GREAT CHURCH

GREAT CHURCH. Applied to the early Church, this phrase customarily signifies the catholic (q.v.) Church of the early centuries, i.e., the Church as defended by such as Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, Cyprian of Carthage, and Origen of Alexandria (qq.v.), and characterized as possessing a single teaching and communion over and against the divisions of the sects, e.g., gnosticism, and the heresies (qq.v.). In the Byzantine era, the phrase comes to be associated with Hagia Sophia, the enormous cathedral (see Architecture) in Constantinople built by Justinian (qq.v.), with the idea that this church constituted the sum of Christian Orthodoxy and the standard to which the faith and liturgy of other communities within the oikoumene (qq.v.) were expected to conform.