The Quinisext Council

The fifth and sixth ecumenical councils had both been convened to settle doctrine and both had done exactly that and nothing else. Neither issued disciplinary canons. That left the eastern church with two councils of the highest authority and no new church law from either, at a time when practice varied widely across the patriarchates and the older canonical collections were centuries out of date.

The council of 692 was called to fill the gap. Its name says so: quinisext means fifth and sixth together, and it met in the same domed hall of the imperial palace as the sixth had, which is why it is also called the council in Trullo. It issued a hundred and two canons and claimed the authority of the two councils it was completing.

The canons are a portrait of what the eastern church was actually worried about. Clergy discipline and the terms on which a married man may serve. What may be sung, and by whom. The regulation of festivals inherited from pagan practice. Rules against gambling clergy, against clerics keeping taverns, against a range of local customs the council wanted stopped. Provisions on marriage, penance and the treatment of those returning from heresy.

For the Orthodox churches this is church law and has been continuously since. The canons are cited, interpreted and applied, and a good deal of what an Orthodox parish looks like today can be traced to them.

Justinian II sent the canons west for the pope's signature and Sergius I refused to give it. The emperor sent an officer to arrest him. The imperial troops stationed in Italy mutinied, took the pope's side, and the officer is said to have ended up hiding under the pope's bed. The canons were never received at Rome.

The refusal was not procedural. Several canons contradict Latin practice directly and were understood at the time to be aimed at it. A married man may be ordained and continue to live with his wife, which the western church had been moving away from for centuries. The Saturday fast that Rome kept in Lent is forbidden. Christ is to be depicted in human form and not as a lamb, which struck at a western iconographic convention. Read from Constantinople these are corrections; read from Rome they are one church legislating for another.

The two families of churches have never fully resolved it. The Orthodox churches count these canons as belonging to the sixth ecumenical council and binding on the whole church. The Catholic Church accepts some of them as ancient discipline, does not treat the council as ecumenical, and holds that canons never received in the west never bound the west.

This is the clearest first millennium case of a council which is law in one half of Christendom and a dead letter in the other, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that a council's authority is settled by the fact of its meeting. Reception is what settles it, and reception can simply fail.