06 — Primacy, Conciliarity, and the Dialogue
Zizioulas carried his ecclesiology into the hardest question dividing Orthodoxy from Rome, and into the hardest question dividing Orthodox from one another: whether primacy is a matter of the Church’s being or only of her good order. His answer — that synodality and primacy require each other at every level, so that there is no council without a first and no first without a council — shaped the Ravenna document of 2007 and made him, for nearly forty years, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s principal theologian in the dialogue and in the road to Crete.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34 | The 34th Apostolic Canon as his hinge text; “the one and the many”; the claim that primacy is a dogmatic and not merely a canonical necessity; universal primacy and the intra-Orthodox dispute, §4.2 |
| Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016 | The Joint International Commission from 1978; the Ravenna document and §41’s recorded disagreement; the Moscow walkout; Chieti; the pre-conciliar work at Chambésy, the Council of Crete, and the anthropos/prosopon dispute with Metropolitan Hierotheos |
Why This Section Follows from the Last Two
The argument is continuous and it will not be understood in pieces.
From the doctrine of God, Zizioulas takes the structure of the one and the many: in the Trinity the many are one because there is one who is the source, and the one is what he is only in relation to the many (see The Monarchy of the Father).
From the eucharist, he takes the same structure in the local church: the bishop is the one at the head of the many, and neither is intelligible without the other (see The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church).
He then argues that the structure necessarily recurs at the regional and universal levels — that wherever bishops assemble, one of them is first, and that this is not an administrative arrangement but the Church’s own form. Hence his formulation: primacy is a dogmatic necessity, because synodality is.
That claim is the reason his work matters to the Roman question, and also the reason it is contested inside Orthodoxy — where the necessity of a universal primate, as distinct from regional primates, is precisely what the Moscow Patriarchate’s 2013 position paper denies.
The Line This Section Holds
Two things must be kept apart and this section keeps them apart.
What the Orthodox Church confesses: that the Church is conciliar; that each autocephalous church has a primate; that the bishop of Rome held a primacy of honour in the undivided Church; and that the papal dogmas of 1870 — universal ordinary jurisdiction and ex cathedra infallibility — are not the Orthodox faith. These are stated as the Church’s in The Great Schism and in Orthodox vs. Catholic.
What Zizioulas argued: that primacy at every level, including the universal, follows from the nature of conciliarity itself. That is his theological position; it is shared by many Orthodox and rejected by many others; no Orthodox council has settled it; and the intra-Orthodox dispute is reported here per METHODOLOGY §4.2 with the parties named and unadjudicated.
See Also
- The Great Schism: The Official Dialogue — the dialogue’s documents and the intra-Orthodox argument about the dialogue, at length
- The Holy and Great Council (Crete, 2016) — the council, its absences, its documents and its contested reception
- The Ecumenism Debate — the pro-dialogue and anti-ecumenist positions, both stated
- The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church — the ecclesiology being applied
- Harvard, Florovsky, and the Academic Career — the biographical frame of the ecumenical work
References
- Zizioulas, John D. “Primacy in the Church: An Orthodox Approach.” In James F. Puglisi, ed., Petrine Ministry and the Unity of the Church. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999, 115–125.
- Zizioulas, John D. “Recent Discussions on Primacy in Orthodox Theology.” In Walter Kasper, ed., The Petrine Ministry: Catholics and Orthodox in Dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, 2006, 231–248.
- Zizioulas, John D. The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today. Ed. Gregory Edwards. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010.
- Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ravenna Document, 13 October 2007; Chieti Document, 21 September 2016.
- John Zizioulas Foundation. “Orthodox–Roman Catholic Dialogue” and “The Holy and Great Synod.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026).