Primacy and Synodality

Orthodoxy has always had primates and has always insisted that a primate is not a monarch. Apostolic Canon 34 states the relation as a reciprocal constraint — the first does nothing without the rest, the rest do nothing of consequence without the first — and it has worked for seventeen centuries at the level of a province. What it means at the level of the universal Church is the question the Orthodox churches have not answered, and the absence of an answer is the structural cause of the crisis treated in section 09. This file sets out the canonical basis, the two modern Orthodox positions from their own texts, and the gap.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Canon

Apostolic Canon 34 is the constitutional text:

“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)

Three provisions, and the canon collapses if any is dropped:

There must be a first. The canon does not treat primacy as an optional convenience.
The rest may not act in common matters without him.
He may not act at all without them.

The canon’s own stated purpose is homonoia, unanimity, and its stated end is the glory of God in the Trinity — the last clause is not decoration but the theological ground: the “one” and the “many” are held together because that is how God is. Zizioulas’ formula compresses it: there is no council without a primate and no primate without a council (Being as Communion).

The canon was framed for a ethnos, a province or region, and is uncontroversial at that level. Every Orthodox church operates on it internally: a synod of bishops with a presiding primate who cannot act alone.

The Ranking of Sees, and Its Basis

The ancient ordering of the great sees was established by canon and it was established on a stated basis.

Nicaea I, Canon 6 confirms “the ancient customs” by which the bishop of Alexandria has authority over Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis, “since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome also,” and likewise at Antioch and in the other provinces.
Constantinople I, Canon 3 gives the bishop of Constantinople “the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome.”
Chalcedon, Canon 28 confirms this and extends Constantinople’s competence to the ordination of the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia, and Thrace, and of bishops “among the barbarians” in those dioceses. Its stated reason is explicit: the Fathers gave privileges to the throne of old Rome “because it was the royal city,” and the hundred and fifty bishops gave equal privileges to New Rome, “judging with good reason that the city which is honoured with the sovereignty and the senate, and enjoys equal privileges with the old imperial Rome, should in ecclesiastical matters also be magnified as she is” (Chalcedon, Canon 28; trans. NPNF II/14).

The last point is doctrinally significant and is regularly passed over. The canon grounds the ranking of the two senior sees in the civil status of their cities, not in apostolic foundation and not in any divine institution. This is the canonical basis of the Orthodox refusal to treat primacy as iure divino: the honour of a see is an ecclesiastical arrangement made for good order, and what the Church has arranged the Church may in principle rearrange.

The reading of Canon 28’s phrase “among the barbarians” (en tois barbarikois) is one of the two principal proof-text disputes and is set out with both-side sourcing in the canon-law hub (Autocephaly and Territory); the other is the appellate reading of Chalcedon, Canons 9 and 17 (Church Governance). This collection does not restate those disputes; it uses them.

The pentarchy — Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem — was the Byzantine formulation of this order, expressed in Justinian’s legislation and ranked conciliarly at Trullo, Canon 36. It ceased to function long ago: three of the five sees fell under Islamic rule in the seventh century, Rome separated in the eleventh, and the emergence of the Slavic and Balkan autocephalies transformed the structure entirely. The canon-law hub records the scholarly dispute over how far the pentarchy was ever operative rather than theoretical.

What Orthodox Primacy Is Not

Stated plainly, because it is the point at which Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiology diverge and because the difference is dogmatic.

The First Vatican Council, in Pastor Aeternus (1870), defined that the Roman Pontiff possesses “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church,” that this power is “ordinary and immediate” over all churches and all the faithful, and that he teaches infallibly when he defines ex cathedra a doctrine concerning faith or morals. The Orthodox Church has examined these propositions and has not received them. The objection is not that the definition assigns Rome too high a rank — the Orthodox order of the first millennium gave Rome the first place — but that immediate universal jurisdiction makes every other bishop something less than the head of his own church, and that infallibility attached to an office rather than exercised in the body contradicts the doctrine of reception (The Council and the Question of Reception; and see Orthodox and Catholic).

Orthodox primacy is accordingly a primacy of taxis and honour with real coordinating functions: presidency at pan-Orthodox gatherings, the right to convene them, the role of spokesman, and — on one reading — a role in receiving appeals. It does not include jurisdiction over other autocephalous churches, the power to define dogma, or the power to intervene in another church’s internal affairs without its consent. So far all Orthodox churches agree. The disagreement begins at exactly the point where this list stops being negative.

The Modern Dispute, from Its Own Texts

The Ravenna Document (2007)

The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church adopted at Ravenna, on 13 October 2007, the text “Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority.” Its substance: conciliarity and primacy are correlative at every level of church life — local, regional, and universal — and at the universal level there is a protos among the patriarchs, the bishop of Rome in the order of the first millennium, whose specific prerogatives remained to be studied.

The Moscow Patriarchate’s delegation withdrew from the Ravenna session at its opening over the participation of a delegation of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church, a jurisdiction it does not recognize, and Moscow subsequently stated that it does not consider itself bound by the text. The dialogue continued and produced the Chieti document, “Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium,” in September 2016.

The status of these texts should be stated exactly: they are documents of a theological dialogue commission. They are not synodal acts of the Orthodox Church, they bind no Orthodox church, and citing them settles nothing. They are cited here because they framed the intra-Orthodox argument that followed. (John Zizioulas: Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016 treats them in detail.)

Moscow: Position on Primacy (2013)

On 26 December 2013 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church adopted the “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church.” Its argument:

Primacy exists at three levels, and its source is different at each. In the diocese, primacy belongs to the bishop, and its source is the apostolic succession effected by consecration. In the autocephalous church, primacy belongs to the primate, and its source is the election by the synod of bishops. At the universal level, primacy is determined by the order of the diptychs — a primacy of honour, established by canonical tradition and expressed in the sacred diptychs, which carries no power of jurisdiction. Because the source of primacy differs at each level, the prerogatives of a primate at one level cannot be transferred by analogy to another; and to attribute to a universal primate the administrative functions proper to a primate within an autocephalous church is a distortion which the document identifies with the Roman development (Moscow Patriarchate, “Position … on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church,” 26 December 2013, mospat.ru).

Constantinople: First Without Equals (2014)

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s most direct published reply is the essay “First Without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate,” published in January 2014 by Metropolitan Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), then of Bursa and Abbot of the Holy Trinity Monastery on Halki, on the Patriarchate’s own site (ec-patr.org). Its argument, stated at its strongest because that is the discipline of this collection:

The Moscow text’s premise — that primacy at the universal level has no source but the diptychs — is, on this account, precisely the error. Primacy is not a decoration added to an existing order; it is constitutive of the order, because the many cannot exist as one without a one. If primacy at the universal level had no personal bearer, there would be no such thing as the one Church expressed in a single first. Hence the essay’s title and its most quoted sentence: the source of primacy at the universal level is not an abstraction but a person, “the very person of the Archbishop of Constantinople, who as bishop is one among equals, but as Archbishop of Constantinople and thus as primus hierarch of the Orthodox Church is primus sine paribus, first without equals.” The essay further argues that a refusal to recognize primacy within the Orthodox Church — a primacy which cannot but be embodied by a primus — is not a mere administrative preference but a theological error of the first order (Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, “First Without Equals,” January 2014, ec-patr.org).

Alongside it stand the Patriarchate’s positions on the two specific prerogatives at issue: the exclusive competence to grant autocephaly, and the right to receive appeals from clergy of other churches on the basis of Chalcedon 9 and 17 (Ecumenical Patriarchate, “The Ecumenical Throne’s Exclusive Prerogative Regarding Litigious Disputes,” ec-patr.org).

Where the Two Positions Actually Differ

[Disputed: the nature and content of primacy at the universal level in the Orthodox Church. The Moscow Patriarchate holds that universal primacy is a primacy of honour whose source is the order of the diptychs, carrying no jurisdictional or administrative power, and that the prerogatives of a primate within an autocephalous church cannot be transferred to the universal level ("Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church," 26 December 2013). The Ecumenical Patriarchate holds that primacy is constitutive of ecclesial order at every level including the universal, that it is necessarily embodied in a person, and that the *protos* possesses real prerogatives — among them the granting of autocephaly and the reception of appeals (Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, "First Without Equals," 2014; Ecumenical Patriarchate, "The Ecumenical Throne's Exclusive Prerogative Regarding Litigious Disputes"). No pan-Orthodox synodal act has adjudicated between these readings.]

Two observations that neither side disputes, and which are worth having in front of a reader.

Both sides are reading Apostolic Canon 34. Moscow reads the third clause — the first does nothing without the rest — as limiting; Constantinople reads the first clause — there must be a first, whom the rest acknowledge as head — as constitutive. The canon says both. It does not say what happens when the first and the rest disagree, and that is the entire practical question.

Neither position is Roman. Constantinople’s case is not a claim to universal immediate jurisdiction or to infallibility, and representing it as “Orthodox papism” is a polemical shortcut this collection does not use. Nor is Moscow’s position a denial of primacy; the 2013 text affirms a universal primacy of honour and locates it in Constantinople. The dispute is about content, not existence.

The Gap, and What It Costs

The honest summary is short. The Orthodox Church has no agreed account of universal primacy, and no agreed procedure for exercising it. There is no agreed answer to who may convene a pan-Orthodox council, what quorum such a council requires, whether a church may absent itself and thereby prevent one, who may receive an appeal from a cleric of another church, or who may grant autocephaly (How Autocephaly Arises).

This is a gap in the received tradition and not a scandal invented by either party. The first millennium did not need to answer these questions because the emperor convened councils and the taxis of the five sees was stable; the second millennium did not answer them because the Church lived under conditions — Ottoman, Russian imperial, Soviet — that made pan-Orthodox action nearly impossible. The Chambésy pre-conciliar process of the 1990s and 2000s came close to an agreed procedure for autocephaly and foundered on the single question of who signs the tomos, which is the primacy question in miniature (Autocephaly and Territory).

The cost is set out in section 09. A dispute arose for which there was no agreed forum, no agreed procedure, and no agreed arbiter — and communion broke. That this collection takes a position in that dispute does not oblige it to pretend the gap is not there. It is there, both parties know it is there, and no honest ecclesiology can be written without saying so.

References

Apostolic Canon 34; First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea I, 325), Canon 6; Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople I, 381), Canon 3; Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canons 9, 17, 28; Quinisext (Trullo, 692), Canon 36 — trans. NPNF II/14 (Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils); Cummings, The Rudder.
Justinian, Novellae 131 (on the order of the sees).
First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870). (Cited for the position it defines, per METHODOLOGY §4.1.)
Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. “Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority” (the Ravenna Document), 13 October 2007; “Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church” (Chieti), 21 September 2016.
Moscow Patriarchate. “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church.” Holy Synod, 26 December 2013 (mospat.ru).
Lambriniadis, Elpidophoros (Metropolitan of Bursa). “First Without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate.” January 2014 (ec-patr.org).
Ecumenical Patriarchate. “The Ecumenical Throne’s Exclusive Prerogative Regarding Litigious Disputes” (ec-patr.org).
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion. 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.
Pre-Conciliar Commission, “Autocephaly and the Manner in Which It Is to Be Proclaimed” (Chambésy, 1993).