Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Orthodox Canon Law

The canons of the councils and Fathers, the nomokanon, the twelfth-century commentators and the Pedalion — how Byzantine church law still regulates 260 million Orthodox Christians.

The Orthodox churches have no code of canon law. There is no Orthodox equivalent of the Catholic Codex Iuris Canonici — no single promulgated body of rules with articles and numbers, revised by a competent authority.

What exists instead is a corpus: the canons of the ecumenical and certain local councils, the canons attributed to individual Fathers, the imperial legislation on church matters, and a tradition of commentary on all of it stretching from the twelfth century to the present. Applying it requires interpretation, and the interpreters disagree.

This is a Byzantine inheritance in the fullest sense, and it governs, in practice, the internal life of the Orthodox churches today.

What the Corpus Contains

The canonical collection recognised across the Orthodox world consists of:

The eighty-five Apostolic Canons, a fourth-century Syrian compilation attributed to the apostles. Their authority was accepted in the east and only partially in the west, which is one of the older divergences between the two traditions.

The canons of the ecumenical councils — Nicaea I through Nicaea II. Note that the fifth and sixth councils issued no canons; their disciplinary work was done by the Quinisext Council in Trullo of 692, whose 102 canons are treated in the east as supplementing them and were rejected in part by Rome.

The canons of ten local councils, including Ancyra, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Sardica and Carthage.

The canons of the Fathers — patristic letters and rulings treated as canonical, chiefly those of Basil the Great, whose three canonical letters to Amphilochius of Iconium supply a large part of Orthodox penitential practice.

Later synodal decisions, including those of the councils that endorsed hesychasm in the fourteenth century.

The Nomokanon

The characteristic Byzantine legal book was the nomokanon: a compilation setting the ecclesiastical canons (kanones) alongside the imperial laws (nomoi) on the same subject, so that a judge could see both.

The most important is the Nomokanon in Fourteen Titles, compiled in the seventh century and revised under Photios in 883. It organises the material by subject rather than chronologically, which made it usable, and it remained the standard reference in the Byzantine church.

The genre reflects a fundamental feature of the Byzantine arrangement: church law and state law were not separate systems. The canons were enforceable in civil courts, and imperial legislation on marriage, clergy and monasteries was part of the church’s own working law. The framework is described in Byzantine law and Byzantine church government.

The Commentators

The corpus is old, occasionally contradictory and frequently addressed to circumstances that no longer exist. Twelfth-century Constantinople produced three canonists whose commentaries became inseparable from the canons themselves:

John Zonaras, whose commentary is historically minded and concerned with what a canon originally meant.

Alexios Aristenos, who wrote concise summaries.

Theodore Balsamon, patriarch of Antioch in title though resident in Constantinople, the most influential of the three. Balsamon is concerned with current application: which canons are still in force, how they interact with imperial law, and what to do when they conflict. His commentaries are cited as authority in Orthodox canonical argument to this day.

The relationship between canon and commentary is the crucial point. An Orthodox canonist does not read the canon alone; he reads the canon with Zonaras and Balsamon, in the same way a common lawyer reads a statute with the cases.

The Pedalion

The standard modern collection is the Pedalion — the Rudder — compiled by Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Agapios the Monk and published in 1800.

It prints each canon with a paraphrase, a summary of the commentators, and notes on current application, and it has been the working handbook of Greek-speaking Orthodoxy for two centuries. Its influence is enormous and its judgements are sometimes rigorist — Nikodemos was a strict Athonite monk, and the Pedalion’s positions on the sacraments of non-Orthodox, in particular, are more severe than much of the tradition.

The Slavic equivalent is the Kormchaia Kniga, the “Book of the Helmsman,” descended from the Nomokanon of St Sava compiled around 1219, which carried the Byzantine canonical tradition into Serbia and then Russia, as the Byzantine legacy in the Balkans describes.

Akriveia and Oikonomia

The most distinctive feature of Orthodox canonical practice is a pair of principles governing how strictly the rules apply.

Akriveia — exactness — is the application of a canon in its full rigour.

Oikonomia — economy, in the sense of household management or dispensation — is the authority of a bishop to relax the rule in a particular case for the sake of a person’s salvation.

Oikonomia is not a loophole and is not unlimited: it cannot alter dogma, and it is exercised by the bishop as a pastoral judgement rather than claimed as a right. But it gives Orthodox canon law a flexibility that a codified system lacks, and it is how the tradition handles the reception of converts, irregular marriages, and the validity of sacraments performed outside the church.

The obvious cost is inconsistency. Two bishops may treat identical cases differently, and both may be acting correctly.

What It Governs Today

Orthodox canon law regulates:

  • Marriage and divorce. Degrees of kinship, including spiritual kinship through godparenthood; the permissibility of a second and third marriage (allowed, with a penitential rite) and a fourth (not); the grounds for ecclesiastical divorce.
  • Ordination and clergy discipline. Married men may be ordained; ordained men may not marry; bishops are chosen from the celibate.
  • Fasting and the calendar.
  • Jurisdiction. Which bishop has authority where — the source of the most contentious modern disputes, including the multiple overlapping jurisdictions of the diaspora and the Ukrainian question.
  • Reception of converts — by baptism, chrismation or confession, depending on the case and the bishop.

For four centuries under Ottoman rule, canon law also governed the civil affairs of the Orthodox population — inheritance, contracts, personal status — under the millet system, which gave it a reach no Byzantine patriarch had enjoyed.

The Codification Question

Whether the Orthodox churches should codify has been discussed for over a century, and the Council of Crete in 2016 did not settle it.

The arguments for codification: legal certainty, consistency between jurisdictions, and the practical difficulty of applying fourth-century rules without a systematic statement of what is in force.

The arguments against: that codification is a Latin legal habit alien to the Orthodox understanding of the canons as the expression of a living tradition; that a code would freeze what should remain flexible; and that no authority exists with the competence to promulgate one.

The result is a body of law that is genuinely ancient, genuinely in force, and genuinely uncertain in its application — which is, in fairness, roughly how it worked in Byzantium too.

Marriage: The Rules in Practice

Marriage is where canon law touches most lives, and the Byzantine rules are specific enough to be worth setting out.

Degrees of kinship. Marriage was prohibited within a defined range of blood relationship, and Byzantine law extended the prohibition further than Roman or western law — to the seventh degree by the twelfth century, which excludes third cousins. Affinity created by a previous marriage counted, and so did spiritual kinship: a godparent and the godchild’s family were within the prohibited degrees, which is why syntekni relationships were tracked carefully.

Second and third marriages. A second marriage was permitted with a penitential rite rather than the full crowning service, and carried a period of exclusion from communion. A third was discouraged, permitted grudgingly under conditions of age and childlessness, and carried a longer penance. A fourth was absolutely forbidden — the rule established by the Tomos of Union of 920, after Leo VI’s fourth marriage had split the church.

Divorce. Grounds narrowed over time and included adultery, attempts on a spouse’s life, prolonged absence, insanity and entry into monastic life by mutual consent. The church resisted divorce by consent alone.

Age. Twelve for girls and fourteen for boys were the legal minimums, raised in some later legislation.

Betrothal was a binding contract with its own blessing, and breaking it had legal consequences.

The patriarchal register shows all of this being applied, contested and — through oikonomia — relaxed, case by case, for three generations of the fourteenth century.

The Canons and Modern Difficulties

Applying a fourth-century corpus in the twenty-first produces specific problems, and they are argued about seriously.

Canons that are plainly obsolete. Prohibitions on Christians bathing with Jews, on clergy attending horse races, on visiting synagogues for healing. Nobody proposes enforcing these; the question is what their status is if they are simply ignored.

Canons in tension with modern practice. The canons require that a bishop govern a defined territory and that there be one bishop per city, which the diaspora violates comprehensively. They set rules on the reception of converts that different jurisdictions apply differently.

Canons in tension with civil law. Provisions on marriage, on clergy discipline, and in some jurisdictions on the reporting of crimes.

The absence of a legislator. Because there is no body with recognised authority to repeal a canon, obsolete provisions cannot be removed. They can only be left unapplied, which leaves them formally in force and available to anyone who wants to invoke them.

The oikonomia principle absorbs a great deal of this pressure, and it is why the system functions at all. Its cost is unpredictability: what is permitted depends on which bishop is asked.

The Slavonic Route

The transmission of Byzantine canon law into the Slavic world is worth tracing, since it determined the shape of Orthodoxy over half of Europe.

The Nomokanon of Saint Sava, compiled around 1219 by Rastko Nemanjić — Sava, first archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian church — translated Byzantine canon and civil law into Slavonic with the commentaries of Zonaras and Aristenos.

It was not a straightforward translation. Sava selected, and his choices had consequences: he preferred Aristenos’s shorter commentaries over Balsamon’s, and he handled the material on the relationship of church and state in a way suited to a small kingdom rather than an empire.

The Nomokanon passed to Bulgaria, and from Bulgaria to Rus in the thirteenth century, where it became the Kormchaia Kniga, the “Book of the Helmsman.” It was the governing law book of the Russian church until the nineteenth century, went through repeated revisions, was printed in 1650 and 1653, and the revisions of the 1650s were among the changes that provoked the Old Believer schism.

So a Serbian prince-monk’s selection from Byzantine legal compilations, made in 1219, shaped the church law of Russia for six hundred years — and a disagreement about how to print it helped split Russian Orthodoxy permanently.

Continue exploring