canonical tradition

7/27/2019 Canonical Tradition

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HeyJ x l w l l (1992), p p . 415-425

NIKOLAI AFANASEV AND THEBYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITIONAIDAN NICHOLSBlackfriars, Cambridge

A two-part article in this journal (XXXIII 1992], pp. 125-45; 247-66)has already considered Nikolai Afanasevs appeal to the Fathers inecclesiology, suggesting how, through the pressure of concerns derivedfrom the historic situation of thz Russian church, both under the Tsardom,and after the Revolution of 19 17, he felt obliged to downplay those elementsin the patristic doctrine of the Church which drew attention at once to heruniversal, or unitary, and organizationally (and not only sacramentally)ordered nature -a reference to, above all, the conciliar institution. In orderto present the Church as fundamentally a local, and Eucharistic reality,Afanasev counterposed an Ignatian (sound) to a Cyprianic (unsound)tradition of ecclesiological thinking among the Fathers, thus abandoningin practice the traditional Orthodox (and Catholic) appeal to a consensuspatrum. Though a canon lawyer as well as a patrologist by training, hereserved a special animus for the canonical element in the Churchs make-up, while at the same time recognizing canonical materials as importanttestimonies to how the mystery of the Church was perceived in differentepochs.Afanasev is surely correct in regarding canonical sources as - at leastpotentially - theological sources. Canon law may be seen as implicitecclesiology. In periods when a specific literary genre of treatises deEcclesiu did not exist, it was natural that the theological articulation ofthe meaning of Church should be found, inter alia , in commentaries onthe canons. In addition, the canons themselves are a witness to the senseof the Church in a given period. Afanasevs use of canonical sources isconsidered in this sequel to an article on his patrology because the canonicaltradition, in its main lines, was established in the patristic period andpartakes to some degree in the authority of that periodfor the later Church.This is the age when the faith, worship and ordered existence of the Churchwere crystallized. Commentaries on the canons of the patristic age do nothave an equivalent authoritative force, yet, like later canons, they testifyto the theological life of the post-patristic Church and so form part ofTradition.Before looking at Afanasevs approach to his canonical materials, itwill be appropriate to offer a historical overview of the stateof the canonicaltradition in the period that interests him. This is the more desirable in thatOrthodox canon law, being, by contrast with its Catholic counterpart,


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416 AIDAN NICHOLSuncodified, constitutes a vast and unwieldy body of literature. As onehistorian has somewhat despairingly remarked, Thecanons of the OrthodoxChurch. . form a huge body of material, and in any age there are nevermore than a few people who master it in de tail.2 The origins of thedifferentiation between Western and Eastern canon law lie in the sixthcentury. By that time, collections of papal decretals, regarded as equalin weight to synodal decrees as early as the pontificate of S iricius, 384-99,were being added to conciliar canonical collections in the West, but notin the East.3 In the East, prior to the reign of Justinian, and leaving asideScripture itself, w hich after all contains references to the d iscipline of theearliest communities, we have canonico-liturgical collections and thecanonical determinations of various councils 4 The canonico-liturgicalcollections group together liturgical prescriptions, moral precepts anddisciplinary rules. The principal members of this literary family are theDidache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus,the Canons of Hippolytus, the Apostolic Constitutions, the Testament ofour Lord Jesus Christ and the Didascalia of the Apostles. The (eighty-five) Apostolic Canons, a recurrent feature of Byzantine canonicalcollections, consist of forty-seven canons drawn from the eighth book ofthe Apostolic Constitutions, itself probably a Syro-Palestinian work of themid fourth century, to which have been added thirty-eight further canonsdrawn from the councils of the first four centuries. Relevant to Afanasevspost-1934 critique of the canonical enterprise is M . Metzgers explanationof this development in terms of the legislative vacuum of the sub-apostolicchurches:

Sporadic conciliar reunions were far from furnishing a complete disciplinary code ,and yet difficulties abounded: conflicts of authority, doctrinal divergences, con-troversial, if necessary, initiatives. . .Recourse to apostolic patronage guaranteedthe value of the solutions proposed.6Equally momentous for the future, however, is Justinians decision tolegislate for the C hurch, appealing in effect to the Constantinian principlethat the emperor is responsible for the public peace and order of theChristian community. But his Codex repetitae pruelectionis, Book I ofwhich dealt with Church affairs, and his later Novellae, of whose numberthirty-four are of ecclesiastical concern, had little impact outside the bordersof the Roman em pire. It was in Justinians reign that the first systematiccollection of canonical texts was made in the East, a Nomocanon in LXTitles, now lost. Around 550, in the wake of this early attempt atsystematization, John of Antioch (sometimes called John the Scholastic)produced the first extant collection with any claim to completeness, theSynugZgZ in Fifty Titles. This comprises the Apostolic Canons, togetherwith the canons of the first four Ecumenical Councils (plus or minus oneor two canons added in the aftermath of those Councils or subtractedbecause of papal non-ratification), canons from certain local synods and,


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A F A N A S E V A N D T H E B Y Z A N T I N E C A N O N I C A L TR A D IT IO N 4 17finally, canons inferred from the letters of Basil the Great. John alsocomposed a tractate of eighty-seven chapters on civil laws of the empirerelevant to religious issues. W hen he became C onstantinopolitan patriarchin 565, the SynugijgZ in L Titles became the established canonicalcollection in Byzantium.Around 630, the Nomocunon in XIV Titles was compiled by ananonymous hand and soon acquired an unrivalled position. Noteworthyis its clear separation of the canons from civil legislation, even though,unlike John of A ntioch, its author does include both w ithin the same book.The second edition of this work, produced in 883, added canons takenfrom the Council in Trullo of 691, the Second C ouncil of Nicaea of 787and the Photian councils of 861 and 879, but not the anti-Photian councilof 869. It was also influenced by the Eclogu of Leo 111and Constantine V,a rksumt of Justinianic legislation. Its tendency to am algamate ecclesiasticaland civil legislation is especially pertinent to Afanasevs comments oncanon law. Slightly later than the second edition of the Nomocunon inXIV Titles comes the Busiliku, Leo VIs compilation of imperial lawssumm ing up and ex tending the legislative work of the M acedonian dynasty,much of which affected the Church. In 920 the patriarch NicholasMystikoss council of Constantinople, which regulated the issue of thirdand fourth marriages, a delicate point in imperial-patriarchal relations atthe time, deemed the Nomocunon in XIV Titles to be the singleauthoritative collection of the canons. In 1080 a third edition of theNomocunon was produced by Theodore Besta and incorporated cross-references to the Busilika, thus injecting an even larger dose of civillaw.9 Thus opens the great century of Byzantine canonical comm entaries,the twelfth, the period of Afanasevs favoured sources: Theodore Balsamonand John Zonaras.It will be seen from this overview that Afanasevs strictures on thegenesis of the canonical tradition as a non-evangelical importation of thesecular world into the comm unity of gra ce are not equally applicable, inthe eyes of the historian, to all periods in the developm ent of that tradition.While it is true that the canons had the force of law within the Romanem pire, a clear distinction w as made, at least in the early period , betweenthe ecclesiastical authority to issue canons (which might then be promulgatedby the emperor) and the civil power. Both the work of John of Antiochand the anonymous com piler of the Nornocanon in XIV Titles maintaina clear and ecclesiologically vital distinction at this point. Unfortunately,under the influence of the theory of the total symphoniu of Byzantineemperor and patriarch, this distinction became blurred in later times.Byzantine sources show a remarkable oscillation between Caesaropapistor Caesaroprocuratorist views of the Church and a true dyarchy. Inmany B yzantine writers, the unity of the emp ire was presented a s essentialto the unity of the Church. Indeed, the emperors, conscious of aresponsibility for preserving the unity of faith, itself the most decisive


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418 AIDAN NICHOLSprinciple of the unity of the empire, ascribed to themselves in practiceif not in theory a sporadic doctrinal magisterium.12 The Ecloga of 726describes the emperor, accordingly, as the Churchs pastor.13 On theother hand, the existence of a dyarchy is recognized in Justinians legislatioilwhere the ideal is seen as consonantia or symphonia between the twoauthorities. 4 In the EpanagijgZ, a late ninth-century work, possibly byPhotius, Church authority is accorded full independence in its ownsphere. Although this document was never made into an officialmanual, the increasing weakness of the empire after the Seljuk occupa-tion of Anatolia in 1072 and the Latin seizure of Constantinople in 1204ensured that the patriarchal and synodal structure of the Byzantine Churchwould come more and more into its own. Similar fluctuations betweenimperial and episcopal authority in the matter of legislation punctuate thehistory of the Russian church also. As Afanasevs unpublished lecturematerials on the history of Russian canon law demonstrate, he was deeplyread in the area. Doubtless he felt that it offered no solution differentfrom the Byzantine experience.

But even had the principle of dyarchy been faithfully observed throughoutChurch-State relations on Christian history, Afanasevs difficulties aboutthe role of canon law in the Church would scarcely have been resolved.For two distinct questions were at stake. Firstly, there is the question ofthe right and duty of the Christian emperor to legislate for the Churchcommunity. Afanasev rejects such a notion on the reasonable ground thatthe imperial office cannot be regarded as a differentiationof the apostolicministry. It cannot be related to the Eucharist. It cannot, therefore, in hisview, be considered a distinct charism within the royal priesthood. Thisclear rejection of the Eusebian theology of the emperors God-given rolein the Christian oikoumenZ leads Afanasev to his positive evaluation ofAugustines writing on the relation of Church to empire in the D e civirareDei.16 But secondly, there is also the question as to whether the life ofthe Church, as a community of grace, can ever be appropriately expressedin the form of canons, rules, laws, since grace when expressed in Christianpractice is agapi?, charity, of its nature unspecifiable in legal terms. Itis because Afanasev eventually found himself unable to accept a compat-ibility of any kind between law and the community of charity that hedoes not consider more benignly the less Eusebian canonists in the East,such as Zonaras, or indeed the almost entirely non-Eusebian canonicaltradition in the West. We must now turn to his use of specific canonists.

THEODORE BALSAMONTheodore Balsamon is the most frequently mentioned of the Byzantinecanonists cited by Afanasev. Born at Constantinople, Balsamon became acleric of the great church, Hagia Sophia, attaining the post of chartophylax,


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A FA NA SE V A N D T H E BY Z A N T I N E CA N O N I CA L T RA D I T IO N 4 19a lund of vicar-gene ral, in 1179.18 H e w as appointed patriarch of Antiochby the em peror Isaac An gelos but was unab le to take up his see becauseof the Crusader presence. It is not known w hether he lived to see the seizureof the capital by the Latins in 1204. If he did, the event would havesharpened his already strong anti-Latin animus. Balsamons most importantwork is his commentary on the Nornocanon in XZV Titles, written at thebehest of the emperor Manual Comnenos and the Byzantine patriarchMichael Anchialos. Balsamon takes as his text the second edition of 883which, as w e have seen, took the major innovatory step of integrating civillegislation with ecclesiastical.

Above all, it is the principle which is important: the imperial laws are no longersubordinate. They pen etrate into the very sy stematisation itself on a footing of equalitywith the other decrees of councils and bishops.Balsamon believed, w rongly, that this second recension was the work ofthe patriarch Photius. He followed its spirit faithfully.For Afanasev, Balsamon is an imperialist who would forbid people,or en coura ge them to forbid themselves, the practice of their full sacra-mental rights in the Churc h. A t stake is Balsamons comm entary on theApostolic Canons, especially canon I X , and his exegesis of the C ouncilin Trullo, the Constantinopolitan synod of 691-2, which saw itself ascompleting, at the canonical level, the work of the fifth and sixth ecum enicalcounc ils and who se canons, though by no means all ratified at Rom e, hadbeen added to the Nornocanon in its later form. Afanasev deploredBalsamons insistence that while the emperor, as Christs earthly vice-gerent, has full liturgical rights in the eucharistic sanctua ry, the Christianpeople are neither to enter there nor to communicate themselves. Admittingthat other Byzantine canonists perm it self-administration in case of neces-sity, Balsamon had written:

I think otherwise: for one cannot permit such a liberty on the base of (mere)interpretations or contradictions.2nAfanasev is evidently glad to read of Balsam ons own failure to get canonLXIX of the Council in Trullo put into practice. He tried to prevent laypeople entering the sanctuary but they stood their ground.

How is it possible that at the divine sanctuary of the glorious church of our LordJesus Christ on the island of Chalkis anyone who likes may enter in? know n ot. . .But mark w ell this rule, a nd d o not allow lay me n to enter into the church s sanctuary.How ever, I myself mad e great efforts to prevent laymen fro m entering the sanctuaryof the church of my holy Lady, the M other of God Hodegitria, but without success.They told me it was an ancient custom which one could not forbid.2But Afanasevs greatest anger is vented on Balsamons comment onApostolic Canons IX which prescribed that:

All the faithful wh o enter into a chu rch and listen to the reading of the Scripturesbut do not assist at the Prayer and at the holy com munion, must be excom municatedas sowers of disorder in the Church.*


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420 AIDAN NICHOLSAfanasev points out that, as m ore clearly with Canon 2 of the Antiochenecouncil of (c.) 34 , the context here is that of those faithful who cameto the eucharistic synaxis but did not communicate. Balsamon regards thiscanon as impossible of realization: those who do not communicate out ofscorn or pride might be declared excommunicate but not those who failto communicate out of piety and h ~ m il it y .~ ointing out that the exhor-tation to frequen t, and even daily, comm union is found in such prestigioussources a s the Letters of Basil the G reat,24 Afanasev comm ents onBalsamon:

Everything that was the very basis of the life of primitive Christianity had becom e,in the twelfth century, impossible to realise. With Balsamon, the word impossibleshows, in a way more striking than all his fine speeches, the point to which Christianconsciousness had evolved. . . 5Afanasev overlooked, however, Balsamons answers to the patriarch Markof Alexandria in which he gives his opinion that all people withoutexception, whether clergy, monks or layfolk, might be allowed HolyCommunion daily, provided that they had prepared themselves for it byleading holy lives.26

JOHN ZONARASJohn Zonaras is the other of the two Byzantine canonists cited by Afanasev.Little is known of his life but he held an important court position underthe emperor Alexis Com nenos until his entry into the religious life at themonastery of Hagia Glykeria. He probably died soon after 1150. Inorder of time he is the second of the triumvirate of Byzantine canonistswhose judgements are still noted in Eastern Church practice, workingshortly after Alexis Aristenes, the first great commentator on the SynopsisCanonurn, ut before Theodore Balsamon who knew and used his work .Zonarass tendency is towards a benign interpretation of the canons andhe is notably less Caesaroprocuratorist than Balsamon. His method isnotable for its recourse to history, especially institutional history, whenelucidating the canons. He may well indeed be the author of the EpitornZHistonlon, historical manual reaching from the Genesis account of creationto the accession of the Eastern Rom an E mpe ror John Com nenos in 1118.Byzantinists have recognized this to be a workmanlike piece, makingexcellent use of the manualists sources.We must now look at the use Afanasev has made of Zonarass work.As we might expect from the above summary, Zonaras escapes more lightlythan Balsamon. The points at issue ar e pretty well the same: canon LXIXof the Trullan council, Apostolic Canons IX and the cognate canon I1 ofthe Antiochene council of 341 found in the collection compiled by M eletiusof Antioch and known as the Antiochene Corpus canonurn.On the first,Zonaras rem arks mildly that, strictly, the em peror should not, as a layman,


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AFANASEV AN D TH E BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION 42 1enter the sanctuary, but because of his authority and his dignity anexception is made.28On the ninth Apostolic canon, Zonaras simply saysthat in his day it was not rigorously obeyed: on the issue of communion-whenever-at-the-sumis, while Zonaras makes it clear that in his time therewas widespread opposition to frequent communion on grounds of piety,he does not really indicate his own attitude to this. More probably, hethinks it an insufficient reason for not communicating - and so occupiesAfanasevs own ~ta nd po int . ~The modest total of Afanasevs references to the great Byzantinecanonists hardly permits his readers to obtain a satisfactory overview oftheir work. However, his own lack of sympathy with them is suffi-ciently clear. As he puts it, People have tried to find a theologicalfoundation for the law, but they have never yet s ~ c c e e d e d . ~ fanasevsuse of canonical materials, like his attitude to the canon law in general,came to be affected by his reading of the Lutheran historian of canon law,Rudolf Sohm. Sohms foundational thesis was that Church and law aremutually exclusive ~o n c ep ts . ~his opinion, stated on the very first pageof his Kirchenrecht, brought him considerable notice, as did his attemptto show historically how such allegedly con tradictory notions could havebecome intertwined. Sohms learning, as well as the elegant simplicityof his fundamental concep t, gained a w ide readersh ip for his ideas in bothProtestant and Catholic circle^.^' Moreover, as early as 1906 a Russiantranslation of Sohms principal work appeared in MOSCOW.t wastranslated in part by the polymath priest-philosopher Pave1 Florensky whocites it in his Stolp i utverzhdenie i~tiny.~ergei Bulgakov, himselfinfluenced by Florensky, also devoted some attention to Sohm, mainlyn e g a t i ~ e . ~ohms own ecclesiology was founded on the concept of thepeople of God. ust as the Old Covenan t knew only one quhal, so the Newknows only one ekklzsia, die Volksversammlung der gesamtenChr i~ tenhe i t . ~nd yet, Sohm points out, we use the word church,following New Testament practice, for individual congregations also. Hefinds the solution to this riddle in the thought that

the word e k k k i u does not express any determinate empirical magnitude or any socialconcept (not even the concept of the local community) but merely a dogmatic value-judgment. EkkEsia means every assembly which, in a dogmatic perspective, forfaith, according to its spiritual value, represents a gathering of the New Testamentpeople of the covenant before God and with him (e n ChrisrE).At its foundationlies the dominical saying: where two or three are gathered in Christs Na me, thereis all Christianity, with all its promises realised and allotted. For Christ is in itsmidst, he who is all in all. So where Christ is, there is the e k k k i a , the Peopleof God.38The single ecclesiu has, at the empirical level, countless Erscheinungs-formen , epiphan ies of itself which take the form of worshipping assemblies.Originally, these gatherings were independent and structureless affairs.Only in the course of time did they become formally constituted Gemeinden,


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422 AIDAN NICHOLSbound to a single monarchical bishop. This process is the birth of thatform of the Church which Sohm dubs Altkatholizismus, defined by himas a Verrechtlichung, juridicization, of the Gospel. Sohm takes Ignatiusof Antioch to be the archetypal representative of this falsification of theoriginal ecclesia. The freedom of the Christian gathering is dissolved byIgnatius through a concern for obligations to a hierarchical order of bishop,presbyter and deacon, a consideration so all-important that without thebishop there is no longer the reality of the Church. The bishops presencehas replaced that of Jesus Christ in the Matthean logion as the sine quanon of ecclesial reality. Here, according to Sohm, the entire structure oflater canon law is present in nuce.

Since primitive Christendom had only a religious concept of the Church, and,accordingly, employed that concept also for the description of externally visibleChristianity, the rise o f a juridical Christian order signified, by a natural necessity,the emergence of Catholicism from out of primitive C hr i~ te nd or n .~ ~

It remained for Cyprian of Carthage to complete the image and organiza-tion found in Ignatius. Just as the unity of the local assembly is found forIgnatius in the monarchical bishop, so the unity of all such local assembliestaken together is found by Cyprian in the unity of the episcopal order.In the medieval period, a further step is taken. The transformation of theold Catholic into the Roman Catholic church came about through thecanonizing of relations of precedence between stronger and weaker localchurches. Through Fiirsorge on the part of the former and Rezeption onthe part of the latter, metropolitanates grow in authority. But if these areto be the terms of a struggle for paramountcy, the Roman church wasvirtually predestined to victory.

After the year 70, the star of Jerusalem had declined. Since that time, and rightin to the fourth century, Rome gathered the leadership of Christianity into its ownhands. Rome was he strongest community, great, capable of leadership anddecisionv i s -h i s all others.40

The renaissance of Roman law at Bologna in the twelfth century enabledthe papacy after Gratian to present itself as the supreme governing organof a Church conceived on the model of a society or corporation.Although Afanasev departs from S o h n seeing the episcopally-orderedeucharistic assembly of Ignatius as the model of an authentic early com-munity, while for Sohm the primitive congregation is structureless andlacking office-holders, he agrees with him in regarding the emergence ofcanon law, and the power-relations it both expresses and enables, as theprimary denaturing agent at work in the Churchs history. Afanasevsstrictures on a juridical ecclesiology that would lay stress on the powerof the apostolic ministry to govern has a certain Byzantine backgroundin the context of Greek polemic against the claims of the Roman church,especially in the period of the reunion movements of 1204 to 1439. Ina major fourteenth century text combating the concept of papal plenifudo


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AFANASEV AND THE BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION 423potestatiS, Peter and the apostles are declared not to have acted by anypow er of an administrative kind. Instead, their actions were authoritativein so far as they were carried out under the impulse of the Holy Spirit.But such Byzantine statements hardly call into question the general possi-bility of canon law. Afanasevs attraction to Sohm is better explained byreference to the struggle of the Slavophiles with the Eras tian image of theRussian church after Peter the Great. A comparison with a writer froma similar background, Sergei Bulgakov, is instructive. In his earliestecclesiological essays, Bulgakov spoke of the C hurch as a union of faithand love and even as an anarchic union. But during the crisis of thestructures of church life in Russia in the years 1917-22 he came to seethe insufficiency of a purely m ystical conception of the Churchs fellowship.As the principal authority on Bulgakovs ecclesiology informs his readers:

he began to look for the principles of the Churchs existence in history, becausethe descriptions he had employed hitherto, such as , for example, the union of lovein freedom or the mystical organism seemed to him to concern only an invisibleChurch. He now saw in the definitions of the Slavophiles an act of opposition tothe state of oppression in which the Church of Russia lived under the tsars. Bulgakovunderlined (therefore) the necessity of the external forms of the Church, indispensableas they are if she is to be perceptible andAfanasev failed to realize that Sohm, so far from being a presupposi-tionless historian, was working within a politico-theological frameworkof a definite kind. W riting in a Lutheran context in Bismarckian Germany,Sohm was deeply influenced not only by Luthers account of the contrastbetween Law and G race but also by a particular view of S tate sovereignty.In the two Kingdoms, charity is free, and overflows into the limitlessbenevolence of the justified sinner, while law is imposed, and confinesitself to minimal standards of human conduct on threat of sanction by thePrince 43 However, Afanasev , by repudiating the distinction betweendivine, unchangeable elements in the canon law and human, changeableones, created for himself a virtually intolerable situation as an ecclesiologistconcerned with the theological foundations of canon law. It was,perhaps, inevitable that, in repudiating this distinction, and neglecting suchconcepts as the E astern oikonorniu or the Western dispensafio,Afanasevcame to consider not only the B yzantine canonical tradition, but all canonlaw, a disastrous subversion of the Churchs life.Notes

1 For the significance of the term canon see J . Gaudemet. Les Sources du droir de Ikglise enoccidenr du f f eau Vf fe iPcle (Paris 1985). pp. 1If. Early canons were frequently simply sanctioningsof custom whose own authority is first discussed in Termllian: see De virginibus velondir 1 ; De corona

2 I . Ellis, 7heRussian Onhodox Church:A ConfemporuryHisrory (Bloomington and Indianapolis:3 C. de Clercq, Byzantin (droit canonique). Dicrionnnaire de Droir Canonique, cited below4 On he origins of canon law see 0.Heggelbacher, Geschichfe de sw ch ri sr li ch en Kirchenrechrs

3, 5 ; 4. 6-7.Indiana University Press, 1986). pp. 67f.as DDC I1 (Pans 1957 ), col. 1170.


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424 AIDAN NICHOLSbi s ~ w nonzil von Nizdu, 325 . (Fribourg University Press, 1974).Religieuses LIV (1980), pp . 204-15.5 A. Faivre, LaDocumentation canonico-liturgique de IEglise ancie nne, Revue des Sciences6 M. Metzger, Constitutions apostoliques, Revue de Droir Cunonique XXXII (1982). pp. 141f.7 The fullest account is 9. BenebviE, Sinugogu v 50 rirulov i drugie iuridihkie sbornikiJounni Skholusrika (St Petersburg 1914).8 Cf. E. Herman, S. J., The Secular Church in J. M. ussey (ed.), te Byznnrine Em pire.II : Government, Church and Civilisurion (Cambridge University Press, 1967). p. 106.9 C . de C lercq, Byzantin (droit canonique), art. cit. (note 3 above), col. 1174.10 See A. Michel, D ie K a i s e m c h r i n der Osrkirche (Darmstadt, 1959).11 E.g. Vira nteoabri 31 , cited by A. Michel. ibid., p. 8; Nicephorus of Constantinople, Ep. ad

12 Obvious examples are: Zenos Henorikon; Justinians condemnation of the Three Chapters ;13 M.P .G. 113, 456 .14 Novellae 6; 42.I5 J . de Malafosse, EpanagBgE, DDC V (1953), cols. 354-62.16 N. Afanasev, TserkovDukhn Sviurogo (Paris, 1971). cited below as Tserkov, pp. 281-88.17 bid . , pp . 292-303.18 E. Herman, S. J., Balsamon (Thhdore), DDC 11. op. cit., col. 76.19 C. de Clercq, Byzantin (Droit canonique), art. cit., col. 1174.20 Balsamon, Commenrury on Canon 5 8 of the Council i n Trullo, cited Tserkov, p. 4 6 .21 Balsamon, Commenrury on Canon 69 of the Council in Tmllo, cited Tserkov, p. 42.22 Cited Tserkov, p. 52.23 Balsamon, Commenrury on Apostolic Canon 9 , cited Tserkov, pp. 54f.24 Basil, Ep. 113.25 Tserkov. p. 56.26 Balsamon, Responsio ad Murcum purriurchum Alexundriue 17 (=M.P .G. 138, 968).27 E. Herman, S . J . , Jean Zonaras, DDC VI, cols. 129f.28 Zonaras, Commenrury on Canon 69 of the Council in Trullo. cited Tserkov. p. 42.29 b i d . , p. 54.30 For a brief ove rview, see J. Hussey, nte Orthodox Church in rhe Byunrine Empire (Oxford:31 LEglise du Saint-Esprit, p . 350.32 Sohm, Kirchenrechr I (Leipzig, 1892). p. 1 .33 H.-J. Schmitz, Friihkurholizismus bei Ad olf von Ham uck, Rudolph Sohm und Ernsr Kdsemunn34 R . Zom, Tserkovnoi srroi v pervie veku Khrisriunsntu. per. A. Perrovskugo i P. Florenshgo35 P. Florovsky. Srolp i unteridenie isrinnu (Moscow, 1914). p. 755.36 S. N . Bulgakov, Pravosluvie (Paris 1%5), p. LOO: Ierarkhiya i tainstva, Pur 49 (1935),pp. 24-33; more positively, in the early stu dy, 0 ervok hnstian stve originally 1908, in Dvu groda(Moscow. 1911). 1 . p. 275.

pupum Leonem II I (=M.P .G. 100, 197B), cited by Michel, op. cit.. pp. 90 and 155ff.Heracliuss Unhesis; Leo Ills edict against the images.

Clarendon Press, 1986). pp . 304-10.

(Diisseldorf, 1977). pp . 94-104.(Moscow, 1906).

37 Sohm. Kirchenrechr, p. 18.38 bid . , pp . 19f.39 R . Sohm, Wesen und Ursprung des Kurholizismus (Leipzig, 1909; Berlin, 1912). p. 68.40 Sohm, Kirchenrechr, p. 257.41 Cf. J. Darrouzes, Con ftrence sur la primautt du pape B Constantinople e n 1357, Revue dcsh d e s byvlnrins 19 ( l % l ) , pp. 76-109.42 S. Swierkosz, Lkglise visible selon S.Bulgcrkov. Srructure hiirurchique er sucrumenrelle (Rome1980). pp . 19f. However, Bulgakov later reverted to a more Khomiakovian stress on sobornost,describing his middle period as that when he felt closest to Catholicism: Avrobiogrufiteskiyu z.umerki(Paris, I%), p. 49.43 Sohmappears to have been much influenced by E . Rietschl, LuhersAnschauung yon Wrrichdwerund ichrburer Kirche (Leipzig. 1900). See Y . Congar. R. Sohm nous interroge encore, Revue d esSciences Philosophiques er 7hheologiques 57 (1973), p. 264. Con gar considers that underlying Sohmsapproach is une w rt e dapollinansme eccltsiologique: as the Logos ncarnate fo r Apollinaris lackeda rational swl, so fo r Sohm he Church of the Word Incarnate lacks a proper soc ial form: ibid. p. 277.It is won h noting that a more positive evaluation of canon law took place in the Lutheran-Evangelical


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AFANAS'EV AND THE BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION 425

tradition in Germ any when, d uring the strug gle ove r the Reichskirche idea in Hitlerite Germany. henotion of canon law took on a new attractiven ess as a way of distinguishing, and so defending, theChurch from the State. See M. endiscioli, Germaniu Religiosu nel Term Reich (Brescia. 1977'),p. 136.44 Afan as'ev's claim that Christian antiquity did not know the distinction between unchangeableand changeable features in the canons was too hastily made: see E . Rosser, G(inlicheswtdmcnrchliChes.unverdnderliches und verdnderliches Kirchenrechr von der Enrstehung der Kirche bis zur Mitre des9. Juhrhundens (Paderborn, 1934).

canonical tradition

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