Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34

Zizioulas’ argument on primacy in one sentence: because a synod without a president has never existed in the Orthodox Church, and because a first without a synod is not a first but a monarch, primacy and conciliarity require each other, and primacy is therefore a matter of the Church’s being and not merely of her good order. This file sets out the argument, the 34th Apostolic Canon on which it turns, its application to the universal level, and the intra-Orthodox dispute it provoked — reported with the parties named and unadjudicated.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Canon

The hinge text is the 34th of the Apostolic Canons, an early canonical collection received into the Orthodox canonical corpus:

“The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them, and account him as their head, and do nothing of consequence without his consent… But neither let him do anything without the consent of all; for so there will be unanimity, and God will be glorified through the Lord in the Holy Spirit.”
— Apostolic Canon 34

Zizioulas reads the canon as containing a complete ecclesiology in three clauses. The many must recognize a first. The first must do nothing without the many. And the reason given is trinitarian — the canon ends with a doxology naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which Zizioulas takes not as a pious flourish but as the canon’s ground: the Church’s order of one-and-many images the divine life.

The canon’s importance to him is that it forbids both of the mistakes he thinks have divided East and West. A first who acts without the many is the papal claim as the Orthodox understand it; a many who acknowledge no first is a federation, and on Zizioulas’ account not a Church at all.

“The One and the Many”

The structural principle that governs the whole of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology is that a “many” requires a “one” in order to be one, and that the “one” exists only in relation to the “many.”

In the Trinity: the Three are one God because the Father is the source; the Father is Father only in begetting and breathing forth (see The Monarchy of the Father).
In the local church: the assembly is one because the bishop presides at its eucharist; the bishop is a bishop only as head of an assembly (see The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church).
In the region: the bishops of a province are one synod because one of them is protos; the protos acts only with them.
In the universal Church: the same, applied to the heads of the autocephalous churches.

The move from the third level to the fourth is the contested one, and Zizioulas made it deliberately and repeatedly (Zizioulas, “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; “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; The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today, ed. Gregory Edwards, Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010).

The Formulation

Zizioulas’ sharpest statement of the case is this:

“The logic of synodality leads to primacy,” since “synods without primates never existed in the Orthodox Church, and this indicates clearly that if synodality is an ecclesiological, that is, dogmatical, necessity so must primacy [be].”
— Zizioulas, “Recent Discussions on Primacy in Orthodox Theology,” in Kasper, ed., The Petrine Ministry (2006), 242–243; quoted by Archbishop Job (Getcha) of Telmessos, “‘Synodality’ — Results and Challenges of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church,” 1 and n. 1.

Two things in that sentence are worth marking. First, the argument is from Orthodox practice, not from a Roman premise: Zizioulas is pointing at the Orthodox synodal system and asking what it presupposes. Second, the word he chooses is “dogmatical.” He is not saying that primacy is a convenient arrangement the Church has adopted; he is saying it belongs to what the Church is. That word is the one his Orthodox critics contest.

What the Primate Is and Is Not, on His Account

Zizioulas is careful to specify what he is not asking for, and the specifications matter because they are what distinguish his position from the Roman one.

The primate is a bishop among bishops, not a bishop over bishops. His primacy is exercised inside the synod, not above it.
He has no separate source of authority. He cannot teach, judge or govern apart from the body whose head he is; the second clause of Canon 34 is as binding as the first.
He is not the source of the churches’ unity. The churches are one because each is wholly the Church and they are in communion; the primate serves that communion and does not create it.
His primacy is not a possession but a relation — which is simply the application to primacy of Zizioulas’ general account of ordination and office (see The Argument of the Book, on ministry as relation).

On this basis Zizioulas held that the Orthodox objection to Vatican I is not that Rome has a primacy but that Rome’s primacy was defined in 1870 in terms — universal ordinary jurisdiction, infallibility exercised ex sese — that sever the first from the many. The doctrinal statement of the Orthodox position on those definitions belongs to the hub and to the schism collection (Orthodox vs. Catholic; What Divides and What Reunion Requires).

The Intra-Orthodox Dispute — §4.2

The application of the principle at the universal level is a live and unresolved argument within the Orthodox Church, sharpened rather than settled by the events of 2018. Both positions are stated here; neither is endorsed.

The position Zizioulas held. Primacy is required at every level at which the Church acts conciliarly, and the Church does act conciliarly at the universal level — pan-Orthodox councils exist, and they have presidents. To hold that a universal primate is unnecessary is, on this view, to treat the universal level as differently constituted from every other, and in practice to make pan-Orthodox conciliar action impossible. In the Orthodox order the protos at that level is the Ecumenical Patriarch, by the canonical taxis recognized in the councils. This position is held, with variations, by theologians of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and by others; the Ravenna document’s agreed statement that at each level “there is a protos” reflects it (Ravenna Document, 13 October 2007, §§10, 24, 43–44).

The position of the Moscow Patriarchate and of many Orthodox theologians. Primacy at the universal level is a primacy of honour only, carrying no prerogatives of power analogous to those of a bishop in his diocese or a primate in his local church; the analogy from the local and regional levels to the universal breaks down, because the universal Church has no single bishop and no single eucharist. This is stated formally in the Moscow Patriarchate’s “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church,” adopted 26 December 2013, which was published as a response to the direction the dialogue had taken at Ravenna (Moscow Patriarchate, 26 December 2013; reported in The Official Dialogue).

A third strand objects not to the conclusion but to the method: that deriving Church order from the inner life of the Trinity — reasoning from the monarchy of the Father to the necessity of a protos — is an illegitimate transfer, since the Trinity is not a model of social organization and the analogy proves whatever the arguer wants it to prove. This objection is pressed by critics of Zizioulas’ trinitarian theology generally (see Person, Nature, and Grace) and independently by theologians wary of “social trinitarianism.”

[Disputed: whether universal primacy is a dogmatic necessity or an honorific ordering. The dispute is live as of 2026, it is entangled with the Constantinople–Moscow rupture of 2018 over Ukraine, and no pan-Orthodox decision exists. See ../../orthodoxy/11-world-orthodoxy/contemporary/ukraine-autocephaly-and-2018-schism.md and ../../the-great-schism/09-the-schism-today/the-official-dialogue.md.]

A Note on Zizioulas’ Position Within His Own Church

It should be said plainly, since it bears on how the argument is read: Zizioulas was a hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and his theology of primacy supports the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s understanding of its own role. His critics have not failed to notice this, and some have treated his ecclesiology as an elaborate justification of Constantinopolitan prerogative. His defenders answer that the argument was published before the disputes of the 2010s made it useful, that it was worked out from Ignatius and the Cappadocians rather than from the Patriarchate’s needs, and that a theologian’s belonging to a church does not by itself impeach his reasoning. The collection reports the observation and the answer, and adjudicates neither.

References

Apostolic Canons, canon 34. (Text as received in the Orthodox canonical collections; cited in the Ravenna Document §24.)
Zizioulas, John D. “Primacy in the Church: An Orthodox Approach.” In James F. Puglisi, ed., Petrine Ministry and the Unity of the Church: “Toward a Patient and Fraternal Dialogue.” 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. (Quoted passage at 242–243.)
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.
Job (Getcha), Archbishop of Telmessos. “‘Synodality’ — Results and Challenges of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church.” Conference paper, Université de Fribourg / Institut d’études œcuméniques (unifr.ch). (Quoting Zizioulas at n. 1.)
Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ravenna Document, 13 October 2007, §§5, 6, 10, 17–42, 43–44.
Moscow Patriarchate. “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church.” 26 December 2013.