08 — The Church, the Nation, and the State

The Church has never existed outside a political order, and her ecclesiology has been shaped, damaged, and occasionally rescued by that fact. This section treats two related questions: what the Byzantine ideal of symphonia claimed and how it failed, repeatedly and in both directions; and what the Council of Constantinople of 1872 condemned when it condemned phyletism — a principle that indicts more parties than the one it was framed against, including parties this library is otherwise sympathetic to.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
symphonia-and-its-failures.md Justinian’s Novel 6 and what symphonia actually asserted; the Eisagoge and its parallel definitions of emperor and patriarch; the failures — imperial heresy in iconoclasm and monothelitism and the Fathers who resisted it, imperial pressure at Florence, the Ottoman millet and the ethnarch’s compromised position, Peter the Great’s Spiritual Regulation of 1721, and the Declaration of 1927; and the limit the Church herself sets, stated in her own modern documents
phyletism-and-the-council-of-1872.md The honest-concession file of this collection. The Bulgarian Exarchate crisis, the Council of Constantinople of 1872, and the exact terms of its condemnation; the Bulgarian case reported at its strongest, because it was not frivolous; the seventy-three-year schism and its healing in 1945; and the principle’s modern application — to the diaspora, where every jurisdiction violates it, and to the Ukrainian question, where it bears on both parties and where this library’s own position in section 09 does not rest on denying it

Why This Section Comes Before Section 09

Deliberately. The Ukrainian question cannot be discussed honestly without it.

Every modern autocephaly has arisen in a political context; every one has involved a state; and the identification of a church with a nation is the characteristic modern temptation of Orthodoxy, condemned by a council of the Eastern patriarchs in 1872 and practised by nearly every Orthodox church since. A reader who arrives at section 09 without this section will be tempted to think that state involvement in church affairs is an argument available to one side. It is not, and this section says so before the argument begins.

The distinction this section insists on — and which section 09 observes throughout — is between reporting the bearing of state action on the Church, which is required, and taking a position on a state, a war, or a government, which this library does not do.

See Also