Council and primacy in the Church

The unity of the Church, as has long been established, is expressed through its synodality. This notion, present and explained throughout the history of Christianity, seems to have lived more through councils and liturgical communion than has become a transparent, defined and quite clear theological notion. Whenever, in the spirit of Western rationalism, an attempt was made to explain the concepts of council and synodality, there was a contradiction between the metaphysical concepts formed in antiquity, one and many. Expressed in theological terminology, it is about the relationship between the council and the primacy in the Church, which should be preserved so that it does not fall into crises on the local and universal level as we are witnessing today. The council of the Church, as an expression of the fullness and harmony of all its members (limbs), cannot be treated as an institution of hierarchy that implies subordination or as a collective of socially organized individuals. The present paper briefly discusses the issue of the synodality and the primacy in the light of current problems in Orthodoxy, and emphasizes the patristic and traditional approach to this topic, built on the interpretation of the existence of the Trinity.