Synergy (Synergeia)

The word comes straight from St. Paul. "For we are labourers together with God," he tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3:9) — in his Greek, synergoi, "fellow workers," the root of synergeia. And to the Philippians he gives the whole teaching in a single breath: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12-13). Both halves of that sentence stand. You must work; and it is God who works in you. Orthodoxy refuses to soften either half, and synergy is simply the Church's name for holding them together.

Synergy is not arithmetic. It does not mean God contributes ninety percent and we supply the remainder, as though grace were a quantity to be split. Everything in salvation is God's gift — grace is nothing less than His own uncreated life, offered to us. Our part adds nothing to God's work; it receives it. As St. Cyril of Jerusalem told those preparing for baptism, God's part is to grant grace, and ours is to receive it and guard it. A sail adds nothing to the wind — but the ship will not move until the sail goes up.

The Church has had to defend this teaching on two fronts. Against pelagianism — the old teaching that human beings can take the first steps toward God by their own unaided effort — the Church confessed that without grace we cannot even rightly desire the good, let alone accomplish it. Grace always comes first: it awakens, accompanies, and completes every movement toward God. No one climbs to heaven by willpower; heaven descends.

But Orthodoxy equally declined the opposite conclusion, drawn by some in the Christian West, that grace is irresistible and the human will contributes nothing of its own — that God's saving grace, once given, cannot finally be refused. The Church heard the Gospel differently: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock" (Revelation 3:20). He knocks; He does not break the door down. Free will belongs to the image of God in us, and a salvation that bypassed our freedom would rescue something less than a person. Love, to be love, must be freely answered.

The tradition's favorite picture of synergy is a young woman in Nazareth. At the Annunciation, the eternal purpose of God awaited the freely spoken consent of the Theotokos: "be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). Heaven did not compel her answer. In her yes the Church sees what every human yes to God looks like — small, free, and world-changing.

In ordinary life, synergy has an ordinary shape: prayer kept when it is dry, fasting, the Holy Mysteries, the slow keeping of the commandments, repentance after every fall. None of these earn salvation, any more than opening the curtains earns the sunrise. They are how a free creature stays turned toward the light. This is why the Church speaks of salvation as a life rather than a moment, and why synergy is the grammar of theosis: God gives everything — and waits, with unfathomable patience, for us to say yes.