Soterichos and the Councils of 1156–1157

In the middle of the twelfth century Constantinople argued about a question raised by a single phrase of the anaphora: to whom is the Eucharistic sacrifice offered? The councils of 1156 and 1157 answered that Christ offers Himself and that the whole Trinity receives, condemned Soterichos Panteugenos for denying it, and their chapters entered the Synodikon — where they stand beside a cluster of other twelfth-century Christological condemnations. This file treats that stratum.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question

The anaphora of the Divine Liturgy addresses the Father, and the priest says of the offering: “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee.” The prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, however, addresses Christ and says that He is “the offerer and the offered, the receiver and the distributed.” Read side by side, these raise a real question: if the sacrifice is offered to the Father, and Christ is Himself the recipient, in what sense is the Son a receiver of what He offers?

The question is not scholastic hair-splitting. Behind it lies the whole doctrine of the atonement: whether Christ’s Passion was a transaction between two parties — a payment made by the Son to an offended Father — or the act of the undivided Trinity for the salvation of the world. And behind that lies the doctrine of God: whether the three hypostases can be so distinguished that one can be a creditor of another.

The Controversy

The dispute broke out in 1156 around the rhetoricians Michael of Thessalonica and Nikephoros Basilakes, and it drew in Soterichos Panteugenos, a deacon of the Great Church who had just been elected (but not yet consecrated) Patriarch of Antioch. Their position, as reported by their opponents, drew a strong distinction between the persons of the Trinity and held that the Eucharistic sacrifice — and the sacrifice of the Cross — was offered to God the Father alone.

A synod met, and then, on 12 May 1157, a larger council assembled at the palace of Blachernae, under the presidency of the Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, with the patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, the archbishop of Bulgaria, and some thirty-eight metropolitans present. Michael and Basilakes recanted; Soterichos defended his views stubbornly, even against the emperor, before finally confessing error. The senior clergy demanded and obtained his dismissal from the see of Antioch, announced the following day. His chief theological opponent, Nicholas of Methone, wrote the account on which most of our knowledge of his position depends — a hostile account, since Soterichos’ own writings do not survive (Council of Blachernae, May 1157; the participants and the outcome as summarized in the standard reference literature, which cites Alexander Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], and Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993/2002]; on the character of the sources, Pavel Yermilov’s work on the twelfth-century acts).

[Disputed: because Soterichos’ own writings are lost, the exact content of his teaching is known only through his opponents, above all Nicholas of Methone. This collection reports what the councils condemned, which is documented, and does not claim to reconstruct what Soterichos privately held, which is not.]

What the Councils Defined

The doctrinal settlement can be stated in one sentence: Christ in His humanity is the offerer and offers Himself; the whole Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — receives the sacrifice; and the sacrifice offered daily on the Church’s altars is not a different sacrifice from that of the Cross but the same one.

The Synodikon’s chapters carry this in five movements. Their content, in the order of the received text and without invented numbering:

On the offering and the receiving. Against those who say that the sacrifice of His precious Body and Blood was offered by Christ “to God the Father,” fulfilling the ministry of High Priest in His humanity — “inasmuch as He is at the same time God and Sacrificer and Victim, according to St. Gregory the Theologian” — but who then deny that He, the Only-begotten, with the Holy Spirit, “did Himself accept the sacrifice as God together with the Father,” thereby estranging the Word and the Spirit from “the divine equality of honor and dignity” (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text of the Triodion, “Against Basilaki, Soterichos, and others”; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston). The invocation of St. Gregory the Theologian is significant: the council does not reject the language of Christ as priest and victim, it keeps it, and adds that He is also, as God, the recipient.

On the daily offering. Against those who “do not accept that the sacrifice which is offered daily by those who have received from Christ the priestly service of the Divine Mysteries, is in fact offered to the Holy Trinity,” and who thereby contradict “the sacred and divine fathers, Basil and Chrysostom, and other God-bearing fathers who all agree in both their words and writings.” The appeal is to the anaphoras themselves (see The Divine Liturgy; The Holy Mysteries).

On “Do this in remembrance of Me.” Against those who hear the Lord’s command and “do not understand ‘remembrance’ correctly,” but say that the daily sacrifice “reenacts only symbolically and figuratively” the sacrifice of the Cross, thereby introducing “the doctrine that this is a different sacrifice from the one originally consummated by the Saviour” — against which the chapter invokes “our divine Father John Chrysostom who says in many commentaries on the sayings of the Great Paul that the sacrifice is identical, that both are one and the same.” This clause is the twelfth century’s most explicit statement of the identity of the Eucharistic and the Calvary offering, and it is worth noticing that it is directed against a symbolic reduction, not against a repetition (see St. John Chrysostom; St. Nicholas Cabasilas, whose Commentary on the Divine Liturgy is the classic Byzantine development of the same doctrine).

On intervals of time in the reconciliation. Against those who “invent and introduce intervals of time into the reconciliation of human nature with the Divine and blessed nature,” legislating that we were first reconciled to the Word by the assumption of humanity and only afterwards to the Father by the Passion — against which the chapter sets the teaching “that the Only-begotten reconciled us to Himself through the entire Mystery of the Economy, of the Incarnation and through Himself and in Himself to God the Father and… to the all-holy and life-creating Spirit.”

On misreading the Fathers. Against those who “do not correctly understand the divine voices of the holy teachers of the Church of God and who attempt to misinterpret and pervert those things clearly and manifestly spoken in them by the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

Why This Is Theologically Large

The 1156–57 settlement matters far beyond its immediate occasion, and Orthodox theology has repeatedly returned to it.

It rules out a transactional atonement. If the sacrifice is offered to the Trinity and not by one party to another, then the Cross cannot be construed as the Son placating an angry Father or discharging a debt owed to Him. The council’s own words — that the Only-begotten reconciled us “to Himself… and through Himself and in Himself to God the Father,” and necessarily “to the all-holy and life-creating Spirit” — locate the whole work of salvation inside the single will and love of the undivided Trinity (see Soteriology; The Holy Trinity).

It safeguards the unity of the divine operation. The Cappadocian axiom that the works of the Trinity toward the world are undivided is here applied to the one work that most tempts theology to divide it.

It secures the Eucharist as the same sacrifice. By condemning the reduction of the Liturgy to a symbolic reenactment, the council fixed the Orthodox understanding that what is offered on the altar is Christ’s own one sacrifice, made present — neither a repetition nor a picture.

The Neighboring Twelfth-Century Chapters

The Soterichos material does not stand alone in the received Synodikon. It is surrounded by a cluster of twelfth-century Christological chapters, all turning on the status of Christ’s assumed humanity:

Against Eustratios of Nicaea and Leo of Chalcedon — against those who say that Christ’s human nature “like a servant, worships the unapproachable Divinity and everlastingly retains servitude as an essential and inseparable mark,” and against those who employ the conceptual distinction of the two natures improperly, making the assumed humanity a fellow-servant of the ministering spirits, and identifying “the great High Priest with the assumed human nature itself, rather than with the Word of God Who became man” (received text, “Against Eustratios and Leo of Chalcedon”).

The chapters on “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) — a remarkable block in which the Synodikon anathematizes a wrong construal and, unusually, gives “Eternal Memory” to two positive statements: to those who apply the saying to Christ’s humanity as the Fathers do, and to those who confess that the Lord’s flesh, by the hypostatic union, is “honored with a glory equal to His and worshipped with one worship and is established on the royal and divine Throne at the right hand of God the Father… while the properties of the two natures are preserved” (received text). This is one of the few places in the whole Synodikon where an acclamation stands inside the block of anathemas, and it shows the document doing positive dogmatic work.

Against Constantine of Corfu (“Constantine the Bulgarian”), metropolitan of Corfu, condemned for holding that John 14:28 can only be understood when the flesh is considered as conceptually separated from the Godhead — the chapter invoking “the supremely theological Damascene” against him and charging that he “was not willing to follow the Holy and Ecumenical Fourth and Sixth Councils” (received text; on the Damascene, see St. John of Damascus).

Against John Irenikos, condemned on the same question of the abstract separation of the humanity from the divinity (received text).

Taken together, this cluster shows what the twelfth-century Church was defending: the full reality and the full glorification of the humanity Christ assumed, against every attempt to hold it at arm’s length from the Godhead — whether by making it a servant, or by dissolving it into the divine essence, or by considering it only in abstraction.

The Pattern of Accretion

Two observations close this file. First, the strata of the eleventh and twelfth centuries show the Synodikon settling into its mature function: a running conciliar register, updated as the Church defined. Second, the questions defined in this period are not marginal — the relation of philosophy to dogma, the nature of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the status of Christ’s glorified humanity — and each of them prepared the ground for the fourteenth century, when the Church would confess that the humanity of Christ is the place where the uncreated energies are given to men (see The Palamite Chapters; Theosis).

See Also

References

  • Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion, the chapters “Against Eustratios and Leo of Chalcedon,” “Against Basilaki, Soterichos, and others,” “Against Constantine the Bulgarian,” and “Against John Irenicus”; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston.
  • Kazhdan, Alexander, and Ann Wharton Epstein. Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The intellectual setting of the controversy.)
  • Magdalino, Paul. The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (The council of Blachernae in its political and ecclesiastical context.)
  • Nicholas of Methone. Refutation of Soterichos Panteugenos. (The principal — and hostile — source for Soterichos’ position; his own writings do not survive.)
  • Gouillard, Jean. “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire.” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. (The critical edition in which the twelfth-century chapters are established; not consulted directly for this collection.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §2 (anathema numbering), §4.2.