The Christological Roster

The received text of the Synodikon carries a short roll of the great heresiarchs — Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Dioscorus, Severus and the rest — chanted near the end of the anathemas. This file gives that roster exactly as it stands in the received text, notes that it is absent from the primitive Constantinopolitan witness used here, and refuses to date or number what cannot be verified.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Warning Before the List

The roster of Christological heretics is the part of the Synodikon most often quoted and most often quoted carelessly. Three cautions govern this file.

First, the list appears in the received printed text of the Triodion. It does not appear in the primitive Constantinopolitan form witnessed by London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 — the manuscript Gouillard judged “certainly one of the best witnesses to the primitive and purely Constantinopolitan form of the Synodikon” — whose anathemas run from the iconoclast positions to the named iconoclasts to “To all the heretics: Anathema!” and then to the short icon clauses, without any roll of Christological heresiarchs (Synodikon, trans. Andrew Louth, edited to BL Add. 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash], with the editorial note quoting Gouillard’s assessment). Whoever cites the roster as “the anathemas of 843” is on shaky ground.

Second, this collection has not been able to consult Gouillard’s critical edition directly, and therefore does not assign the roster to a recension. It can be said with confidence that the list stands in the received printed text; it cannot be said here in which stratum it originated. That is stated rather than guessed.

Third, the clauses are not numbered here. The received English text presents them as a sequence without numbers, and inventing numbers for them would violate the rule of this collection and of the repository (METHODOLOGY §2, on never guessing a canon or anathema number).

The Roster as It Stands

In the received text the roll follows immediately upon the chapters against Barlaam and Akindynos and the clause against Isaac Argyros, and runs:

To Arius, the first to fight against God, and the leader of every heresy, Anathema (3)

To Peter the Fuller and fool, who said “Holy Immortal, Who was crucified for us,” Anathema (3)

To Nestorios, the cursed of God, who said that the Holy Trinity suffered, and to the godless and mindless Valentinos, Anathema (3)

To Paul of Samosata and Theodotion, his like-minded confidant, and to another Nestorios, Anathema (3)

To Peter the Paltry, the heretic, who was surnamed Lycopetrus, or “the Wolf,” to the evil-minded Eutychius and Sabellios, Anathema (3)

To James Stanstalus the Armenian, to Dioscorus the Patriarch of Alexandria, to the godless Severus, as well as to the like-minded Sergius, Paul and Pyrrus, and to Sergius, the disciple of Lycopetrus, Anathema (3)

To all the followers of Eutychius, to the Monothelites, the Jacobites and the Artzivurites, and generally to all heretics, Anathema (3)

(Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston.)

Reading the Roster

The list is not systematic and does not pretend to be. It is a liturgical roll, and it has the compressions, the doublets, and the occasional confusions of a text transmitted by chanting rather than by cataloguing. Several features should be pointed out plainly.

It compresses whole controversies into an epithet. “Arius, the first to fight against God, and the leader of every heresy” stands for the entire fourth-century Trinitarian crisis (see The Holy Trinity; St. Athanasius). “Nestorios” stands for the christology condemned at Ephesus in 431 (see Ephesus 431; St. Cyril of Alexandria); “Eutychius” and “Dioscorus” for what Chalcedon condemned in 451 (see Chalcedon 451; St. Leo the Great); “Sergius, Paul and Pyrrus” for the seventh-century monothelite crisis settled at Constantinople III in 680–681 (see Constantinople II (553) and III (680); St. Maximus the Confessor). The Synodikon does not argue these cases; it records their outcome.

Its charges are not always historically precise. The clause “To Nestorios… who said that the Holy Trinity suffered” attaches to Nestorius an accusation — theopaschism — that is properly the charge against Peter the Fuller’s addition to the Trisagion, named in the immediately preceding clause; the received text’s Greek arrangement here is compressed to the point of confusion. Likewise “Theodotion” as the confidant of Paul of Samosata, and “another Nestorios,” are hard to identify with certainty. [Disputed: the attributions within this roll do not all match the historical record as reconstructed by modern scholarship; this collection reports the text as it stands and does not silently correct it, since what is being described is a liturgical roster, not a doctrinal history.]

Some names are non-Chalcedonian, and the Church’s language about them has a history. “Dioscorus the Patriarch of Alexandria,” “the godless Severus,” “James Stanstalus the Armenian” (Jacob Baradaeus, from whom the term “Jacobite” derives), “the Jacobites,” and “the Artzivurites” (a term applied to the Armenians in Byzantine polemic) name the communions the Orthodox Church has known since the fifth and sixth centuries as separated from her over the Definition of Chalcedon. The Orthodox Church confesses the Definition of Chalcedon as the faith, and the Synodikon records the conciliar rejection of the christology of those who refused it. What the modern reader should understand equally clearly is that these clauses are the record of a sixth-century verdict expressed in sixth-century polemical vocabulary, and that the question of the relation between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian communions has since the twentieth century been the subject of an official theological dialogue whose agreed statements have not been received by the Orthodox Church as a whole. That whole question — the historical christology of Severus and his tradition, reported in its own terms; the Chalcedonian confession; the modern dialogue and its contested reception — is treated in the sibling collection Chalcedon and the Non-Chalcedonians, and is not adjudicated here (METHODOLOGY §4.1 on the confession, §4.2 on the unreceived modern initiative).

Lycopetrus and his disciple Sergius are not Christological at all. “Peter the Paltry… surnamed Lycopetrus” and “Sergius, the disciple of Lycopetrus” belong to the Paulician controversy, and their presence in this roll shows that it accumulated by association rather than by chronology.

What the Textual Evidence Permits

What can be said with confidence about how such material entered the Synodikon comes from the analysis of the earliest stable Greek text. Frederick Lauritzen finds, in the Synodikon as it stood under Patriarch Alexios Studites (roughly 1034–1043), a set of three anathemas against all heretics, all Jacobites, and all Nestorians, and a further long series against a dualist sect; and he assigns both to the eleventh century, connecting them with Alexios Studites’ documented actions against the Jacobite community and with Constantinople’s heightened awareness of Balkan and Anatolian dualism in that period (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 124, 126–127, citing G. Dagron, “Minorités ethniques et religieuses dans l’Orient byzantin,” Travaux et Mémoires 6 [1976]: 177–216, and A. Kazhdan, “Euthymios of Akmonia,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium).

So the generic clauses against Jacobites and Nestorians can be pinned: they are eleventh-century, not ninth. Whether the personal roster quoted above — Arius through the Artzivurites — belongs to the same moment, to an earlier one, or to a later Palaiologan expansion, this collection cannot determine from the sources available to it, and says so. The critical edition to consult on the question is Gouillard, Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967), which has not been consulted here.

Why the Roster Is There at All

One theological observation is worth making. The Synodikon began as a text about icons. It ends up reciting the whole roll of the ancient heresies, and the transition is not arbitrary: the defense of the icon was a Christological defense, and once that is granted, the christological heresies belong in the same document by right. To confess that the Word may be depicted is to confess that He is truly God (against Arius), truly one person (against Nestorius), truly human in a nature not absorbed by the divinity (against Eutyches and Dioscorus), and possessed of a real human will and energy (against the monothelites). The roster is not an appendix to the icon anathemas. It is their premise, made explicit.

References

Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston. (The roster as quoted.)
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Trans. Andrew Louth, edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). (The primitive form, which lacks the roster.)
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (The eleventh-century dating of the generic anathemas against Jacobites and Nestorians and of the anti-dualist series.)
Dagron, Gilbert. “Minorités ethniques et religieuses dans l’Orient byzantin à la fin du Xe siècle et au XIe siècle: l’immigration syrienne.” Travaux et Mémoires 6 (1976): 177–216. (Cited here through Lauritzen 2017.)
Gouillard, Jean. “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire.” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. (The critical edition that would settle the stratum of the roster; not consulted for this collection.)
METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §2 (never guess an anathema number), §4.1, §4.2.