The fact that St Athanasius got it right is by no means an argument against His Church (though synods and Papal approval) approving a Canon to be used at Mass.
According to Canon VI of Nicaea the Church of Alexandria was, and still is, autocephalous, and furthermore even today the Coptic Catholic Church is what an Orthodoxy would be called “autonomous” insofar as the Roman Pope does not claim to be the Patriarch (there are I think a couple of sui juris Eastern Catholic churches where the Pope is the Patriarch due to size and location, for example, the Italo-Albanian Greek Catholic Church, which does have its own bishops, but it consists of the Byzantine Rite Catholics of Sicily, who are largely but not entirely ethnically Albanian, as there have always been Byzantine Rite churches in Sicily.* Thus Papal approval would not have been required for Paschal Encyclical 39. Now to clarify the the nature of these documents, these were encyclicals sent by Pope St. Athanasius to the bishops of his Patriarchate, to advise them on which date to celebrate Pascha (Easter) according to the Paschalion (known in Latin as the computus, which is the mathematical formula for calculating the date on which to celebrate Easter in a given year according to the rules adopted by the entire church at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
Now, neither the Greek Orthodox nor the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria has never accepted the doctrine of Papal Supremacy whether it involved the Roman Pope or its own. Indeed there is a famous anecdote among the Copts (which might well also exist among the Alexandrian Greeks; sadly I don’t know any, whereas ChristianForums is blessed with at least two Coptic members,
@Pavel Mosko and
@dzheremi who might have heard this story, in which many years ago, a diocesan bishop was unavoidably detained while en route to one of his churches, where he was to concelebrate the Divine Liturgy with the Pope of Alexandria. When he finally arrived, he was justifiably indignant that the Pope had begun to liturgize without him, which is a huge canonical no-no, with many canon laws from the first millenium strictly prohibiting bishops, even bishops of higher rank such as Metropolitans, Patriarchs and Popes, from celebrating a liturgy in the diocese of another bishop (likewise parish priests are not supposed to cross parish boundaries without authorization, but in the case of bishops, since there is canonically no such thing as a bishop of bishops, intruding in the diocese of another bishop, by, for instance, celebrating the liturgy in his diocese, is strongly frowned upon and could even get one deposed.
Thus, rightfully indignant, the diocesan priest proceeded to squash underfoot the Pope’s mitre, and the Pope of Alexandria accepted this rebuke, because he realized he was in the wrong.
Note this story is not about Pope St. Athanasius, or as far as I know, any of the other well known Popes of Alexandria, such as St. Cyril the Great, St. Theophilus, Dioscorus, Shenouda II of blessed memory, or any other recent Pope; the story might be an instructive tale, or perhaps it did happen, and perhaps
@dzheremi or
@Pavel Mosko will know who it was about or if its origins are in legend (this is the sort of thing that if true would be recorded in the Coptic Synaxarion, which is similiar to the Roman Martyrology and the Greek Synaxarium, and the Prologue of Ohrid, in that it details the martyrs, saints and historic events commemorated on each day, and which is read along with a Psalm, a Pauline Epistle, a Catholic Epistle (that is to say, one of the Epistles not written by St. Paul, such as 1 John, 2 Peter, Jude or James), the book of Acts, and a Gospel lesson at every Divine Liturgy).
This all being said, while the power of Pope St. Athanasius to enforce the Athanasian canon outside of the boundaries of the Metropolis of Alexandria would have required the support of his Holy Synod, the permanent council of bishops which rules every Orthodox church (albeit only to the extent that the perogative of individual bishops is not violated, since all bishops are equal and titles like Patriarch, Metropolitan, Archbishop and so on are more indicative of seniority than raw political power, with the leader of each Orthodox church being the Primus Inter Pares among the bishops of the Holy Synod), St. Athanasius commanded enough respect by the time he wrote his 39th Paschal Encyclical that his bishops would have implemented it without question. For Pope St. Athanasius, who by then was quite elderly and had only a decade previously been allowed to return after years spent in exile in Trier after having been arrested by Imperial guards after St. Constantine’s son Constantius had been converted to Arianism through the sinister machinations of Eusebius of Nicomedia, the Arian bishop who managed to avoid attending the Council of Nicaea and thus ingratiate himself with the Imperial household without the stigma of someone defiant of Emperor Constantine, and indeed it was he who baptized St. Constantine when the man who had stopped the death of millions of Christians by the genocidal Diocletian persecution was himself on his deathbed. And this ironically gave rise to a renewed persecution of Christians, only this time by Arians who claimed to be Christian, but whose theology was that of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a persecution fortunately nowhere near as bloody as the Diocletian, however, the Arians did convert the Visigoths to their religion, so even though the official persecution ended under St. Theodosius, a blood soaked persecution continued as Visigothic tribes conquered Roman land and killed and enslaved Roman Christians.
Later the Visigoths who had settled in Asia and Africa were converted to Islam, which is not a huge leap of faith when one has already thrown out the doctrine of the Trinity, and eventually Christianity disappeared from all North African countries except for Egypt and Ethiopia, with all signs pointing to a genocide similar to that later visited on the Assyrian Church of the East in the twelfth century (before that persecution, under the Uzbek warlord Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, which sounds like the name of a demon to me, the Church of the East was the largest in the world geographically and in terms of members, covering an area from Turkey to Mongolia and Socotra, an island south of Yemen, to Tibet, and everything in between, such as Persia, India, and China, stopping only at the Yellow Sea; after the persecution, only those parts of the Church in Kerala, India and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, primarily the Nineveh Plains in modern day Iraq and Kurdistan, survived).
Also by the way, the Athanasian Canon is not a lectionary; it does not define which books are to be read, rather, it is a list of books permitted to be read, with some restrictions. Interestingly, the Athanasian Canon authorized the Apocalypse of St. John, or Revelation as some people call it, or Revelations as I like to call it since there is more than one big reveal, however, most traditional lectionaries do not include it in their annual cycle of lessons (for that matter, I am not sure about the new three year lectionaries either), the one prominent exception being the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, which reads the
entire Apocalypse cover-to-cover in the afternoon on Holy Saturday.
*and also in Venice, which is also a center of the Armenian Catholic Church and home to their most important monastery - this is interesting because before the genocide in 1915 the Armenian Catholic Church was the largest Eastern Catholic Church, whereas now the Maronites outnumber Armenian Catholics to a massive extent, which shows how much larger and worse the genocide against Armenians, Syriacs and Pontic Greeks was than most people realize the result of the Armenian Apostolic Church as a whole nearly uniting with Rome, which is why Armenian liturgies conclude with the Last Gospel and Armenian bishops wear Western-shaped mitres, but there is also extreme influence from the Byzantine Rite, because the Armenian church also nearly reunited with the Eastern Orthodox, and this all occurred during a schism with the Syriac Orthodox Church, which combined with the later cultural devastation inflicted by Turkey and Azerbaijan, has caused a great detail of indigenous Armenian liturgical practices and artforms to be lost or to become endangered. For example, of the 13 or so Armenian language anaphoras, which included a Presanctified liturgy, translations of major Eastern anaphoras such as those of St. Basil, and Armenian-original compositions, only one of them, the Anaphora of St. Athanasius, which is an abbreviated version of the anaphora from the ancient Jerusalemite liturgy, the Divine Liturgy of St. James used in the Byzantine, Maronite, Syriac Catholic, Malankara Catholic, and Syriac Orthodox** liturgies, which is now coupled to a Byzantine Rite synaxis.
One thing I wish the Armenian Catholic Church would do, which would be in keeping with Vatican II, would be to introduce vernacular services and restore the disused anaphoras and other disused parts of the Armenian liturgy. Right now the Armenian Apostolic Church is (I think***) the only Orthodox church which does not use the vernacular, rather, everything is done in Classical Armenian except preaching, but as you may know Classical Armenian has a relationship with the vernacular Eastern and Western dialects of Armenian not unlike the relationship between Classical Latin and modern Portuguese and Romanian, or the relationship between Church Slavonic and vernacular Russian and Serbian.
** Syriac Orthodox in this case includes all four jurisdictions, namely the Patriarchate of Antioch, the Jacobite Church in India which is in communion with the Patriarch of Antioch, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church also known as the Indian Orthodox Church, and the Malankara Independent Syrian Church, which is in full communion with the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, a Protestant church using a simplified version of the Divine Liturgy of St. James, which is also a member of the Anglican communion, so by curious circumstances, the Malankara Independent Syrian Church is the only Orthodox church in full communion with an Anglican church (but I don’t think any of the other Oriental Orthodox churches are in communion with them). The Church of South India, the Church of North India, the Church of Pakistan and the Church of Bangladesh are uniting churches comprised of most of the Protestant churches in India that existed during the British Raj, of which the Anglicans were the largest, and these were united into regional churches after independence and the disastrous Partition. Of these, due to its proximity to the churches St. Thomas Christians of South India, who have been in India since 53 AD, and are thus a thousand years older than Sikhism (and the total number of Christians in India is about equal to the combined total of Sikhs and Jains), the Church of South India in 1952 adopted a liturgy partially based on that of St. James.
Unfortunately, the CSI also, with that liturgy, became the first major denomination to celebrate versus populum, a practice which tragically became normalized in Roman Catholicism with the Novus Ordo Missae under Bugnini, which led to the “wreckovation” of tens of thousands of ancient Catholic churches in order to facilitate celebration of the liturgy facing the people; prior to this, only a few churches in Rome had westward-oriented altars, and this was actually for a very pious and traditional reason: these churches feature a confessio, an architectural feature that is a dip in the floor allowing the faithful to, without entering the altar, to pass down directly in front of the altar and thus become as close as possible to the relics of the holy martyr buried beneath the holy table.
This, for non-liturgical Christians, by the way, is why altars in some churches have anthropic proportions similiar to coffins: because the Roman Empire martyred so many Christians in the second and third and early fourth centuries, that historically liturgies were held in cemetaries and catacombs atop the graves of Christian martyrs, and after the Diocletian persecution finally came to an end under St. Constantine, it was agreed by all the ancient churches that henceforth every altar (or to be more precise, every holy table in the altar) on which Holy Communion was celebrated was to contain the relics of a martyr. This custom was respected until the Reformation, when in the darkest hour of Anglicanism under Thomas Cranmer, the thing Cranmer did which I cannot endorse, a horrible iconoclasm was embraced in which the relics of the saints interred under many English altars, including St. Thomas Becket, who was martyred by King Henry, who had been his best friend, for excommunicating an English nobleman who murdered a priest, were disinterred and desecrated, and the altars smashed; this event, along with the original reasons for the Anglican schism, Dissolution of the Monasteries, which was a disaster both because of the adverse impact on religious freedom and because of the vital role monasteries played in providing social services to the people of England (they were in effect the welfare system), are the only things about Anglicanism I find historically objectionable, but the Church of England did spectacularly redeem itself through its missionary work, and the work of the Anglo Catholics in the late 19th and early 20th century to aid the urban poor, in which they rivalled the Salvation Army in terms of their successes, and in aiding impoverished Christians of the East, in which they remain unrivalled.
Likewise I have little patience for people who object to Roman Catholicism on the basis of the Crusades and the Inquisition; these historic events are irrelevant and the Roman church has apologized for them, while at the same time the Roman church operates the most comprehensive, and probably the most significant, network of charities in the entire world including schools, hospitals, orphanages (which are needed in Muslim-majority countries with Shariah law, which is more barbaric than most people realize in that in addition to requiring people be flogged, dismembered or beheaded for various offenses, it strongly prohibits adoption), hospices, food banks, accomodation for the homeless, and other charitable services.
*** I seem to recall recently coming across a vernacular language Ethiopian or Eritrean Orthodox liturgy; they have a reputation for doing everything in the ancient Ge’ez language, the Semitic language spoken by Ethiopian Jews in antiquity, in which several books of the Old Testament survive intact where only Hebrew and Aramaic fragments exist, that is the ancestor of Amharic**** and other vernacular languages spoken in Ethiopia at present.
**** Not to be confused with Aramaic, speaking of which, the Assyrian Church of the East recently introduced vernacular liturgies in the English language in Australia; prior to that point, they used the Classical Syriac dialect of Aramaic exclusively for many years, but now commonly, and fortuitously, since the 700,000 members of their church who still speak a vernacular Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialect are the largest surviving community of vernacular Aramaic speakers in existence (if I had to guess, I would think the 60,000 Mandaeans who lived in Iraq prior to 2003 and who have since that time become geographically scattered would be the second largest Aramaic population; it is a pity
@SteveCaruso who used to regularly post about Aramaic issues on CF.com seems to be inactive), and since the Assyrians primarily use just one common dialect, unlike the small number of vernacular Aramaic speakers in the Syriac Orthodox and Antiochian Orthodox churches, who speak a few different dialects, the priests now tend to do the service in this modern Aramaic dialect, rather than Classical Syriac.
