ABSTRACT
The Orthodox Church, in the realm of faith, is apt to be static: but, in the realm of order, by its policy of adjusting and readjusting its constitution to the shifting frontiers of rival nations, it has proved itself a living and progressive Church. The principle, on which it has acted, is that ecclesiastical divisions should conform to civil: 7 a principle first known to have been asserted when the Emperor Valens, 364--t78, erected part of Cappadocia into a province. Anthimus, bishop of Tyana, which thus became a civil metropolis, claimed corresponding rank; and succeeded in asserting his claim, in spite of the opposition of his ecclesiastical superior, St. Basil, Exarch of C::esarea in Cappadocia, 370-t9. The principle was acceptM by the Council of Chalcedon, 451,8 and reaffirmed by the Council in Trullo,9 692. It thus became the governing principle of ·Eastern policy. "The Latin Church," on the other hand, "with a certain superb indifference to political changes, maintained the opposite principle."lO "It has not seemed fitting," wrote Pope Innocent 1. in reply to Alexander, bishop of Antioch, c. 415, "that the Church of God should change her course to suit the fickleness of worldly needs."ll Characteristic
The Ancient Patriarchates with Cyprus and Sinai 299
difference of spirit! But the Eastern way is not less characteristic of a living church than the Western: and the West has sometimes copied it, "as when Paris, for many ages a suffragan of Sens, became at last, in 1622, an archbishopric . . . while London," on the other hand, in conformity with the principle laid down by Innocent, "continues in that subjection to Canterbury which was natural while Essex was a dependency of Kent."12
