§ 80. The Convocation of the Ecumenical Council

Ecumenical councils do not belong among the regular institutions of the Church, as, for instance, metropolitan councils would be, but appear in history as extraordinary events of significance not only for the Church but for the state as well. In keeping with such significance of theirs, it is natural that both church and state authority must take part in the convocation of an ecumenical council. To the former belongs the internal side of the council, to the latter the external. The Church, by her very nature, has the right to act independently in matters of her belief and her life, and her ordinances on such matters must proceed from herself alone, and must stand in close connection with her general purpose and the needs of her being. But the Church, as a spiritual kingdom, cannot dispose of those earthly means she needs in order to exercise that right of hers, especially on such occasions when she must gather bishops from all parts of the Christian world, so that, assembled together, they may with one common voice establish some fundamental truth and prescribe something that must be the expression of the whole Church, and hence binding on all. For this reason the Church has need of the state authority, which can furnish her those means and guarantee her freedom in the exercise of the aforesaid right. This explains the participation that the state authority had in the convocation of those seven ecumenical councils that the Orthodox Church receives, and which participation that same state authority would have to have today as well, were a new ecumenical council to be convoked. From the history of those seven councils we see that the occasions for convoking a council, the subjects of deliberation, the persons who were by right to deliberate on those subjects, and finally the promulgation of the decisions themselves, all depended on the church authority, and were established by the rights that belong to her independently; whereas the fixing of the place and time for the council, the securing of the members of the council and the freedom of conciliar deliberation, the guarantee that the conciliar decisions would be universally promulgated and would be binding on all as state laws—this and the like required the participation of the state authority and was achieved with its help. The convocation of ecumenical councils belongs, then, to the joint participation of church authority and state authority. The bishops demonstrate the need for an ecumenical council to be convoked on account of a given question, and the state authority then convokes them for that purpose to an appointed place and furnishes them the means by which they may constitute that council and work upon it freely.[1]