How the Synodikon Functions

The Synodikon is not primarily a text to be read but an act to be performed: chanted aloud on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, with the people answering “Eternal memory!” and “Anathema!”, it makes the whole assembly a party to the Church’s confession. This file describes what the document does — liturgically, doctrinally, and pastorally — and why the Church chose to keep her dogmatic memory in a form that is sung.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

An Act, Not an Archive

The most revealing physical evidence about the Synodikon’s function is codicological. The eleventh–twelfth-century witness London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 — written in 1110 or 1111 by a monk named Andrew of the monastery of Oleni in the Morea, and judged by Gouillard “certainly one of the best witnesses to the primitive and purely Constantinopolitan form of the Synodikon” — copies the text in red and black and supplies it throughout with ekphonetic notation. The Synodikon was therefore intended, like the Apostle and the Gospel, to be solemnly chanted and not simply read (editorial note by Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash] to the translation of Andrew Louth, edited to BL Add. 28816, on the Anastasis site; Gouillard’s judgment of the manuscript quoted there).

That single detail settles the genre question. A document furnished with lection marks is a document meant for the ambo. The Synodikon is not the Church’s filing cabinet of condemnations; it is a liturgical proclamation whose natural home is the assembly.

The Antiphonal Grammar

The functional core of the Synodikon is a two-part grammar of ascription and response. Each clause names a position — held or denied — and the assembly answers with one of two words.

The positive form runs: “To them who confess with word, mouth, heart, and mind, and with both writing and icons the incarnate advent of God the Word,” and the response is “Eternal memory”, chanted three times (Synodikon, received text of the Triodion, opening ascriptions). The negative form runs: “To them who in words accept the Economy of the Incarnation of the Word of God, but will not tolerate its representation by icons, and thus in word they make a pretense of accepting, but in fact deny our salvation,” and the response is “Anathema”, likewise threefold (same text, first of the iconoclast anathemas).

Two things follow from this shape. First, the confession is ascriptive: the Synodikon does not primarily say “the following proposition is true”; it says “those who hold the following are of the Church, and those who hold its contrary are not.” The unit of judgment is a position together with those who hold it. Second, the confession is responsive: it is not complete until the people answer. A conciliar act signed by bishops binds; the Synodikon, additionally, is received out loud, annually, by everybody in the building. This is the ordinary Orthodox doctrine of reception (see The Reception of Tradition) given a liturgical mechanism.

Anamnesis: The Church Remembering Her Own Decisions

The Synodikon’s deepest function is anamnetic. Byzantium had no shortage of archives, and the acts of the councils were preserved; what the Synodikon adds is that the Church rehearses her doctrinal history as memory rather than as record. The acclamation is literally “eternal memory” (aiōnia hē mnēmē) — the same formula used at the burial of the dead. The champions of Orthodoxy are commemorated with the words the Church uses over her departed, because they are her departed, and because the faith they defended is not a past achievement but a present possession.

The preamble makes this explicit: the day is treated as a dedication feast, and the assembly is told that it stands where Israel stood after the desert, setting up a pillar of great stones “ready to be written on,” so that “we should inscribe in the hearts of the brothers the blessings that are due to those who kept the law and the curses which the lawless have brought upon themselves” (Synodikon, Louth/Lash translation of BL Add. 28816, preamble; the same passage in the received text speaks of inscribing “on the hearts of our brethren, as on a pillar constructed of large fitted stones”). The image is deliberate: the Synodikon is a stele, and the stone it is cut into is the memory of the congregation.

A Boundary-Marking Function

The Synodikon also does something plainer: it draws lines. Fr. Lawrence Farley, writing for the Orthodox Church in America, puts it that the Synodikon “draws very thick lines in the doctrinal sand,” and that this is precisely its point — the Church declares that beyond a certain frontier one must either recant or acknowledge that one has left (Lawrence Farley, “Defending the Synodikon,” Orthodox Church in America, Reflections in Christ).

It is worth being exact about the kind of line. The Synodikon does not say that everyone outside its bounds is damned; it says nothing whatever about the eternal destiny of individuals, and where it names living persons at all it names them as holding a condemned teaching, not as sentenced souls. What it marks is the boundary of communion in the faith: what a man may hold and still be understood to be confessing the faith of this Church. That distinction is developed in What an Anathema Is and Is Not, and it is the single point on which the document is most often misread.

Why an Annual Recital

Why did the Church choose an annual liturgical recital rather than, say, a catechism? Several functions converge.

It keeps the definitions in the possession of the whole body. In a Church without a magisterial office that can define alone, the safeguarding of dogma belongs to the whole people (a point the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 makes explicitly, locating the guardianship of Orthodoxy in “the people themselves” — Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848, §17). A text that is chanted to the whole assembly every year is a mechanism for keeping the definitions where that doctrine says they belong.

It ties dogma to ascesis. The Sunday of Orthodoxy stands at the threshold of the Great Fast (see Great Lent). The Church’s yearly restatement of what she believes is therefore placed inside her yearly summons to repentance, which is a theological statement in itself: right belief and the purification of the heart are one work, not two.

It makes the councils continuous. A council that met in 787 or 1351 recedes; a text chanted every March does not. The addition of new chapters over five centuries meant that a Byzantine layman in 1400 heard, in a single service, the Church’s rejection of iconoclasm, of a philosopher’s rationalism, of a mistaken account of the Eucharistic sacrifice, and of a denial of the uncreated energies — as one continuous act of the same Church (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, on the accumulation of strata into “one text”).

The Limits of the Function

Three limits should be stated, because ignoring them produces most of the abuses of the Synodikon.

It is not self-authorizing. The Synodikon’s authority is borrowed from the councils whose decisions it carries. A clause added by a local synod carries the authority of that synod, and no more, unless and until it is received more widely. This is directly relevant to the modern expanded versions discussed in What Is Actually Proclaimed Today.

It is not a complete theology. The Synodikon is polemically shaped: it says what had to be said against particular errors at particular times. It is not a balanced exposition of the faith and was never meant to be. Reading it as a summa produces a distorted picture of Orthodoxy — heavy on Christology and the icon, silent on much else.

It is not a weapon for private use. Anathema is an act of the Church in council, not a verdict any believer may pronounce (see The Sobriety of the Fathers). The Synodikon is proclaimed by the Church about teachings; it does not license the faithful to apply its clauses to their neighbors.

The Text as an Argument About Where Dogma Lives

Finally, the very existence of the Synodikon is an argument. A tradition that kept its doctrinal decisions only in juridical form would be saying that dogma lives in law. A tradition that kept them only in a catechism would be saying dogma lives in instruction. Orthodoxy kept hers in the Triodion, between a procession with icons and the Divine Liturgy, and thereby said that dogma lives in worship — that the rule of prayer and the rule of faith are one (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi). The Synodikon is the sharpest single illustration in the tradition of that principle, because it takes the most juridical-sounding material the Church possesses — anathemas — and puts it inside a service.

References

Synodikon of Orthodoxy. English translation by Andrew Louth, edited to correspond with London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 (written 1110/1111 by the monk Andrew of the monastery of Oleni in the Morea) by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), with the editorial note quoting Gouillard’s assessment of the manuscript and describing its ekphonetic notation.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston.
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128.
Gouillard, Jean. “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire.” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. (Cited here at second hand, through the editorial note to the Louth/Lash translation.)
Farley, Lawrence. “Defending the Synodikon.” Orthodox Church in America, Reflections in Christ. (The boundary-marking function; the pastoral case for retaining the category of heresy.)
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17. (The guardianship of Orthodoxy in the whole body of the Church.)