The Canonical Tradition

The canons of the councils and Fathers are the Church’s living order — Tradition applied to the governance and discipline of the Body. This file surveys the canonical corpus and its collection (culminating in The Rudder), explains that the canons are the application of dogma rather than a second, parallel law, and expounds the twin principles by which they are applied: akribeia (strict exactness) and oikonomia (pastoral economy).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Canons as the Order of Tradition

Alongside the dogmatic definitions, the Ecumenical Councils and certain local councils and Fathers issued canons (Greek kanones, “rules, measuring-rods”) — rulings on the order, discipline, and governance of the Church: the qualifications and duties of clergy, the reception of converts and penitents, the boundaries of jurisdiction, marriage and its impediments, fasting, and the conduct of the faithful. Together these form the canonical Tradition, the Church’s own law, understood not as an autonomous legal code but as the practical ordering of her life in fidelity to the faith (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 15–16, on the councils’ canons; and the topical treatment in Canon Law). The canons are a genuine bearer of Tradition — the Church’s living memory applied to her order — but they occupy a distinct rank from the dogmas: where a dogmatic horos defines the unchangeable faith, a canon orders a changeable discipline in the service of that faith, and the two must not be confused (see Tradition and Traditions, on the gradations within Tradition).

The Canonical Corpus and Its Collection

The Orthodox canonical corpus was gathered over the first millennium. It comprises the canons of the Ecumenical Councils (Nicaea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and the disciplinary canons of the Quinisext Council of 692, which supplied the canons the fifth and sixth councils had not issued), the canons of a number of received local councils (such as Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Sardica, and Carthage), and the “canonical” letters and rulings of a group of Fathers (notably the canons of St. Basil the Great, drawn from his letters, and rulings of Gregory of Nyssa, Cyprian, Dionysius and Peter of Alexandria, and others). The Quinisext Council’s second canon formally ratified this body of conciliar and patristic canons as the received law of the Church (Quinisext, 692, Canon 2; and see Canon Law). This corpus was collected, arranged, and commented upon by the great Byzantine canonists — Zonaras, Aristenos, and above all Theodore Balsamon in the twelfth century — whose commentaries remain standard.

In later Orthodox use the canons were gathered, with commentary, in The Rudder (Greek Pedalion), compiled by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Agapios the Monk and first published in 1800, which became the most widely used canonical collection in the Greek-speaking world and beyond (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993; and the treatment of sources in Canon Law). It is worth a methodological note, per the repository standard, that in The Rudder the canon-text and St. Nicodemus’s interpretive commentary are distinct: the canon carries the Church’s authority, the commentary is the compiler’s learned explanation, and the two should not be conflated when the canons are cited (METHODOLOGY §2.2, on citing The Rudder).

Canons as the Application of Dogma, Not a Second Law

For the doctrine of Tradition the essential point is the relation of the canons to the faith. The canons are not a body of divine legislation parallel to and independent of the dogmas, still less a self-contained juridical system after the manner of a secular law code; they are the application of the one faith to the concrete life of the Church in given circumstances. Many canons are frankly circumstantial and provisional — responses to the pastoral needs and abuses of a particular time and place — and the Church has never treated the whole canonical corpus as uniformly and permanently binding in the way the dogmas are (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, on the nature of canonical authority; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 15–16, 202–203). Some canons address situations that have long ceased to exist; some have fallen into desuetude; some are applied strictly, others with wide latitude. This flexibility is not a betrayal of the canons but a recognition of what they are: instruments of the Church’s care for souls, whose purpose is the healing and salvation of the faithful, not the vindication of an abstract legal order.

This purposive, therapeutic understanding of the canons is the key to the two great principles by which they are applied.

Akribeia: Strictness

Akribeia (ἀκρίβεια, “exactness, precision, strictness”) is the application of a canon in its full rigor, according to the letter. It is the norm and the default: the canons express the Church’s considered order, and ordinarily they are to be kept exactly. Akribeia guards the seriousness of the canonical Tradition against laxity, ensuring that the Church’s discipline is not dissolved into mere convenience. It is the standard by which the Church holds up the full measure of her order — the exact requirement for ordination, the full period of a penance, the strict rule for the reception of converts (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 203; and the treatment in Canon Law).

Oikonomia: Economy

Oikonomia (οἰκονομία, “household management, stewardship, economy”) is the discretionary relaxation or adaptation of the strict application of a canon, exercised by the competent ecclesiastical authority for the good of souls. The word carries a rich theological resonance — it is the same word used for God’s “economy” of salvation, His merciful arrangement for humanity’s rescue — and the Church’s canonical oikonomia is understood as a participation in that divine mercy: the bishop, as steward of the mysteries, may temper the strict letter of a canon where doing so serves the salvation of the person, without thereby abolishing the canon or denying its rightness (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 203–204; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974, on oikonomia). The classic illustrations are the reception of converts and of those returning from schism or heresy: the strict standard (akribeia) might require reception by baptism, while oikonomia may receive by chrismation or confession of faith, the same person being received differently as the Church judges best for their salvation and the good order of the Body (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 203–204; and see the topical Canon Law).

The two principles are not opposites but complements, and both are exercises of the one canonical Tradition. Akribeia holds up the norm; oikonomia applies it with mercy to the concrete case. Neither is a license: oikonomia is not the abolition of the canon nor a claim that the strict rule was wrong, but a discretionary act of stewardship that presupposes the canon it relaxes, exercised by legitimate authority and ordered always to the salvation of souls rather than to convenience. [Disputed: the limits of *oikonomia* — how far the Church's economy may extend, whether it can ever touch matters bound up with dogma (as distinct from discipline), and where legitimate pastoral flexibility ends and the erosion of the canons begins — is a genuinely debated question among Orthodox canonists, sharpened in modern controversies over the reception of converts, marriage discipline, and inter-Orthodox relations. The principle is universally received; its boundaries are contested. The compendium reports the principle and marks the boundary-question as open (see [Canon Law](../../orthodoxy/08-canon-law/README.md)).]

The Canons within the Living Tradition

The canonical Tradition thus displays, in the register of law, the same structure the whole compendium has traced. The canons are true vehicles of Tradition — the Church’s Spirit-guided order, handed on and received — yet they are vehicles, not the life itself: they serve the faith and the salvation of souls, they are applied with the discernment (akribeia and oikonomia) that only a living authority within the living Body can exercise, and they must never be absolutized into a rigid code that forgets its purpose. To keep the canons rightly is neither to dissolve them in a false mercy nor to freeze them into a legalism that mistakes the letter for the life, but to apply them as the Church has always applied them: as the wise and merciful ordering of a Body whose law exists for the healing of its members. This is the canonical form of living within the Tradition rather than venerating it as a museum-piece.

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The canons of the councils; akribeia and oikonomia; the reception of converts, pp. 15–16, 202–204.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The nature of canonical authority; oikonomia.)
  • Quinisext Council (in Trullo), 692, Canon 2. (Ratification of the conciliar and patristic canons.) In The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
  • The Rudder (Pedalion). Comp. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Agapios the Monk (1800). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago, 1957. (The canonical corpus with commentary; the canon-text distinguished from St. Nicodemus’s commentary per METHODOLOGY §2.2.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §2.2, this repository. (On citing the canons and The Rudder.)