148 The Œcumenical Synods of the Orthodox Church Saturday and not on any other day, or, out of obstinacy and self opinion, celebrates such services and offers κόλλυβα on Sunday, re- inforcing those who have, from time to time, fallen into this error, or openly states that Christians should Commune every forty days, neither more nor less, such a person, no matter what his station in life, or rank, or age, should be aware that if his conduct becomes known to the Church, he will be subject to her righteous indig- nation and chastisement and will experience such things as he has never imagined even in his wildest dreams.59 The example of the greatKολλυβάδες Fathers, whose zeal was tempered by love—leaders among them included Saint Makarios of Corinth and Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, the compilers of the Φιλοκαλία (Philokalía), and Saint Athanasios of Paros—, re- mains an inspiring model for contemporary traditionalists seek- ing to cure the ills plaguing the Church in our own age of inno- vation and apostasy. The Synod of Constantinople of 1872 hen the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in W1453, it introduced the millet (“nation,” “religious commu- nity”) system of government in the territories of the former East- ern Roman Empire. Under this system, non-Muslim minori- ties (largely Christians and Jews) were grouped together by faith as distinct political entities with limited autonomy (but second class citizenship). An ethnarch, or millet başı (“head of the na- tion”), was appointed for each of these religious communities by the Turkish authorities, and this leader was responsible for over- seeing his millet on behalf of the state. In the case of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, this task was deputed to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who became the head of Rum milleti, “the Roman nation,” an indiscriminate congregation of all Or- thodox peoples—Wallachians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Arabs, 59 Collectio Conciliorum Recentiorum Ecclesiæ Universæ, ed. Jean-Baptiste Martin and Louis Petit, Vol. iv (Paris: Expensis Huberti Welter, 1909), col. 82. Father James Thornton 149 Albanians, etc. The Patriarch of Constantinople came to enjoy an administrative ascendancy over the Patriarchs of Alexandria, An- tioch, and Jerusalem, as a result of which, in the harsh words of the Roman Catholic scholar Father Adrian Fortescue (1874–1923), most of these Greek patriarchs did not even take the trouble to re- side in their titular city. Mere servants of the oecumenical bishop..., they were content to fritter away their lives in Constantinople, use- less ornaments of the Phanar.60 The corruption of the Hierarchy at its highest levels was one of “two melancholy effects”61 that, in the assessment of Metro- politan Kallistos, the millet system inflicted upon the Church, the other one being a sad confusion between Orthodoxy and nationalism. With their civil and political life organized completely around the Church, it became all but impossible for the Greeks to distinguish between Church and nation. The Orthodox faith, being universal, is lim- ited to no single people, culture, or language; but to the Greeks of the Turkish Empire “Hellenism” and Orthodoxy became inextrica- bly intertwined, far more so than they had ever been in the Byzan- tine Empire.62 Describing this phenomenon at work in the Jerusalem Patriarch- ate, Father Theodore Pulcini, in words that are equally applicable to the Œcumenical Patriarchate, states: After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the concomitant de- mise of the empire..., the “Romans” of the Patriarchate thought of themselves more and more as “Greeks,” in contradistinction to 60 Adrian Fortescue, “Jerusalem,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. viii (New York, ny: Robert Appleton Co., 1910). 61 Ware, The Orthodox Church, p. 89. 62 Ibid. Metropolitan Kallistos’s astute observation, here, puts the lie to allegations that the Roman Empire was guilty of cæsaropapism—sometimes pejoratively termed “Byzantinism”—, for, in fact, it was a Muslim state, not a Christian one, that made the Œcumenical Patriarchate an instrument of tem- poral power. 150 The Œcumenical Synods of the Orthodox Church the...native ecclesiatical populace. Thus the cultural-linguistic dis- tinction of earlier centuries was transmogrified into a racial-ethnic (or national) one. The Byzantine/“Roman” emphasis in the Patri- archate became a Hellenic one.63 These historical factors set the stage for the confrontation that, rightly or wrongly, has come to be known as “The Bulgar- ian Schism,” a complex sociopolitical drama involving not only Greeks and Bulgarians, but also Turks and Russians. The Bul- garians had been converted to Orthodoxy by Saints Cyril and Methodios the Equals-to-the-Apostles, who, under the patron- age of Saint Photios the Great, developed the Glagolitic alpha- bet (which evolved into the modern Cyrillic alphabet, named in honor of Saint Cyril) in order to evangelize Slavic peoples in their vernacular tongues. From its establishment in the ninth century, however, the autonomy of the Bulgarian Church was on-again off-again, and, as Father Meyendorff notes, The question of independence was long a sore point in the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, for the Bulgarians were governed by Greek bishops who, especially in the towns, sought to suppress the Slavonic liturgy and generally Hellenize the Church.64 Tensions only escalated as the intractability of the problem re- vealed itself: Several of the ecumenical patriarchs tried to satisfy the legitimate claims of the Bulgarians in the course of the nineteenth century, but they always failed because of the hopeless way in which the two populations were mixed up with each other in the Balkan area. In Constantinople itself they lived side by side, but the Bulgarians, inspired by nationalist feelings, demanded the establishment of a 63 Theodore Pulcini, “Tensions Between the Hierarchy and Laity of the Je- rusalem Patriarchate: Historical Perspectives on the Present Situation,” St. Vladi- mir’s Theological Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 (1992), p. 279. 64 John Meyendorff,The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today, 4th ed., rev. Nicholas Lossky (Crestwood, ny: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), p. 152. Father James Thornton 151 genuine national church without any precise territorial limits and with jurisdiction over all their compatriots, in default of which they wished to have equality between Greeks and Bulgarians in the ad- ministration of the ecumenical patriarchate.65 The volatility of this ecclesiastical disagreement was then ex- acerbated by having political intrigue thrown into the mix: Other pressures mounted, forcing the issue of an autocephalous church in Bulgaria. After the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War, union was proposed with Rome through French aid. ...Russia, ea- ger to exert a leading influence in Bulgaria, felt that it should en- courage a national church rather than one connected with Rome. ...In 1870 the Turks wished to divorce Bulgaria from Russian in- fluence and complied with the Bulgarian wishes for an indepen- dent church.66 Thus it was that in 1870, with the connivance of the Ottoman au- thorities, the Bulgarian Exarchate, an independent ecclesiastical entity, with segregated Bulgarian parishes under a Bulgarian Hi- erarch—Metropolitan Hilarion of Trnovo was originally offered this position, but, when he declined, Exarch Anthimos of Bul- garia was eventually appointed instead—, was established and le- gitimated legally by a firman (“decree”) of Sultan Abdülaziz Oglu Mahmud ii. In response, Patriarch Anthimos vi of Constantino- ple convened a Synod in 1872, which was attended by Patriarch Sophronios iv of Alexandria, Patriarch Hierotheos of Antioch, and Patriarch Cyril ii of Jerusalem, along with other Hierarchs, to consider the situation of the Bulgarian Exarchate. The Synod excommunicated the Bulgarians and condemned them for a her- esy it termed “phyletism,” (from “φυλή” [“phyl´ē ”] or “φῦλου” [“phýlou”], “clan,” “tribe,” “race”), the false principle that ecclesi- astical jurisdictions and congregations should correspond to the ethnic divisions among the Faithful in a given territory, each eth- nic group having its own Hierarchy and parishes: 65 Ibid., pp. 152–153. 66 Maloney, A History of Orthodox Theology Since 1453, p. 235. 152 The Œcumenical Synods of the Orthodox Church In compunction of soul, and invoking the Grace from on high that comes down from the Father of Lights (St. James 1:17), set- ting in our midst the Gospel of Christ, “in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3), and compar- ing phyletism both to the teaching of the Gospel and to the age old polity of the Church of God, we have discovered that it is not only alien, but also diametrically opposed to them, and we per- ceive that the transgressions that have occurred in the formation of their [the Bulgarians’] phyletistic conventicle [παρασυναγωγή (parasynagōg´ē )], when enumerated one by one, are manifestly ex- posed by the corpus of the Sacred Canons. Wherefore, together with our Holy and God-bearing Fathers “embracing with gladness the Divine Canons, holding fast all the decrees of the same without alteration, whether they have been set forth by the holy trumpets of the Spirit, the all-laudable Apostles, or by the Holy Seven Œcumenical Synods,67 or by Synods locally assembled for the promulgation of such decrees, or by our Holy Fa- thers, for all of these, being illumined by the same Spirit, decreed such things as were