Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 40

The early Church had known episcopal councils, but their significance had been that local churches were really represented; they participated in the person of their bishops. The bishop, uniting his flock, was its voice and the witness to its faith, and for it he was the voice of the Church Universal expressed at the council. The synod, on the other hand, was an administrative organ, and for a bishop to participate in it meant, however paradoxical it may sound, that he was in fact separated from his own flock and Church. The synod did not feel itself to be the “mouth of the Church” as a council would be, but a sort of permanent authority which the bishops represented in their local churches. We have seen that the synod of Constantinople was formed almost haphazardly, being composed of bishops who happened to be passing through the capital on various business. Once established, however, it soon became a permanent institution, and the obvious reason for this was the increasing parallelism between the structures of Church and empire. Later Byzantine documents, as we shall see, openly confirm the parallel between them: the patriarch corresponded to the emperor and the synod to the Senate. This is far removed from the sacramental root of the structure of the early Church.

When Egypt, Palestine, and Syria fell under the rule of Islam, Constantinople became the only patriarchal see in the empire, and naturally the see became “ecumenical,” since the empire was called oekumene, the universe. During the Christological dispute, Constantinople was obliged to oppose the other Eastern centers: Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus. The capital was frequently the source of heresies and of compromise with heresies; but it assumed the whole weight of the struggle for Chalcedonian orthodoxy. From the time of Justinian and the separation of the churches, the orthodox Chalcedonian bishops of Antioch and Alexandria, competing with local Monophysite hierarchy, were not local men but appointed from Constantinople. This sort of control from the capital increased in the seventh century; to replace the patriarch of Antioch, Macarius (deposed for Monothelitism by the Sixth Ecumenical Council), the orthodox Theophanes was simply appointed and consecrated right in Constantinople. This practice became usual in the Orthodox Church for a very long time to come. The patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria became leaders of small groups of Melkites, or Greek minorities in a Monophysite sea, and naturally came to regard themselves as representatives of the center, the powerful ecumenical patriarch.

The importance of the patriarch of Constantinople increased so much by reason of these various circumstances that he assumed the position of head of the whole Eastern Church, much as the Roman pope stood at the head of the Western Church.[14] The analogy must not, of course, be carried too far. The Roman pope in the West not only assumed the position of head, but the fall of the empire made him the bearer of secular authority as well — the source of imperial and state structure. The Byzantine patriarch, on the contrary, acquired his position because the theory of “symphony” demanded a parallelism between the structure of state and Church. While the empire was personified in the emperor, the priesthood must also have a single personification which — became the ecumenical patriarch of the new Rome.

 

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