§ 43. The Greek Canonical Collections

The Greek canonical collections of this period may be divided into: a) elementary collections, in which the canons are set out synoptically; b) collections with commentaries; and c) systematic collections.

I. In the eleventh century Michael Psellus[1] composed a short canonical synopsis for practical use, in which the canons of the first four ecumenical and the first six local councils[2] are set out in chronological order, then the canons of the Church Fathers, and finally the apostolic canons.[3] Fuller than this is the Nomocanon of Gregory Doxapatres[4] from the first half of the twelfth century, in which all the canons contained in the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles are set out synoptically, with several further articles added that are found in the supplemented synopsis of Stephen of Ephesus.[5]

II. Commentaries are found either on the synopses, or on the full text of the canons, or on the nomocanons.

1. On the synopsis of the canons—namely on that synopsis first prepared by Stephen of Ephesus, and which was afterward supplemented with all the articles it contains today[6] — Alexius Aristenus, deacon and nomophylax of the cathedral church at Constantinople, wrote a commentary in the year 1130.[7] Aristenus’s commentary consists in this: that beneath the abridged text of the canon he set the full, periphrastic text; and where the abridged text of the given canon was itself correct and intelligible, he left that canon without any commentary, noting only that it was “clear.”[8]

2. On the full text of the canons, the best and most complete commentary was written at the beginning of the twelfth century by John Zonaras.[9] In his collection the canons are arranged by the importance of their sources: first the apostolic canons, then those of the ecumenical councils, then of the local councils, and finally of the holy fathers—all the canons contained in the collection accompanying the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles. Zonaras’s commentaries aim to clarify the words of each canon and to penetrate its meaning. The soundness of these commentaries of Zonaras was acknowledged by the best canonists of the Eastern Church. Balsamon, in his own commentaries on the canons, repeats Zonaras almost word for word, and calls him “the most excellent”;[10] likewise Blastares too appeals to Zonaras’s commentaries.[11] The esteem of Zonaras’s work stood so high that good canonical collections were simply called “Zonaras.”[12] For the canon law of the Orthodox Church Zonaras’s commentaries constitute a source of law, and for scholarship they are of immeasurable importance.[13]

3. Commentaries on the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles are found from several different jurists. The first would be some unknown author from the period immediately after the issuing of the Nomocanon, who wrote commentaries on individual passages, both of the canonical part and of the other part, where the civil laws are.[14] The second is Theodore Bestes, a jurist from the end of the eleventh century,[15] who did not so much write particular commentaries on the Nomocanon as insert into the civil part of the Nomocanon the text of those laws that had been indicated only by number, just as someone else had done with respect to the canonical part.[16] But the most important commentator on the Nomocanon is Theodore Balsamon, first chartophylax of the church of Constantinople, and then (from 1193) patriarch of Antioch, the most acknowledged of all the canonists of the Eastern Church of his time.[17] By order of the emperor Manuel Comnenus and the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Anchialos, Balsamon undertook, between 1169 and 1177, to write his commentary on the Nomocanon. From his preface we learn that his chief aim was to write a commentary on each individual canon, to bring the prescriptions of the canons into harmony with the prescriptions of civil legislation, and to indicate the civil laws found in the Basilica which, in consequence, carried unconditionally binding force for everyone.[18] In his commentaries on the canons Balsamon follows Zonaras throughout, and only occasionally supplements him, adducing, for the clarification of one canon or another, the decrees of the patriarchal synod of Constantinople; in the other part of the Nomocanon he works independently, and this earned him the name of the renowned. The Nomocanon with the commentary on the civil part of the Nomocanon makes up the first volume of the Athenian Syntagma,[19] and his commentaries on the canons are found in the same Syntagma, after the text of each individual canon and after Zonaras’s commentary.[20]

III. As for the systematic collections of this period, three changes may be observed in their composition. Down to the middle of the fourteenth century several independent works of considerable importance for the law stand out; thereafter these works decline as a result of political misfortunes in the East, for several centuries, and only in the nineteenth century does new life awaken again. Let us turn to the principal ones this period offers us.

1. In the thirteenth century the Athonite monk Arsenius, afterward, according to some, patriarch of Constantinople,[21] wrote a canonical synopsis important for the church law of that time.[22] It has 141 chapters; an analysis of the individual canonical prescriptions is given, along with all the canons touching the matter in question. The civil laws are taken from Scholasticus’s collection in 87 chapters.

2. High renown in the history of canon law was earned by the hieromonk Matthew Blastares[23] through his alphabetical Syntagma, which he issued in 1335.[24] After an extensive preface and a survey of the sources, the Syntagma is divided into 24 parts by the number of letters of the Greek alphabet, and each part into as many chapters as there are nouns beginning with the letter in question. In all there are 303 chapters, and under each chapter heading are set out first all the canons, then the corresponding civil laws. This Syntagma of Blastares is a very sound and practical work.

3. We have said that Harmenopoulos issued, as a supplement to his Hexabiblos, a separate canonical collection.[25] Harmenopoulos prepared this collection around the middle of the fourteenth century, and after a preface it is divided into six sections, each of which is again divided into particular titles, and under each title all the canons that make up today’s Pedalion are set out synoptically.[26]

With the collection of Harmenopoulos the older history of the canonical collections of the Greek Church properly comes to an end. The collections issued afterward, down to the nineteenth century, are inferior compilations from earlier ones, and it is not necessary for us to dwell on them.[27]

Because of the connection which two of these compilations bear to today’s canonical collections, we shall mention them, namely:

1) The Nomocanon of Manuel Malaxos, from the year 1561.[28] Malaxos compiled this collection of his from the most varied sources, and in it he treats, in several hundred chapters (from 203 to 694 according to the various manuscripts), of matters as much canonical as altogether unrelated to law—for instance, meteorology, geography, philology, and so on. This collection forms one of the sources of the first part of the Romanian Indreptarea.[29]

2) The Nomocanon in 228 chapters, from the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century.[30] This is a somewhat better compilation than that of Malaxos, since it concerns at least a single subject, namely it sets out the penances for various sins, and it served as a handbook for confessors. In the sixteenth century this collection was translated into Old Serbian, and was afterward printed in Russia, and is found today at the end of the Slavonic “Great Book of Needs.”[31]

3) Malaxos’s collection and the multitude of other similarly poor canonical collections, which threw the very administration of the Church in the East into confusion, and which caused it to be forgotten what constitutes a canonical prescription and what had been brought into the law, alongside it, from non-canonical sources,[32] moved two learned Greek monks, Nicodemus and Agapius, in the last years of the eighteenth century, to prepare a new canonical collection that would correspond to canonical truth.[33] This collection they composed in 1793 and called it the Pedalion,[34] which, after approval by the synod of Constantinople, was printed at Leipzig in 1800, and then, in a revised edition, in 1841, according to which it has been printed ever since.[35] It contains, after an extensive preface, first the apostolic canons, then those of the ecumenical councils, then of the local councils, and finally of the holy fathers—all the canons that are in the fundamental canonical collection—and further only: the canons of the council of Carthage under Cyprian, the canons of John the Faster, of Nicephorus the Confessor, and of Nicholas of Constantinople.[36] Alongside the text of each canon stand the parallel canons, and then a fairly extensive commentary on the canon in question. At the end there is an article on kinship and several forms of various official church documents. The Pedalion is today the official canonical collection of the Greek Church.[37]

Footnotes

[8] The title of the collection containing Aristenus’ commentaries is this: Νομοκάνον σὺν Θεῷ ἑρμηνευθὲν παρὰ τοῦ θεοφιλεστάτου νομοφύλακος κυροῦ Ἀλεξίου τοῦ Ἀριστηνοῦ. Mortreuil. III, 413 Heimbach. l. c. p. 461. Biener, De collect. can. 32 sq. In Beveregii Synodicon, and likewise in the Athenian Syntagma, where these commentaries of Aristenus are found, they are not presented as an independent collection, but are placed with each canon after the commentaries of Zonaras and Balsamon, and that in an incorrect manner, for the name Aristenus stands beside the synoptic text of the canon, whereas it ought in fact to stand beside the commentary, for it was not Aristenus who compiled the synopsis, as was formerly erroneously held. This same irregularity passed over into the Moscow edition (1876 ff.) “The Rules, etc., with Commentaries”. Aristenus’ commentaries are found in the Kormchaia and in Indreptarea legii. See On can. coll., pp. 15—16.

[19] Ἐξήγησις τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ θείων κανόνων τῶν τε ἁγίων καὶ πανευφήμων ἀποστόλων, καὶ τῶν ἱερῶν οἰκουμενικῶν συνόδων, ἀλλὰ μὴν καὶ τῶν τοπικῶν ἤτοι μερικῶν, καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν ἁγίων πατέρων· πρὸς δὲ καὶ δήλωσις τῶν ἐνεργούντων νόμων καὶ μὴ ἐνεργούντων, τῶν ἀναταττομένων ἐν τοῖς δέκα πρὸς τοῖς τέσσαρσι τίτλοις τοῖς κατ᾿ ἀρχὴν τῶν κανόνων κειμένοις, πονηθεῖσα κατὰ πρόσταξιν βασιλικὴν καὶ πατριαρχικὴν Θεοδώρῳ τῷ εὐτελεῖ διακόνῳ τῆς ἁγιωτάτης τοῦ Θεοῦ μεγάλης ἐκκλησίας, Νομοφύλακι, Χαρτοφύλακι, καὶ πρώτῳ τῶν Βλαχερνῶν τῷ Βαλσαμῶνι, τῷ μετὰ χρόνους τινὰς γεγονότι Πατριάρχῃ Θεουπόλεως μεγάλης Ἀντιοχείας, καὶ πάσης ἀνατολῆς. The Athenian Syntagma. I, 31.

[20] Ἑρμηνεία εἰς τοὺς κανόνας τῶν ἁγίων καὶ σεπτῶν ἀποστόλων, καὶ εἰς τὰς μετέπειτα οἰκουμενικὰς συνόδους τῶν ἁγίων πατέρων, πονηθεῖσα παρὰ Θεοδώρου διακόνου τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ Μεγάλης Ἐκκλησίας, νομοφύλακος, χαρτοφύλακος, καὶ πρώτου τῶν Βλαχερνῶν, τοῦ Βαλσαμῶνος. Ath. Synt. II, 3. Balsamon’s commentaries on the nomocanon and on the canonical collection were published for the first time in a Latin translation (Gentiano Herveto interprete) in 1561 in Paris, then in the same year the commentary on the nomocanon itself in a Latin translation (Henr Agylae) in Basel. The Greek text was published first in 1615 in Paris, and again, more completely, in Paris in 1620; and together with both prefaces to the nomocanon Balsamon’s commentaries were published in 1661 in the Voelli et Justelli Bibliotheca jur. can. II, 785—1138. The commentaries on the canons are given critically in the Bevereg. Synodicon immediately after the text of the canons themselves; and in the Russian translation, in the Moscow edition of “The Rules with Commentaries,” after Zonaras’s commentary and after the synoptic text of the canons with Aristenus’s commentary, Balsamon’s commentary is placed under each canon.

[24] In the Athenian Syntagma (in which it occupies the whole of volume VI) it bears this title: Σύνταγμα κατὰ στοιχεῖον τῶν ἐμπεριειλημμένων ἁπασῶν ὑποθέσεων τοῖς ἱεροῖς καὶ θείοις κανόσι, πονηθέν τε ἅμα καὶ συντεθὲν τῷ ἐν ἱερομονάχοις ἐλαχίστῳ Ματθαίῳ (τῷ Βλάσταρῃ). The same in the Beveregii Synodicon, where it is printed in volume II with a separate pagination (I—XXVI, 1—272). Two excerpts from Blastares’s syntagma, which concern marriage law, are also printed in the Leunclav. Jus gr. rom. I, 478—518. See on this syntagma: Biener, De coll. can. p. 37—38. Id., Gesch der Nov. S. 218—222. Mortreuil, III, 457—464 Zachariae von Ling., Die griech. Nomokanones. S. 17—18. Heimbach. l. c. S. 467—470. On can. coll., pp. 78—80. This syntagma was also translated into Slavonic and was used in the old Serbian church (P. J. Safarik, Geschichte der serb. Literatur. II. Abtheil S. 216. fg. I. Florinsky, Monuments of the Legislative Activity of Dušan p. 307—321), and in it an abridged edition of this syntagma was prepared as well (I. Florinsky. Ib. 321—439). The Russian translation was prepared by N. Ilyinsky, who published it in 1892 in Simferopol. This edition is scholarly and at the same time very practical. On the various translations of this syntagma from ancient Greek into modern Greek see Zachariae, Delin. p. 88. sq.

§ 43. The Greek Canonical Collections

§ 43. Грчки канонички зборници