HeyJ x l w l l (1992), p p .

415-425

NIKOLAI AFANASEV AND THE

BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION

AIDAN NICHOLS

Blackfriars, Cambridge

A two-part article in this journal (XXXIII[1992], pp. 125-45; 247-66) has already considered Nikolai Afanasevs appeal to the Fathers in ecclesiology , suggesting how, through the pressure of concerns derived from the historic situation of thz Russian church, both under the Tsardom, and after the Revolution of 1917, he felt obliged to downplay those elements in the patristic doctrine of the Church which drew attention at once to her universal, or unitary, and organizationally (and not only sacramentally) ordered nature - a reference to, above all, the conciliar institution. In order to present the Church as fundamentally a local, and Eucharistic reality, Afanasev counterposed an Ignatian (sound) to a Cyprianic (unsound) tradition of ecclesiological thinking among the Fathers, thus abandoning in practice the traditional Orthodox (and Catholic) appeal to a consensus patrum. Though a canon lawyer as well as a patrologist by training, he reserved a special animus for the canonical element in the Churchs makeup, while at the same time recognizing canonical materials as important testimonies to how the mystery of the Church was perceived in different epochs. Afanasev is surely correct in regarding canonical sources as - at least potentially - theological sources. Canon law may be seen as implicit ecclesiology. In periods when a specific literary genre of treatises de Ecclesiu did not exist, it was natural that the theological articulation of the meaning of Church should be found, inter alia, in commentaries on the canons. In addition, the canons themselves are a witness to the sense of the Church in a given period. Afanasevs use of canonical sources is considered in this sequel to an article on his patrology because the canonical tradition, in its main lines, was established in the patristic period and partakes to some degree in the authority of that period for the later Church. This is the age when the faith, worship and ordered existence of the Church were crystallized. Commentaries on the canons of the patristic age do not have an equivalent authoritative force, yet, like later canons, they testify to the theological life of the post-patristic Church and so form part of Tradition. Before looking at Afanasevs approach to his canonical materials, it will be appropriate to offer a historical overview of the state of the canonical tradition in the period that interests him. This is the more desirable in that Orthodox canon law, being, by contrast with its Catholic counterpart,

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AIDAN NICHOLS

uncodified, constitutes a vast and unwieldy body of literature. As one historian has somewhat despairingly remarked, The canons of the Orthodox Church. . .form a huge body of material, and in any age there are never more than a few people who master it in detail.2 The origins of the differentiation between Western and Eastern canon law lie in the sixth century. By that time, collections of papal decretals, regarded as equal in weight to synodal decrees as early as the pontificate of Siricius, 384-99, were being added to conciliar canonical collections in the West, but not in the East.3 In the East, prior to the reign of Justinian, and leaving aside Scripture itself, which after all contains references to the discipline of the earliest communities, we have canonico-liturgical collections and the canonical determinations of various councils .4 The canonico-liturgical collections group together liturgical prescriptions, moral precepts and disciplinary rules. The principal members of this literary family are the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, the Canons of Hippolytus, the Apostolic Constitutions, the Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Didascalia o f the Apostles. The (eightyfive) Apostolic Canons, a recurrent feature of Byzantine canonical collections, consist of forty-seven canons drawn from the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions, itself probably a Syro-Palestinian work of the mid fourth century, to which have been added thirty-eight further canons drawn from the councils of the first four centuries. Relevant to Afanasevs post-1934 critique of the canonical enterprise is M. Metzgers explanation of this development in terms of the legislative vacuum of the sub-apostolic churches:
Sporadic conciliar reunions were far from furnishing a complete disciplinary code, and yet difficulties abounded: conflicts of authority, doctrinal divergences, controversial, if necessary, initiatives. . . Recourse to apostolic patronage guaranteed the value of the solutions proposed.6

Equally momentous for the future, however, is Justinians decision to legislate for the Church, appealing in effect to the Constantinian principle that the emperor is responsible for the public peace and order of the Christian community. But his Codex repetitae pruelectionis, Book I of which dealt with Church affairs, and his later Novellae, of whose number thirty-four are of ecclesiastical concern, had little impact outside the borders of the Roman empire. It was in Justinians reign that the first systematic collection of canonical texts was made in the East, a Nomocanon in LX Titles, now lost. Around 550, in the wake of this early attempt at systematization, John of Antioch (sometimes called John the Scholastic) produced the first extant collection with any claim to completeness, the SynugZgZ in Fifty Titles. This comprises the Apostolic Canons, together with the canons of the first four Ecumenical Councils (plus or minus one or two canons added in the aftermath of those Councils or subtracted because of papal non-ratification), canons from certain local synods and,

AFANASEV AND THE BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION

4 17

finally, canons inferred from the letters of Basil the Great. John also composed a tractate of eighty-seven chapters on civil laws of the empire relevant to religious issues. When he became Constantinopolitan patriarch in 565, the SynugijgZ in L Titles became the established canonical collection in Byzantium. Around 630, the Nomocunon in XIV Titles was compiled by an anonymous hand and soon acquired an unrivalled position. Noteworthy is its clear separation of the canons from civil legislation, even though, unlike John of Antioch, its author does include both within the same book. The second edition of this work, produced in 883, added canons taken from the Council in Trullo of 69 1, the Second Council of Nicaea of 787 and the Photian councils of 861 and 879, but not the anti-Photian council of 869. It was also influenced by the Eclogu of Leo 111 and Constantine V, a rksumt of Justinianic legislation. Its tendency to amalgamate ecclesiastical and civil legislation is especially pertinent to Afanasevs comments on canon law. Slightly later than the second edition of the Nomocunon in XIV Titles comes the Busiliku, Leo VIs compilation of imperial laws summing up and extending the legislative work of the Macedonian dynasty, much of which affected the Church. In 920 the patriarch Nicholas Mystikoss council of Constantinople, which regulated the issue of third and fourth marriages, a delicate point in imperial-patriarchal relations at the time, deemed the Nomocunon in XIV Titles to be the single authoritative collection of the canons. In 1080 a third edition of the Nomocunon was produced by Theodore Besta and incorporated crossreferences to the Busilika, thus injecting an even larger dose of civil law.9 Thus opens the great century of Byzantine canonical commentaries, the twelfth, the period of Afanasevs favoured sources: Theodore Balsamon and John Zonaras. It will be seen from this overview that Afanasevs strictures on the genesis of the canonical tradition as a non-evangelical importation of the secular world into the community of grace are not equally applicable, in the eyes of the historian, to all periods in the development of that tradition. While it is true that the canons had the force of law within the Roman empire, a clear distinction was made, at least in the early period, between the ecclesiastical authority to issue canons (which might then be promulgated by the emperor) and the civil power. Both the work of John of Antioch and the anonymous compiler of the Nornocanon in XIV Titles maintain a clear and ecclesiologically vital distinction at this point. Unfortunately, under the influence of the theory of the total symphoniu of Byzantine emperor and patriarch, this distinction became blurred in later times. Byzantine sources show a remarkable oscillation between Caesaropapist or Caesaroprocuratorist views of the Church and a true dyarchy. In many Byzantine writers, the unity of the empire was presented as essential to the unity of the Church. Indeed, the emperors, conscious of a responsibility for preserving the unity of faith, itself the most decisive

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AIDAN NICHOLS

principle of the unity of the empire, ascribed to themselves in practice if not in theory a sporadic doctrinal magisterium.12 The Ecloga of 726 describes the emperor, accordingly, as the Churchs pastor.13 On the other hand, the existence of a dyarchy is recognized in Justinians legislatioil where the ideal is seen as consonantia or symphonia between the two authorities.l4 In the EpanagijgZ, a late ninth-century work, possibly by Photius, Church authority is accorded full independence in its own sphere. Although this document was never made into an official manual, the increasing weakness of the empire after the Seljuk occupation of Anatolia in 1072 and the Latin seizure of Constantinople in 1204 ensured that the patriarchal and synodal structure of the Byzantine Church would come more and more into its own. Similar fluctuations between imperial and episcopal authority in the matter of legislation punctuate the history of the Russian church also. As Afanasevs unpublished lecture materials on the history of Russian canon law demonstrate, he was deeply read in the area. Doubtless he felt that it offered no solution different from the Byzantine experience. But even had the principle of dyarchy been faithfully observed throughout Church-State relations on Christian history, Afanasevs difficulties about the role of canon law in the Church would scarcely have been resolved. For two distinct questions were at stake. Firstly, there is the question of the right and duty of the Christian emperor to legislate for the Church community. Afanasev rejects such a notion on the reasonable ground that the imperial office cannot be regarded as a differentiation of the apostolic ministry. It cannot be related to the Eucharist. It cannot, therefore, in his view, be considered a distinct charism within the royal priesthood. This clear rejection of the Eusebian theology of the emperors God-given role in the Christian oikoumenZ leads Afanasev to his positive evaluation of Augustines writing on the relation of Church to empire in the De civirare Dei.16 But secondly, there is also the question as to whether the life of the Church, as a community of grace, can ever be appropriately expressed in the form of canons, rules, laws, since grace when expressed in Christian practice is agapi?, charity, of its nature unspecifiable in legal terms. It is because Afanasev eventually found himself unable to accept a compatibility of any kind between law and the community of charity that he does not consider more benignly the less Eusebian canonists in the East, such as Zonaras, or indeed the almost entirely non-Eusebian canonical tradition in the West. We must now turn to his use of specific canonists.
THEODORE BALSAMON

Theodore Balsamon is the most frequently mentioned of the Byzantine canonists cited by Afanasev. Born at Constantinople, Balsamon became a cleric of the great church, Hagia Sophia, attaining the post of chartophylax,

AFANASEV AND THE BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION

4 19

a lund of vicar-general, in 1179.18He was appointed patriarch of Antioch by the emperor Isaac Angelos but was unable to take up his see because of the Crusader presence. It is not known whether he lived to see the seizure of the capital by the Latins in 1204. If he did, the event would have sharpened his already strong anti-Latin animus. Balsamons most important work is his commentary on the Nornocanon in XZV Titles, written at the behest of the emperor Manual Comnenos and the Byzantine patriarch Michael Anchialos. Balsamon takes as his text the second edition of 883 which, as we have seen, took the major innovatory step of integrating civil legislation with ecclesiastical.
Above all, it is the principle which is important: the imperial laws are no longer subordinate. They penetrate into the very systematisation itself on a footing of equality with the other decrees of councils and bishops.

Balsamon believed, wrongly, that this second recension was the work of the patriarch Photius. He followed its spirit faithfully. For Afanasev, Balsamon is an imperialist who would forbid people, or encourage them to forbid themselves, the practice of their full sacramental rights in the Church. At stake is Balsamons commentary on the Apostolic Canons, especially canon IX, and his exegesis of the Council in Trullo, the Constantinopolitan synod of 691-2, which saw itself as completing, at the canonical level, the work of the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils and whose canons, though by no means all ratified at Rome, had been added to the Nornocanon in its later form. Afanasev deplored Balsamons insistence that while the emperor, as Christs earthly vicegerent, has full liturgical rights in the eucharistic sanctuary, the Christian people are neither to enter there nor to communicate themselves. Admitting that other Byzantine canonists permit self-administration in case of necessity, Balsamon had written:
I think otherwise: for one cannot permit such a liberty on the base of (mere) interpretations or contradictions.2n

Afanasev is evidently glad to read of Balsamons own failure to get canon LXIX of the Council in Trullo put into practice. He tried to prevent lay people entering the sanctuary but they stood their ground.
How is it possible that at the divine sanctuary of the glorious church of our Lord Jesus Christ on the island of Chalkis anyone who likes may enter in?I know not. . . But mark well this rule, and do not allow laymen to enter into the churchs sanctuary. However, I myself made great efforts to prevent laymen from entering the sanctuary of the church of my holy Lady, the Mother of God Hodegitria, but without success. They told me it was an ancient custom which one could not forbid.2

But Afanasevs greatest anger is vented on Balsamons comment on Apostolic Canons IX which prescribed that:
All the faithful who enter into a church and listen to the reading of the Scriptures but do not assist at the Prayer and at the holy communion, must be excommunicated as sowers of disorder in the Church.*

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Afanasev points out that, as more clearly with Canon 2 of the Antiochene council of (c.) 34 1, the context here is that of those faithful who came to the eucharistic synaxis but did not communicate. Balsamon regards this canon as impossible of realization: those who do not communicate out of scorn or pride might be declared excommunicate but not those who fail to communicate out of piety and h~mility.~ Pointing out that the exhortation to frequent, and even daily, communion is found in such prestigious sources as the Letters of Basil the Great,24 Afanasev comments on Balsamon:
Everything that was the very basis of the life of primitive Christianity had become, in the twelfth century, impossible to realise. With Balsamon, the word impossible shows, in a way more striking than all his fine speeches, the point to which Christian consciousness had evolved. . .25

Afanasev overlooked, however, Balsamons answers to the patriarch Mark of Alexandria in which he gives his opinion that all people without exception, whether clergy, monks or layfolk, might be allowed Holy Communion daily, provided that they had prepared themselves for it by leading holy lives.26
JOHN ZONARAS

John Zonaras is the other of the two Byzantine canonists cited by Afanasev. Little is known of his life but he held an important court position under the emperor Alexis Comnenos until his entry into the religious life at the monastery of Hagia Glykeria. He probably died soon after 1150. In order of time he is the second of the triumvirate of Byzantine canonists whose judgements are still noted in Eastern Church practice, working shortly after Alexis Aristenes, the first great commentator on the Synopsis Canonurn,but before Theodore Balsamon who knew and used his work. Zonarass tendency is towards a benign interpretation of the canons and he is notably less Caesaroprocuratorist than Balsamon. His method is notable for its recourse to history, especially institutional history, when elucidating the canons. He may well indeed be the author of the EpitornZ Histonlon,a historical manual reaching from the Genesis account of creation to the accession of the Eastern Roman Emperor John Comnenos in 1 118. Byzantinists have recognized this to be a workmanlike piece, making excellent use of the manualists sources. We must now look at the use Afanasev has made of Zonarass work. As we might expect from the above summary, Zonaras escapes more lightly than Balsamon. The points at issue are pretty well the same: canon LXIX of the Trullan council, Apostolic Canons IX and the cognate canon I1 of the Antiochene council of 341 found in the collection compiled by Meletius of Antioch and known as the Antiochene Corpus canonurn. On the first, Zonaras remarks mildly that, strictly, the emperor should not, as a layman,

AFANASEV AND THE BYZANTINE CANONICAL TRADITION

42 1

enter the sanctuary, but because of his authority and his dignity an exception is made.28On the ninth Apostolic canon, Zonaras simply says that in his day it was not rigorously obeyed: on the issue of communionwhenever-at-the-sumis, while Zonaras makes it clear that in his time there was widespread opposition to frequent communion on grounds of piety, he does not really indicate his own attitude to this. More probably, he thinks it an insufficient reason for not communicating - and so occupies Afanasevs own ~tandpoint.~ The modest total of Afanasevs references to the great Byzantine canonists hardly permits his readers to obtain a satisfactory overview of their work. However, his own lack of sympathy with them is sufficiently clear. As he puts it, People have tried to find a theological foundation for the law, but they have never yet s~cceeded.~ Afanasevs use of canonical materials, like his attitude to the canon law in general, came to be affected by his reading of the Lutheran historian of canon law, Rudolf Sohm. Sohms foundational thesis was that Church and law are mutually exclusive ~oncepts.~ This opinion, stated on the very first page of his Kirchenrecht, brought him considerable notice, as did his attempt to show historically how such allegedly contradictory notions could have become intertwined. Sohms learning, as well as the elegant simplicity of his fundamental concept, gained a wide readership for his ideas in both Protestant and Catholic circle^.^' Moreover, as early as 1906 a Russian It was translation of Sohms principal work appeared in MOSCOW. translated in part by the polymath priest-philosopher Pave1 Florensky who Sergei Bulgakov, himself cites it in his Stolp i utverzhdenie i~tiny.~ influenced by Florensky, also devoted some attention to Sohm, mainly negati~e.~ Sohms own ecclesiology was founded on the concept of the people of God.Just as the Old Covenant knew only one quhal, so the New knows only one ekklzsia, die Volksversammlung der gesamten Chri~tenheit.~ And yet, Sohm points out, we use the word church, following New Testament practice, for individual congregations also. He finds the solution to this riddle in the thought that
the word ekkkiu does not express any determinate empirical magnitude or any social concept (not even the concept of the local community) but merely a dogmatic valuejudgment. EkkEsia means every assembly which, in a dogmatic perspective, for faith, according to its spiritual value, represents a gathering of the New Testament people of the covenant before God and with him (en ChrisrE). At its foundation lies the dominical saying: where two or three are gathered in Christs Name, there is all Christianity, with all its promises realised and allotted. For Christ is in its midst, he who is all in all. So where Christ is, there is the ekkkia, the People of God.38

The single ecclesiu has, at the empirical level, countless Erscheinungsformen, epiphanies of itself which take the form of worshipping assemblies. Originally, these gatherings were independent and structureless affairs. Only in the course of time did they become formally constituted Gemeinden,

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AIDAN NICHOLS

bound to a single monarchical bishop. This process is the birth of that form of the Church which Sohm dubs Altkatholizismus, defined by him as a Verrechtlichung, juridicization, of the Gospel. Sohm takes Ignatius of Antioch to be the archetypal representative of this falsification of the original ecclesia. The freedom of the Christian gathering is dissolved by Ignatius through a concern for obligations to a hierarchical order of bishop, presbyter and deacon, a consideration so all-important that without the bishop there is no longer the reality of the Church. The bishops presence has replaced that of Jesus Christ in the Matthean logion as the sine qua non of ecclesial reality. Here, according to Sohm, the entire structure of later canon law is present in nuce.
Since primitive Christendom had only a religious concept of the Church, and, accordingly, employed that concept also for the description of externally visible Christianity, the rise of a juridical Christian order signified, by a natural necessity, the emergence of Catholicism from out of primitive Chri~tendorn.~~

It remained for Cyprian of Carthage to complete the image and organization found in Ignatius. Just as the unity of the local assembly is found for Ignatius in the monarchical bishop, so the unity of all such local assemblies taken together is found by Cyprian in the unity of the episcopal order. In the medieval period, a further step is taken. The transformation of the old Catholic into the Roman Catholic church came about through the canonizing of relations of precedence between stronger and weaker local churches. Through Fiirsorge on the part of the former and Rezeption on the part of the latter, metropolitanates grow in authority. But if these are to be the terms of a struggle for paramountcy, the Roman church was virtually predestined to victory.
After the year 70, the star of Jerusalem had declined. Since that time, and right in to the fourth century, Rome gathered the leadership of Christianity into its own hands. Rome was the strongest community,great, capable of leadership and decision v i s - h i s all others.40

The renaissance of Roman law at Bologna in the twelfth century enabled the papacy after Gratian to present itself as the supreme governing organ of a Church conceived on the model of a society or corporation. Although Afanasev departs from S o h in seeing the episcopally-ordered eucharistic assembly of Ignatius as the model of an authentic early community, while for Sohm the primitive congregation is structureless and lacking office-holders, he agrees with him in regarding the emergence of canon law, and the power-relations it both expresses and enables, as the primary denaturing agent at work in the Churchs history. Afanasevs strictures on a juridical ecclesiology that would lay stress on the power of the apostolic ministry to govern has a certain Byzantine background in the context of Greek polemic against the claims of the Roman church, especially in the period of the reunion movements of 1204 to 1439. In a major fourteenth century text combating the concept of papal plenifudo

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423

potestatiS, Peter and the apostles are declared not to have acted by any power of an administrative kind. Instead, their actions were authoritative in so far as they were carried out under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. But such Byzantine statements hardly call into question the general possibility of canon law. Afanasevs attraction to Sohm is better explained by reference to the struggle of the Slavophiles with the Erastian image of the Russian church after Peter the Great. A comparison with a writer from a similar background, Sergei Bulgakov, is instructive. In his earliest ecclesiological essays, Bulgakov spoke of the Church as a union of faith and love and even as an anarchic union. But during the crisis of the structures of church life in Russia in the years 1917-22 he came to see the insufficiency of a purely mystical conception of the Churchs fellowship. As the principal authority on Bulgakovs ecclesiology informs his readers:
he began to look for the principles of the Churchs existence in history, because the descriptions he had employed hitherto, such as, for example, the union of love in freedom or the mystical organism seemed to him to concern only an invisible Church. He now saw in the definitions of the Slavophiles an act of opposition to the state of oppression in which the Church of Russia lived under the tsars. Bulgakov underlined (therefore) the necessity of the external forms of the Church, indispensable as they are if she is to be perceptible and

Afanasev failed to realize that Sohm, so far from being a presuppositionless historian, was working within a politico-theological framework of a definite kind. Writing in a Lutheran context in Bismarckian Germany, Sohm was deeply influenced not only by Luthers account of the contrast between Law and Grace but also by a particular view of State sovereignty. In the two Kingdoms, charity is free, and overflows into the limitless benevolence of the justified sinner, while law is imposed, and confines itself to minimal standards of human conduct on threat of sanction by the Prince .43 However, Afanasev , by repudiating the distinction between divine, unchangeable elements in the canon law and human, changeable ones, created for himself a virtually intolerable situation as an ecclesiologist concerned with the theological foundations of canon law. It was, perhaps, inevitable that, in repudiating this distinction, and neglecting such concepts as the Eastern oikonorniu or the Western dispensafio, Afanasev came to consider not only the Byzantine canonical tradition, but all canon law, a disastrous subversion of the Churchs life.
Notes 1 For the significance of the term canon see J . Gaudemet. Les Sources du droir de Ikglise en occidenr du f f eau VffesiPcle (Paris 1985). pp. 1 If. Early canons were frequently simply sanctionings of custom whose own authority is first discussed in Termllian: s e e De virginibus velondir 1; De corona 3, 5 ; 4. 6-7. 2 I. Ellis, 7he Russian Onhodox Church: A Confemporury Hisrory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986). pp. 67f. 3 C. de Clercq, Byzantin (droit canonique). Dicrionnnaire de Droir Canonique, cited below as DDC I1 (Pans 1957), col. 1170. 4 On the origins of canon law see 0. Heggelbacher, Geschichfe deswchrisrlichen Kirchenrechrs

424
bis

AIDAN NICHOLS
von Nizdu, 325. (Fribourg University Press, 1974).

~ w Konzil n

5 A. Faivre, LaDocumentation canonico-liturgique de IEglise ancienne, Revue des Sciences

Religieuses LIV (1980), pp. 204-15. 6 M. Metzger, Constitutions apostoliques, Revue de Droir Cunonique XXXII (1982). pp. 141f. 7 The fullest account is 9. BenebviE, Sinugogu v 50 rirulov i drugie iuridihkie sborniki Jounni Skholusrika (St Petersburg 1914). 8 Cf. E. Herman, S. J., The Secular Church in J. M. Hussey (ed.),nte Byznnrine Empire. II: Government, Church and Civilisurion (Cambridge University Press, 1967). p. 106. 9 C. de Clercq, Byzantin (droit canonique), art. cit. (note 3 above), col. 1174. 10 See A. Michel, Die K a i s e m c h r in der Osrkirche (Darmstadt, 1959). 11 E.g. Vira nteoabri 31, cited by A. Michel. ibid., p. 8; Nicephorus of Constantinople, Ep. ad pupum Leonem III (=M.P.G. 100, 197B), cited by Michel, op. cit.. pp. 90 and 155ff. 12 Obvious examples are: Zenos Henorikon; Justinians condemnation of the Three Chapters; Heracliuss Unhesis; Leo Ills edict against the images. 13 M.P.G. 113, 456. 14 Novellae 6; 42. I5 J. de Malafosse, EpanagBgE, DDC V (1953), cols. 354-62. 16 N. Afanasev, Tserkov Dukhn Sviurogo (Paris, 1971). cited below as Tserkov, pp. 281-88. 17 bid., pp. 292-303. 18 E. Herman, S. J., Balsamon (Thhdore), DDC 11. op. cit., col. 76. 19 C. de Clercq, Byzantin (Droit canonique), art. cit., col. 1174. 20 Balsamon, Commenrury on Canon 58 of the Council in Trullo, cited Tserkov, p. 46. 21 Balsamon, Commenrury on Canon 69 of the Council in Tmllo, cited Tserkov, p. 42. 22 Cited Tserkov, p. 52. 23 Balsamon, Commenrury on Apostolic Canon 9, cited Tserkov, pp. 54f. 24 Basil, Ep. 113. 25 Tserkov. p. 56. 26 Balsamon, Responsio ad Murcum purriurchum Alexundriue 17 (=M.P.G. 138, 968). 27 E. Herman, S. J., Jean Zonaras, DDC VI, cols. 129f. 28 Zonaras, Commenrury on Canon 69 of the Council in Trullo. cited Tserkov. p. 42. 29 b i d . , p. 54. 30 For a brief overview, see J. Hussey, nte Orthodox Church in rhe Byunrine Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). pp. 304-10. 31 LEglise du Saint-Esprit, p. 350. 32 Sohm, Kirchenrechr I (Leipzig, 1892). p. 1. 33 H.-J. Schmitz, Friihkurholizismus bei Adolfvon Hamuck, Rudolph Sohm und Ernsr Kdsemunn (Diisseldorf, 1977). pp. 94-104. 34 R . Zom, Tserkovnoi srroi v pervie veku Khrisriunsntu. per. A. Perrovskugo i P. Florenshgo (Moscow, 1906). 35 P. Florovsky. Srolp i unteridenie isrinnu (Moscow, 1914). p. 755. 36 S. N. Bulgakov, Pravosluvie (Paris 1%5), p. LOO: Ierarkhiya i tainstva, Pur 49 (1935), pp. 24-33; more positively, in the early study, 0pervokhnstianstve originally 1908, in Dvu groda (Moscow. 1911). 1. p. 275. 37 Sohm. Kirchenrechr, p. 18. 38 bid., pp. 19f. 39 R. Sohm, Wesen und Ursprung des Kurholizismus (Leipzig, 1909; Berlin, 1912). p. 68. 40 Sohm, Kirchenrechr, p. 257. 41 Cf. J. Darrouzes, Conftrence sur la primautt du pape B Constantinople en 1357, Revue dcs h d e s byvlnrins 19 ( l % l ) , pp. 76-109. 42 S. Swierkosz, Lkglise visible selon S .Bulgcrkov. Srructure hiirurchique er sucrumenrelle (Rome 1980). pp. 19f. However, Bulgakov later reverted to a more Khomiakovian stress on sobornost, describing his middle period as that when he felt closest to Catholicism: Avrobiogrufiteskiyu z.umerki (Paris, I%), p. 49. 43 Sohm appears to have been much influenced by E . Rietschl, Luhers Anschauung yon Wrrichdwer und sichrburer Kirche (Leipzig. 1900). See Y . Congar. R. Sohm nous interroge encore, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques er 7hheologiques 57 (1973), p. 264. Congar considers that underlying Sohms approach is une wrte dapollinansme eccltsiologique: as the Logos incarnate for Apollinaris lacked a rational swl, so for Sohm the Church of the Word Incarnate lacks a proper social form: ibid. p. 277. It is wonh noting that a more positive evaluation of canon law took place in the Lutheran-Evangelical

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tradition in Germany when, during the struggle over the Reichskirche idea in Hitlerite Germany. the notion of canon law took on a new attractiveness as a way of distinguishing, and so defending, the Church from the State. See M. Bendiscioli, Germaniu Religiosu nel Term Reich (Brescia. 1977'), p. 136. 44 Afanas'ev's claim that Christian antiquity did not know the distinction between unchangeable and changeable features in the canons was too hastily made: see E . Rosser, G(inlicheswtd mcnrchliChes. unverdnderliches und verdnderliches Kirchenrechr von der Enrstehung der Kirche bis zur Mitre des 9. Juhrhundens (Paderborn, 1934).