§ 36. Collections of Church Law: General Survey

The codification of the sources of church law proceeded gradually, according to how new sources arose. The respective legal ordinances, as soon as they were once issued, became a measure by which one had thereafter to act in a given case. Knowledge of the legal ordinances already issued constituted a duty for every member of the church, and in the first place for the superiors of the churches, who had to watch that they were exactly carried out. For this reason, as soon as some new legal ordinance had been issued by the competent authority, and by its subject bore upon itself the seal of general obligation, those concerned took care that it should at once be joined to the earlier ones, so that all legal ordinances might be known to everyone. In this way there quite naturally arose particular collections in which were contained all those legal ordinances that had been issued up to a certain time, and by which the life of the church was to be governed; and in the measure in which the number of these ordinances grew, the scope of the collections themselves grew, and the codification of the sources of church law developed. Work in this respect was private work, the labor of individual persons, who were moved to it by a practical aim; and only afterward, when the competent authority subjected that labor to its review and found it expedient, did it acquire official significance, and the respective legal collections became official collections, generally binding upon all.[1]

The history of the codification of church law has its definite periods, which in the main coincide with the periods of the history of the church itself, and of which there are three.[2] The first constitutes the period from the beginning of the church to the Edict of Milan (313). In this period the Christian church draws the laws for its governance from Holy Scripture and living apostolic tradition, and confines itself to gathering the traditions and customs of the apostles from the accounts of the apostles’ disciples and successors, and from the practice of those churches which the apostles founded. The second period embraces the time when the ecumenical councils were held, and those local councils whose canons have binding force for the whole church. In this period the codification of the sources of church law receives a broad development, and reaches its highest point when the basic canonical collection of the Orthodox church is issued, namely the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles (883). The third period follows after the issuing of that Nomocanon, when the legislative work of the ecumenical church had in its essentials been rounded off. The legislative organs of the local churches, having taken the general church legislation as their basis, govern the life of the church by it in the main, and confine themselves to resolving only particular questions according to local and national needs. The labors of the canonists in this period are directed to making the fundamental legislation of the church a handy reference for everyone, and to bringing the provisions of that legislation into connection with the other sources of law which also held force in the church, and which derived either from state legislation or from the legislation of the local churches. — In the first two periods the church was one, undivided, and the canonical collections of this era, even if some of them had only local significance, were nonetheless respected throughout the whole ecumenical church. For this reason we shall examine all the principal collections of that era, both those of the East and those issued in the West. After that period, the churches divide, and each has its own separate church law, which in its foundations is entirely different from the other, and there is no longer anything common between the two churches: the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic. For this reason we, too, in keeping with the task of the present work, shall confine ourselves in the third period to the canonical collections of the Orthodox church, and shall examine first the Greek, then the Slavic, and finally the Romanian canonical collections.

According to their content, the collections are divided into those exclusively canonical, if they contain only the provisions of church legislation; into church-civil collections, if they contain the provisions of civil legislation on church matters; and into nomocanons, if they contain the provisions of both church and civil legislation. There further exist collections that are: general, if they concern the whole church, and particular, if they concern only one local church or one particular institution in the church; chronological, if they set forth the respective legal provisions in chronological order; systematic, if they set forth those provisions either according to the subjects to which they pertain, or according to the significance of the sources from which they derive. Finally, collections are distinguished also by how the legal ordinances are rendered in them, namely, whether they contain the complete original text of the law, or contain that text in abridged form, or paraphrase it, or contain the text in full, abridged or paraphrased form together with shorter or more extensive commentary.