vid

I found this (supposedly infallible, BTW) canon interesting: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf...xviii.vii.html

What exactly is meant here by "military charge" and "secular dignity"? Is it undertaking military service or holding position in state government?

Toto

Military charge refers to military enlistment. One definition of dignity is high office or rank or station. So this requires that monks not participate in the military or in the secular government.

vid

I never heard word "dignity" used that way. Is that in translation from Latin?

Not just monks. It says "those who have once been enrolled among the clergy, or have been made monks". Does that mean priest who becomes minister or president of state has broken this canon?

Toto

It is definition 3 here.

It would appear so.

vid

Thank you.

Roger Pearse

By the time of Chalcedon the Byzantinisation of the church was well advanced.

A.H.M.Jones remarked in his Later Roman Empire that there were only two ways to escape the crushing pressure of the imperial bureaucracy and tax system; to join the clergy, which was easy, or to join the aristocracy, which was hard. In consequence a great number of people became clergy during the late 4th century who did so purely for secular reasons.

The canons of the council look to me as if they reflect this kind of abuse of office. Such people were not wicked men, but merely treating the church as just another form of employment (a practice not unknown today in state churches). Evidently some of these gentry had got into the church -- probably as secular clergy rather than monks --, and were using it as a stepping stone to the next positions in the imperial bureaucracy.

The council would not, perhaps, have approved of someone like the late Archbishop Makarios III, first president of the Republic of Cyprus, or the Turkish Millet system.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

vid

Thank you Roger. I tend to agree with your explanation.