GREEK
m
GREEK
andria had the right of consecrating all his bishops,
once their election had been confirmed by the metro-
politan, whereas in the other greater Churches the
metropolitan himself discharged this function.
Although the sixth canon, in as far as it refers to Antidch, is far from clear, it would seem that the Nicene Council recognized and granted to the Bishop of Antioch the same jurisdiction over the provinces of the civil diocese of the East (Dioscesis Orientis) that it liad recognized and granted to the Bishops of Rome and of Alexandria over the Provinces of the West and of Egypt respectively. Therefore it attributes to An- tioch a supremacy over many provinces, each hav- ing its own metropolitan, in such a way as to consti- tute them into a patriarcliate. It is thought that the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch was co- extensive with the aforesaid civil diocese of the East, but it may very likely have extended also over certain provinces in Pontus and Asia Minor.
The same canon requires that the rights of the other eparchies be maintained. The meanmg of the word eparchies is not clear and has been variously inter- preted. According to some, it refers to ordinary eccle- siastical provinces, but this is hardly probable, seeing that the council had already dealt with them in its fourth canon. Others are of opinion that the council intended to grant the Bishops of Heraclea, Ephesus, and Ca'sarea the same privileges and rights over the prov- inces of the civil dioceses of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus that the Bishops of Alexandria and Antioch enjoyed over the provinces of the civil dioceses of Egypt and the East. The second canon of the Council of Con- stantinople (381) seems to support this uiterpretation, where it says: "The Bishops of the Diocese of Asia must watch over the concerns of Asia only; those of Pontus, over what concerns Pontus, and those of Thrace over what concerns Thrace." Perhaps the council simply meant to enfranchise the provinces of the.se three civil dioceses from the jurisdiction of An- tioch, Alexandria, or any other Church, without, how- ever, raising any particular see — Ephesus for instance, or Ca;sarea — to a particular rank like that of Antioch or Alexandria.
As for Jerusalem, or ^Elia, according to the seventh canon, it remained a simple bishopric under the juris- diction of Caesarea Maritima, its metropolitan see, but enjoyed the right to certain honours on the occasion of oecinnenical councils, when its bishops sat next to tho.se of the greater Churches of the empii-e.
The Council of Constantinople (381) confirmed and defined, in its second canon, what the Council of Nic^a had attempted to outline. It was understood that the Bishop of Alexandria should be the head of the Church of Egypt, and the Bishop of Antioch head of the Church of the East. As for the remaining two Asiatic dioceses, those of Pontus and of .\sia, the am- biguous phra.ses of the second canon, and the inter- pretation thereof given by the historian Socrates (Hist. Eccl., V, c. viii, in P. G., LXVII, 580), do not permit us to infer the supremacy of any one Church over all the other Churches of a civil diocese. That I'^phesus in Asia and Ca-sarea in Pontus held privileged positions is certain, but that either Ephesus or Pontus was at the head of the episcopate of Asia or of Pontus, as Antioch was at the head of the Eastern ejiiscopate, is a position which we have no documentary evidence to support. The third canon of this council of Con- stantinople brings another Church on the scene, that of the imperial capital itself, to which Nicipa had made no reference. The silence of the First (Ecumenical Council is easily understood when we remember that in 3'2.T Byzantium, or Constantinople, was .still an undis- tinguished bishopric, with Heraclea, in Thrace, as its metropolitan, and that its fir-st bishop, St. Metro- phanes, had died as recently as 314. In consequence of the transfer of the seat of imperial government to Byzantium, the city increased in importance, even
from an ecclesiastical point of view ; in .'(30 and 3G0 we
find two Arian bishops, Eu.seliius aii<l luidoxius, leav-
ing their metropolitan Sees of Niconicdia and Antioch
to occupy this bishopric, which they hadalreatly begun
to consider the first episcopal see of the Empire. The
Council of .381 encouraged this attitude, and its third
canon asserts that "the Bishop of (,'onstantinople
ought to have a pre-eminence of honour next to the
Bishop of Rome, for that city is the mnv Rome".
It would be hard to protest too strongly against the spirit of this canon, which attempts to measure the ecclesiastical dignity of a see by the civil importance of the city. But although the popes refused to recognize it, all the bishops of the East accepted it, and Con- stantinople considered itself henceforward as the premier see of the Empire of the East.
Novella cx.x.xi of Justinian approveil this decision of the council : " Ita sancimus .... veteris Romce papam primura esse omnium sacerdotum .... ar- chiepiscopiun Constantinopolis, novse Roma;, post sanctissimam apostolicam sedem veteris Roma; secun- dum locum habere." Did this honorary pre-eminence carry with it a wider jurisdiction? and can the Bishop of Constantinople be henceforward looked on as a patriarch? We have no juridical text in support of .such a thing, but Socrates (Hist. Eccl., V, viii) assures us that Constantinople did exercise authority over Thrace, while Theodoret of Cyrrhus (Hist. Eccl., V, xxviii) attributes to St. John ("hrysostom (398-404) a superior's authority over twenty-eight provinces. Now the "Notitia dignitatum", a document dating from about 410, reckons six provinces in Thrace, eleven in the diocese of Asia, and eleven in that of Pontus. Constantinople was actually at the head of these three dioceses, whose twenty-eight provinces officially made up its patriarchate in 451. In any case, if a superior jurisdiction over these twenty-eight provinces did not belong de jure to the Bisliops of ( 'onstantinople from 381 to 457, it is quite certain that <le facto they exercised such jurisdiction. (For a num- ber of instances in proof of this see the article "Con- stantinople" in Vacant and Mangenot, " Dictionnaire de th^ologie catholique", II, 1323-25.) Furthermore, their aim at this time was to have only one Eastern Church, only one patriarchate, of which they should be the chiefs, and this was to be brought about by the annexation of the provinces of lUyricum, subject to the pope, and the suppression of the rights enjoyed by the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. Thus, on 14 July, 421, the Emperor Theodosius II issued a law whereby Illyricum was brought imder the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Byzantium (Cod. Just., I, ii, vi; Cod. Theod., XVI, ii, xlvi), but in con-seciuence of the pro- tests of Pope Boniface I and of Honorius, Emperor of the West, this law never was enforced.
Again, according to Socrates (Hist. Eccl., VII, xxviii). Bishop Atticus of Con.stantinople obtained from Theodosius II a decree forbidding the con.secra- tion of a single bishop in the East without the consent of the Bishop of Constantinople, but, owing to the opposition it encountered, this decree was hardly ever observed, except in the civil dioce-ses of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus. The struggle undertaken against the See of Alexandria brought nothing but disaster for Constantinople. In less than fifty years three of its bishops, St. John Chrysostom in 4(J3, Ncstorius in 431, St. I'iaxian in 449, were depo.sed by the primates of Egypt, Theophilus, St. Cyril, and Dio.scurus. On the other hand, in the Patriarchate of Antioch the Byzan- tine interference became more and more successful, as was proved in the ease of Ibas, in the partition of Phoenicia, and at the time of the con.secration of the Patriarch Maximus. In 431, at the Council of Ephe- sus, a fourth Greek Church, that of Cyprus, took its place side by side with Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Its subjection to Antioch never having been clearly defined, it had profited by the .Vrian di.s-
