Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 39

This was expressed primarily in the final triumph of the seat of Constantinople as the center of the whole Eastern Church. Justinian in his Code had called the Church of Constantinople “the head of all other Churches” and was apparently the first to call its patriarch “ecumenical.” The title provoked sharp protests from Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century, but nevertheless became under Heraclius the usual title of the patriarchs of the imperial city. The Greeks, it is true, have always made the reservation that it does not signify that the patriarch of Constantinople is in any way superior to his brethren, and in the twelfth century one of the most authoritative Byzantine canonists, Theodore Balsamon, did not regard the patriarch of Constantinople as holding “any of the advantages which adorn the Pope of Rome.” Indeed, the Greeks have never suffered from “papism” in the sense of claiming that the bishop of the capital held any divinely established primacy over other bishops.

Yet the structure of the Church, of which the patriarch of Constantinople became the central point, differed essentially from what we saw when the Church first united with the Roman Empire. Canonically everything remained as it had been; the universal structure of the Church remained as always a union of autocephalous (i.e., autonomous) patriarchs, the bishops of the large cities retained their pompous titles, and dogmatically speaking, every bishop remained what he had been in the doctrine of St. Cyprian of Carthage, St. Hippolytus of Rome, or — even earlier — St. Ignatius of Antioch: the image of God, the fully-empowered preserver of apostolic tradition, and the bearer of the unity of his bishopric. In fact, however, such local churches, which had previously felt themselves to be the people of God in all its fullness in a particular locality, were increasingly becoming eparchies or administrative subdivisions of a greater whole; and the head of the eparchy, the bishop, was accordingly becoming a representative or agent of the central, higher Church authority concentrated in the hands of the patriarch of Constantinople and the patriarchal synod.

The change in the practice of episcopal consecration is extremely indicative of this. According to the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, a document of the first half of the third century, a newly-elected bishop was always consecrated amid the congregation of the Church to which he was elected — among the people whose spiritual father, first priest, and pastor he was to be, and with their prayerful participation. It was the bishop’s marriage to the Church, according to St. Paul’s teaching in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Immediately after his consecration he celebrated the Eucharist, and the bishops who had laid hands upon him participated in this Eucharist as concelebrants. Also the bishop naturally remained in his Church to the end of his days, so that a Church which had lost its bishop was called “widowed.”

In the course of time, however, the significance of the local Church was progressively weakened, giving way to a centralized concept. By the fourth century we encounter bishops shifting from one see to another. At first the practice was generally condemned, but the protests dwindled, and the transfer of bishops from see to see became so usual that much later, in Petrine Russia, it had become the norm of Church life. Bishops were increasingly accepted as assistants, representatives, and executives of the orders of central power, and a new institution naturally developed which had been absolutely unknown in the early Church: the episcopal synod of the patriarch.

 

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