Why Orthodoxy

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Chapter 03 of 12 · The case for Orthodoxy

The Faith of the Seven Councils — and Only Seven

The Orthodox Church is the Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea (325) to Nicaea II (787). The Catholic Church recognizes twenty-one. This chapter examines why the Orthodox count stops at seven, and what the difference means for the authority of Councils themselves.

The form. This article concerns the first principle of all the rest: what makes a council the voice of the Church, and what binds the whole Church. The objections are the strongest form of the Roman case; the sed contra quotes the Church's own canons and the record she left; the determination follows; the replies close each objection.

Whether a council is ecumenical in authority only by the reception of the whole Church, and whether the definitions made by the Western communion alone, after the separation, bind the whole Church.

Objections to the Orthodox position

  1. Obj. 1 — From the promise of indefectibility. Christ promised "lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28:20) and that "the gates of hell shall not prevail" (Matthew 16:18). The succession of the Roman see is unbroken, and Vatican I teaches that "the Roman pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra… enjoys that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed." The head cannot err in defining the faith for the body; the body cannot out-vote the head.1
  2. Obj. 2 — Against reception-theory. If a council's authority depends on subsequent "reception," then no council is ever finally binding — there is no end to the waiting, no court to decide whether a council was received, and every dogma floats on opinion. This is not the ancient order; it is a modern expedient invented to avoid the pope.2
  3. Obj. 3 — From the substance of the later councils. The Lateran, Trent, and Vatican councils condemned real errors — the iconoclasts, the Cathars, the Reformers, modernism — and their condemnations the East itself has never repudiated. The East was absent from these councils by its own choice; absence is not a veto; and a church that accepts the condemnation of iconoclasm while rejecting the council that condemned it is inconsistent.3

On the contrary

The Lord set the tribunal of the Church, not of a throne: "If he will not hear them, tell it unto the church" (Matthew 18:17); "the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15).4 And the Lord: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20) — a promise to the gathered body, not to a single see. And the ancient Church acted on the principle of reception with all solemnity: the "Robber Council" of Ephesus (449), convoked by the emperor, attended by many bishops, and ratified the Monophysite position, was refused by the Church and undone at Chalcedon (451) — an imperial council, rejected because it did not confess the faith of the Church. Reception is not a modern expedient; it is the ancient judgment of the Church on her own councils.5 And the Church of the first millennium never once saw a council convoked, ratified, or corrected by the authority of one see: every one of the Seven went forth "it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us" (Acts 15:28), and each was received by the whole Church — East and West alike — or was not received at all.6

I answer that

Three things must be distinguished, or the whole question is confounded: the definition of an ecumenical council, the criterion of ecumenicity, and the content of what a council may do.

On the definition and the criterion. An ecumenical council is the gathering of the bishops of the whole world, in unity of faith with their flocks, confessing and guarding the deposit. Its authority is not self-constituting: an emperor can summon an assembly, a pope can summon an assembly, but an assembly becomes the voice of the Church when the whole Church — over which the Holy Spirit continues to preside — recognizes in it the faith of the Church. This is exactly how the Church of the first millennium behaved, and exactly what Objection 2 calls a modern invention and is not: the Church's judgment on Ephesus (449) is the standing proof. The Seven Councils were received, over time and sometimes over resistance, by East and West together — Constantinople I (381) had almost no Western bishops; Constantinople II (553) was held against Pope Vigilius's will; Nicaea II (787) was attacked in the Frankish Libri Carolini and at Frankfurt (794). Reception is a process, not a roll-call on the last day of the synod. The post-1054 councils of the Roman list were not "gatherings of the West alone": Lyons II (1274) had a Byzantine embassy that chanted the filioque; Florence (1438–39) had the emperor, the patriarch, and some seven hundred Greeks, and every Eastern bishop but Mark of Ephesus signed Laetentur Caeli. That is the East's strongest exhibit, not its weakest: a union signed by the hierarchy and then refused by the body of the Church — 449 in reverse. Non-reception, not non-attendance, is the verdict.7

On the content — what a council may do. The Orthodox do not deny the Church's power to confess her faith more fully; they deny the power to amend it. The distinction was established in Chapter 1: Nicaea (325) used the new word homoousios to guard the ancient faith, and it was received precisely because it guarded it; the filioque in the Creed, and the dogmas of 1854, 1870, and 1950, changed the confession the Church had sealed, and were resisted precisely because they changed it. The test in every instance is the Vincentian canon, which West and East alike acknowledged for a thousand years: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus — what was believed everywhere, always, by all.8 A council that confesses that faith has authority over all; a council that adds to it binds only those who consent. The Orthodox Church has never required of the whole Church, as a condition of communion, a new article the undivided Church did not confess. That is a narrower claim than "Orthodoxy never developed anything," and it must be kept honest. The Quinisext Council in Trullo (691–692) is received in the East as completing the Fifth and Sixth Councils; Rome never received it — Pope Sergius I refused to sign — precisely because canons 13 and 55 name and reject Roman clerical continence and the Roman Saturday fast. Trullo is disciplinary, not a new credal article, and the East holds it without pretending the West received it. The Palamite additions to the Synodikon (after 1351) dogmatize the essence–energies distinction inside the Orthodox communion; they were never imposed on Rome as the price of being Christian. Those two facts are the East's own record, and a Roman reviewer who leads with them is owed the distinction, not a slogan.14

On the vacuum of human authority. It is true, and the site concedes it without evasion, that the Orthodox Church has no human tribunal whose sentence is final and no way to convene a ninth ecumenical council: the divided administration of Orthodoxy is a wound and a scandal (see Chapter 10, Objection 6). But the concession does not mend the Roman case, for two reasons. First, the vacuum is the cost of the first-millennium structure itself: a communion of churches cannot coerce, and its head is in heaven. Second, the Roman alternative has known its own vacuum — three popes at once in the Great Western Schism, with no criterion but the majority of a council — and the fact that Rome escaped it by defining the papacy's finality at Vatican I (1870) proves the East's point: the remedy was a new dogma, defined by the very office in question, imposing on the Church what the Church of the Councils had never believed. The Orthodox prefer the first-millennium order: Christ the head, the councils of the whole Church in the Spirit, and the Creed unamended — at the price of administration, whose defects are cheaper than the price of amendment, which touches the soul.9

The record of the Seven — and only Seven — in brief. Nicaea I (325) against Arius; Constantinople I (381) against Macedonius, sealing the Creed; Ephesus (431) against Nestorius, with canon 7 forbidding any new faith; Chalcedon (451) against Eutyches, defining one Christ in two natures, and receiving Leo's Tome as it received the faith; Constantinople II (553) against the Three Chapters; Constantinople III (680–681) against Monothelitism, condemning Pope Honorius; Nicaea II (787) against iconoclasm, restoring the holy icons. Each assembly dealt with a heresy threatening the whole Church; each was confirmed by the witness of the whole Church; each confessed the faith rather than amending it. That is the pattern of a council of the Church; and it is by that pattern, not by the count of a canonist, that the twenty-one councils of the West are to be judged.10

Replies to the objections

  1. Reply to Obj. 1. The promise of indefectibility belongs to the Church, and its history shows what it protects. "The gates of hell shall not prevail" was spoken to the Church (Matthew 16:18), and the pillar of truth is the Church (1 Timothy 3:15). The Roman see enjoyed no exemption in the first millennium: Pope Honorius was anathematized for heresy by an ecumenical council whose sentence Leo II confirmed; nearly forty years of the Great Western Schism (1378–1417), and the Avignon displacement before it, produced rival claimants each with a plausible title; and the dogmas of 1870 themselves required an authority the first millennium had not known. Indefectibility is the Spirit's fidelity to the Church's faith; it was never the impeccability of a see, and the East's confidence rests on the promise to the Church, not on a throne.11
  2. Reply to Obj. 2. Reception is not a theory invented to avoid the pope; it is the act by which the Church has always recognized her councils. The Robber Council of 449 was solemn, imperial, and attended — and rejected; its acts were undone by the very whole-Church process Objection 2 calls impossible. Nor does reception leave every dogma in doubt: the Church has never "un-received" Nicaea, and its dogma of the consubstantiality of the Son stands as it has stood for 1,700 years. What reception correctly refuses is novelty asserting itself as tradition; that is its office, and it is the office of the Spirit in the body of Christ, not of a majority vote.12
  3. Reply to Obj. 3. The East rejects no truth condemned by Trent or Vatican; it declines the councils' authority to bind — a distinction Rome itself concedes in dialogue. Orthodoxy condemns iconoclasm (which the East's own Seventh Council condemned, with Rome's participation, in 787) and shares the West's rejection of the Reformation's novelties without accepting Trent's authority to bind. (The seventeenth-century Orthodox confessions — Peter Mogila, Dositheus at Jerusalem 1672 — did borrow Western scholastic vocabulary, including metousiosis; that is a fact of Orthodox history, not a reception of Trent.) And the modern Roman instruments concede the point: the 1995 clarification that the original Creed is the common confession; the Ravenna Document's agreement that primacy must be exercised in synodality; Ratzinger's "must not require more than the first millennium." What the East objects to is not the West's battles but the West's amendments — and on those, even Rome's own most recent documents side step by step with the East.13

Citations for this chapter

  1. Matthew 28:20; Matthew 16:18 (KJV): Matthew 28:20. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus (1870), ch. 4: vatican.va.
  2. The reception-theory objection is the standard Roman and Protestant criticism; for its secular statement see the Catholic Encyclopedia, "General Councils": newadvent.org/cathen/04423f.htm.
  3. The argument that absence is not a veto is standard in Roman apologetics (e.g., the arguments collected around Vatican I); the Seven Councils' condemnations are documented in NPNF2-14: newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm ff.
  4. Matthew 18:17; 1 Timothy 3:15 (KJV): 1 Timothy 3:15.
  5. The Robber Council of Ephesus (449) and its rejection: introductory matter and Acts of Chalcedon (451), NPNF2-14, newadvent.org/fathers/3811.htm. The episode is undisputed history.
  6. Acts 15:28 (KJV): Acts 15:28. The conciliar practice of the first millennium (convocation by emperors, confirmation by reception) is documented throughout NPNF2-14.
  7. The "twenty-one" count in the Roman communion and the Orthodox refusal: see the Catholic Encyclopedia, "General Councils," newadvent.org/cathen/04423f.htm; for the Orthodox account of non-reception, the 1848 Encyclical, Fordham Sourcebook; and Chapter 1 of this site.
  8. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium 2.5: newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm. On homoousios as explicitation, see Chapter 3 §5 of the earlier edition of this site and the Fathers cited there (Athanasius, De Decretis).
  9. See Chapter 2, Reply to Obj. 2 (Avignon and the Western Schism), with Ratzinger's account: Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 197–198.
  10. The Seven Councils, each with its acts: Nicaea I — newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm; Constantinople I — 3808; Ephesus — 3810; Chalcedon — 3811; Constantinople II — 3812; Constantinople III — 3813; Nicaea II — 3819 (all NPNF2-14).
  11. Honorius condemned at Constantinople III (681), confirmed by Leo II: Wikipedia: Honorius I; NPNF2-14: newadvent.org/fathers/3813.htm. The Great Western Schism: fn. 9.
  12. The Robber Council precedent (fn. 5) and the standing of Nicaea as irreformable in the Church's own life are the reply; see also the Eastern fathers' reception of the Seventh Council in the 843 restoration, Chapter 5 of this site.
  13. Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (1995): christianunity.va; Ravenna Document (2007): christianunity.va; Ratzinger: full text.
  14. Quinisext / Council in Trullo (692), canons 13 and 55, naming Roman practice: NPNF2-14, newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm; Sergius I's refusal: Catholic Encyclopedia, "Council in Trullo": newadvent.org/cathen/04311b.htm. Lyons II Eastern embassy: Catholic Encyclopedia, "Second Council of Lyons": newadvent.org/cathen/09476c.htm. Florence attendance and signing: Wikipedia: Council of Florence. Haec sancta, Constance Session 5 (1415): uoregon.edu. Constantinople IV 869–870 (the Latin "Eighth") vs. 879–880: Fordham: Constantinople IV 869–70. Libri Carolini and Frankfurt 794 against Nicaea II: Catholic Encyclopedia, "Caroline Books": newadvent.org/cathen/06236a.htm.