Information AboutEparchy |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT EPARCHY | |
| eastern orthodoxy | |
| eastern catholicism | |
| episcopacy in roman catholicism | |
| episcopacy in orthodoxy | |
| oriental orthodoxy | |
| ecclesiastical titles | |
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SECULAR JURISDICTIONS Imperial administration Tetrarchy model Originally eparchy was the Greek term for one of the divisions of the Roman Empire at the third echelon. The Tetrarchy ('rule of four'), an overhaul of the imperial structure by Emperor Diocletian (284-305) and Maximian, divided the empire into four great Pretorian Prefectures, originally sort of a chief of staff to the four co-emperors, but only the prefectures remained after the two junior emperors (each in charge of a quarter of the empire) were soon be taken out of the equation. They were Gaul and Italy in the Western empire, soon again under one Emperor in Rome; furthermore Illyricum, and the so-called Oriens in the Eastern, the later Byzantium. Each of these was subdivided into (civil) Diocese s, each under a Vicarius, and these again into Eparchies, i.e. Roman Province s (but smaller then before, in many cases resulting from the split of a pre-existing province, and thus more numerous), under governors with different ranks (in many cases Praeses Provinciae , but also various terms tied into the pre-dominate vocabulary) reflecting the province's intrinsic and/or strategic importance, for which the generic Latin term Rector was used. Byzantium In the linguistically often illogical, mixed Greco-Latin jargon of Byzantine administration, eparchy (or its re-latinization eparchia!) is mainly used as the 'literal' Greek version of the Latin ''praefectura'' 'prefecture', i.e. the office, term or resort (rather Latin Provincia in the widest sense, not necessarily territorial) of any Praefectus, Modern Greece The Roman title of Eparch, as governor of a province of Roman Greece, was also used as equivalent to, or represented that of the Roman praefectus. The area of his administration -prefecture- was called an eparchy. The term was revived as one of the administrative sub-provincial units of post-Ottoman independent Greece, the country being divided into nomarchies, subdivided into eparchies, again sub-divided into demarchies. CHURCH HIERARCHY The Christian Church (before the split into Roman Catholic and Byzantine Orthodox) adopted the temporal administrative division since the Tetrarchy in the Dominate, and part of its terminology, as convenient for internal use, but adapted it as follows.
Under these patriarchates and exarchates came the eparchies under Metropolitan s; these had authority over the Bishop s of various cities. The original ecclesiastical eparchies then were provinces, each under a metropolitan. The First Council Of Nicaea in 325 accepts this arrangement and orders that: "the authority appointing bishops shall belong to the metropolitan in each eparchy" (can. iv), i.e. in each such civil eparchy there shall be a metropolitan bishop who has authority over the others. This is the origin of ecclesiastical provinces. Later in Eastern Christendom, after a proces of title-inflation, multiplying the numbers of dioceses, metropolities and (arch)bishops and reducing their territorial size, the use of the word was gradually modified and now it means generally the diocese of a simple bishop. Thus in Eastern Orthodoxy , Oriental Orthodoxy , and Eastern-rite Catholicism, an eparchy is the jurisdiction of a Bishop , corresponding to what in the West is called a Diocese . The name Eparchy was, however, (long?) not commonly used except in Russia, as the usual term for a diocese. The Russian Church in the early 20th century counts eighty-six eparchies, of which three (Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg) ruled by bishops who always bear the title "Metropolitan", and fourteen others under archbishops. SOURCES AND REFERENCES |
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