Canon of the Seventh Local Council, of Constantinople (394)

Canon 1

OF THE SEVENTH LOCAL COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. In accordance with the ordinance of the council of Nicaea, two bishops can neither appoint nor depose a bishop. And in order that the condemnation of one who has deserved deposition may be better founded, through the voice of many and after the accused has been heard, it is ordained that henceforth he who has fallen under judgment may be deposed not even by three, still less by two, bishops, but by the decision of a greater council and of the bishops of the province in question, as the apostolic canons also ordained.

132; Protodeutera 13; Theophilus of Alexandria 9.

— In the historical note on this council we saw (I, 23) for what reason this council convened. To the see of Bostra a bishop named Bagadius had been elected and appointed. After some time this Bagadius was deposed, on account of certain transgressions, by two bishops, and this in his absence and without his defense being heard, and in his place they appointed one Agapius; Bagadius then complained of this, contending that he had been unlawfully deposed. The matter came before this council at Constantinople, and the bishop of Ancyra, rendered here as Dravianus, pointed out that this matter needed to be examined and settled by law for all future times. In the sense of the 1st Apostolic canon and canon 4 of the First Ecumenical Council,[1] it had first been established that, just as two bishops alone cannot elect and appoint a third, so two bishops alone cannot depose a single bishop. And since Bagadius had been condemned without a hearing, and since a sentence, before it is pronounced, must be entirely well-founded and several persons must have expressed their judgment upon it, the council therefore declared unlawful what those two bishops had done in the case of Bagadius, and in the sense of the 14th Apostolic canon it was ordained that for the lawful deposition of a bishop a regular court must be constituted, and the accused must be duly summoned before that court, and the sentence must be pronounced by a full council composed of all the bishops of the province—in any case more in number than three—and ‘with the metropolitan himself,’ as the Kormchaia says regarding this canon.[2]