The Limits of Economy

Economy is bounded, and the bounds are what make it a theological principle rather than a licence. Dogma is not subject to it; a dispensation that becomes universal has stopped being one; it belongs to the bishop and not to the individual; and it cannot make a sacrament out of nothing. This file sets out the four limits, then takes up the hard cases where the limits themselves are argued about — and states plainly that where the tradition has not settled the argument, this collection does not settle it either.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

First Limit: Dogma Is Not Subject to Economy

The Church may adapt discipline. She may not adapt the faith.

This is the least contested of the four limits and the one most often invoked, so it is worth being precise about its scope. It does not mean that pastoral flexibility ends where doctrine is mentioned; it means that the content of the faith confessed is not a variable. A bishop cannot commune a person who denies the divinity of Christ, and no exigency makes it possible; a council cannot, by economy, receive into communion a body that has not confessed the Orthodox faith.

The limit has a hard historical edge. The imperial attempts to reconcile the non-Chalcedonians by formulas designed to be acceptable to both parties — Zeno’s Henotikon of 482 above all — were economies in intention and were rejected precisely because a doctrinal formula cannot be an economy: it either states the faith or it does not (Chalcedon and the Non-Chalcedonians, §05). The same objection was raised in the twentieth century against the Agreed Statements with the Oriental Orthodox by their Orthodox critics, and it is one reason those statements were never received (Chalcedon and the Non-Chalcedonians, §09).

Where the limit is genuinely difficult is at the boundary between dogma and discipline, which is not always obvious. Is the calendar a matter of discipline? Almost universally answered yes. Is the mode of receiving a convert a matter of discipline, or does it presuppose a dogmatic judgment about the Church’s boundaries? That is the question of section 06, and it does not have an agreed answer.

Second Limit: Economy Is Not a Precedent, and Cannot Become the Norm

An economy is granted in a case. It does not amend the canon, and it does not create a rule for the next case.

This limit is structurally necessary rather than merely prudent. Economy is by definition a departure from a norm; a departure taken universally is no longer a departure but a new norm, and the canon it departs from has been silently repealed by practice rather than by any competent authority. The Church has no doctrine of desuetude and no mechanism by which accumulated dispensations amend the canons.

The limit is also the one most often breached in fact. A great deal of contemporary Orthodox practice consists of economies so universal that no one experiences them as economies: penances of a length no bishop imposes, fasting rules observed by few, canonical impediments routinely dispensed. The honest description of this situation is not that the canons have changed but that a gap has opened between the canonical norm and the lived discipline, and that the gap is filled by episcopal discretion exercised at scale.

Two responses to that gap exist within Orthodoxy, and both are held by serious people. One holds that the gap is a scandal requiring either the recovery of the discipline or the honest revision of the canons by a competent synod. The other holds that the gap is what a therapeutic law looks like in practice, that the canons function as a standard to be aimed at rather than a code to be enforced, and that Basil said as much when he refused to decide by time. This collection reports both and adopts neither; what it does insist on is that neither response permits calling a universal practice an “economy.”

Third Limit: Economy Belongs to the Bishop or the Synod

Economy is an act of authority, and the authority is episcopal.

A presbyter exercises it within the scope his bishop has delegated — in practice, fasting and the ordinary work of confession. Matters of substance belong to the bishop; matters affecting the church as a whole belong to the synod. And no one exercises economy on his own behalf: a believer who decides that a canon does not apply to him has not received an economy, whatever he calls it.

This limit is why the appeal to economy is not available as a general argumentative move. “By economy” is a description of an act performed by someone competent to perform it; it is not a reason available to anyone who wants a rule relaxed.

The limit also bounds the bishop. He is not the owner of the canons but their steward, and his discretion is exercised within the spirit of the canons and the tradition of the Church, for the person’s spiritual benefit, without setting a precedent that abolishes the norm, and without causing scandal — the four conditions set out in the canon-law hub (Pastoral Economy). A bishop who dispenses at will is not exercising economy; he is legislating without authority.

Fourth Limit: Economy Cannot Make Something Out of Nothing

This is the limit with the sharpest ecclesiological teeth, and the one most often violated in argument.

Economy operates on the application of a canon. It does not operate on reality. It cannot make an unordained man a priest, an unbaptized man baptized, or an act that did not occur an act that occurred. What it can do is decline to require the repetition of a rite, or accept an irregular act as sufficient in the circumstances — which is a decision about what the Church will require, not a decision about what happened.

The distinction sounds scholastic and it is entirely practical. Consider the two competing readings of reception by chrismation.

The economy reading (St Nikodemos, and the Cyprianic tradition generally): there are no sacraments outside the Church; the heterodox rite conferred nothing; when the Church receives such a convert by chrismation rather than baptism she does not recognize a prior baptism but supplies, by her own act and authority, what the empty form lacked, choosing for pastoral reasons not to require the full rite (Nikodemos, footnotes in the Pedalion).

The recognition reading: where the Trinitarian form and the intention were preserved, the Church can genuinely recognize the rite, and receives by chrismation because the baptism is accepted as real rather than tolerated by dispensation.

Notice what the fourth limit does to the argument. On the economy reading, the Church’s act at reception is the operative one, and the limit is respected — nothing is being made out of nothing, because the Church is doing the making. On the recognition reading, the limit is not engaged at all, because there was something there. What the fourth limit forbids is a third position that helps itself to both: the claim that a rite performed outside the Church conferred nothing, and that the Church by economy retroactively causes it to have conferred something. That position is incoherent, and it is the position most often stated by people who have not thought about it.

John Erickson’s caution belongs here: the “economy” and “validity” frameworks are both later rationalizations imposed on a more varied early practice, and neither the Cyprianic absolutism nor the Western-derived language of “valid but illicit” fits the canonical evidence cleanly (Erickson, “The Reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church,” SVTQ 41 [1997]; The Challenge of Our Past, 1991).

[Disputed: whether reception by chrismation is an economy supplying what was absent or a recognition of a real prior baptism. The economy reading is stated by St Nikodemos the Hagiorite in his footnotes to the *Pedalion* and follows the Cyprianic principle that there are no sacraments outside the Church; the recognition reading is characteristic of much Russian and later academic theology, and is surveyed by G. Dragas, "The Manner of Reception of Roman Catholic Converts into the Orthodox Church," *Greek Orthodox Theological Review*. John H. Erickson argues that both frameworks are later rationalizations of a more varied early practice (*SVTQ* 41 [1997]). The Church has not dogmatically resolved between them, and the mode of reception in a given case rests on the bishop's judgment within a genuinely unsettled theology — as recorded in [Reception of Converts](../../orthodoxy/08-canon-law/reception-of-converts.md).]

The Hard Cases

Three places where the limits are argued about rather than simply applied.

Can economy operate retroactively? The question arises whenever a body outside communion is received: what is the status of the ordinations, marriages, and baptisms it performed while separated? The Church’s practice has been to receive clergy of schismatic bodies in their orders in some cases and to require re-ordination in others, and the practice has varied with the judgment of the receiving synod about the character of the separation — the three-fold distinction of Basil’s Canon 1 doing the work. The theoretical question of what economy is doing in such cases is not settled, and the practical stakes are visible in section 09.

Can economy be exercised toward a body rather than a person? The canonical texts speak of economy toward persons. Modern usage frequently speaks of economy toward a whole church or confession, which is an extension, and an extension that the “no precedent” limit makes uncomfortable: an economy granted to a body is by its nature general and permanent. Basil himself, in Canon 1, comes close to this when he defers his own strict judgment about the Encratites to “the general good,” but the extension has never been theorized.

Can economy resolve a jurisdictional dispute? It is regularly proposed that it could — that one party might, by economy, accept what it holds to be canonically defective in order to restore communion. This is not obviously excluded, and it is one of the ways in which the dispute in section 09 might eventually be settled. What the four limits require is that such an economy be an act of competent authority (a synod, and in a pan-Orthodox matter a pan-Orthodox one), that it not be represented as a concession that nothing was wrong, and that it not be claimed unilaterally by the party seeking recognition.

When Akribeia Is the Merciful Course

The final point, and it is not a rhetorical flourish.

Canon 102 of Trullo warns against error in both directions: the physician who fails by excessive severity and the one who fails by excessive leniency are both named, and both fail by the same standard, the healing of the person. An economy that leaves a man comfortable in a condition he needs to leave has not been merciful to him. A boundary maintained is sometimes what allows a person to know where he stands and what he must do.

This is what is meant in ROCOR usage by the phrase that strictness is mercy, and it is worth stating in the neutral form the canon gives it: the criterion is neither strictness nor leniency but healing, and either can be the failure (Pastoral Economy).

References

Basil the Great, Canonical Epistles, Canons 1, 4, 74, 84 (Epp. 188, 199, 217); trans. NPNF II/8.
Council in Trullo (Quinisext, 692), Canons 95, 102; trans. NPNF II/14; Cummings, The Rudder.
Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople I, 381), Canon 7; First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea I, 325), Canon 19.
St Nikodemos the Hagiorite, footnotes in The Rudder (Pedalion), on reception by economy and by akriveia; trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
Erickson, John H. “The Reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church: Contemporary Practice.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 (1997); and The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991.
Dragas, George. “The Manner of Reception of Roman Catholic Converts into the Orthodox Church.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.
Zeno, Henotikon (482), and the Acacian schism (484–519).
Nikodim (Milaš), Bishop. Pravila pravoslavne crkve s tumačenjima, 2 vols. Novi Sad, 1895–96.
Patsavos, Lewis J. Spiritual Dimensions of the Holy Canons. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2003.