Byzantine, Canon Law

BYZANTINE, CANON LAW. - It is, originally, the law proper to the Church of Byzantium, or Constantinople, which became the common law of all the Eastern Churches of the Byzantine rite, both Catholic and dissident.

I. EXTENT

All the pagan peoples to whose evangelization Constantinople contributed, such as the Russians and the Serbs, or who, for one reason or another, turned definitively toward Constantinople, recognizing its supremacy, received simultaneously the liturgy and the ecclesiastical discipline of Byzantium, so much so that, subsequently, Byzantine canon law effectively became the common foundation of the legislation of all the Churches that recognized, at a certain moment, in varying degrees, the authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople: in other words, of all the Orthodox Churches, in the sense of the Council of Chalcedon, that is, practically, of all the Churches of the Byzantine rite.

Therefore, the following today observe Byzantine discipline, as the common foundation of legislation, integrated by the particular law of the individual communities: the Greeks strictly so called, or Hellenes, the Melkites of the three patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the Romans, the Ukrainians or Ruthenians, the Russians, the Georgians, the Serbs, then various small groups of Albanians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Chinese and Japanese. It should be observed that in almost all the aforementioned groups there exists a united Catholic community, which bases its discipline on Byzantine canon law, just as the dissidents of the respective group do.

II. DURATION

The history of strictly Byzantine canon law embraces a period of about thirteen centuries, extending more precisely from the Trullan Council of 691, in which Byzantine discipline asserted itself with its most characteristic features, down to the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Indeed, before 691, the Byzantine patriarchate was almost exclusively governed by conciliar and patristic legislation, common to the whole Catholic Church, or, at most, by the law proper to the whole Church of the East. On the other hand, after 1453, the patriarchate of Constantinople, increasingly dismantled both by the establishment of Catholic communities and by the emancipation of the dissident Churches, which acquired their autocephaly, established a new law, not recognized, at least in principle, in the other Churches, and to which it reserves, with better reason, the designation of Greek or Hellenic.

III. SOURCES

Canon 2 of the Trullan Council fixed the sources of Byzantine canon law as follows: 1) the 85 canons known as the Apostolic Canons, extracted from Book VIII of the Apostolic Constitutions; 2) the canons of the ecumenical Councils of Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451); 3) the canons of seven local councils held in the East: Ancyra in Galatia (ca. 314), Neocaesarea in Pontus (between 314 and 325), Gangra in Paphlagonia (mid-4th century), Antioch in Syria (314, or 330-32), Laodicea in Phrygia (between 347 and 381), Sardica in Moesia (343), Constantinople (394), to which is added a single local council of the West, that of Carthage of 419; 4) the canons of twelve Fathers of the Eastern Church: the holy archbishops of Alexandria Dionysius (d. 264), Peter (d. 311), Athanasius (d. 373), Timothy (d. 385), Theophilus (d. 412) and Cyril (d. 444); St. Gregory of Neocaesarea (d. 270), St. Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia (d. 379), St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. ca. 390), St. Amphilochius of Iconium (d. ca. 403), St. Gennadius of Constantinople (d. 471); of the writings of the Fathers of the Western Church, only the letter written by St. Cyprian of Carthage in the name of the bishops of Africa, at the Council of 256, on the Baptism of heretics, is accepted; 5) finally, the 102 canons of the Trullan Council itself.

To complete the list of the sources of Byzantine canon law, one must further add, naturally, the 22 canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicaea (787). The Byzantine dissidents add to these the 17 canons of a double council (called first-second) held in the church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople in 861, under the patriarch Photius, as well as 3 canons of another council assembled in the church of Hagia Sophia in 879 under the presidency of the same patriarch. Furthermore, the Byzantine commentators of the Middle Ages received into the Corpus of canon law writings of other patriarchs of Constantinople, namely: a synodal letter of St. Tarasius (784-806), addressed to Pope Adrian, 35 canons of John II the Faster (582-95), two canons attributed to St. Nicephorus (806-15), as well as two responses of Nicholas Grammaticus (1084-11).

IV. COLLECTIONS

Besides the chronological collections composed according to canon 2 of the Trullan Council and which were gradually integrated by the addition of canons of new councils or of decisions of patriarchs, the Church knew, almost immediately after the publication of the second edition of the Justinian Code, a Collectio LX titulorum, today lost, composed around 535. The first systematic collection of canons that has come down to us is the Collectio L titulorum, made by John Scholasticus, at Antioch, around 550, and reissued by him at Constantinople, after his elevation to the patriarchal throne of that city in 565 (G. Voell-H. Justell, Bibliotheca iuris canonici veteris, II, Paris 1661, pp. 499-602; cf. V. Benešević, Synagoga 50 titulov i drugie iuridiceskie sborniki Ioanna Skolastika, St. Petersburg 1914). There is also, from the period prior to the Trullan Council, a valuable and precise Synopsis canonum, revised around 965 by Simeon Logothetes, and known principally through the commentary of Aristenos (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 673-709; G. Rhalles, M. Potles, Σύνταγμα τῶν θείων καὶ ἱερῶν κανόνων, IV, Athens 1854, pp. 393-416). Finally, one must number among the systematic collections a Liber poenitentialis, of uncertain date, wrongly known under the name of Nomocanon Ioannis Ieunatoris, patriarch of Constantinople from 582 to 595 (Rhalles-Potles, op. cit., pp. 432-45; cf. Zaozerskij-Khakhanov, Nomokanon Ioanna Postnika, Moscow 1902; A. J. Almasov, Kanonarij monakha Ioanna, Odessa 1907).

But the most characteristic feature of the collections of canon law is the ample reception they reserve for the legislation on ecclesiastical matters of the civil authority, often considered as a true, if not autonomous, source of canon law. At the beginning, such texts are found gathered in separate collections; thus there are: the Collectio XXV capitulorum, extracted from the Justinian Code and already placed in an appendix to the Collectio LX titulorum (G. Heimbach, Ἀνέκδοτα, II, Leipzig 1840, pp. 145-207); the Collectio LXXXVIII capitulorum made by John Scholasticus as a complement to his canonical work (Heimbach, op. cit., pp. 208-34); the Collectio XXII capitulorum extracted from various Novels of Justinian (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 660-72); the Collectio Tripartita extracted from the Corpus iuris civilis, and more precisely from the first 13 titles of the Code, with indication of the respective parallel passages (whence the Collection is also called Paratitla), from the Digest and from the Novels, with a commentary by Anastasius Scholasticus on the latter (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 1217-1361).

However, it was not long before both the laws of the civil authority in ecclesiastical matters (νόμος) and the canons of the Church (κανόνες) were gathered into a single collection and under the same headings, whence arose the famous collections known under the name of Nomocanons. Already toward the end of the 6th century, an unknown author distributed under the headings of the Collectio L titulorum the imperial texts of the Collectio LXXXVII capitulorum, thus forming, in a purely artificial manner, the first of the Nomocanons, of which a translation into the Slavic language made in the 9th century is attributed to St. Methodius (H. Schmid, Die Nomokanoniibersetzung des Methodius, Leipzig 1922). But the best known of these collections is the Nomocanon XIV titulorum (PG 104, 441-976; I. B. Pitra, Iuris ecclesiastici Graecorum historia et monumenta, II, Rome 1868, pp. 433-642; Rhailles-Potles, I, Athens 1852, pp. 1-335; cf. V. Benešević, Kanoničeskij Sbornik XIV titulov so vtoroj četverti VII věka, St. Petersburg 1905; K. E. Zachariae von Lingenthal, Über den Verfasser und die Quellen des Pseudo-Photianischen Nomokanon in XIV Titeln, ibid. 1885; V. Narbekov, Nomokanon Konstantinskago patriarcha Fotija, Kazan 1899). The first redaction of this Nomocanon, which probably made use of a preceding collection of 14 titles made around 580, dates back to the time of Heraclius, around 620, and comprises three parts: the first contains the arrangement of the canonical texts in 14 titles; the second is a chronological collection of the canons; the third contains the civil texts, extracted from the Collectio Tripartita and from the Novels of Heraclius. The second recension of this Nomocanon, made in 883 and by tradition attributed to the patriarch Photius, introduces into the collection the later canonical texts and inserts among the canons the indication of the respective civil documents, forming a Nomocanon in the full sense of the word. There is also a third recension, little known, made by Theodore Besta in 1080, who contented himself with reproducing the civil documents in their entirety and with inserting references to the text of the Basilica, the new and extensive legal collection of the Macedonian dynasty. Translated into Slavic in the course of the 12th century, according to the so-called Photian recension (cf. Benešević, Drevne-slavjanskaja Kormčaja XIV titulov bez tolkovanij, St. Petersburg 1906), enriched and commented upon in 1198 by the well-known canonist Balsamon, the Nomocanon in 14 titles was and remains the most representative and fundamental monument of Byzantine canon law.

V. COMMENTATORS

With the Nomocanon in 14 titles, it may be said that, by the end of the 9th century, Byzantine canon law is already fundamentally and essentially constituted. The period that follows until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 adds nothing other than decrees, more often synodal, of one or another of the patriarchs of Constantinople, among whom stand out Nicholas Grammaticus (1084-1111), Luke Chrysoberges (1156-69) and Michael Anchiales (1169-77). Then, with the 12th century, the era of the great commentators and canonists opens. The most celebrated are: Alexius Aristenus, author of a brief commentary on the Synopsis canonum; Zonaras, historian and canonist endowed with a great ecclesiastical sense and respectful of the Roman Church; Theodore Balsamon (v.; d. after 1195), the most prolific and the most able of the Byzantine commentators, but a declared opponent of the Roman Church; Demetrius Comatianus (d. after 1235); Constantine Armenopulus (ca. 1345) and Matthew Blastares (14th century), author of an alphabetical Syntagma, written in 1335, in the manner of an encyclopedic dictionary.

Acacio Cousa