Ecumenicity and Reception

What makes a council “ecumenical” is not its size, its imperial convocation, or its self-description, but its reception by the whole Church over time as an authentic witness to the apostolic faith. This principle explains both why the Orthodox Church numbers exactly seven universally-received councils and why several large, imperially-backed councils were rejected as “robber synods.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Ecumenicity Is Not Self-Evident at the Time

It is a striking and clarifying fact that no council was self-evidently “ecumenical” in the moment it met. The word oikoumenikē originally meant simply “of the [Roman] inhabited world” — an imperial-geographic term for a council summoned from across the empire, not yet a theological rank (Chadwick, The Early Church, 1967, on the term; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990, on the shifting meaning). Several councils that claimed the title and were convened with full imperial pomp were later rejected; several councils now reckoned ecumenical were, in their aftermath, contested for decades before the Church settled on them. Nicaea I’s homoousios was fought over for the better part of sixty years, through the long Arian and semi-Arian reaction, before Constantinople I ratified it; Chalcedon provoked a schism that has never healed. Ecumenicity, in other words, is recognized in retrospect. It is a judgment the Church arrives at, not a status a council can confer on itself.

Reception as the Decisive Mark

The Orthodox answer to “what makes a council ecumenical?” is: its reception by the whole Church, guided by the Holy Spirit. A council’s decrees are recognized as the authentic voice of the Church when the whole body — bishops, clergy, and faithful, across time and across the local Churches — receives them as the faith it holds and confesses them in its worship. This is not a democratic ratification, as if the faithful voted on dogma; it is the organic recognition by the Church of her own faith in the council’s confession (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1957, on reception as an act of the Church’s life in the Spirit, not a juridical mechanism; see Conciliarity and Authority).

The reception principle is sometimes misheard as the claim that the laity can overturn a council by refusing it. Orthodox theologians are careful here. Reception is not a veto held by any part of the Church against the rest; it is the whole Church, over time, recognizing the Spirit’s own voice — and the Spirit does not contradict himself. Florovsky put it that a council is not above the Church, judged by it from outside, but is the Church confessing; reception is the Church recognizing herself, not a second tribunal sitting in judgment on the first (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). John Zizioulas, treating the theme in the modern discussion, likewise insists that reception is constitutive of a council’s authority and yet is not a power standing over the council: it is the same conciliar life continuing (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, on communion, conciliarity, and reception). The practical upshot is what history shows: the councils the Church received became the unshakeable framework of her faith, and no later assembly, however grand, could dislodge them.

Why Exactly Seven

The number seven is itself a fruit of reception, not a target the Church set out to reach. Each of the seven — Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople III (680–681), Nicaea II (787) — defined a dogma of the Trinity or the Incarnation against a specific heresy, and each was, in the end, received by the whole Orthodox world (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). The seven acquired a kind of symbolic completeness: they were felt to have defined, in their sequence, the two central mysteries — who God is (the Trinity, at Nicaea I and Constantinople I) and who Christ is (the Incarnation, from Ephesus through Nicaea II) — so that the seven together came to be spoken of as the seven pillars of the house of Wisdom (Proverbs 9:1), a typology old in Byzantine and Slavic usage (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 1974, on the reverence for the seven).

Two cautions keep this honest. First, “seven” names the councils universally received as ecumenical; it does not mean the Church stopped holding authoritative councils in 787. Later councils of the highest authority — the union synod of 879–880, the hesychast councils of 1341–1351, the councils that rejected the Union of Florence — are received as binding, and some Orthodox writers argue that one or another of them ought to be numbered among the ecumenical (see The Question of an Eighth Council and Beyond). Second, the number is not a dogma. That there are seven great ecumenical councils is the settled and near-universal reckoning; whether the list is closed at seven is precisely the open question Section 09 takes up.

The Rejected Councils

The reception principle is sharpest at its negative edge: the councils the Church refused. These were not small or marginal gatherings. They were large, imperially convened, and claimed ecumenical or supreme authority — and the Church rejected them.

The Second Council of Ephesus (449), convened by Theodosius II and presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, met with full imperial sanction and deposed the leading Antiochene bishops; it approved Eutyches and refused to read the Tome of Leo. Pope Leo branded it a latrocinium — a “robbery,” a den of thieves rather than a court — and the name stuck; two years later Chalcedon overturned it entirely (Leo, Epistle 95, to Pulcheria; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2005, introduction, on the reversal of 449; see The Controversy and the Tome of Leo). Ephesus 449 is the classic case: everything an imperial “ecumenical” council could have except reception.
The iconoclast Council of Hieria (754), convened by Constantine V, gathered some 338 bishops and styled itself the “Seventh Ecumenical Council,” condemning the veneration of icons. It had no patriarch of the five great sees and, decisively, was rejected by the Church and overturned by the genuine Seventh Council at Nicaea in 787, whose Acts refute Hieria at length (Council of Nicaea II, 787, sessions against the Horos of 754, in Percival, NPNF II/14; Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, 2018; see The Iconoclast Controversy).
The iconoclast synod of 815 under Leo V, which revived iconoclasm, was likewise repudiated at the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843.

Each of these had imperial convocation, a substantial episcopate, and the claim of supreme authority; each lacked the one thing that finally counts, the reception of the whole Church. They are the empirical demonstration that ecumenicity is not manufactured from above.

The Marks Reception Presupposes

Reception is decisive but not arbitrary; the Church receives a council because she recognizes in it the marks of truth. Orthodox and Roman Catholic accounts differ on the weighting — Rome giving papal confirmation a constitutive role the Orthodox deny — but the Orthodox tradition points to a convergence of signs: fidelity to the faith of the previous councils and Fathers, the freedom and catholicity of the assembly, the eventual agreement of the great sees, and, gathering all these, the settled confession of the whole Church in her doctrine and worship (Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed., 1993, on the criteria and on reception; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on conciliarity and reception). No single mark is sufficient — a large council can lack freedom, a great see can fall into heresy, imperial backing proves nothing — and it is their convergence, ratified over time by the whole body’s reception, that the Church reads as the Spirit’s own seal. The seven councils bear all the marks together; the robber synods bore some and lacked the rest.

References

Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787): Their History and Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
Florovsky, Georges. “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers.” In Bible, Church, Tradition (Collected Works, vol. 1). Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Leo the Great. Epistle 95 (to Pulcheria; the latrocinium of Ephesus 449). In Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14, and NPNF Second Series vol. 12.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900.
Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 3 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Price, Richard. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018.
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.