jimmy:
Is it a doctrine or a dogma? I don’t think Anselm could just declare dogmas of the church.
I forgot about this Catholic distinction. In the East we don’t have such a distinction.
But I do remember that when a friend of mine, a Catholic school teacher, asked one of the local priests about it he told her that she could not deny it and remain a Catholic. So I guess it is de fide.
The Orthodox have a quite wholistic approach to the Faith.
Orthodoxy looks on the faith as a united and organic whole. Speaking of the Anglo Russian Theological Conference at Moscow in 1956, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, expressed the Orthodox viewpoint exactly:
The Orthodox said in effect: " … The ‘tradition is a concrete fact. There it is, in its totality. Do you Anglicans accept it, or do you reject it?’ The Tradition is for the Orthodox one indivisible whole: the entire life of the Church in its fullness of belief and custom down the ages, including Mariology and the veneration of icons.
Faced with this challenge, the typically Anglican reply is: ‘We would not regard veneration of icons or Mariology as inadmissible, provided that in determining what is necessary to salvation, we confine ourselves to Holy Scripture.’
But this reply only throws into relief the contrast between the Anglican appeal to what is deemed necessary to salvation and the Orthodox appeal to the one indivisible organism of Tradition, to tamper with any part of which is to spoil the whole, in the sort of way that a single splodge on a picture can mar its beauty."
‘The Moscow Conference in Retrospect’, in Sobornost, series 3, no. 23, 1958, pp. 562-3.]
In the words of another Anglican writer: "It has been said that the faith is like a network rather than an assemblage of discrete dogmas; cut one strand and the whole pattern loses its meaning.’