Phyletism and the Council of 1872

In September 1872 a council at Constantinople condemned phyletism — the organizing of the Church on ethnic rather than territorial lines — and declared the Bulgarian Exarchate schismatic. The principle it stated is sound and it is the sharpest instrument Orthodox ecclesiology possesses for criticizing itself. It also indicts nearly everyone: the council that pronounced it was not disinterested, the Bulgarian case was not frivolous, every Orthodox jurisdiction in the diaspora violates the principle daily, and it bears on the Ukrainian question from more than one side. This is the honest-concession file of this collection, and it is written as one.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Happened

The setting. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Orthodox population of the Ottoman Balkans was organized as a single millet under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, whose hierarchy was overwhelmingly Greek and whose language of administration and worship in many Bulgarian dioceses was Greek. The Bulgarian national revival produced a movement for Bulgarian-language worship and Bulgarian bishops, and it did so in a period when Greece, Serbia, and Romania had already obtained national churches with the help of national states (How Autocephaly Arises).

The firman. On 28 February / 12 March 1870 the Ottoman government issued a firman establishing a Bulgarian Exarchate, with jurisdiction over specified dioceses and provision for others to join by plebiscite of their population. The Exarchate was thus created by an act of the Ottoman state, not by an act of the Church — and, critically, its jurisdiction was defined not by territory alone but by the ethnic composition of populations, including populations inside dioceses the Ecumenical Patriarchate governed.

The break. On 11 May 1872 the Bulgarian hierarchs proclaimed an autocephalous Bulgarian Church at Constantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus VI declared them deposed.

The council. A council convened at Constantinople in the late summer of 1872 and issued its decision in September 1872. Present were the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus VI, Patriarch Sophronius of Alexandria, Patriarch Hierotheos of Antioch, and the Archbishop of Cyprus, together with former patriarchs and members of the Constantinopolitan synod. The council condemned phyletism (φυλετισμός) and declared the Bulgarian Exarchate to be in schism.

The operative condemnation, in the rendering standard in English-language literature, runs:

“We renounce, censure and condemn phyletism, that is racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ, as contrary to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy canons of our blessed fathers…”

[Disputed: the participation of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Standard accounts of the council record that Patriarch Cyril II of Jerusalem declined to endorse the condemnation of the Bulgarians and was deposed by his own synod later in 1872. The episode is regularly reported in histories of the Bulgarian schism and is relevant because it shows the condemnation was not unanimous among the ancient sees; the details of his position and the grounds of his deposition are given differently in different accounts, and are not settled here.]

The schism. It lasted seventy-three years. The Ecumenical Patriarchate lifted it in February 1945; the Bulgarian patriarchate was restored in 1953 and recognized by Constantinople in 1961.

What the Principle Actually Says

The condemnation is not a condemnation of national feeling, of vernacular worship, or of a church having a particular cultural character. Orthodoxy has always translated, always inculturated, always produced national saints and national liturgical usages, and Sts Cyril and Methodius are honoured precisely for giving the Slavs the Scriptures and the Liturgy in their own tongue.

What is condemned is a principle of ecclesiastical organization: that jurisdiction should follow ethnicity rather than territory, so that in one place there are two bishops for two nations. That is a violation of the oldest and least disputed canonical rule in the Church — one bishop to a city (Nicaea I, Canon 8) — and it is condemned because it makes the Church a function of the nation instead of the assembly in which “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free” (Colossians 3:11).

The theological objection is exactly that: an ethnically defined church is a church in which the ethnic division survives the baptism that was supposed to abolish it.

The Bulgarian Case, Reported at Its Strongest

Because it was not frivolous, and because reporting it accurately is the same discipline this collection applies everywhere else.

The Bulgarians argued that the existing arrangement was already phyletist, and that the Greek hierarchy’s control of Bulgarian dioceses functioned as an instrument of Hellenization: Greek bishops who did not speak the language of their flocks, Greek in the schools and increasingly in the services, and a millet structure that identified Orthodoxy with Greek identity. On this reading the condemnation of 1872 was a condemnation of one nationalism by another, issued by a hierarchy which was itself the ecclesiastical expression of a national interest and which was defending a position it had reached through the Ottoman millet arrangement described in Symphonia and Its Failures.

The scholarship broadly supports the observation that the nationalization of the Balkan churches was a general nineteenth-century phenomenon in which all parties participated, and that the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position in the millet had itself fused ecclesiastical and ethnic identity long before the Bulgarians did (Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19 [1989]).

This does not make the 1872 principle wrong. A true principle stated by an interested party is still true, and the Bulgarian counter-argument is a tu quoque rather than a refutation. But it establishes something that matters for the rest of this file: the principle indicts more than its original target, and it was already indicting the party that stated it.

The Diaspora: Where Everyone Violates It

The largest standing violation of the 1872 principle is not in the Balkans. It is in the Orthodox diaspora, where in a single city there are commonly Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Antiochian, Bulgarian, and Georgian bishops with overlapping jurisdictions, organized on precisely the ethnic basis the council condemned.

Every Orthodox church acknowledges this as an anomaly. Every Orthodox church maintains it. The pre-conciliar process produced a partial measure — the Episcopal Assemblies established by the Fourth Pre-Conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference at Chambésy in 2009, which bring the bishops of a region together without merging their jurisdictions — and the Holy and Great Council of Crete in 2016 addressed the diaspora in a document that preserved the assemblies as a transitional arrangement. The anomaly persists.

Two observations are unavoidable.

No jurisdiction is exempt. This includes the Russian Church, which maintains parishes and dioceses across the world outside its historic territory; it includes ROCOR, which exists as a jurisdiction constituted for a national diaspora, however much its self-understanding has broadened; and it includes the Ecumenical Patriarchate, whose claim to the diaspora under its reading of Chalcedon 28 is a claim to govern the anomaly rather than to end it.

The principle is therefore not available as a partisan weapon. An argument that says “your church is organized on ethnic lines and mine is not” is not available to anyone in the modern Orthodox world.

The Ukrainian Question, from More Than One Side

This is the paragraph the file exists for, and it is stated in Pan-Orthodox terms; the jurisdictional judgment is in section 09 and does not belong here.

The principle bears on the Moscow side. The “Russian world” (russkii mir) framework — which treats Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as one spiritual and cultural people with a shared civilizational vocation — has been criticized from within Orthodoxy as an ethno-phyletist ecclesiology: an account in which the boundaries of a church are drawn by the boundaries of a nation understood culturally rather than territorially. The most prominent statement of that criticism is the “Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ (Russkii Mir) Teaching,” issued on 13 March 2022 and signed by a large number of Orthodox theologians internationally, which identifies the teaching as a form of ethno-phyletism and appeals to the condemnation of 1872 by name (publicorthodoxy.org, 13 March 2022). Whatever one concludes about the canonical merits of the Ukrainian dispute, this criticism is on the record, it is made by Orthodox theologians, and a collection that suppressed it would be dishonest.

And it bears on the other side. The formation of an autocephalous Ukrainian church has been bound up from the beginning with Ukrainian nation-building: the 2018 petition to the Ecumenical Patriarch was made by the President of Ukraine together with the leaders of the two unrecognized bodies, and the autocephaly campaign was conducted publicly as a national project (Ukrainian Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism). An ecclesiology in which a church’s boundary is drawn by a nation’s boundary is the same ecclesiology whichever nation is drawing it.

And it bears on the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own position, insofar as its claim over the diaspora rests on a reading of Chalcedon 28 that organizes the world’s Orthodox outside the ancient territories under one see — a claim that is territorial in form but that has in practice coexisted with the ethnic organization the council condemned.

The honest conclusion is that the 1872 principle is a standing indictment of the modern Orthodox order as a whole. It is not a sword one party may draw.

What This Concession Does and Does Not Cost

Stated plainly, because the point of an honest concession is lost if its scope is left vague.

It costs the argument from phyletism. No party to the Ukrainian dispute can win it by showing that the other has confused Church and nation, because all of them have. Section 09 accordingly does not argue from phyletism, and its case does not rest on the “Russian world” question in either direction.

It does not cost the territorial principle. That jurisdiction follows territory is precisely what 1872 affirms, and it is the canonical rule the whole dispute is fought over. The concession that everyone has violated the principle is not a concession that the principle has lapsed.

It does not cost the case for a canonical judgment. That both parties have national entanglements is a reason to argue from canons and documents rather than from motives — which is what section 09 does.

And it does not license cynicism. The 1872 council was right. The nineteenth-century nationalization of the Orthodox churches was a real deformation with real consequences, and the fact that it was general does not make it benign. A principle everyone violates is still the principle by which everyone is judged.

References

Synod of Constantinople (September 1872), condemnation of phyletism and declaration of the Bulgarian schism; the operative sentence is quoted in the rendering standard in English-language literature.
Ottoman firman establishing the Bulgarian Exarchate, 28 February / 12 March 1870; declaration of Bulgarian autocephaly, 11 May 1872.
Act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate lifting the Bulgarian schism, February 1945; recognition of the restored Bulgarian patriarchate, 1961.
First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea I, 325), Canon 8; Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canon 28 — trans. NPNF II/14.
Scripture: Colossians 3:11; Galatians 3:28.
Fourth Pre-Conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference, Chambésy, June 2009: decision establishing the Episcopal Assemblies of the diaspora; Holy and Great Council, “The Orthodox Diaspora,” Kolymbari, Crete, June 2016 (holycouncil.org).
“A Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ (Russkii Mir) Teaching,” 13 March 2022 (publicorthodoxy.org). (Cited as what it is: a declaration by Orthodox theologians, carrying no synodal authority, and reported here because the criticism it makes is on the record.)
Kitromilides, Paschalis M. “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans.” European History Quarterly 19 (1989): 149–192.
Roudometof, Victor. Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001.
Erickson, John H. The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991.