Councils and Their Canons
12 topics
EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsFirst Ecumenical Council: Nicaea I (325)The first council of the whole Church, called by Constantine to Nicaea in 325 when the quarrel over Arius had split the East. The Church remembers the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, the number of Abraham’s household in Genesis; historians count somewhat fewer. It condemned Arius, wrote the first part of the Creed with the word homoousios at its centre, and settled that all the churches should keep Pascha on the same Sunday, apart from the Jewish Passover reckoning. Its twenty canons regulate the rights of the great sees, the readmission of the lapsed, and why no one kneels on Sundays. The council did not end the controversy; it took fifty years for the Church to receive what it had said, and that reception, more than the gathering itself, is what made it ecumenical.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsFourth Ecumenical Council: Chalcedon (451)Defined the two natures of Christ, divine and human, in one Person, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." Condemned the one-nature teaching of Eutyches. Canon 28 gave the see of Constantinople privileges equal to those of older Rome while ranking it second in order after her; Rome refused to ratify that canon, though it received the definition of faith. 630 bishops attended, the largest of the ancient councils.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsSecond Ecumenical Council: Constantinople I (381)The council of a hundred and fifty bishops that met at Constantinople in 381 under Theodosius, after the Arian emperors were gone. St Gregory the Theologian presided for part of it and resigned during it. It confessed the divinity of the Holy Spirit against those who made Him a creature, and gave the Creed the form the Church says now: the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, and the articles on the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the life of the age to come. Its third canon gave the bishop of Constantinople the first place after Rome, because it was the new Rome, which is the beginning of the order of the churches. It was a council of the East alone, and became ecumenical when Chalcedon received it.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsSeventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787)The seventh and last Ecumenical Council, which met at Nicaea in 787 under the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, after a first attempt the year before was broken up by soldiers loyal to the iconoclasts. It defined that holy images of Christ, the Mother of God, the angels and the saints are to be set up and venerated, and drew the distinction the whole argument turned on: veneration, proskynesis, may be given to an icon, while worship, latreia, belongs to God alone; and the honour paid to the image passes to the one it shows, in St Basil’s words. Its reason is the Incarnation: God made Himself visible, and to refuse to paint Him is to deny that He was seen. Iconoclasm returned in 815 and was ended for good in 843, which the Church keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsThird Ecumenical Council: Ephesus (431)The council of 431, called to settle whether the one born of the Virgin is God. Nestorius of Constantinople preferred to call her Christotokos, mother of Christ, and St Cyril of Alexandria answered that to refuse her the title Theotokos was to divide her Son into two. Cyril opened the council before the bishops from Antioch arrived and condemned Nestorius; the Antiochenes held a rival council when they came and condemned Cyril; the emperor arrested both. It took the Formula of Reunion in 433 to bring the two sides together on one confession of the one Christ. The people of Ephesus met the verdict with torches in the street. Its seventh canon forbids any other creed than Nicaea’s, and its eighth upheld the independence of the Church of Cyprus.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsSixth Ecumenical Council: Constantinople III (680-681)Convened by the Emperor Constantine IV and held in the domed hall of the imperial palace. It condemned Monothelitism and the single operation that went with it, and defined that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, without change, without separation and without confusion, His human will following the divine not as resisting or reluctant but as subject to it. The argument is St. Maximus the Confessor's: a will belongs to a nature and not to a person, so a Christ with no human will would not be a man, and what He did not assume He did not heal. Gethsemane is the text it rests on, where the Lord prays that not His will but the Father's be done, and prays it with a human will that wants to live. It condemned Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter of Constantinople, Cyrus of Alexandria, Theodore of Pharan and Pope Honorius of Rome, whose condemnation Pope Leo II then confirmed; an Ecumenical Council judging a pope for heresy is among the plainest Orthodox answers to the later claim of personal infallibility. St. Maximus and Pope St. Martin I had both died in exile for this confession and neither lived to see it received. It issued no canons of its own, and the Quinisext Council supplied them eleven years later.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Palamite Councils (1341-1351)A series of councils at Constantinople, principally in 1341, 1347 and 1351, which judged the hesychast controversy in favour of St Gregory Palamas against Barlaam of Calabria and his successors. The council of 1351, at Blachernae, issued the Synodal Tomos that states the doctrine: there is in God a real distinction between the unknowable essence and the uncreated energies, both are truly God, and the light seen by the hesychasts is that uncreated energy and not a created sign. A further council in 1368 numbered Palamas among the saints. Orthodox writers commonly treat these councils as carrying ecumenical authority, without a settled number.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsFifth Ecumenical Council: Constantinople II (553)Convened by the Emperor Justinian and presided over by Eutychius of Constantinople, with 165 bishops signing its acts. Its work was to settle how Chalcedon is to be read: it condemned the Three Chapters, the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against St. Cyril, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari, so that the two natures could never be taken to mean two subjects. It confessed that One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh, received the twelve anathemas of St. Cyril as the measure of Chalcedon, and named the Theotokos ever-virgin. It condemned Origen by name alongside Arius, Nestorius and Eutyches, and the fifteen anathemas against Origenism are received with the council in the tradition, though whether the council itself issued them or a synod shortly before it is disputed. Pope Vigilius was in the city and would not attend, wrote in defence of the Three Chapters, and assented only afterwards, and northern Italy went into the Three Chapters schism, Aquileia for more than a century. It did not win back those who had refused Chalcedon, which was the thing Justinian wanted from it most.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Apostolic CanonsEighty-five rules handed down under the name of the Apostles, the oldest body of church law the Orthodox Church receives. They were compiled in Syria in the later fourth century as the close of the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Church took the canons while setting the Constitutions aside: the second canon of the Council in Trullo (692) received the eighty-five and rejected the rest as corrupted by heretics. The councils already treated them as binding; Nicaea I's fifteenth canon appeals to "the apostolic canon" against a cleric moving from city to city. They come first in every collection and in the Pedalion, and they govern ordination (a bishop by two or three bishops), the conduct of the clergy, the reception of heretics, the Paschal reckoning, and, in the eighty-fifth, which books are to be held as Scripture.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Council of Constantinople (879-880)Held under St Photios the Great, with legates sent by Pope John VIII. It restored Photios to his see, annulled the council of 869-870 that had deposed him, and anathematised anyone who should add to or take from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is a condemnation of the Filioque before Rome itself had added it to the Creed. John VIII accepted its decisions; Rome repudiated it in the eleventh century and now counts the council of 869-870 as its eighth. Many Orthodox reckon this council the Eighth Ecumenical Council, and that reckoning is not universally settled among them.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Quinisext Council (Trullo, 692)Called Penthekte, the fifth-and-sixth, because it supplied the canons that the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils had not issued, both having ruled on doctrine alone. Its 102 canons are the backbone of Orthodox canon law: they settle the scriptural canon by receiving the earlier lists, regulate the clergy, forbid depicting Christ as a lamb in place of His human form, and legislate on fasting and marriage. The Orthodox Church receives them as having the authority of the Sixth Council; Rome never accepted them in full, which is itself one of the older fault lines between East and West.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Synod of Jerusalem (1672)Convened at Bethlehem under Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem to answer a Calvinist confession circulated under the name of Patriarch Cyril Loukaris of Constantinople. Its Confession of Dositheos rejects predestination without regard to the will, faith without works, and the reduction of the Mysteries to signs; it affirms the real change of the gifts in the Eucharist, the veneration of icons and saints, and the anagignoskomena as genuine Scripture. It is the nearest thing Orthodoxy has to a formal reply to the Reformation, and it is a local council of high authority rather than an ecumenical one.