In this case, Archbishop Anatoly, as it were, threw off his Cyril-Dioscorus origin and turned into a Constantinople pur sang (by blood). the entire Greek episcopate was with him. They believed that Pope Leo should be fully satisfied with his diplomatic victory, and this was an opportune moment for the Romans to gladly subscribe to the fait accompli, that is, to the privileges generally recognized in the Greek East as archbishop of the imperial capital.

Here is the letter of this 28th Chalcedonian canon: "Following in all things the definitions of the Holy Fathers and recognizing the canon of the 150 most God-loving bishops who were in the council (381) in the days of the pious memory of Theodosius in the reigning city of Constantinople, New Rome, we determine the same and decree the privileges of the most holy church of Constantinople, the New Rome.

For the throne of ancient Rome, as befits it, was given precedence by the Fathers, because it was a reigning city. Following the same motive, 150 most God-loving bishops granted the same privileges to the most holy see of New Rome, justly judging that the city, which had received the honor of being the city of the king and the senate, and having equal privileges with ancient imperial Rome, would accordingly be exalted in ecclesiastical affairs and would become second only to it.

And it is only on this basis that the metropolitans of the districts of Pontus, Asia and Thrace, as well as the bishops of the foreigners of the above-mentioned districts, let them be ordained at the Holy See of the most holy Church of Constantinople. That is, each metropolitan of the above-mentioned districts with the bishops of these districts must ordain the bishops of the dioceses, as prescribed by the divine canons. and the metropolitans of the above-mentioned districts themselves should be ordained, as has already been said, by the Archbishop of Constantinople after the concordant election (on the spot) has been made according to custom and presented (to Constantinople)."

The question of the advantages of the See of Constantinople was raised as a consequence of the mistakes of imperial policy from the point of view of its own interests. By allowing the Bishop of Alexandria to fight against the Bishop of Constantinople on the basis of dogmaticism, the imperial power gained in the person of Dioscorus a political opponent. Now it was decided that the emperor should take the reins of church government more firmly into his hands. and, consequently, he elevated his metropolitan bishop next to him, and did not humiliate his prestige before other popes (Alexandria and Rome), as Constantinople had hitherto unwisely and frivolously done. According to the very apt judgment of Professors F. A. and S. A. Ternovsky, the Greeks experienced, not without embarrassment and a kind of fright, the decisive, and one might say, the overwhelming role at the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the true leader of Orthodox thought, Pope Leo. Fearing lest they should belittle before Rome not only their dogmatic, but also their canonical honor, which Constantinople had recently humiliated with obvious frivolity before Alexandria in the case of Dioscorus, and before that in the case of Chrysostom. Learning of the decision, of course, since it was not a secret, the Roman legates demanded a general meeting of the council on the very next day, November 1. It was the last plenary meeting. All three legates spoke. Bishop Paskhazin, in general, protested the decree, which later became known as the 28th canon of the Council of Chalcedon. Bishop Lucentius (Lucentius) reproached him for forgetting the 6th Nicene Canon, where the cathedra of Alexandria was placed in second place. The presbyter Boniface recalled the order given to the legates by the pope: not to allow any encroachment on the decisions of the Nicene Fathers and to defend the privileges of the see of Rome, rejecting any reference to the fame of any cities (an allusion to the New Rome). They read the 6th Nicene Canon, which did not answer the new question about the rank of Constantinople, for in 325 there was no Constantinople cathedra itself. But the addition was dear to the Latins: "The Roman Church has always had primacy," an addition which Roman Catholic scholarship itself considers apocryphal (G. Bardy, op. cit., p. 239). And without any falsity, it did not occur to anyone at that time to object to the universally recognized primacy of the authority of the Roman cathedra. But the Romans objected to the inevitable new, also organic fact of the special privileges of the bishop of the capital of the empire. They can be rejected only by rejecting the theocratic union of church and state. and in affirming this union, it is impossible to deny the role of the second bishop in the twofold empire for the bishop of the real capital, while the first place without any disputes or doubts was forever recognized for the ideal capital, ancient Rome, apart from even a purely ecclesiastical foundation, the primacy of the Apostle Peter, which was also not denied by anyone. But the concerned representatives of Rome saw in this matter a direct insult to the primacy of the apostolic see. Bishop Lucentius declared: "The apostolic see should not be humiliated in our presence. Therefore, everything that was done yesterday in our absence contrary to the canonical rules, we ask the supreme power to repeal. If not, let our protest be included in the acts of the council. We know what exactly must be reported to the apostolic bishop, the first in the whole church, so that he may judge the insult inflicted on his see and the violation of the canons." This formulation is a direct statement of the legates' appeal to the pope on the 28th canon of the council. The legates doubted whether the metropolitans of Pontus and Asia freely agreed to these supreme rights of Constantinople. Te claimed that yes, freely. Although Eusebius of Ancyra and Thalassius of Caesarea-Cappadocia were not delighted with the confirmation of the advantages of the capital, they did not want and could not identify with the "Romans" in this protest against the Second Rome. Of course, the 28th canon was later rejected by Pope Leo and was never recognized by the Roman Church. Only in the latest editions of the Corpus juris canonici [40] is it published separately, for information, as a historical document.

This protest-appeal was heard without any discussion, as an indisputably legitimate act. And the representatives of the imperial power immediately closed this last session of the council.

But the court, together with the Archbishop of Constantinople and the Greek bishops in general, was interested in softening the mood of Pope Leo and, if possible, getting him to recognize the 28th canon. A decent reason for this was revealed in the procedure of the pope's "approval" of the decrees brought by his legates from the council. In fact, this moment of "confirmation" took place in all other cases, when the deputy at the council of some inconspicuous provincial metropolitan brought to the latter for reading the acts of the council, or rather, the most important of them. But the Roman archbishops and later Latin canonists extracted from this essentially accidental fact the normative principle of church law, supposedly traditional, the right of the pope to assert by his consent and signature the very authority of the ecumenical councils, i.e., to be super-arbiters over the ecumenical councils. Meanwhile, this "statement" primarily meant only confirmation of the correctness of the actions of the papal legates. The Pope retroactively duplicated their act of agreement with the decision of the Council and their signatures under it. The same act of "confirmation" and signature post factura was given by all other bishops, no matter how small and provincial their sees were, if their deputies, presbyters and archimandrites, were actually present and voted at the council. It did not occur to the bishop of Amastrida, Iconium, Apamea, etc., at the moment of his affirmative signature to the report of his deputies, that by this he exalted himself to the height of a super-arbiter above the ecumenical councils. But the Roman sense of self was completely different. And practice seemed to fully justify him. It has been the custom since the First Council of Nicaea that the popes freed themselves from boiling in the cauldron of conciliar passions by sending their deputies. The heretical fervor of the East was sincerely alien to them, and they looked down on the councils. The East, as always, did not understand the West, was not interested in it, and did not suspect that another ecclesiological mysticism was growing and developing there: from a simple technical fact, the Roman spirit already concluded that the popes had a special superior position in relation to the ecumenical councils. and the East, not suspecting any of this, continued unconsciously to subscribe to all the honorable formulas that Rome offered it. When, in the ninth century, the East had to pay these bills of exchange, and it began to refuse, it turned out to be a dishonest apostate in the eyes of the West. And this profound misunderstanding by the West of the behavior of the East tragically continues to this day.

One of the illustrations of this thousand-year-old mutual misunderstanding can be found in the last act, which came out of the depths of the council and can be morally qualified as an act of the entire council. This is a solemn letter from the entire plenum of the Eastern episcopate to Pope Leo with a petition to confirm the 28th canon protested by his legates. The letter is ultra-diplomatic, complimentary, designed to at least soften the irreconcilable position of the legates. The protest of the legates, of course, turned into a firm protest of Pope Leo himself. In no way wishing to enter into a clash with the pope, the emperor was in no hurry to confirm all the acts of the council, for only after church confirmation did he approve the council as an imperial law. Anatoly had to send the lowest petition for approval. It is an example of epistolary flattery, and, moreover, of the recognition of the special prerogatives of the bishop of Rome in the Church, which served both as a support for the papal pretensions and as a proof to Rome afterwards that the Greeks themselves had betrayed their ancient belief in the primacy of the popes.

The members of the Council wrote to the Pope: "You have come to us as an interpreter of the voice of Blessed Theft. Peter, and extended the blessing of his faith to everyone. We could proclaim the truth to the children of the Church in the communion of one spirit and one joy, participating, as at a royal feast, in the spiritual pleasures that Christ has prepared for us through your letters. We were there, about 520 bishops, that you led as the head leads the members."

After such a solemn and flattering preface, there is a request for the 28th canon:

"We have brought to your attention that we have decreed certain other measures in the interests of peace and order in church affairs and for the strengthening of the statutes of the church, knowing that Your Holiness will confirm and approve them. In particular, we have confirmed the ancient custom by virtue of which the bishop of Constantinople ordained metropolitans in the dioceses of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace, and this mainly not for the sake of the privileges of the see of Constantinople, but in order to ensure tranquility in the metropolitan cities... We have confirmed the canon of the Council of 150 Fathers, which guarantees the See of Constantinople second place after your holy and apostolic See... We were of the opinion that it was fitting for the Ecumenical Council to confirm to the imperial city, in accordance with the desire of the emperor, these privileges, convinced that, having learned this, you would consider them as your own (own) business, for all the good that sons do is an honor to the fathers. Wherefore we beseech thee to honour our decrees with thy approbation. And as we have joined your decree (on faith), so may Your Majesty do what is fitting to your sons."

Of course, Rome remained deaf to this alien logic. Both sides, the Latin and the Greek, are guilty of different (but without realizing this difference) approach to the question of the meaning of the primacy of the Apostle Peter among the apostles and the meaning of the primacy of the Roman see.

The Apostle Peter did not put on any vestments of future popes either for himself or for his heirs. He honored Antioch before Rome with his primacy. But he left with ease, without sowing in the hearts of his Antiochian heirs not an atom of papist pretensions. But Rome is a different matter. Rome has long been the true capital of world culture. The Prince of the Apostles, having laid his martyr's head in this cup of imperial greatness, overflowed it to the brim. He made it not only "in the flesh," but also "in spirit," the sacred capital of all Christianity, the new and last world religion. This is an irreversible and extremely weighty fact. The historical—and within the limits of history, providential—primacy of Rome is indisputable. But also providential is the exhaustion of Rome and its "rejuvenation" through the doubling of Rome II on the Bosphorus. Constantine did not create it without the will of God. Shortsighted was the reaction of Alexandria, its attempt to strangle and seize Constantinople in order not to give it second place. Throughout the East, the recognition of the hierarch of the new capital as their leader and their head was irresistible. The Church, not sinfully and criminally, but with inspiration and conviction, incarnated herself with the state, with the empire, in the name of the subjugation of all earthly history to Christ, without fear of its material shell. Dogmatically correct, anti-Monophysite inspiration.

Constantinople, or Tsaregrad, was instinctively submitted to the cathedra to the east of it, which had not been vividly aware of it and had not kept its apostolic banner. In the vast diocese of Pontus, for example, stretching from the Bosphorus to the Euphrates, there was not a single universally recognized administrative center. Some gravitated towards Caesarea in Cappadocia, others towards Ancyra. Still others resolutely subordinated themselves to Constantinople. In the same Asia Minor, regions and cities appeared that found it convenient and profitable for themselves to gravitate towards the capital. Such are Bithynia, as part of the Pontic diocese, and the city of Chalcedon, which was part of Bithynia, which turned out to be a suburb of Constantinople. Nicaea and Nicomedia, located on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, also considered themselves in the circle of metropolitan interests. And in general, the bishops of all Asia Minor constantly appeared in the capital, conferred with the archbishops of the capital, surrounded their cathedra, conciliating with them on current affairs. They also brought their disputes here and involved the capital's archbishops in their local affairs. Thus, a whole patriarchal region grew up around the archbishop of the capital.