The standard Orthodox apologetic argument about Roman primacy runs roughly as follows: the Catholic claim of universal papal jurisdiction is a Western innovation, a later development that has no basis in the first-millennium Church. The authentic ecclesiology of the undivided Church was pentarchic — five ancient sees governed the Church in collegial concert, with Rome as the first in honor but not in jurisdiction. The proof texts for this model are the great conciliar canons of the fourth and fifth centuries. And the most-cited of these proof texts are Canon 3 of Constantinople I (381) and Canon 28 of Chalcedon (451).

These canons are genuine first-millennium documents. They are not Western fabrications. They do reflect something real about how the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries structured its governance. But when you read them carefully — when you look at precisely what grounds they give for their determinations — they reveal something their Orthodox defenders prefer not to examine directly: the ecclesiological principle underlying both canons is not apostolic succession. It is imperial geography.

I. Canon 3 of Constantinople I (381) — Read Carefully

The First Council of Constantinople met in 381 under Emperor Theodosius I. It was an Eastern council — the Western church and Rome were essentially unrepresented, and Pope Damasus I was not invited. The council’s third canon reads, in full:

Read that reason clause again: because Constantinople is New Rome. Not: because Constantinople was founded by an apostle. Not: because Constantinople preserves a distinctive apostolic tradition. Not: because the bishop of Constantinople holds any theological distinction from other bishops. The single stated reason for the elevated rank is geographical and political: Constantinople is the new imperial capital, the New Rome, and therefore its bishop deserves the honor-precedence of proximity to imperial power.

The canon’s implicit logic is equally revealing. It grants Constantinople second place after Rome — which means it is simultaneously explaining why Rome is first. And the explanation it gives for Rome’s firstness is precisely the same: Rome was the old imperial capital. If Constantinople deserves second place because it is the new seat of empire, then Rome deserves first place because it was the old seat of empire. The entire hierarchy of honor in this canon is derived from one principle: ecclesiastical rank tracks imperial geography.

Canon 3 was building on an existing hierarchy, not creating one from scratch. The Council of Nicaea (325) had already recognized the special authority of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch in its Canon 6 — but those sees were ancient apostolic centers with established authority. One honest qualification: Nicaea Canon 6 grounds these authorities in “ancient custom” rather than explicitly in apostolic succession — the canon says, for instance, that “ancient customs shall be maintained” regarding Alexandria’s authority, and analogizes Rome’s to the same. An Orthodox apologist will note this. The Catholic response is that the “ancient custom” Nicaea recognized had apostolic foundation as its historical basis — which is why Rome could invoke Matthew 16 as the source of that custom while Canon 3 could invoke no equivalent theological anchor for Constantinople. The custom in Alexandria’s case derived from its foundation by Mark, Peter’s disciple; the custom in Rome’s case derived from its Petrine foundation. “Custom” in the Nicaean sense does not exclude apostolic derivation — it presupposes it for the sees in question. What Nicaea could not say for Constantinople, because it did not yet exist as a patriarchal city, it could not say later either — which is why Canon 3 had to abandon the apostolic framework entirely and invoke imperial geography instead.

Critically, Nicaea’s Canon 6 does not mention Constantinople at all — because Constantinople did not yet exist as a patriarchal see. When Canon 3 of Constantinople I attempted to insert Constantinople into Nicaea’s hierarchy, it faced a structural problem: it could not invoke the same framework Nicaea had used for Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, because Constantinople had no comparable apostolic or customary foundation. The only argument available was political prestige. So political prestige is what the canon invoked. The twelfth-century Orthodox canonical commentator Balsamon acknowledged this openly, noting that Nicaea’s Canon 6 “commemorated the four patriarchs — Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — but did not mention the bishop of Constantinople” because “the great city was not yet called Constantinople, but was a small town named Byzantium.” The silence of Nicaea is itself evidence that Constantinople’s elevated rank was a later insertion justified by politics, not a reflection of apostolic tradition.

This is the tension Francis Dvornik — the most important Catholic scholar of Byzantine-Roman relations — identified precisely: the contest between what he called the “principle of apostolicity” (ecclesiastical rank derives from apostolic foundation) and the “principle of accommodation” (ecclesiastical rank tracks the political geography of the Empire). Canon 3 is the fullest expression of the accommodation principle. It inserts Constantinople into a hierarchy whose other members were ordered by apostolicity — by deploying a purely political argument. (Byzantium and the Roman Primacy, Fordham 1966, pp. 44–45.)

Pope Damasus I understood immediately what Canon 3 implied — and rejected it. Pietri’s study of Damasus notes that he “tenaciously opposed the authority of apostolic tradition to the growth of a political capital (Constantinople)” — precisely naming the conflict Canon 3 had created. The Roman Council of 382 then declared formally, the year after Canon 3 was issued:

The contrast could not be sharper. Canon 3 grounds Rome’s precedence in being the old imperial capital. The text attributed to Damasus responds immediately and explicitly: Rome’s precedence comes not from any synodal decree — not from any canon, not from any council — but from the Gospel itself, from the words of Christ to Peter. These are two completely different ecclesiologies stated in direct juxtaposition: one political, one apostolic. The Orthodox, who cite Canon 3 as proof of their ecclesiological model, are citing the political one. The bishop of Rome, whose see Canon 3 was purporting to describe, articulated a directly contrary account of that see’s basis within twelve months of the canon’s promulgation.

II. Canon 28 of Chalcedon (451) — The Problem Deepens

Seventy years later, at the Council of Chalcedon, the Eastern bishops attempted to consolidate and extend Canon 3’s logic. Canon 28 — technically a resolution passed at the council’s sixteenth session over the formal protest and walkout of the Roman legates, who were present and explicitly objected before being overruled — reads:

The language is explicit and self-incriminating in a way that rewards slow reading. “The fathers rightly accorded prerogatives to the see of older Rome, since that is an imperial city.” This is the Chalcedonian council’s own account of why Rome has its ecclesiastical privileges: because it is an imperial city. Not because of Peter. Not because of Paul. Not because of apostolic foundation or Petrine succession or any theological category. Because it is — or was — the seat of empire.

A careful reader will note that Canon 28 is using Rome’s existing privileges as the basis for a claim by analogy — “as Old Rome was honored, so New Rome should be” — and is not directly defining the theological basis of Rome’s own primacy. This distinction has genuine grammatical force. The Catholic response is that the analogy’s logic necessarily implies the same basis for both ranks: if political geography is the reason the extension to Constantinople is “reasonable,” then political geography is the operating principle of the entire hierarchy. Canon 28 cannot invoke political prestige as the justification for Constantinople’s elevation without simultaneously revealing political prestige to be the hierarchy’s foundational principle. If the fathers had understood Rome’s privileges to derive from apostolic succession, they could not coherently extend “equal privileges” to a see with no comparable apostolic foundation — they would have had to extend a lesser, administratively-derived rank. By extending “equal privileges” on the grounds of political parity, they reveal what they understood Rome’s privileges to be grounded in.

And then the extension: Constantinople deserves equal privileges because it is “the city honoured by the imperial power and senate.” Again: the determining factor is political prestige. The senate. The emperor. The civil rank of the city.

This canon is the Orthodox Church’s strongest canonical argument for first-millennium pentarchic ecclesiology. And its explicit reasoning locates the entire hierarchy of ecclesiastical rank in the political geography of the Roman Empire.

III. The Argument That Follows

The Orthodox use Canon 3 and Canon 28 to argue two things simultaneously: first, that Rome’s primacy in the first millennium was merely honorific and politically derived — not grounded in apostolic succession as Rome claimed; and second, that the first-millennium model of ecclesial governance was pentarchic, collegial, and authentically apostolic rather than monarchical.

But the canons they cite to make this argument reveal their own ecclesiastical structure to be built on the same political foundation they are attacking in Rome. The argument collapses under its own weight:

IV. Leo I Saw It Clearly — And Said So

Pope Leo I’s rejection of Canon 28 is one of the most important primary source texts in the entire East-West ecclesiological debate, and it is routinely underread. When the Roman legates returned from Chalcedon, Leo immediately and forcefully rejected Canon 28. His letter to Emperor Marcian (Epistle 104) contains the sharpest single formulation of the Catholic position:

In his letter to Anatolius of Constantinople directly (Epistle 106), Leo is equally blunt: the canon violates “the most sacred constitutions of the Nicene canons.” To the Empress Pulcheria he went further still: “As for the resolution of the bishops which is contrary to the Nicene decree, in union with your faithful piety, I declare it to be invalid and annul it by the authority of the holy Apostle Peter.” (Ep. 105.)

Leo’s three-letter campaign against Canon 28 is revealing not just for what he says but for what he identifies as the crucial distinction: royal city versus apostolic see. He does not dispute that Constantinople is a great city. He does not dispute that the emperor deserves honor. He disputes the principle that imperial prestige can constitute or transfer ecclesiastical authority. And in making that dispute, he identifies with complete clarity what Canon 28 was claiming — and why Rome rejected it.

The Eastern bishops’ response to Leo’s rejection is equally instructive. Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople wrote to Leo effectively conceding the point about who drove the canon — deflecting blame to the clergy — and not defending the principle on theological grounds. Anatolius told Leo: “As for those things which the universal Council of Chalcedon recently ordained in favor of the church of Constantinople, let Your Holiness be sure that there was no fault in me… It was the most reverend clergy of the church of Constantinople who were eager about it.” The emperor Marcian then explicitly requested Leo’s confirmation of the council — itself an act of Roman jurisdictional deference that proves the point about the first-millennium pattern.

V. The 250-Year Deferral

After Leo’s rejection, Canon 28 was effectively shelved in terms of formal canonical assertion. One honest qualification is necessary: the canon was not entirely dormant during this period. Constantinople exercised de facto jurisdiction over the three provinces named in Canon 28 — Asia, Pontus, and Thrace — throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, and Rome did not successfully contest this practical exercise of authority. Leo’s letter rejecting Canon 28 was, in fact, left unread throughout the Greek empire — Leo himself complained about this to Julian of Cos. The 250 years was thus a period in which the formal canonical status of Canon 28 was disputed, while its jurisdictional provisions quietly functioned on the ground. This is worth stating honestly.

What did not function during this period, however, was any formal Eastern conciliar reassertion of the accommodation principle over the apostolicity principle. The Eastern church lived with the tension rather than resolving it — which is itself evidence that the question was genuinely disputed rather than settled in Constantinople’s favor. When the Quinisext Council finally reasserted Canon 28 formally in its Canon 36, it did so without Roman participation — not a single legitimate papal legate attended the council — and in the context of a systematic assertion of Eastern independence across a range of disciplinary issues. Rome rejected the entire council. The West never recognized the 102 disciplinary canons of this council. The Eastern reassertion of Canon 28 was thus achieved only by a council Rome did not recognize, producing canons Rome did not accept. This is not evidence of a settled first-millennium consensus. It is evidence of a live jurisdictional dispute in which the formal canonical question remained open for 250 years before being overridden by a council Rome refused to ratify.

VI. The Political Pattern — When Eastern Deference Tracked Imperial Power

Canon 3 and Canon 28 are not anomalies. They represent a consistent pattern: Eastern willingness to defer to Roman authority correlates with Roman political power, and Eastern resistance to Roman authority correlates with Constantinople’s political ascendancy.

The pattern is traceable across the centuries. In the fourth century, when Rome was still the old imperial capital and Constantinople newly established, Eastern deference was greater — the Sardican canons (343) codified Roman appellate authority, and Eastern bishops submitted formal appeals to Rome. In the fifth century, as the Western Empire declined and Constantinople emerged as the unambiguous center of power, the Canon 28 attempt was made — but Leo’s political position as interlocutor with the surviving Western emperors still gave Rome sufficient leverage that the canon was deferred. By the late seventh century, with the Western Empire long gone and Constantinople as the sole Roman imperial center, the Quinisext Council felt able to assert Eastern independence systematically — Canon 28 reasserted, Western disciplines explicitly rejected, Roman authority implicitly dismissed.

By the ninth century the pattern is explicit in the documentary record. In 864, “Roman” Emperor Michael III at Byzantium called Latin — the language of Virgil, the language of the Roman church — a “barbarian” tongue. Photius — the greatest scholar of ninth-century Constantinople — composed entirely in Greek and treated Latin theological tradition as essentially foreign to his intellectual world, whether or not he could technically read the language. Byzantine civilization — Greek, imperial, theologically sophisticated, the direct continuation of the Roman Empire — increasingly found submission to a Latin bishop in the now-barbarian West not merely inconvenient but civilizationally offensive.

This cultural dimension does not appear in the canonical texts. But it shapes their deployment. Canon 3 and Canon 28 were produced by Eastern councils meeting without Roman participation, under Eastern emperors, making arguments that elevated Constantinople’s ecclesiastical standing in direct proportion to its imperial standing. Byzantines saw westerners as barbarians who had stolen the Roman name without inheriting Roman civilization. The ecclesiological argument — that authentic Christianity is conciliar, collegial, and pentarchic rather than monarchical — carries genuine theological content that should not be entirely reduced to politics. But the political and cultural dimensions are present in the documentary record, and they must be part of any honest account of why the Eastern church resisted Roman primacy with increasing intensity as Constantinople’s political confidence grew.

VII. The Andrean Tradition — Constantinople’s Own Donation of Constantine

An alert Orthodox apologist reading this article will object at the point where it states “Constantinople has no apostolic foundation comparable to Rome’s.” The objection runs: you are ignoring the Andrean tradition. Constantinople was founded by the Apostle Andrew — the First-Called, the brother of Peter. This claim is officially maintained by the Ecumenical Patriarchate today: GOARCH’s own website describes Constantinople’s “ministry reflecting the witness of St. Andrew, the First Called Apostle.” If Constantinople has an apostolic founder, then its primacy is not merely political-geographical after all.

This objection deserves full engagement — and it leads to one of the most uncomfortable parallels in the entire Catholic-Orthodox debate. Orthodox apologists are fond of noting that medieval popes used the Donation of Constantine — a document purporting to grant Pope Sylvester I temporal authority over the Western Empire — as a basis for territorial and political claims. Lorenzo Valla exposed the Donation as a forgery in 1440. The Catholic Church has long since abandoned any reliance on it. It played no role in the theological argument for Roman primacy.

The Andrean tradition is Constantinople’s Donation of Constantine. The parallel is precise — and in one important respect, Constantinople’s position is worse.

The scholarly assessment of the Andrean foundation claim is unambiguous. Modern scholars regard it as a later tradition. The Wikipedia article on the list of Ecumenical Patriarchs states plainly that “the foundation of the see by Andrew the Apostle is met with similar amounts of skepticism with scholars believing it to be a later tradition.” The Macksey Journal’s 2021 study of Andrean apostolic succession narratives found that “the rudimentary elements of the later Byzantine narrative of Andrean apostolic succession developed sometime in the early eighth century” — fully three centuries after Canon 3 (381) and Canon 28 (451). Britannica describes the Andrew-Byzantium connection as deriving from “early church legends.” An Orthodox apologist may point out that Andrew’s relics were transferred to Constantinople as early as 357, under Emperor Constantius II — which is before Canon 3. This is true and should be acknowledged. But relic veneration and apostolic succession claims are categorically different. Having Andrew’s relics is not the same as claiming Andrew as the founder of Constantinople’s episcopal succession. It was precisely the latter claim — that Constantinople’s bishops are successors of Andrew as their apostolic founder, grounding Constantinople’s canonical rank in apostolic tradition rather than imperial geography — that developed in the early eighth century as a counter to Rome’s Petrine argument. The relic transfer in 357 honors Andrew’s memory; it does not establish Andrean apostolic succession as the basis for canonical primacy. The canons themselves prove this: Canon 3 (381) and Canon 28 (451), promulgated after the relics had been in Constantinople for decades, invoke the emperor and senate — not Andrew — as their justification.

This chronology is decisive. Canon 3 was produced in 381. Canon 28 was produced in 451. Both canons explicitly ground Constantinople’s rank in imperial geography rather than apostolic foundation — because in 381 and in 451, Constantinople’s defenders had no apostolic foundation claim to make. The Andrean tradition developed roughly 300 years later, precisely as Constantinople increasingly needed an apostolic counterweight to Rome’s Petrine claim. As one scholarly analysis notes, Constantinople and other churches “developed Andrean apostolic succession narratives due to struggles for ecclesiastical power and influence.” The tradition was not remembered from the apostolic era. It was constructed to serve an ecclesiological argument.

Furthermore — and this is the critical asymmetry — even if the Andrean tradition were historically valid, it would not rescue Canon 3 and Canon 28. Those canons do not invoke Andrew. They invoke the emperor and the senate. When the Eastern bishops at Constantinople in 381 and Chalcedon in 451 were making their argument for Constantinople’s elevated rank, they did not say “Constantinople deserves honor because Andrew founded it.” They said “Constantinople deserves honor because it is the imperial capital.” If they had an apostolic foundation argument available, they did not use it. The canons are what they are: arguments from imperial geography. The Andrean tradition, whether historically valid or not, does not retroactively change what Canon 3 and Canon 28 actually say.

VIII. The Political Pattern — With Honest Qualifications

The pattern of Eastern deference and resistance tracking political power is real and significant — but it requires honest qualification on both sides. Eastern deference to Roman authority in the fourth century was partly driven by Rome’s political prestige in the Constantinian era, just as Eastern resistance was partly driven by Constantinople’s growing confidence as the surviving imperial capital. Political accommodation ran both ways: not only Eastern resistance but also Eastern acceptance of Roman authority was sometimes politically colored.

What the pattern establishes, with appropriate qualification, is not that Eastern theology was secretly pro-Roman but secretly embarrassed to admit it. The pattern establishes something more modest and more defensible: that the first-millennium church operated in a context where political factors shaped ecclesiastical decisions on all sides, and that the Orthodox narrative of principled theological consistency against Roman political overreach is itself a selective reading that ignores the political accommodation visible in their own canonical tradition.

IX. The Orthodox Responses — and Why They Fail