Page 187 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

C O N C I L I A R I T Y O R S Y N O D A L I T Y
tension beyond one locality of what already exists in every
Eucharistic assembly. The Syrian Didascalia preserves this
same consciousness: the bishop with his presbyters judges
matters of reconciliation and communion, not as an external
tribunal, but as the Eucharistic center of ecclesial unity.
For this reason, the earliest councils were concerned above
all with Eucharistic communion. Their first purpose was not
abstract doctrinal definition, but the preservation of unity at
the Lord’s Table. This is why the fifth canon of the First Ecu-
menical Council is so important. It orders that bishops of each
province gather twice yearly chiefly to examine cases of exclu-
sion from communion. The council exists because no local
rupture can remain merely local: whoever is cut off in one
Church is cut off from all, unless the communion of bishops
judges otherwise. Here the original meaning of synodality
becomes clear: it is the visible guardianship of Eucharistic
communion. As Zizioulas shows, councils arose first from the
need to preserve the one Eucharist across the many Churches.
This explains why councils have from the beginning an
episcopal character. Bishops are their natural members be-
cause each bishop is not simply an individual office-holder,
but the incarnation of his local Church. He carries his Church
into the synod. In the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of
Rome, every episcopal ordination requires several bishops,
showing that no bishop is constituted in isolation. The bishop
is born within communion, and therefore synodality is inher-
ent to episcopacy itself. A bishop participates in council not as
a private person, but as the embodiment of the catholic full-
ness of his Church.
Yet this never means that the local Church is absorbed into
a larger centralized structure. One of the deepest principles of
Orthodox ecclesiology is that every local Church is fully
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