ABSTRACT
In the exhibition dedicated to Byzantium 330–1453 held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (25 October 2008–22 March 2009), in the section called “Beyond Byzantium” the Armenian Church is identified as “non-Orthodox” (Cormack and Vassilaki 2008). The Armenian church together with the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syriac churches and the Christian Church of South India have been variously called Monophysite, Miaphysite, Lesser Eastern Orthodox churches, Oriental Orthodox churches, even after the exhaustive consultations between the Greek and Catholic churches, where agreement had been reached to call this family of churches anti-Chalcedonian, pre-Chalcedonian, or non-Chalcedonian (Bristol Consultation [Holy Cross School of Theology Hellenic College 1968]; Belopopsky and Chaillot 1998; Five Vienna Consultations [Pro Oriente 1993], Kirchschläger et al. 2010). The term “Orthodoxy” – from the Greek orthos, “right,” and doxa, “doctrine” – became common to refer to “true doctrine” and “true practice.” Fundamental to the orthodox consensus was an affirmation of the authority of tradition, as that which had been believed “everywhere, always, by all” (ubique, semper, ab omnibus). In the West, after the seventh century, the idea of catholicity from the word katholikê (meaning “universal”) increasingly came to be referred to the test issue: of communion with the supreme Western “apostolic see” of Rome, with its “office of oversight over all the churches” (sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum) (Pelikan 1971: 333).
