Ecclesiology: Canonical Sources.

In Greek Patristic literature accepted throughout the entire Byzantine period as the ultimate expression of Church tradition, there was, generally speaking, no systematic treatment of “ecclesiology.” This does not mean however that such factors of Christian life as Church order, the sacraments, and tradition were not central for the Byzantines. A major source of our knowledge of Byzantine ecclesiological ideas is constituted by ancient canonical texts: conciliar decrees, commentaries, and later synodal legislation. Even imperial laws concerning the Church, inasmuch as they were accepted as guiding principles of ecclesiastical polity, often witnessed to ecclesiastical consciousness essentially identical to that of the conciliar canons.

Viewed from a juridical point of view, the entire body of Byzantine canonical sources hardly constitutes a coherent whole. The attempts at codification which we shall mention later are far from exhaustive and do not eliminate important contradictions. They were never intended to provide the Byzantine Church with a complete corpus juris. Many Western polemicists have pointed to this state of affairs as an essential weakness of Eastern Christianity, which has failed to provide itself with an independent and consistent canon law and thus has surrendered to the power of the state. These judgments however have generally taken for granted that the Church is a divine “institution” whose internal existence could be adequately defined in juridical terms, a presupposition, which Byzantine Christians did not consider. For them the Church was first of all a sacramental communion with God in Christ and the Spirit, whose membership — the entire Body of Christ — is not limited to the earthly oikoumene (“inhabited earth”) where law governs society but includes the host of angels and saints as well as the divine head. The management of the earthly Church was certainly recognized as a necessary task; and there, the use of juridical terms and concepts was unavoidable. But these concepts never exhausted the ultimate reality of the Church of God and could be determined occasionally by the councils or even left to the benevolent and, in principle, Christian care of the emperors.

This attitude did not mean however that the Byzantines were either indifferent toward the canons or juridically incompetent quite the contrary. They were generally aware that at least certain canons reflected the eternal and divine nature of the Church, and it was a Christian and absolute duty to obey them. Yet Roman traditions were always strong enough in Byzantium to maintain almost permanently a series of highly competent ecclesiastical lawyers who advised the emperors on decrees concerning the Church and also introduced principles of Roman Law into ecclesiastical legislation and jurisprudence. But again, they always understood their role as subordinate to the more fundamental and divine nature of the Church expressed in a sacramental and doctrinal communion uniting heaven and earth. And they recognized that there was no canonical legislation in heaven (for if “justification comes by law, then Christ died in vain,” Ga 2:21), and that their task was a limited one.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 536