Pentarchy
Semi-Autonomous: Philosophers Works Pentarchy (from the Greek Πενταρχία, Pentarchía, from πέντε pénte, "five", and ἄρχειν archein, "to rule") was a model of Church organization formulated in the laws of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) of the Roman Empire.
In this model, the Christian Church is governed by the heads (patriarchs) of the five major episcopal sees of the Roman Empire: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
[5] The Quinisext Council of 692 gave it formal recognition and ranked the sees in order of preeminence, but its organization remained dependent on the emperor, as when Leo the Isaurian altered the boundary of patriarchal jurisdiction between Rome and Constantinople.
The Islamic conquests of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch in the 7th century left Constantinople the only practical authority in the East, and afterward the concept of a "pentarchy" retained little more than symbolic significance.
[11] In the beginning of the 2nd century, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, speaks of the Church of Rome as "presiding in the region of the Romans" (ἥτις προκάθηται ἐν τόπῳ χωρίου Ῥωμαίων).
[11] In the end of that century, Pope Victor I threatened to excommunicate the Eastern bishops who continued to celebrate Easter on 14 Nisan, not on the following Sunday.
Bishops participating in councils held at Antioch in the middle of the 3rd century came not only from Syria, but also from Palestine, Arabia, and eastern Asia Minor.
With the imperial capital having moved to Byzantium in 330, the re-named city of Constantinople became increasingly important in church affairs of the Greek East.
The Emperor Theodosius I, who called the Council, divided the eastern Roman Empire into five "dioceses": Egypt (under Alexandria), the East (under Antioch), Asia (under Ephesus), Pontus (under Caesarea Cappadociae), and Thrace (originally under Heraclea, later under Constantinople).
"[23] The transfer of the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople in 330 enabled the latter to free itself from its ecclesiastical dependency on Heraclea and in little more than half a century to obtain this recognition of next-after-Rome ranking from the first Council held within its walls.
[22] The Council of Chalcedon (451), which marked a serious defeat of Alexandria, gave recognition, in its 28th canon, to Constantinople's extension of its power over Pontus and Asia in addition to Thrace.
[22] Canon 9 of the Council declared: "If a bishop or clergyman should have a difference with the metropolitan of the province, let him have recourse to the Exarch of the Diocese, or to the throne of the Imperial City of Constantinople, and there let it be tried."
This has been interpreted as conferring on the see of Constantinople a greater privilege than what any council ever gave Rome (Johnson) or as of much lesser significance than that (Hefele).
[33] Thus in little more than a hundred years the structural arrangement by provinces envisaged by the First Council of Nicaea was, according to John H. Erickson, transformed into a system of five large divisions headed by the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
[34] Because of the decision of the Council of Ephesus, Cyprus maintained its independence from the Antioch division, and the arrangement did not apply outside the empire, where separate "catholicates" developed in Mesopotamia and Armenia.
[22] The basic principles of the pentarchy theory, which, according to the Byzantinist historian Milton V. Anastos,[36] "reached its highest development in the period from the eleventh century to the middle of the fifteenth", go back to the 6th-century Justinian I, who often stressed the importance of all five of the patriarchates mentioned, especially in the formulation of dogma.
"[40] The 7th and 8th centuries saw an increasing attribution of significance to the pentarchy as the five pillars of the Church upholding its infallibility: it was held to be impossible that all five should at the same time be in error.
[19] The Byzantine view of the pentarchy had a strongly anti-Roman orientation, being put forward against the Roman claim to the final word on all Church matters and to the right to judge even the patriarchs.
[43] Nearly all the Byzantine writers who treated the subject of the pentarchy assumed that Constantinople, as the seat of the ruler of the empire and therefore of the world, was the highest among the patriarchates and, like the emperor, had the right to govern them.
[19] Thus, for the Byzantines of the first half of the second millennium, the government of the Christian Church was a primacy belonging to the patriarchate of Constantinople, which however was choosing not to insist on it with regard to the west.
