the ability to seek the mystery of eternal salvation by themselves without the revelation of God. The Lord himself shows how contradictory this is by declaring that no one is able to come to him “unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44), as he also says to Peter, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 16:17), and as the Apostle says, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3).
In Spirit, the Orthodox accept the content of these canons, but not this council per se, though it occurred in the 6th century.
This is an example of the selective reading and bias that many Orthodox display in their “patristic” theology. But not only this, there are innovations that are clearly contrary to the fathers. The essence/energies distinction as a real distinction in God, and not simply a mental, or virtual distinction as taught by Dionysius the Areopagite and St. John of Damascus for example. The fact that the east created scholasticism, not the west, which essentially imitated St. John of Damascus (who used aristotles metaphysics in his theology!!!).
These canons for example are not the product of scholastic legalism, but the fathers. Yet to adhere to them is to be accused as a legalist as I was earlier.
