Eastern Orthodox Church

EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH

Direct descendant of the Byzantine State Church; also includes a group of independent national Christian churches.

The Eastern Orthodox Church comprises a group of autonomous Christian churches united by doctrine, liturgy, and internal hierarchical organizations. The heads are patriarchs or metropolitans, with the patriarch of Constantinople only the first among equals. Orthodox churches represented in the Middle East include the Russian, the Balkan, the Greek; the churches of Antioch (now based in Damascus), Alexandria, Jerusalem, and the See of Constantinople (now Istanbul); and the old churches that date to the fifth century c.e., which emancipated themselves from the Byzantine State Church—the Nestorian Church in the Middle East and India (with a half million members) and the Monophysite churches (with some 17 million, including the Coptic of Egypt, the Ethiopian, the Syrian, the Armenian, and the Mar Thoma of India). There are also the Uniate churches, which, properly speaking, are not Orthodox churches because, though they retain traditional eastern liturgies, they acknowledge the primacy and authority of the pope in Rome. Orthodox Christians today number some 150 million or more worldwide—with 125 million in Europe, 25 million in Africa, 3.5 million in Asia, and about 1 million in North America.

Eastern Christianity, with its decentralized organization, diverged from the Western hierarchically organized Roman (Catholic) Church after the fourth century c.e., when Constantinople became the capital of the Roman Empire. The theological split between the Western and Eastern churches was formalized in the Schism of 1054. Rivalry between Rome and Constantinople, aided by longstanding differences and misunderstandings, led to the schism: The Eastern Orthodox churches recognize only the canons of the seven ecumenical councils (325–787 c.e.) as binding for faith, and they reject doctrines that have subsequently been added in the West.

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, the Orthodox patriarch was entrusted with full civil administration over all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. This centralized administration contrasted with the Eastern church's traditional localist organization. Although the Ottomans granted Christians freedom of worship, the restrictions they imposed on the public profile of the church bred resentment and stagnation in theological scholarship.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox community once again splintered under the impact of European Catholics and Protestants and of emerging nationalism. The Russian Empire assumed a pan-Slavic stance in its attempts to expand south and east into warm-water ports during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the affinity of Russian Orthodoxy with other Eastern Orthodox communities was stressed. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire ended that gambit, although Russian and Soviet interests in the Middle East never diminished.

Today in the Arab East, the Antioch (Melkite) church represents the largest Arab Christian group, with dioceses in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The Alexandria church has become the center of emerging African Orthodox communities.

Bibliography

Braude, Benjamin, and Lewis, Bernard, eds. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982.

Haddad, Robert M. Syrian Christians in Muslim Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Shaw, Stanford. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

elizabeth thompson