The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially the Orthodox Catholic Church, also known as the Greek Orthodox Church is the second-largest Christian body in the world after the Roman Catholic Church, and one of the three major doctrinal and jurisdictional groups of Christianity.
The Eastern Orthodox Church operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops via local synods. The church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by them as primus inter pares (), a title held by the patriarch of Rome prior to the East–West Schism.
As one of the oldest surviving religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played an especially prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Since 2018, there has been an ongoing schism between Constantinople and Moscow, with the two not in full communion with each other.
Eastern Orthodox theology is based on the Scriptures and holy tradition, which incorporates the dogmatic decrees of the seven ecumenical councils, and the teaching of the Church Fathers. The church teaches that it is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church established by Jesus Christ in his Great Commission, and that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles. It maintains that it practises the original Christian faith, as passed down by holy tradition. Its patriarchates, descending from the pentarchy, and other autocephalous and autonomous churches, reflect a variety of hierarchical organisation. It recognises seven major sacraments (which are called holy mysteries), of which the Eucharist is the principal one, celebrated liturgically in synaxis. The church teaches that through consecration invoked by a priest, the sacrificial bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The Virgin Mary is venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the Theotokos, which means 'God-bearer', and she is honoured in devotions.
The churches of Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch—except for some breaks of communion such as the Photian schism or the Acacian schism—shared communion with the Church of Rome until the East–West Schism in 1054. The 1054 schism was the culmination of mounting theological, political, and cultural disputes, particularly over the authority of the pope, between those churches. Before the Council of Ephesus in AD 431, the Church of the East also shared in this communion, as did the various Oriental Orthodox Churches before the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, all separating primarily over differences in Christology.
The Eastern Orthodox Church is the primary religious confession in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Belarus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, North Macedonia, Cyprus, and Montenegro. Eastern Orthodox Christians are also one of the main religious groups in Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Latvia as well as a significant group in Syria, Lebanon, and other countries in the Middle East. Roughly half of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in the post Eastern Bloc countries, mostly in Russia. The communities in the former Byzantine regions of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean are among the oldest Orthodox communities from the Middle East, which are decreasing due to forced migration driven by increased religious persecution. Eastern Orthodox communities outside Western Asia, Asia Minor, Caucasia and Eastern Europe, including those in North America, Western Europe, and Australia, have been formed through diaspora, conversions, and missionary activity.
Name and characteristics
Definition
The Eastern Orthodox Church is defined as the Eastern Christians which recognise the seven ecumenical councils and usually are in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Patriarchate of Antioch, and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Eastern Orthodox churches "are defined positively by their adherence to the dogmatic definitions of the seven [ecumenical] councils, by the strong sense of not being a sect or a denomination but simply continuing the Christian church, and, despite their varied origins, by adherence to the Byzantine rite". Those churches are negatively defined by their rejection of papal immediate and universal supremacy.
The seven ecumenical councils recognised by the Eastern Orthodox churches are: Nicaea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II. These churches consider the Quinisext Council as "shar[ing] the ecumenical authority of Constantinople III." "By an agreement that appears to be in place in the [Eastern] Orthodox world, possibly the council held in 879 to vindicate the Patriarch Photius will at some future date be recognized as the eighth [ecumenical] council" by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Western Rite Orthodoxy exists both outside and inside Eastern Orthodoxy. Within Eastern Orthodoxy, it is practised by a vicariate of the Antiochian Orthodox church. The Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America estimated there are 1,416 members of the Western Rite vicariate in 24 parishes. With roughly 3,000 members worldwide, spread across about 50 scattered parishes, Western Rite Orthodoxy remains a very small minority within the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Name The official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the "Orthodox Catholic Church". It is the name by which the church refers to itself and which is issued in its liturgical or canonical texts. Eastern Orthodox theologians refer to the church as Catholic. This name and longer variants containing "Catholic" are also recognised and referenced in other books and publications by secular or non-Eastern Orthodox writers. The catechism of Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow published in the 19th century is titled: The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church ().
In keeping with the church's teaching on universality and with the Nicene Creed, Eastern Orthodox authorities such as Raphael of Brooklyn have insisted that the full name of the church has always included the term "Catholic", as in "Holy Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Church".
From ancient times through the first millennium, Greek was the most prevalent shared language in the demographic regions where the Byzantine Empire flourished, and Greek, being the language in which the New Testament was written, was the primary liturgical language of the church. For this reason, the eastern churches were sometimes identified as "Greek" (in contrast to the "Roman" or "Latin" church, which used a Latin translation of the Bible), even before the Great Schism of 1054. After 1054, "Greek Orthodox" or "Greek Catholic" marked a church as being in communion with Constantinople, much as "Catholic" did for communion with the Catholic Church.
In Hungarian, the church is still commonly called "Eastern Greek" (). This identification with Greek, however, became increasingly confusing with time. Missionaries brought Eastern Orthodoxy to many regions without ethnic Greeks, where the Greek language was not spoken. In addition, struggles between Rome and Constantinople to control parts of Southeastern Europe resulted in the conversion of some churches to the Catholic Church, which then also used "Greek Catholic" to indicate their continued use of the Byzantine rites. Today, only a minority of Eastern Orthodox adherents use Greek as the language of worship.
"Eastern", then, indicates the geographical element in the church's origin and development, while "Orthodox" indicates the faith, as well as communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. There are additional Christian churches in the east that are in communion with neither the Catholic Church nor the Eastern Orthodox Church, who tend to be distinguished by the category named "Oriental Orthodox". While the Eastern Orthodox Church continues officially to call itself "Catholic", for reasons of universality, the common title of "Eastern Orthodox Church" avoids casual confusion with the Catholic Church.
Orthodoxy
The first known use of the phrase "the catholic Church" (he katholike ekklesia) occurred in a letter written from one Greek church to another (Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans). The letter states: "Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be, even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal [katholike] Church." Thus, almost from the beginning, Christians referred to the Christian Church as the "one, holy, catholic (from the Greek καθολική, 'according to the whole, universal') and apostolic Church". The Eastern Orthodox Church claims that it is today the continuation and preservation of that same early church.
A number of other Christian churches also make a similar claim: the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Church of the East, and the Oriental Orthodox. In the Eastern Orthodox view, the Church of the East and Oriental Orthodox left the Orthodox Church in the years following the Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) and the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), respectively, in their refusal to accept those councils' Christological definitions; conversely, the latter two churches hold the same view towards the Eastern Orthodox Church regarding each respective council. Similarly, the churches in Rome and Constantinople separated in an event known as the East–West Schism, traditionally dated to the year 1054, although it was more a gradual process than a sudden break.
To all these churches, the claim to catholicity (universality, oneness with the ancient Church) is important for multiple doctrinal reasons that have more bearing internally in each church than in their relation to the others, now separated in faith. The meaning of holding to a faith that is true is the primary reason why anyone's statement of which church split off from which other has any significance at all; the issues go as deep as the schisms. The depth of this meaning in the Eastern Orthodox Church is registered first in its use of the word "Orthodox" itself, a union of Greek orthos ("straight", "correct", "true", "right") and doxa ("common belief", from the ancient verb δοκέω-δοκῶ which is translated "to believe", "to think", "to consider", "to imagine", "to assume").δοκέω in Liddell and Scott.
The dual meanings of doxa, with "glory" or "glorification" (of God by the church and of the church by God), especially in worship, yield the pair "correct belief" and "true worship". Together, these express the core of a fundamental teaching about the inseparability of belief and worship and their role in drawing the church together with Christ. All Slavic Orthodox churches use the title Pravoslavie (), meaning "correctness of glorification", to denote what is in English Orthodoxy, while the Georgians use the title Martlmadidebeli ().
The term "Eastern Church" (the geographic east in the East–West Schism) has been used to distinguish it from western Christendom (the geographic West, which at first came to designate the Catholic communion, later also the various Protestant and Anglican branches). "Eastern" is used to indicate that the highest concentrations of the Eastern Orthodox Church presence remain in the eastern part of the Christian world, although it is growing worldwide. Orthodox Christians throughout the world use various ethnic or national jurisdictional titles, or more inclusively, the title "Eastern Orthodox", "Orthodox Catholic", or simply "Orthodox".
What unites Orthodox Christians is the catholic faith as carried through holy tradition. That faith is expressed most fundamentally in scripture and worship, and the latter most essentially through baptism and in the Divine Liturgy.