§ 60. The Sacred Hierarchy

In the sacred hierarchy the canons mention six degrees,[1] of which three are received in the sanctuary (ἐντὸς τοῦ βήματος) by the invocation upon the candidate of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the other three are received outside the sanctuary (ἐκτὸς τοῦ βήματος) by the blessing of the bishop.[2] Those who hold the first degrees are called sacred ministers (ἱερωμένοι), and those who hold the last are called church-servants (ὑπηρέται).

I. The sacred ministers are divided into three degrees: episcopal, presbyteral, and diaconal. These three degrees constitute the foundation of the church hierarchy, and proceed from divine right (ex jure divino);[3] nor, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, can there be more or fewer than three such degrees.[4] The remaining degrees existing in the Church are conditioned by these three, and are nothing other than these same three degrees, only ramified.[5]

1. First and highest in the church hierarchy is the episcopal degree.[6] Its pre-eminence consists in this: 1, that episcopal power is inherited from the apostles; 2, that in the episcopate lies the fullness of priestly power; and 3, that to the episcopate belongs the supreme governance of the Church.

As to the first—namely that bishops received their power directly from the apostles—the common and unanimous teaching of the Church of the oldest times bears witness,[7] and accordingly the Fathers of the Church spoke of the rights of bishops as of the rights of the apostles, and called bishops at times apostles, just as they also called the apostles bishops.[8] But this succession, or this passing of the episcopate from the apostles, did not extend to a complete equality of the first with the latter. The apostles were called and chosen by the Lord Himself to the evangelical ministry, whereas bishops were appointed by the apostles—and this only in the very earliest period, and thereafter they were appointed by others equal to themselves. Besides this, the apostles were enlightened directly by the Holy Spirit and endowed with extraordinary gifts, while bishops received grace through apostolic ordination, and the gifts they received were not extraordinary, but only the grace-given consecration to govern the Church. Finally, the apostles were the supreme and ecumenical administrators of the Church, for which reason they possessed extraordinary plenary powers, whereas bishops received from the apostles power only within the bounds of the local churches, and could exercise that power in accordance with positive laws and in dependence on the judgment of the Church itself.

As to the second point, the teaching of the Church is likewise unanimous. The episcopal degree contains in itself the fullness of the priesthood and all the rights of priestly ministration, and from it proceed all the other degrees of the church hierarchy.[9] In this respect the canons strictly distinguish the episcopal degree from the others, and in the first place from the presbyteral. A presbyter and a deacon are appointed by a single bishop, whereas a bishop must be appointed by a council of bishops; likewise to the bishop alone belongs the right to appoint to all the other, lower, hierarchical degrees.[10] And for this reason the Church has never recognized as a member of the hierarchy one who was not ordained by a canonical bishop, and has deprived of all hierarchical rights those who, in some case, were ordained by presbyters who had unlawfully arrogated to themselves episcopal power.[11]

Beside these rights, which belong to the bishop by virtue of priestly power, there belongs to him, by an equally unanimous teaching of the Church, a third—namely, supreme power in the government of the Church, that is, the right of teaching, of pastoral care, and of spiritual judgment. And although these rights are held in the Church by others also, they hold them by virtue of the ordination they received from a bishop and by virtue of the authorization they received from him.

Accordingly, the episcopate is in itself indispensable in the Church, and where there is no episcopate there is no Church.[12] It is the organ through which all the mysteries of the Church are communicated, nor can any mystery be validly performed unless he who performs it has received ordination from a bishop.[13] The right of teaching belongs, in the first place, to bishops, as does likewise the right of pastoral care, and no teaching in the Church, nor any pastoral care exercised in the Church by presbyters, can be lawful unless it derives from, and is in immediate dependence on, the episcopate.[14] In view of such and so many prerogatives, upon the episcopal degree lies responsibility for everything in the Church, in the strictest sense of the word.

2. After the episcopal comes the presbyteral degree. Presbyters, or priests, have power in the Church by virtue of episcopal ordination over them, and hence a power conditioned by episcopal power. It extends, within defined limits, to every branch of church administration;[15] and, as regards the performance of sacred or church services, priestly power operates through those means which have been consecrated by the high-priestly power of the episcopate. Accordingly, priests have the right to perform every act in the Church except that which constitutes the foundation of these very acts. And the canons place the foundation of these acts a) in ordination, b) in the consecration of the antimension, and c) in the consecration of the chrism (μύρον τοῦ χρίσματος). The right to perform these sacred acts belongs to episcopal power alone, for it is the high-priesthood (ἀρχιερωσύνη) in the Church.[16] Priests have the right to perform church services, but they cannot appoint the very performer of those services—that is, one equal to themselves—for that belongs to high-priestly power; they have the right to celebrate the liturgy, but the antimension, without which it cannot be celebrated, can be consecrated only by the high priest; likewise they have the right to communicate spiritual gifts to people through the mysteries, but to prepare the means by which a person becomes capable of receiving those gifts—namely the chrism for the mystery of chrismation—only the high priest has the power. In these sacred acts the need for a higher sacred power to enable their performance is self-evident; for the means for every sacred act can be given only by him who holds high-priestly power in the Church, and only by making use of these means does a priest have the right to perform these sacred acts.

3. Last among the fundamental hierarchical degrees is the diaconal degree. The deacon’s principal duty is service at the liturgical rites. By his degree deacons have no power at all in the Church, but are in everything dependent on the bishop and the presbyter.[17] They have some right of authority only over the lower servants of the Church,[18] and, by the express authorization of their bishops, may also participate in matters of the external administration of the Church.[19]

II. Church-servants likewise are divided into three degrees: subdeacon, reader, and singer.[20] These degrees do not proceed from divine right, but were established later, according to the needs of the Church.[21] The duties of all these church-servants concern the external liturgical service,[22] and beyond that the bishops employed them in their chanceries.[23]

Footnotes

[5] It is altogether erroneous what Suvorov says (Course of Church Law. I, 207 n. 25) about the number of the degrees of the sacred hierarchy. This is not, as it would appear according to him, a question of canon law but a dogmatic one, and canon law in this is founded on the teaching of the church; thus when the church teaches that there are three, neither more nor fewer, fundamental degrees of the sacred hierarchy, canon law takes this as an accomplished fact, and considers only the legal relations of the persons concerned who hold those degrees, and nothing more. By proceeding in this way, Suvorov, who wants to stand only upon juridical ground and from that ground to criticize the theologians, falls into an error much greater than that with which he charges the late Archim. Ioann, the father of the canon law of the Orthodox Church in recent times. It is still more erroneous when Suvorov appeals to Balsamon to prove that subdiaconate is also a distinct degree of the priesthood, conferred by cheirotonia. Here he has seized upon the word χειροτονία, which Balsamon used of the subdeacons; but the selfsame word is used of subdeacons, and even of readers, also by Symeon of Thessalonica (On the Sacred Rites. Chaps. 124 and 130, ed. 1868, pp. 207, 213), and yet he strictly distinguishes them from the bishop, the presbyter and the deacon, both by the rite of ordination and by their ministry. According to Suvorov, then, there would be in the Orthodox Church four fundamental degrees of the priesthood—something that, incidentally, does not exist even in the Roman Catholic Church, as he would want to demonstrate. (See Vering, Kirchenrecht. Ed. Cit. S. 408—409) And if we were to adopt, in addition, as Suvorov cites (p. 208), that “императорская власть” is the высшая церковная власть, which stands also above the episcopal power in the church, then we would have, first, five fundamental hierarchical degrees: the subdiaconal, the diaconal, the presbyteral, the episcopal and the imperial, and then we would have a fine and splendid caesaropapism, from which, incidentally, Suvorov in his book does not at all dissociate himself

[6] About the rights of bishops we read in the Apostolic Constitutions: Ἐπίσκοπος εὐλογεῖ, οὐκ εὐλογεῖται· χειροθετεῖ, χειροτονεῖ, προσφέρει· εὐλογίαν παρὰ ἐπισκόπων λαμβάνει, παρὰ δὲ πρεσβυτέρων οὐδαμῶς. Ἐπίσκοπος καθαιρεῖ πάντα κληρικὸν ἄξιον ὄντα καθαιρέσεως πλὴν ἐπισκόπου· μόνος γὰρ οὐχ οἷός τε (VIII, 28. Pitra. I, 61) See the valuable treatise of the Most Rev. Gury On the Divinely-Instituted Character of the Episcopal Order in Christ’s Church in comparison with the teaching on the same among the Reformed communities (Christ. Reading. 1876. I, 565 ff). Kurz, Der Episcopat, der höchste vom Presbyterate verschiedene Ordo. Wien, 1877.

§ 60. The Sacred Hierarchy

§ 60. Свештена јерархија