Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, the Nation-State, and the Specter of Byzantium

ANNALS OF HISTORY Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, the Nation-State, and the Specter of Byzantium

George E. Demacopoulos

While it is customary for Orthodox a Christian presence. The bishop was Christians to look to canonical legis- the overseer (episcopos) for a local as- lation when they seek to evaluate the sembly (ekklesia) of Christians in that challenges of the contemporary world, location, regardless of the size of com- it is rarely the case that inquirers prop- munity, and each distinct community erly account for the full context or Sitz constituted “the Church” as a sacra- im Leben of the canons. And while one mental whole. When the number of might make a case for the timeless in- Christians increased, especially after sight of canonical prescriptions when the legalization of Christianity in the dealing with dogmatic teaching or fourth century, church leaders turned moral prohibitions, it is less appropri- to Roman imperial structures to ac- ate to do so when trying to apply the commodate and regulate this growth. canons to issues of ecclesiastical juris- Individual dioceses were grouped diction, such as the question of auto- into larger metropolitanates, each cephaly. This is because ecclesiastical administratively guided by a metro- borders in the Orthodox Church have politan bishop. The Church not only always reflected broader geopolitical appropriated this concept from the realities, if somewhat belatedly, and Roman political structure, but also this is precisely the context in which adopted the map of the imperial pro- the few canons that speak to these vincial network, recognizing the same issues emerged. In other words, the metropolitan cities that the Romans canons on questions of jurisdiction do had designated to govern each prov- not offer theological verdicts but sim- ince. Whenever the Romans altered ply confirm that the ecclesiastical map the boundaries between or within of the Byzantine church should mirror provinces—as they did frequently— the jurisdictional framework of the the Church followed suit by modify- imperial provincial network. Perhaps ing its own ecclesiastical map to mir- even more problematic for the mod- ror the secular one. ern appropriation of these canons is the fact that they presume an imperial Thus, the earliest articulations of au- superstructure that no longer exists. tocephaly that survive in canonical legislation are little more than the In the early Church, the emergence of Church’s adaptation of the internal diocesan boundaries was little more structure of the Roman government, than the recognition of a sociological which afforded administrative - in reality: that there was a geographic dependence to a handful of Roman gap between towns or villages with provincial governors with super-juris-

12 dictional authority. Each of these su- Christian communities that existed © 2019 The Wheel. per-jurisdictions consisted of multiple within the empire. It was only tangen- May be distributed for noncommercial use. provincial metropolitanates under a tially concerned with the administra- www.wheeljournal.com single political leader, who reported tion of the Church beyond imperial directly to the Roman emperor. Even borders. In fact, even though a signifi- the rights assigned in canon law to the cant proportion of Christians from the Church’s autocephalous leaders mim- fourth through the seventh centuries ic the rights of provincial governors lived beyond the imperial borders, within the imperial structure. So while Byzantine canon law made no effort it is true that a handful of Church can- to establish specific diocesan bound- ons from the fifth through the seventh aries or relate external jurisdiction and centuries describe the conditions of bishops to those of the empire. For autocephaly and emphasize the inde- example, even though the Council of pendence of an ecclesiastical primate, Nicaea (325) granted—in rather vague these same canons simply presume the terms—jurisdictional authority “over existence of an overarching imperial the East” to the bishop of Antioch, structure and make very little (histori- there is no surviving evidence to sug- cal) sense without one. This is because gest that anyone took that to mean an the same canons take for granted that East beyond the Roman frontier. The each autocephalous leader is a citizen very large population of Christians on of a common political structure—the the other side of the Roman-Persian Roman or Byzantine Empire—and, as border operated independently; theirs such, is beholden to the empire (and was an ecclesiological domain beyond to the emperor) in multiple ways. To the scope of Byzantine canonical interest. put it in contemporary political terms, the super-jurisdictions were self-gov- To be sure, Canon 28 of Chalcedon erning but they were not sovereign. (451) grants the Archbishop of Con- stantinople the right to ordain and There are several reasons for caution as appoint bishops in the “barbarian we seek to understand the application lands.” This remains a point of inter- of these historical realities today. First, est because of its implications for the there is no evidence that the bishops jurisdictional authority of the Ecu- who drafted this legislation thought menical Patriarchate. But with respect through the ecclesiological implica- to what it meant in the Byzantine pe- tions of—or made theological argu- riod, I would note that this canon does ments for—this precise model. From a not establish specific jurisdictional historical point of view, it seems much boundaries within the “barbarian more likely that they simply appropri- lands” and it presumes that there are ated the imperial model because that no bishops currently serving the pop- was the model with which they were ulations under consideration. Thus, familiar and because church and state the canon does not refer to those com- were so completely integrated by the munities long since established but sixth century that it would not have existing outside of the empire (such occurred to anyone that the Church as the Christians of Persia or Ethio- should develop a distinct administra- pia), but rather to those communities tive superstructure. that do not presently have episcopal oversight (such as the Germanic tribes Second, the scope of Byzantine canon north of Thrace). In other words, Can- law regarding issues of jurisdiction on 28 of Chalcedon is almost surely was primarily concerned with the concerned with the rights and regu-

The Wheel 17/18 | Spring/Summer 2019 13 lations of bishops within the Byzan- horizon in its articulation of imperial tine empire (Constantinople vis-à- legislation. But scholars of Byzantium vis Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch) are increasingly challenging the no- regarding expansion into new areas tion that Justinian’s contemporaries and under whose jurisdiction those shared this universalist political vi- Christians would fall. It does not at- sion and they are especially doubtful tempt to regulate the jurisdiction of that subsequent Byzantine thinkers existing bishops who reside beyond viewed their empire in such terms.1 the empire, nor jurisdictional disputes As we will see, the apparent incongru- between bishops within the empire ence of individual state interests and and those outside it. the universalist claims of Christian theology as reflected in Byzantine ca- The longstanding misapplication of nonical efforts to establish ecclesiasti- the Byzantine canonical tradition no cal jurisdictions was compounded by 1 See especially doubt stems partly from the fact that the rise of the nation-state. Anthony Kaldellis, some Byzantines had a habit of em- Hellenism in Byzantium: The ploying universalist language even The Challenge of the Nation-State Transformations of though they were seeking to regulate Greek Identity and issues inside the empire. Indeed, in In his groundbreaking work Imag- the Reception of the the modern world we often invoke the ined Communities, Benedict Ander- Classical Tradition universalist term oikoumenie when we son makes a compelling case for the (Cambridge: Cambridge discuss the early Church. The word nation-state as a uniquely modern University Press, literally means “the inhabited earth.” phenomenon. For Anderson, the na- 2007). It is precisely for this reason that we tion-state unites otherwise diverse refer to the “Ecumenical” Councils, 2 peoples through a complex matrix of Benedict Anderson, because we hold their dogmatic claims such deep imagined associations and Imagined Communi- ties: Reflections on the to be universally binding. But in the dependencies that individuals are Origin and Spread of legislation of the Roman emperor Jus- willing to wage war in order to defend Nationalism (New tinian, which provides the foundation people whom they have never met.2 York: Verso, 1983). for so much of our thinking about mat- For Anderson, this sociopolitical fidel- ters of autocephaly and pentarchy, the ity exists only in modernity because Nicolaus Germanus, Map of the world word oikoumenie functions as a stand- it is only after the Enlightenment that after Ptolemy, 1467. in for “the empire.” One might make individuals began to conceive of cit- National Library of the case that Justinian’s language, at izenship as commitment to an idea. Poland. Detail. least rhetorically, envisioned a global This notion of belonging is different from a premodern clan, kingdom, or empire, he argues, because in those arrangements, an individual’s fidelity to the group was predicated upon hierarchical associations involving specific individuals—the clan leader, the king, the king’s representative, and so forth. In the nation-state, however, the citizen’s allegiance and identity are to the nation, the idea of the nation, and the equality that one believes him or herself to share with other citizens of the nation. For example, in premodern France, one’s loyalty was to the French king, and one’s standing vis-

14 à-vis the state was determined by his ethnicity, and shared history—reflect © 2019 The Wheel. relationship to the king or the king’s social, cultural, and political reali- May be distributed for noncommercial use. representative. In post-revolutionary ties that do not easily map onto the www.wheeljournal.com France, one’s loyalty was to the idea of Byzantine experience. They are es- France itself, and one’s standing was pecially difficult to square with the that of a citizen among fellow citizens. Byzantine canonical tradition con- One might challenge Anderson’s pre- cerning autocephaly. Yes, the Byzan- modern-modern dichotomy by point- tines developed advanced systems ing to aspects of Byzantine civilization of organization, both politically and with which he seems to be unfamiliar. ecclesiastically, and those systems But his insights regarding the modern allowed for relative independence nation state are particularly fruitful and self-governance. But we should for thinking about the challenges of not lose sight of the fact that the in- ecclesial jurisdiction in the age of the dividual parts were never sovereign. nation-state. They were always part of a larger imperial, civilizational, and ecclesi- For our purposes, one of the key di- astical whole. What is more, between mensions of Anderson’s assessment the fourth and the seventh centuries, of the modern nation-state is that when the canons on jurisdiction were while the nation-state considers it- composed, the boundaries between self sovereign, it never sees itself in autocephalous churches were never universalist terms. No national ideol- constituted on the basis of cultural or ogy presumes to be a stand-in for the linguistic difference. whole of humanity—there is no oikoumenie of the nation—because the very During the nineteenth century, when organization of the nation-state pre- political activists in Eastern Europe sumes the existence of other nations. first aspired to establish independent As such, the idea of the nation empha- nation-states on the French model in sizes a variety of factors, both preex- Greece, Romania, Serbia, and other isting (such as language) and newly lands, they drew upon the Byzantine developed (such as a legal system), tradition of autocephalous churches in order to differentiate one nation as a means to reinforce national iden- from another. Put more succinctly, a tity by aligning political and ecclesias- national imagination encourages an tical interests and independence.3 This outlook that is distinctive rather than approach was not entirely new: the universalist. In some iterations, a na- Byzantines, too, had always aligned tionalist imagination is benign, but in political and ecclesiastical identity. others it can epitomize evil. Orthodox But the conditions of autocephaly that Christian history since the nineteenth emerged from the nation-state exper- century has witnessed both extremes iment were fundamentally different and everything in between. than those of late antiquity. Not only were the emergent autocephalous Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction after the churches organized upon principles 3 See Orthodox Nation-State of social, ethnic, linguistic, and po- Christianity and litical difference, but there was no Nationalism in If we provisionally adopt Ander- overarching structure to keep them Nineteenth-Century son’s working definitions, we are aligned institutionally or sociologi- Southeastern Europe, ed. Lucian Leustean reminded that many factors we pre- cally. From the very beginning, these (New York: Fordham sume to bind members of a nation churches were deeply invested in the University Press, together—such as language, culture, cultural and political independence of 2014).

The Wheel 17/18 | Spring/Summer 2019 15 jurisdictional disputes between autocephalous churches since the formation of national churches. Many of these disputes have led to schism, if only temporarily. I would like to suggest that it is precisely because the Byzantine canonical texts did not anticipate a post-imperial national church structure, that the Church has been so ill-prepared to adjudicate and resolve jurisdictional disputes when they have occurred.

Indeed, one need look no further than to the Council of Crete in 2016 to be reminded how different our present situation is from the Byzantine. The documents of the Crete Council were innocuous compared to some to dogmatic disputes of the fifth or sixth century. But for the organization of Crete, there was no imperial superstructure to force the participation of those primates who did not want to attend. By way of contrast, during the height of the Christological controversies in the fifth and sixth centuries, no bishop could refuse a summons to a general council of the Church, because the summons came from the emperor. Indeed, at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the bishop Theodoros Vryzakis, their respective nations. Indeed, they of Rome was present only because he Metropolitan Ger- were agents of independence. Both had been dragged there by Justinian’s manos of Old Patras their popular support and their offi- soldiers! I am not suggesting that the Blessing the Greek cial status were (and remain) linked Byzantine model was preferable or Uprising, 1865. to their willingness to envision and even appropriate, but simply identify- articulate an expression of Christian- ing just how different our situation is ity that reinforces national distinctive- today. With no Pope and no emperor, ness. It would be difficult to overstate there is nothing to prevent the leader how much this historical reality has of a national church from self-imposed transformed the Orthodox experience isolation if that is the path he chooses. of autocephaly. Perhaps nothing points to the inad- Thus far, the emergence of national equacy of the Byzantine canonical churches has not led to the kind of tradition to answer the jurisdictional dogmatic disintegration that occurred questions of the twenty-first century centuries after the Roman Church more than the multi-part contro- was politically and culturally isolated versy over the situation in Ukraine. from Byzantium. Nevertheless, there For starters, there is the question of have been countless non-dogmatic, which hierarchical body serves as

16 the final court of appeal when con- council as well? In practical terms, © 2019 The Wheel. demned clerics seek readmission to what mechanism would force them May be distributed for noncommercial use. communion in the Church. Byzantine to attend? www.wheeljournal.com history suggests that both the See of Rome and, later, the Patriarchate of In sum, ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Constantinople served this function. the Orthodox Church continues to be But there is also Byzantine-era prece- what it has always been: a mirror of dent to suggest that this primatial au- broader geopolitical developments. thority was not always recognized by The emergence of national churches other autocephalous churches, even if reflects and reinforces the reality of the same churches in other situations the nation-state. This mirroring is were perfectly willing to recognize it. not likely to stop, either in Ukraine Then there is the question which epis- or elsewhere. To my mind, this situ- copal body possesses the authority to ation presents two distinct but mu- grant autocephaly to a new (national) tually compounding challenges. The church. The nineteenth and twentieth first is that there will always be a centuries are littered with examples temptation for national churches to of this kind of dispute. In nearly ev- prioritize local interests, constituen- ery previous situation (except for the cies, and political pressures over the formation of the Orthodox Church in universalist thrust of the Christian America), each independent church message, whenever a situation aris- was eventually recognized by the es that puts the two in conflict. The other primates. This time might be second (and more problematic) chal- different. But I doubt it will, in the lenge is that the Church’s canonical long run. tradition cannot adequately govern an ecclesial superstructure compris- Several autocephalous leaders, ea- ing national churches, because that ger to avoid taking sides between canonical tradition was born of and Moscow and Constantinople, have presumes an imperial structure that proposed the convening of a new no longer exists. synod to resolve the various jurisdictional questions pertaining to To be clear, I remain hopeful that the Ukrainian Church. Theoretical- should the Church face a true crisis of ly, that makes a great deal of sense. dogmatic proportions at some point The Orthodox Church is, historical- in the future, the necessary admin- ly, conciliar. But in the absence of an istrative mechanism will emerge to emperor, why would the Patriarch resolve the situation. But what that of Constantinople or the Patriarch mechanism will be and how it will of Moscow attend such a council if compensate for the fragmentation of they anticipated a rebuke? Would our post-Byzantine, national-church they not lobby others to avoid the dysfunction I do not know.

George E. Demacopoulos is the Father John Meyendorff & Pat- terson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University. Along with Aristotle Papanikolaou, he co-founded the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies and the author of four monographs, the most recent being Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade.

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