A Liturgical-Conciliar Charter: What Kind of Document the Synodikon Is

The Synodikon of Orthodoxy is neither a creed nor a canon collection nor a conciliar horos, but a fourth kind of ecclesial text: a liturgical act by which the Church, once a year and out loud, names what she confesses and what she has rejected. This file defines the genre, distinguishes it from the documents it is often confused with, and sets out the standpoint from which this collection treats it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word and the Thing

In Byzantine usage the noun synodikon (συνοδικόν) covers a range of documents having synodal origin or conciliar authority — a definition promulgated by a synod, a synodal letter, a register of names commemorated in the diptychs. The text that concerns this collection is the Synodikon by antonomasia: the one composed for the restoration of the holy icons in 843 and proclaimed thereafter on the First Sunday of the Great Fast. Its manuscript titles vary: The Synodikon of Orthodoxy, The Synodikon Confirming Orthodoxy Read on the First Sunday of Great Lent, The Synodikon Against All Heresy; in the printed Greek Triodion it appears as The Synodikon of the Holy and Ecumenical Seventh Council for Orthodoxy — a title that is not strictly accurate, since the synod of 843 promulgated no new definition but reasserted the authority of Nicaea II (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text as printed in the Triodion, with the editorial note prefixed to the English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston; on the manuscript titles, Jean Gouillard, “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire,” Travaux et Mémoires 2 [1967]: 1–316).

The critical edition is Gouillard’s, published in Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967) and running to 316 pages of text, translation, and commentary; it remains the scholarly reference point for every question about the Synodikon’s wording, strata, and manuscript families. The present collection has not been able to consult Gouillard directly, and says so plainly wherever a claim would otherwise depend on him; what is used instead are the later scholarly editions and studies that build on him, above all the volume The Great Councils of the Orthodox Churches: From Constantinople 861 to Moscow 2000, ed. Alberto Melloni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), which prints the eleventh-century Greek Synodikon and the Georgian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian versions in critical editions (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 121, on Gouillard’s edition and its composite character).

Not a Creed

The Synodikon contains a confession of faith and even echoes the cadence of the conciliar acclamations — “This is the faith of the Apostles; this is the faith of the Fathers; this is the faith of the Orthodox; this faith makes fast the inhabited world” (Synodikon, in the translation of Andrew Louth edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash]; the same clause in the received text of the Triodion). But it is not a creed and was never intended to replace or supplement one. The Church has exactly one baptismal symbol, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Synodikon presupposes it rather than competing with it. Where the Creed states the faith positively and in the first person (“I believe”), the Synodikon states it in the third person and by ascription: it does not say “we believe X” so much as “to those who confess X, eternal memory; to those who deny it, anathema.” The grammar is that of a roll-call, not of a symbol (see The Creed and the Rule of Faith; The Nicene Creed).

Not a Canon Collection

Neither is the Synodikon a body of canon law. It imposes no penances, regulates no ordinations, fixes no jurisdictional boundaries; it contains nothing that a bishop applies to a case. The canonical corpus — the Apostolic Canons, the canons of the Ecumenical and local councils and of the Fathers, gathered in the Nomocanon and, in modern Greek use, in the Pedalion — is a different literature with a different function (see The Canonical Tradition; The Canons and the Councils in Orthodox Life). What the Synodikon does with its anathemas is not to sentence a named living person to a penalty but to declare that certain teachings stand outside the faith and that those who hold them obstinately have thereby placed themselves outside the Church’s communion — a declaration whose nature is examined at length in What an Anathema Is and Is Not.

Not a Conciliar Horos

Nor is the Synodikon itself a conciliar definition. The councils whose decisions it carries — Nicaea II in 787, the synod of 843, the synods of 1076/77 and 1082 against John Italos, the synods of 1156 and 1157, the Palamite councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 — each issued their own acts, and those acts are the dogmatic instruments. The Synodikon cites them: it takes the operative sentences of a council and sets them in a form that can be chanted. This is why it is a mistake to treat a clause of the Synodikon as though it were an independent dogmatic definition; the definition lies in the conciliar act, and the Synodikon is its liturgical publication (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 121–128, showing that the Synodikon’s sections were assembled from separately datable conciliar and synodal materials, including the Tome of Union of 920).

What It Is: Conciliar Content in Liturgical Form

The genre is best described by what it does. Once a year the Church gathers, and a deacon or bishop chants aloud a text that (a) narrates the deliverance of 843 in a homiletic preamble built out of Scripture, (b) sets out the dogmatic content of the icon’s defense in a series of ascriptions, (c) proclaims “Eternal memory!” over the champions of Orthodoxy by name, and (d) proclaims “Anathema!” over the heresies and the heresiarchs, also by name. The people answer. What is happening is a conciliar act performed liturgically — the Church doing publicly, in worship, the thing she otherwise does in synod.

That is the reason this collection exists. If one asks how the Orthodox Church actually draws doctrinal lines, the honest answer is: conciliarly, and then she sings it. The Synodikon is the most direct evidence for that answer, because it is the point at which the two modes visibly coincide. The Church’s dogmatic memory is not filed in an archive; it is chanted, with responses, in the middle of Lent, in the hearing of everyone present.

The structure just described is not a modern schematization. Lauritzen’s analysis of the earliest recoverable form — the Synodikon as it stood under Patriarch Alexios Studites (1025–1043) — finds it constituted of six sections: introduction, blessings, saints, anathemas, emperors, patriarchs (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 122). The narrative-then-ascription-then-acclamation-then-anathema movement is native to the document.

A Text That Grew

A creed is fixed; a canon collection closes; a conciliar horos is issued once. The Synodikon did none of these. It is a text that grew for some five centuries, receiving new names to bless and new errors to reject as the Church defined against them — the eleven chapters against John Italos in the late eleventh century, the anti-Bogomil and anti-dualist material, the chapters arising from the Christological controversies of the twelfth century, the Palamite chapters of the fourteenth (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 122–127; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “John Italos,” Winter 2025 edition, on the Italos chapters as the first major post-843 addition). Because it grew, it also varies: Gouillard grouped the roughly forty manuscripts into three principal recensions designated M, C, and P — Macedonian, Comnenian, and Palaiologan — with subdivisions determined by how far the personal acclamations run, what stage of doctrinal development the copy reflects, and whether it was made for the capital or for a provincial church (Gouillard, “Le Synodikon,” 1967, as summarized in Anna-Maria Totomanova, “The Synodikon of Orthodoxy in Medieval Bulgaria,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 169–227, at 170, which situates the first Bulgarian translation within Gouillard’s recension C).

This growth is the single most important fact about the document for anyone handling it, and it dictates the discipline this collection observes: describe content, and name the stratum only where the evidence permits. Numbered anathemas are not invented here, and no clause is assigned to a recension that cannot be shown to carry it. Where the stratum is uncertain, the file says so.

The Standpoint of This Collection

This compendium is written from within the Orthodox Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1). That has two consequences worth stating at the outset.

First, the dogmatic content the Synodikon carries is presented as the Church’s faith, not as one option among several. The veneration of the holy icons, the two natures of Christ confessed at Chalcedon, the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the uncreated divine energies — these are treated here as what the Church has defined, because that is what they are. The positions the Synodikon rejects are reported accurately, in their own terms and from their own texts where those survive, because accuracy toward an opponent is a debt of scholarship and not a concession of the question.

Second, the anathema is neither apologized for nor brandished. It is explained. A very large part of the modern discomfort with the Synodikon rests on a misunderstanding of what an anathema is — a misunderstanding this collection addresses directly, and with the Fathers’ own severe cautions about anathematizing quoted in full, in Section 08.

Where the collection reports genuinely open questions — which recension carries a clause, what precisely a given parish reads today, the reception of modern additions made by particular jurisdictions — it names the positions and does not adjudicate (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

References

Gouillard, Jean. “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire.” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. (The critical edition and commentary; the recensions M, C, P. Not consulted directly for this collection; used at second hand through the studies cited below, which is noted wherever it matters.)
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (The six-section structure; the datable strata; the composite character of Gouillard’s text.)
Lauritzen, Frederick, ed. Synodikon of Alexios Studites (1025–1043). In The Great Councils of the Orthodox Churches: From Constantinople 861 to Moscow 2000, ed. Alberto Melloni, vol. I, 375–394. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (CC.COGD 4.1).
Totomanova, Anna-Maria. “The Synodikon of Orthodoxy in Medieval Bulgaria.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 169–227. (Gouillard’s recensions; the Bulgarian translation from recension C.)
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. English translation by Andrew Louth, edited to correspond with London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), with Scripture references added; published on the Anastasis site. (The primitive Constantinopolitan form.)
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, with its prefatory note on the titles and on the synod of 843.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “John Italos” (Winter 2025 edition). (The Italos chapters as the first major addition after 843.)
METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §§3.5, 4.1–4.2.