Eastern Orthodox Church

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eastern Orthodox Church counts roughly 220 million adherents as of 2020, making it the second-largest Christian body in the world after the Catholic Church. Yet it has no pope. There is no single voice that can settle a doctrine or command its bishops. Instead, it operates as a communion of self-governing churches, each run by its own bishops through local synods. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is honoured among them as primus inter pares, first among equals, but he holds no real authority over the other churches.

  This is one of the oldest surviving religious institutions in the world. It traces itself back to the apostles, claims to preserve the original Christian faith unbroken, and insists its bishops descend in an unbroken line from the followers of Jesus. How does a church with no central authority hold together across centuries, empires, and languages? And how does a single communion survive its own internal ruptures? Since 2018, Constantinople and Moscow have not been in full communion with each other. The answers run through Byzantine emperors, Slavic missionaries, Ottoman sultans, Soviet commissars, and a quarrel over Ukraine that is still unfolding.

• 2. A Quarrel Over Names

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  The official name of this church is not what most people call it. It calls itself the Orthodox Catholic Church, the title it uses in its own liturgical and canonical texts. The 19th-century catechism of Philaret of Moscow bears the full form: The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. Authorities such as Raphael of Brooklyn have insisted the name has always carried the word Catholic, as in Holy Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Church.

  The word catholic is older than the dispute over it. The first known use of the phrase the catholic Church appears in a letter written around AD 110, from Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans. It reads: Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be, even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church. The Greek katholike means according to the whole, universal. For the Eastern Orthodox, catholicity is not centred on any single earthly see, unlike the Catholic Church, which has one earthly centre.

  Greek explains why the eastern churches were once simply called Greek. From ancient times through the first millennium, Greek was the shared language across the regions where the Byzantine Empire flourished, and it was the language of the New Testament. After 1054, the label Greek Orthodox marked a church as being in communion with Constantinople. In Hungarian the church is still commonly called Eastern Greek, Gorogkeleti. Today only a minority of Eastern Orthodox adherents actually use Greek in worship.

  The word Orthodox itself carries the weight of the whole tradition. It joins the Greek orthos, meaning straight, correct, true, with doxa, which means both common belief and glory. Together they yield correct belief and true worship. The Slavic churches translate this as Pravoslavie, correctness of glorification, and the Georgians use the title Martlmadidebeli. The name encodes a teaching the church holds dear: that belief and worship cannot be separated.

• 3. Seven Councils, One Authority

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  An ecumenical council, in Orthodox teaching, is the supreme authority that can be invoked to resolve a contested matter of faith. Seven of them are recognised as ecumenical by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and together they form the spine of its doctrine. The first was convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine at Nicaea in 325, presided over by Patriarch Alexander of Alexandria. More than 300 bishops gathered there to condemn the view of Arius that the Son is a created being inferior to the Father.

  The Second Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 381, with 150 bishops defining the nature of the Holy Spirit against those who denied his equality within the Trinity. The Third, at Ephesus in 431, drew 250 bishops who affirmed that Mary is truly the Theotokos, the Birthgiver or Mother of God, against the teachings of Nestorius. The Fourth, at Chalcedon in 451, gathered 500 bishops who declared that Jesus is truly God and truly man, without mixture of the two natures.

  The later councils refined what the earlier ones had begun. The second Council of Constantinople in 553 further explained the relationship of Christ's two natures and condemned teachings attributed to Origen on the pre-existence of the soul. The third Council of Constantinople in 681 declared that Christ has two wills, human and divine, against the Monothelites. The Seventh, called under the Empress Regent Irene of Athens in 787 and known as the second of Nicaea, supported the veneration of icons while forbidding their worship. It is often called the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

  The councils ran on a strikingly democratic principle. Each bishop had one vote. Members of the imperial court, abbots, priests, deacons, monks, and laymen could speak before the council but could not vote. The pope of Rome held the position of first among equals and, though he was not present at any of these councils, kept that title until the schism of 1054. Some Eastern Orthodox also count two further councils, including the series held between 1341 and 1368 that affirmed the hesychastic theology of Gregory Palamas and condemned the philosopher Barlaam of Calabria.

• 4. The Splits That Made It

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  The Council of Ephesus in 431 produced the earliest of the surviving breaks. The churches that kept the faith of only the first two ecumenical councils became known by outsiders as Nestorian, though the tradition predated Nestorius himself and may trace to the School of Antioch. Their modern form is the Assyrian Church of the East. The label was never one they chose for themselves.

  Chalcedon in 451 fractured Egypt. The Patriarchate of Alexandria split over the relation between the divine and human natures of Jesus, and eventually each group anathematised the other. Those who accepted Chalcedon are known today as the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria. The majority in Egypt, who rejected it, became the Coptic Orthodox Church, now the largest Christian church in Egypt and the entire Middle East. The same rupture struck Antioch, leaving two parallel patriarchates that endure: the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.

  Those who rejected Chalcedon are called Oriental Orthodox, and they reject the label monophysite. They prefer miaphysite, drawn from the theology of Cyril of Alexandria, to denote two natures united into one composite nature. The Coptic liturgy puts it this way: He made it one with his divinity without mingling, without confusion and without alteration. His divinity parted not from his humanity for a single moment nor a twinkling of an eye.

  The most famous break, the East-West Schism, is traditionally dated to 1054, though it was a gradual process rather than a sudden rupture. The filioque clause and the authority of the pope were the doctrinal issues, but political, cultural, and linguistic differences between Latins and Greeks made them far worse. The final breach is often tied to the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when the Latin Empire was established as a seeming attempt to supplant the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. In 2004, Pope John Paul II extended a formal apology for that sacking, accepted by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. Many relics and riches taken then are still held in European cities, particularly Venice. Reunion was attempted at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1439, but the Orthodox people as a whole rejected both.

• 5. Letters, Liturgies, And The Slavs

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  Two brothers from Thessaloniki, Cyril and Methodius, were chosen by the Byzantine emperor Michael III to answer a request from Rastislav of Moravia for teachers who could minister to the Moravians in their own language. They began translating the divine liturgy, liturgical texts, and the Gospels into local speech. As speakers of other dialects copied those translations, a hybrid literary language, Church Slavonic, took shape.

  Great Moravia did not welcome them for long. Cyril and Methodius had to compete with Frankish missionaries from the Roman diocese, and their disciples were driven out in AD 886 and emigrated to Bulgaria. There, after the Christianisation of Bulgaria in 864, disciples such as Clement of Ohrid and Naum of Preslav instructed the future Bulgarian clergy. In AD 870 the Fourth Council of Constantinople granted the Bulgarians the oldest organised autocephalous Slavic Orthodox Church, which soon became a patriarchate.

  The Cyrillic script was developed in Bulgaria, at the Preslav Literary School in the ninth century. Along with Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian, it was declared official in Bulgaria in 893. The choice to use native languages rather than Greek or Latin was decisive. The conversion of the Bulgarians opened the way to the East Slavs, with Kievan Rus baptised in 988.

  The Serbs received the same legacy through familial and tribal lines, in a gradual process between the seventh and ninth centuries. To commemorate their baptisms, each Serbian family or tribe began to celebrate Slava, a patron saint custom honouring the saint on whose day they were baptised. It remains the most solemn day of the year for Serbs of the Orthodox faith. The greatest fruit of the brothers' work, though, was the Russian Orthodox Church, which today is the largest of the Orthodox churches.

• 6. Empire, Sultan, And Tsar

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  Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the mid-5th century to the early 13th century, and it is called the cradle of Orthodox Christian civilisation. In the 530s, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was built there under Emperor Justinian I. It became the paradigmatic Orthodox church form, remained the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520, and its architectural style was emulated by Ottoman mosques a thousand years later.

  In 1453, a much-diminished Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Empire, ending what was once the most powerful state in the Orthodox Christian world. Under the Ottomans, the Greek Orthodox Church became an autonomous millet, and the ecumenical patriarch ruled the Rum, an administrative unit meaning Roman that encompassed all Orthodox subjects regardless of ethnicity. The Orthodox community was legally subordinate but generally tolerated, and at times among the wealthiest and most politically influential of the empire's subjects. During 1914 to 1923 in Asia Minor, the Greek genocide took place, in which 347 clergymen of the Smyrna region and Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Smyrna were tortured and killed.

  Russia took up the Byzantine inheritance as Constantinople declined. Roughly two decades after the fall of Constantinople, Ivan III of Russia married Sophia Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI, and styled himself Tsar. In 1547 his grandson Ivan IV took the title Tsar of All Rus. In 1589 the Patriarchate of Constantinople granted autocephalous status to Moscow, which thereafter called itself the Third Rome, heir of Constantinople.

  The Russian church's independence did not last. In 1721 the first Russian Emperor, Peter I, abolished the patriarchate entirely and made the church a department of government, ruled by a holy synod of bishops and lay bureaucrats appointed by the Emperor. For nearly 200 years, until the October Revolution of 1917, it remained in effect a governmental agency and an instrument of tsarist rule. Under Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825 to 1855, Orthodoxy was made a core doctrine of imperial unity, binding the faith ever tighter to Russian nationalism.

• 7. Under The Hammer And Sickle

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  In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. Part of the clergy fled abroad and founded a church in exile, which reunified with its Russian counterpart in 2007. Others formed the present-day Orthodox Church in America. Believers and priests who remained faced torture, prison camps, labour camps, and mental hospitals.

  War reversed the policy overnight. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic support for the war effort. By 1957 about 22,000 Russian Orthodox churches had become active. The reprieve was temporary. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev launched his own campaign and forced the closure of about 12,000 churches. By 1985 fewer than 7,000 remained active. An estimated 50,000 clergy were executed between the revolution and the end of the Khrushchev era, and many places in the hierarchy were taken by docile clergy with ties to the KGB.

  The pattern varied across the communist world. Albania was the only state to declare itself officially fully atheist. In Romania the Orthodox Church as an organisation enjoyed relative freedom and even prospered, though under strict secret police control and amid the demolition of churches and monasteries during systematisation. Romania also ran a specialised institution where Orthodox believers were subjected to psychological punishment and mind control experimentation to force them to abandon their faith. That programme was supported by only one faction within the regime and lasted three years; the authorities closed the prison in 1952, and twenty of those responsible were sentenced to death.

  The collapse of communism brought a sharp revival. According to the Pew Research Center, between 1991 and 2008 the share of Russian adults identifying as Orthodox rose from 31 per cent to 72 per cent. Yet observance stayed low. In Russia, only 6 per cent of Orthodox adults report attending church at least weekly, 15 per cent say religion is very important in their lives, and 18 per cent say they pray daily.

• 8. Constantinople And Moscow Divided

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  On the 11th of October 2018, the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople revoked the letter that had allowed the Russian Church to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv. The grievance ran back centuries. Since the Baptism of Rus in 867, the Orthodox church in Ukraine had been led by the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus, subordinate to Constantinople, until in 1686 Dionysius IV of Constantinople transferred the territory to the Patriarch of Moscow. The 2018 decision reversed that arrangement and lifted the excommunications Moscow had imposed on rival Ukrainian churches.

  Moscow answered within days. On the 15th of October 2018, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church severed all ties with Constantinople and barred its members from receiving communion or sacraments from any church linked to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. On the 15th of December 2018, two rival Ukrainian churches voted to merge in a Unification council, forming the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with Epiphanius I becoming its first primate. On the 5th of January 2019, Bartholomew I signed the tomos that granted it autocephaly.

  This was not the first such rupture. In 1996 a parallel quarrel had played out over Estonia. The Orthodox Church of Estonia had separated from Moscow in 1923 and placed itself under Constantinople, but the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1944 and forced its churches back under the Moscow Patriarch. When Bartholomew I restored the Estonian church to Constantinople on the 20th of February 1996, Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow, who had been born in Estonia, severed ties and removed Bartholomew's name from the diptychs. A settlement reached in Zurich on the 16th of May 1996 split jurisdiction along ethnic lines and restored communion.

  The 2018 break widened. The Russian Church also severed communion with Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens, Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria, and Archbishop Chrysostomos II of Cyprus. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate severed all ties with the Russian Church. The communion that holds together without a central authority has shown, once again, that it can hold together only as long as its self-governing parts choose to remain in communion at all.