How Orthodoxy Defines Itself: A Closing Assessment

The Synodikon is the clearest available answer to the question of how the Orthodox Church draws doctrinal lines: conciliarly, cumulatively, about teachings rather than souls — and then liturgically, once a year, in the hearing of the whole body. This file draws the collection’s conclusions, states what the document costs as well as what it gives, and closes the compendium.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question the Synodikon Answers

Every Christian body must somehow say where its faith ends. Rome answers with a teaching office that can define; the classical Reformation answered with confessional documents subscribed by ministers; much of modern Christianity has stopped answering. The Orthodox answer, which is neither of the first two and emphatically not the third, is legible in this one text: the Church defines in council, and she publishes the definition by singing it.

That is a real answer, and it has determinate features. Six of them are worth stating.

Six Features of the Orthodox Way of Drawing Lines

1. It is conciliar, without exception

Every stratum of the Synodikon that can be dated followed a synodal judgment: the anathemas from the council of 869–870, the clauses from the Tome of Union of 920, the eleven chapters after the synod of 1082, the Eucharistic and Christological chapters after 1156–57, the Palamite chapters after 1351 (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 122, 124, 126–127). There is no stratum that entered because a great theologian said so, or because an emperor commanded it without a council, or because a monastery was zealous. The Synodikon’s structure is a standing refutation of the idea that Orthodoxy defines by charisma, by consensus fidelium alone, or by the private judgment of the pious.

2. It is cumulative, and therefore has no closure

The text grew over five centuries and remains, in principle, open. It has no final article, and the clause from 920 explicitly contemplates future innovations. This is the liturgical face of a broader Orthodox conviction: the number of Ecumenical Councils is not a limit on the Church’s capacity to speak (see The Question of an Eighth Council and Beyond). The Synodikon is evidence that Byzantium never regarded the conciliar age as closed — the Palamite chapters were added seven centuries after the last council everyone numbers.

The corollary is uncomfortable and should be stated: openness is also vulnerability. A text with no closure can be added to by those without authority, and in the modern period it has been (see What Is Actually Proclaimed Today).

3. It is about teachings

The Synodikon’s condemnations are overwhelmingly of propositions; persons enter as the identified holders of a condemned position, after refusing correction. The tradition’s own formulation is the one this collection has kept returning to: “we must anathematize heretical doctrines and refute impious teachings, from whomsoever we have received them, but show mercy to the men who advocate them and pray for their salvation” (the homily “That We Should Not Anathematize the Living or the Dead,” PG 48:945–952, trans. Hieromonk Patapios).

4. It is liturgical, and therefore belongs to everyone

The decisive fact about the Synodikon is where it is kept. Not in a code, not in a catechism, not in a chancery — in the Triodion, between a procession and the Divine Liturgy. That placement embodies the principle that the rule of prayer and the rule of faith are one (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi), and it has the practical consequence that the definitions are in the possession of the whole body. The people answer. A Church that keeps her dogma in a service has decided that dogma is not the property of specialists.

5. It is anamnetic

The Synodikon does not summarize the faith; it remembers it, person by person and controversy by controversy, using the formula of a funeral. Orthodoxy defines by commemoration. This is why the document is so ill-suited to being read as a systematic theology and so well-suited to being chanted: it is the Church’s memory of what it cost to say what she says.

6. It is restrained in practice

Whatever the rhetoric of the anathemas, the record is one of remarkable parsimony. In five hundred years there are, at most, seven or eight identifiable additions; no iconoclast emperor is named; Nicaea II restored repentant iconoclast bishops in their orders; and the Church has in fact lifted anathemas when the reason for them lapsed. The instrument was used rarely and heavily, which is what one would expect of an instrument the Fathers regarded as dangerous.

What the Document Costs

An honest assessment must include the debits, and there are several.

It is polemically shaped. The Synodikon is a record of what had to be said against particular errors, not a balanced statement of the faith. Read as a summa, it is grotesquely unbalanced — enormous on Christology and the image, silent on nearly everything else. Nobody should learn Orthodoxy from it.

Its rosters are opaque. A modern congregation hearing “Theodore Krithinus and Leon Laloudius” is hearing names it cannot place, and the same is true of most of the eleventh- and twelfth-century figures. A liturgical act whose content is unintelligible to the assembly is not doing what the Synodikon was designed to do.

Some of its charges are historically imprecise. The roster of Christological heretics compresses and occasionally confuses; the propositions condemned as John Italos’ may not all have been his (see The Christological Roster; John Italos and the Eleven Chapters). The Church’s judgment on the propositions is one thing; the historical justice of every proceeding is another, and the two should not be confused in either direction.

Its openness has been abused. The modern lists that anathematize living persons by name, without conciliar warrant and without reception, are a real deformation, and they are made possible by the very feature — cumulative openness — that is otherwise a strength.

Its abbreviation has costs too. Where the anathemas are silently dropped, the Church has kept the memorial and discarded the confession that made these men worth remembering.

What It Gives

Against those debits stand the following.

A visible answer to “what do you actually believe?” The Synodikon is the only place in the Orthodox liturgical year where the Church states, in one continuous act, both the content of her faith and the shape of its boundary. Anyone who wants to know how Orthodoxy defines itself can attend one service.

A refusal to let dogma become abstract. The men acclaimed had been exiled, beaten, and branded; the men condemned had done it, or had taught what made it possible. The Synodikon insists that doctrinal questions had a cost and were paid for by named people.

A discipline against inflation. Because the threshold for entering the text is a conciliar judgment, the Synodikon’s own history is an argument against the private multiplication of anathemas — which is to say, against the abuse most likely to be committed in its name.

The uncreated energies among the dogmas. The Palamite chapters are the point at which the Church confessed, at the level of dogma and in the hearing of everyone, that what is given in prayer is God Himself and not a created gift. That is the collection’s single most consequential content, and it is treated in the wave sibling Theosis.

The Confession, and the Grief

Two passages of the Synodikon should be set beside one another at the end.

The first is the acclamation: “This is the Faith of the apostles, this is the Faith of the fathers, this is the Faith of the Orthodox, this Faith hath established the whole world” (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text of the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston). The Orthodox Church means that sentence. She does not offer it as one confessional option among several, and this collection has not presented it that way (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

The second is the closing prayer, which is the document’s own last word: that by the struggles and teachings of the confessors “we may be guided and strengthened,” and shown to be “imitators of their inspired way of life until the end, by the pities and grace of the great and first high-priest Christ, our true God; at the intercessions of our most-glorious Lady, Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary, of the god-like Angels and all the Saints. Amen” (Synodikon, closing prayer, in the translation of Andrew Louth edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash]).

Between those two sentences the whole document sits. It is a confession, and it ends in a petition for imitation. It draws a boundary, and it prays for those on the other side of it. The Church says both things on the same morning, and neither cancels the other.

A Word to the Reader

Whoever attends the Sunday of Orthodoxy will hear a text that is old, uneven, partly unintelligible without a commentary, and — where it is chanted whole — startling. This collection exists to make it legible: what it is, where it came from, which parts belong to which century, and above all what an anathema means and does not mean.

Three cautions in closing. The Synodikon is not a substitute for the councils whose decisions it carries; go to them. It is not the whole of Orthodox faith; go to the Creed, the Liturgy, and the Fathers. And it is not a licence for anyone to anathematize anyone: that is a conciliar act, and the Fathers who wrote the anathemas also wrote the homily forbidding their private use.

The last thing to say is what the Church says on the day itself. She carries the icons around the church, she states what she believes, and then she does what she was going to do anyway: she offers the Liturgy, and communicates the faithful in the Body and Blood of the One whose image she has just been carrying.

References

Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Trans. Andrew Louth, edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). (The closing prayer.)
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (The schedule of strata, from which the conciliar and parsimonious character of the text’s growth is evident.)
“That We Should Not Anathematize the Living or the Dead,” transmitted among the works of St. John Chrysostom, Patrologia Graeca XLVIII, cols. 945–952; trans. Hieromonk Patapios.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The Orthodox self-understanding and the significance of the feast.)
METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §4.1 (the confessional standpoint stated soberly), §4.2 (the scope of both-sides treatment).