The Council in Trullo

Date

692

Location

The domed hall of the imperial palace at Constantinople

Convoked by

The Emperor Justinian II

Attendance

Between 200 and 240 bishops

Overview

The Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils had both dealt with doctrine and had issued no disciplinary canons. In 692 a council met to supply the omission, and it did so on a scale nothing before it had attempted: 102 canons covering clergy, monastics, laity, worship, marriage, fasting, penance and the relations of Christians with Jews, pagans and heretics.

Its second canon is the single most important text in Orthodox canon law, because it is the canonical index: it confirms by name the collections of apostolic canons, the canons of the ecumenical and named local councils, and the canons of a list of Fathers. What the Orthodox Church means by the canons is very largely what canon II of Trullo confirms.

The Orthodox Church does not count Trullo as an eighth ecumenical council. It treats its canons as belonging to the Fifth and Sixth Councils, which is why they are cited as the canons of the Sixth Council in the collections.

The controversy

Several canons address practices current in the West and legislate against them — most famously on clerical marriage, where Trullo permits married men ordained to the diaconate and presbyterate to continue in marriage, against the Roman discipline. Others touch on fasting on Saturdays in Lent and the representation of Christ as a lamb.

Sergius I of Rome refused to sign. Later popes accepted some canons as not contrary to the faith while not receiving the collection as a whole. The disagreement was not the cause of the later estrangement between East and West, but it is an early and concrete instance of the two traditions legislating past one another.

What the council issued

Trullo issued no creed or dogmatic definition. Its first canon confirms the faith of the six preceding councils; everything after that is discipline.

Canons

The council issued 102 canons in this edition. All 102 canons are archived here in full from Percival's edition. Canon II is the canonical index of the Orthodox tradition; canons XIII (clerical marriage), XXXVI (the order of sees), LV (Saturday fasting) and LXXXII (the image of the Lamb) are among those with the longest afterlives.

Read the canons

Who was there

The council was overwhelmingly Eastern. Whether a Roman legate signed is disputed in the sources; the subscription list as transmitted includes a signature for the see of Rome that Western writers have questioned.

Reception

The Orthodox Church receives the canons of Trullo as the canons of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and they are the foundation of its canonical collections. Their practical application has always been exercised with oikonomia as well as akribeia, and some canons — those regulating relations with Jews, for instance — belong very specifically to their historical setting.

Rome did not receive the collection. The Roman Catholic Church has never counted Trullo among the ecumenical councils, though individual canons have been cited in Western collections.

Reception outside the Eastern Orthodox Church

Roman Catholic Church

Does not receive the canons of Trullo as a body. Several of them legislate directly against Western practice.

Oriental Orthodox churches

Do not receive it, having not received Chalcedon or the councils that followed.

Consequences

Trullo gave the Orthodox Church a settled canonical corpus and a settled way of citing it. Almost every later Orthodox canonical question begins by asking what canon II confirms.

It also fixed a divergence in discipline between East and West on clerical marriage that has lasted to the present day and is one of the most visible differences between the two traditions.

Liturgical commemoration