Oxford history of the christian church

Part II. Organization and Life of the Orthodox Church in Byzantium.

1. Collegiality: the emergence of the pentarchy; the position of Constantinople.

Originally the Christian Church grew up within the Roman Empire, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, one of many religions, officially frowned on because it did not subscribe to emperor-worship. Faith and tenacity enabled it to survive. When in the early fourth century it was recognized by the Roman Emperor Constantine I it had already taken root in the cities of the Empire, spreading out into the countryside around. Its organization was based on that of the civil administration and it was the bishops of the great cities who took the lead in church affairs — Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch — and this they could do openly from the days of Constantine onward. With the foundation of Constantine's capital, Constantinople, a different situation was created. As 'New Rome' and the centre of the eastern half of the Empire it emancipated itself from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the metropolitan of Heracleia in Thrace and claimed second place in the hierarchy next to Old Rome. In 381 this was recognized by the second general council, Constantinople I, thus displacing powerful Alexandria. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become more than a tolerated faith as it had been under Constantine I, for Theodosius proscribed all non-Christian religions. Thus strengthened the Church sought to define its beliefs. The vital theological issues and the rivalries of the fifth and sixth centuries are outside the scope of this book. But by the early seventh century, though some doctrinal problems still remained unresolved, ecclesiastical organization had taken shape and the pentarchy had emerged, consisting of the bishops of five cities, the Pope of Rome, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The first four were of political as well as apostolic significance. Jerusalem was given its position by reason of its special association with the life of Christ on earth.

When in the seventh century the Muslims conquered the lands of the Roman Empire in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine the situation changed and church government took on its medieval pattern. The Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem lived on but were under a non-Christian regime, outside the contracted bounds of the Roman Empire and this orthodox Church now found itself side by side with the separated non-Chalcedonian Churches, either monophysite or Nestorian (these latter were largely in Persian territory). Although the three eastern patriarchs continued when possible to take part in conciliar and other discussions, clearly they were not of anything like the same importance in the Christian world as Rome and Constantinople. Further, in the course of the fifth to the eighth centuries the political situation in what had been the western half of the Roman Empire radically altered. The sixthcentury efforts of Justinian I had failed to regain for the Roman Empire its western provinces which were settled by immigrant Germanic peoples and out of the wanderings of Lombards, Franks, Visigoths, there grew up the independent principalities of western medieval Europe. Italy long remained a bridgehead and East Rome struggled, in the end unsuccessfully, to contest the claims of Lombard, Frank, and Muslim, as well as those of the papacy which had been endowed with temporalities by gift of the victorious Carolingians. It was not however until the late eleventh century that Byzantium was finally evicted from Italian lands. From then onwards the Byzantine Empire, which had to some extent reasserted itself on its eastern reaches, had to give way before a threefold attack: ambitious vigorous western feudatories, a new wave of Turkic peoples in the east, and pressure from the young principalities in the Balkans.

Against this background Byzantium reached its greatest strength in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, after that it slowly lost ground to its Latin and Muslim rivals and was finally integrated into the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In contrast the Orthodox Church did not succumb. As already described in Part I, it held its own in the face of continuing and increasing challenge from the Latin Church. Like the medieval East Roman Empire, the Orthodox Church was not static during the five hundred years from the seventh to the mid-fifteenth centuries nor, as one modern western medievalist would have it, can it be described as 'the Greek Church in a state of slow decline'. It has to be thought of in terms of the patriarchate of Constantinople, since historical circumstances meant that it was only this branch which could take the lead, though the three eastern patriarchates continued their rather shadowy life, unable to take any effective initiative in the ecclesiastical world and in practice virtually subordinate to Constantinople.

The jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople as shown in the various episcopal lists ¹ extended over the provinces within the Empire, and over the countries it converted to Christianity, such as the Balkans, at times provinces of the Empire and at times independent principalities, or the various Russian principalities, never politically integrated into Byzantium. Thus through the medieval centuries the patriarchate of Constantinople gradually expanded or contracted. The annexation of South Italy and Illyricum, the recapture of Crete, added metropolitans and bishops to the list, as did the new Balkan episcopates. On the other hand with the eleventh-century Norman conquests in South Italy, the Greek monasteries and churches increasingly recognized Latin jurisdiction, though keeping their own usages. And Muslim inroads into Byzantine territory in Asia Minor meant that many bishops fled to Constantinople or to Nicaea (from 1204-61) or to Epirus thus deserting their dioceses. Fluctuating fortune in the later middle ages often made it difficult to know who was in charge of a diocese.

Throughout these changes the Orthodox Church under the leadership of Constantinople maintained that ecclesiastical decisions on major issues must be made by a pentarchy of the original five leading sees supported by episcopal consensus in a general council and it became increasingly difficult to reconcile with papal claims to universal primacy.