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The Catholic Historical Review 89.1 (2003) 88-89



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Church Law and Church Order in Rome and Byzantium: A Comparative Study. By Clarence Gallagher, S.J. [Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, Volume 8.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2002. Pp. xi, 279. $79.95.)

Scholars have seldom been courageous (or some might say foolhardy) enough to embark upon a comparison between the canon law of the Eastern and Western Churches in the Middle Ages. The obstacles to such an enterprise are fearsome. The sources, to begin with, are not easy to find. They are, moreover, written in a daunting battery of languages: Latin, Byzantine Greek, old Slavonic, and Syriac. Even more discouraging are their contents. These include conciliar and synodal canons, many of them from obscure, little-known assemblies, plus papal decretals, passages from church fathers, edicts and decrees of Byzantine emperors, and the directives of local bishops, both east and west, as well as records of local customs and practices.

Few scholars have been as well equipped to attempt this task as Father Gallagher, a former dean of the Faculty of Canon Law at the Gregorian University who subsequently served as rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute, and church historians have every reason to thank him for taking it on. Gallagher has carried through this formidable undertaking with impressive clarity and grace. He was able to do so because he was wise enough to impose strict, yet sensible, [End Page 88] limitations upon its scope. He chose to examine just eight writers and their works, three from the Latin tradition and five by Eastern writers.

He begins the book with an examination of a pair of sixth-century writers, Dionysius Exiguus, the compiler of a famous collection of canonical texts known as the Dionysiana, which exercised a continuing influence on all subsequent canonical collections in the West. He then examines the work of Dionysius' Eastern counterpart, John Scholastikos, Patriarch of Constantinople, who produced a substantial collection of Byzantine canon law, the Nomokanon in Fourteen Titles, which he later revised and enlarged as the Synagoge in Fifty Titles. Gallagher next treats two sets of ninth-century writers, the anonymous compilers of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals in the West, and the Eastern missionary, St. Methodios, who was responsible for no less than three canonical collections in Old Slavonic, the Synagoge in Fifty Titles, the Law for Judging the People, and the so-called Anonymous Homily. The twelfth century is represented by Gratian's Decretum in the West, and Balsamon's Commentary on the Nomokanon. Finally, from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Gallagher selected two Eastern canonists for examination. The first was Bar Hebraeus, a prelate of the Syrian Orthodox (or Jacobite) church and author of a Syriac Nomokanon or Book of Directives. The second in this pair was Ebedjesus, a bishop of the East Syrian Church, who produced two canonical works, A Collection of the Synodical Canons and the Regulation of Ecclesiastical Judgments and Laws, both in Syriac.

For each of these sets of writers Gallagher provides an account of the contents of their works, together with an analysis of the similarities and differences between the Eastern and Western authors on three key issues: church governance, the discipline of the clergy, and marriage and divorce. In this way he presents not only a comprehensible overview of the development of the law in the Eastern and Western churches, but also furnishes concrete examples in the ways they differed in their treatments of these crucial topics.

Gallagher's book will be indispensable to historians of canon law and enormously useful to anyone concerned with relationships between the Eastern and Western churches, not only in the medieval period, but even down to the present.

 



James A Brundage
University of Kansas

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