How the Local Churches Are One

If each local church possesses the whole Christ, their unity cannot consist in a shared administration; and yet a church out of communion with the rest is manifestly in a defective state. This file sets out what the unity of the local churches actually consists in — the commemoration of names, letters of communion, the rule that consecration requires several bishops, the provincial and patriarchal synods, and the diptychs — and then states the unresolved theoretical question underneath, which is whether the local or the universal Church is prior.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Not a Federation and Not an Empire

Two models are ruled out before the positive account begins.

Not a federation. The Church is not a voluntary association of self-standing bodies which have agreed to cooperate. If she were, communion would be a policy and could be adjusted like one, and the rupture of communion would be a diplomatic event rather than a wound. The tradition treats a breach of communion as a grave spiritual condition and not as a lapsed treaty.

Not an empire. Neither is the Church a single juridical body with a head, of which local churches are administrative provinces. The Orthodox rejection of the Roman Catholic account of papal primacy — universal immediate ordinary jurisdiction, defined at the First Vatican Council in Pastor Aeternus (1870) — is precisely a rejection of this model, and the Orthodox objection is ecclesiological before it is historical: a bishop with immediate jurisdiction in every diocese would make every other bishop something less than the head of his church (see Orthodox and Catholic, and Primacy and Synodality).

What is left is koinōnia: communion, which is neither a contract nor a chain of command, and which the Church expresses and maintains by concrete and checkable means.

The Means of Communion

The commemoration of names

The primary and most exact instrument. In every Liturgy the celebrant commemorates his bishop; the bishop commemorates his primate; the primate commemorates the primates with whom his church is in communion. To be commemorated is to be in communion; to cease to be commemorated is to be out of it. The instrument is public, liturgical, and unambiguous, which is why every rupture in Orthodox history registers as a change in commemoration — and why the ordered list of commemorated primates, the diptychs, is not a protocol document but the register of communion itself (The Diptychs and Communion).

Letters of communion

From the earliest centuries a Christian travelling from one church to another carried letters attesting that he was in communion at home; clergy and bishops carried the equivalent. The canonical tradition regulates them under various names — systatikai, eirēnikai, apolytikai, letters commendatory, peaceable, and dimissory — and the whole apparatus presupposes that communion is a definite state with an outside and an inside. Antioch (341), Canons 7 and 8, and Chalcedon (451), Canon 11, are among the canons that govern them; Apostolic Canon 12 forbids receiving a cleric who comes without them.

The point is not the bureaucracy. It is that a bishop receiving a stranger to communion is acting for his own church and for all the churches at once — which is what communion means.

The rule that no bishop consecrates alone

Apostolic Canon 1 requires that a bishop be ordained by two or three bishops; Nicaea I, Canon 4 requires that all the bishops of the province take part or at least consent in writing, with the metropolitan confirming. The rule has an obvious practical function and a deeper structural one: no local church can perpetuate its own episcopate by itself. Its head is given to it by the other churches. Whatever the local church’s fullness, her continuity is not in her own hands, and this single canon does more to establish the interdependence of the churches than any theory of primacy.

The rule is also why the derivation of episcopal orders is a live and non-trivial question whenever a body is formed outside communion — a point that becomes concrete in section 09.

The synods

The canonical architecture is layered, and each layer is a body of bishops rather than an office.

The provincial synod. Nicaea I, Canon 5, requires the bishops of each province to meet twice a year, and makes the provincial synod the court that reviews excommunications pronounced by individual bishops. Antioch (341), Canon 9, sets out the metropolitan’s role: the bishops of the province acknowledge him as first, do nothing of consequence without him, and he does nothing without them.
The metropolitan and, later, the patriarchal level. Nicaea I, Canon 6, confirms “the ancient customs” by which Alexandria, Rome, and Antioch exercise authority over surrounding regions; Constantinople I, Canon 3, gives Constantinople the rank of honour after Rome “because it is New Rome”; Chalcedon, Canon 28, extends this and assigns Constantinople the ordination of metropolitans in Pontus, Asia, and Thrace.
The general council. Treated in section 04.

Apostolic Canon 34 is the constitutional text that governs all the levels at once and is quoted here in full because everything in sections 04, 07, and 09 turns on it:

“The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account him as their head, and do nothing of consequence without his consent; but each may do those things only which concern his own parish, and the country places which belong to it. But neither let him (who is the first) do anything without the consent of all; for so there will be unanimity, and God will be glorified through the Lord in the Holy Spirit.” (Apostolic Canon 34; trans. NPNF II/14)

The canon establishes a reciprocal constraint: the bishops do nothing of common consequence without the first, and the first does nothing without them. It is invoked by every party to every modern primacy dispute, and — as the canon-law hub notes — by opposite parties for opposite purposes (Autocephaly and Territory).

The territorial principle

Communion is also maintained by staying out of one another’s territory. Nicaea I, Canon 8, in dealing with returning Novatianists, insists that “there be only one bishop in the city.” Apostolic Canon 35 forbids a bishop to ordain beyond his own limits, on pain of deposition. Constantinople I, Canon 2 forbids bishops to go beyond their dioceses to churches outside their bounds.

The principle is ancient and largely undisputed in theory, and it is honoured in the breach in the modern diaspora, where several bishops of different jurisdictions sit in the same city. Every Orthodox church acknowledges this as an anomaly; none has been willing to resolve it at its own expense. That fact is worth stating in a file about how the churches are one, because it is the largest standing exception to the account given here (see Phyletism and the Council of 1872).

The Unresolved Question

Underneath the machinery is a question the Church has not answered: is the universal Church prior to the local, or the local to the universal?

The Orthodox form of the dispute runs between Afanasiev and Zizioulas, and it was set out in the previous file. Restated as a question about priority:

The local-priority answer. Each eucharistic assembly under its bishop is the whole Church. Nothing is added by aggregation. The relations between churches are therefore relations of mutual recognition among complete realities, and structures above the local church — metropolitans, patriarchs, primates — are matters of good order established by canon, not of the Church’s constitution. Afanasiev is the strongest modern exponent (The Church of the Holy Spirit).

The simultaneity answer. The local church is fully the Church only as the church which is in communion with all the others; catholicity is not a property she has in isolation but her openness to and identity with the rest. There is therefore no level of church life at which the “many” exists without a “one,” and structures of primacy are constitutive rather than merely useful. Zizioulas is the strongest modern exponent (Being as Communion, chs. 4–5).

[Disputed: whether the local church or the universal Church is ecclesiologically prior. Afanasiev's eucharistic ecclesiology gives priority to the local eucharistic assembly and treats supra-local structures as canonical rather than constitutive (*The Church of the Holy Spirit*, Notre Dame, 2007); Zizioulas argues that the "one" and the "many" are simultaneously constitutive at every level, so that a primate is required by the structure of communion itself (*Being as Communion*, SVS Press, 1985, chs. 4–5). Both are Orthodox theologians in good standing; both accounts have been criticised on patristic and historical grounds ([Nicholas Afanasiev: The Critique](../../nicholas-afanasiev/09-the-critique-and-assessment/the-critique.md); [John Zizioulas: The Patristic Question](../../john-zizioulas/08-the-critique/the-patristic-question.md)); and no pan-Orthodox synodal act has adjudicated between them.]

It is important to be clear about the practical stakes, because they are the reason the dispute is not academic. If the simultaneity answer is right in its strong form, then the Church requires a universal protos with real functions, and the absence of an agreed account of what those functions are is a defect that must be repaired. If the local-priority answer is right in its strong form, then a universal primacy is a matter of order that the churches may arrange as they see fit, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s claims are claims about canon law rather than about the Church’s constitution. Sections 04 and 07 show what happens when the two answers meet in a live case.

What Can Be Said Without Deciding

Four things, and they are enough to work with.

Communion is not optional. Whatever the theory, the canons make each local church dependent on the others for its own episcopate, its clergy’s mobility, and the review of its bishop’s acts.
Communion is concrete. It is registered in commemoration, in letters, in concelebration, and in the diptychs, and its rupture is therefore always datable and always public.
Primacy exists at every level and is bounded at every level. Apostolic Canon 34 gives the first real functions and denies him the power to act without the rest, in the same sentence. Any account that drops half the canon has misread it.
The territorial principle is the practical form of the whole. Churches remain one in part by not being in each other’s places, which is why territorial intrusion is treated as a canonical offence rather than as a discourtesy — and why both parties to the dispute in section 09 accuse the other of it in exactly the same terms.

References

Apostolic Canons 1, 12, 34, 35; First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea I, 325), Canons 4, 5, 6, 8; Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople I, 381), Canons 2, 3; Council of Antioch (341), Canons 7, 8, 9; Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canons 11, 28 — trans. NPNF II/14 (Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils); D. Cummings, trans., The Rudder (Pedalion), Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion, chs. 4–5. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.
Meyendorff, John, ed. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992.
Erickson, John H. The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991.
Nikodim (Milaš), Bishop. Pravila pravoslavne crkve s tumačenjima (The Canons of the Orthodox Church with Commentaries), 2 vols. Novi Sad, 1895–96.
First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870). (Cited for the position it defines, per METHODOLOGY §4.1.)
Moscow Patriarchate, “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church,” Holy Synod, 26 December 2013 (mospat.ru).