Today the Church commemorates the Fathers of the 4th Œcumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon. The feast of the council is the Sunday closest to the 16th of July. Why this is so goes back to the tumultuous events between the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451 and the 5th Œcumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 553, a period when some in the Church in the East rejected the Council of Chalcedon as a mere cover for Nestorianism.
The Emperor Anastasius, who ruled from 491 to 518, supported Chalcedon ex officio, although his sympathies lay with the opponents of the Council. On 17 April 518, he appointed John, also sympathetic to the anti-Chalcedonians, as Patriarch of Constantinople. Three months later, on the night of 8–9 July 518, Anastasius died. He was succeeded by Justin, who was widely known as a defender of the Council of Chalcedon.
The people of Constantinople, fervent supporters of Chalcedon, who suspected Patriarch John to be unsound on the question, seized the moment. When John and the clergy were making the Great Entrance in the Liturgy of Sunday, 15 July 518 in Hagia Sophia, the congregation burst into cries: ‘Long live the new Constantine, long live the new Helen, long live the patriarch, worthy of the Trinity. Justin Augustus, you are triumphant! Long live the new Constantine! … Now proclaim the Synod of Chalcedon! Justin reigns, of whom are you afraid?’ The tumult increased to the point that the Patriarch acknowledged Nicaea and ‘particularly the three holy synods, those of Constantinople, Ephesus, and the great Synod of Chalcedon.’
Despite this, the tumult continued in the church for hours until at last he agreed to hold a service on the following day, Monday, 16 July, to ‘celebrate the memory of our Holy Fathers and Bishops who assembled in the metropolis of Chalcedon, and who along with the Holy Fathers who had assembled in Constantinople and Ephesus confirmed the symbol of the three hundred and eighteen Holy Fathers who had assembled at Nicaea.’ (A.A. Vasiliev, Justin the First, 1950, pp. 138–40.)
A matter I was not aware of: it is the famous Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon which conferred on the Œcumenical Patriarch the jurisdiction under which our own Metropolitan Archbishop Sotirios comes: ‘… the metropolitans alone of the Pontic, Asian and Thracian dioceses, and also the bishops from the aforesaid dioceses in barbarian lands, are to be consecrated by the aforesaid most holy see of the most holy church at Constantinople …’ (Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, trans., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2005, III. p. 76)
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