PENTARCHY

PENTARCHY. Meaning the “rule of the five,” this was never more than a theory that no Church decision or ruling was fully binding until the sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem (qq.v.) had pronounced on it. The pentarchy was the official theory of church government from the reign of Justinian (q.v.) on, although the five sees had been singled out for the title “patriarch” at the Council of Chalcedon (qq.v.) in 451. The implication of the theory, i.e., that all five were in the final analysis fundamentally equal, was never accepted by the Church of Rome (q.v.), which from the 4th c. on laid special emphasis on its apostolic and petrine claims to primacy. To be fair, the pentarchy was a highly artificial theory, never implemented until the great 5th c. debates over Christology (q.v.) had removed the Alexandrian (Coptic [q.v.]) Church from communion and fatally split the weakened Church of Antioch. In addition the theory’s insistence on the sovereignty of these five patriarchs was at least debatable, given the early Church’s emphasis on the equal authority of all bishops, an emphasis still preserved in Orthodox Canon Law (qq.v.). Nonetheless, it continues to hold sway in official Greek circles to the present day.