On the "Secret" or "Mystic" Ordinations in Alexandria at the Time of Nicaea

The phrase that started this whole rabbit hole is just one clause in Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History, but it has grown claws in modern debates about schism, succession and Alexandrian identity:

Τοὺς δὲ ὑπ' αὐτοῦ κατασταθέντας, μυστικωτέρᾳ χειροτονίᾳ βεβαιωθέντας κοινωνῆσαι ἐπὶ τούτοις, ἐφ' ᾧτε ἔχειν μὲν αὐτοὺς τὴν τιμὴν καὶ λειτουργίαν, δευτέρους δὲ εἶναι ἐξάπαντος πάντων τῶν ἐν ἑκάστῃ παροικίᾳ καὶ ἐκκλησίᾳ ἐξεταζομένων, τῶν ὑπὸ τὸν τιμιώτατον καὶ συλλειτουργὸν ἡμῶν Ἀλέξανδρον προκεχειρισμένων. 

The standard English rendering from the Nicaean synodal letter to Alexandria goes something like: “Those who have been appointed by him, after having been confirmed by a more legitimate (or more mystical) ordination, should be admitted to communion on these conditions: that they should continue to hold their rank and ministry, but regard themselves as inferior in every respect to all those who have been ordained and established in each place and church by our most-honored fellow-minister Alexander.” 

Everything turns on that compressed phrase μυστικωτέρᾳ χειροτονίᾳ βεβαιωθέντας. Is this “more secret ordination”, “more mystical ordination”, “more sacred ordination”, or just “more legitimate ordination”? Lexically, μυστικός can lean toward “hidden, secret” but in Christian Greek it very quickly drifts into the sacramental register, “mystic, sacramental, sacred”. χειροτονία is likewise slippery: sometimes full sacramental ordination, sometimes a lighter cheirothesia or confirmatory laying-on of hands. So translators choose their poison. Fourthcentury.com opts for “more legitimate ordination.”  Older English church historians, following Valesius and Du Pin, leaned toward something like “more sacred imposition of hands,” and some pushed that all the way to “a kind of re-ordination” of all Meletian clergy.  Modern Orthodox polemical pieces in the context of Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc., have happily revived “more mystical ordination” and “secret ordination” when it suits the argument. 

Specialists on the Melitian schism are actually quite cautious. The recent Ashgate volume on the Melitians sums up the state of play bluntly: Nicaea ordered a “more mystical ordination” (mystikotera cheirotonia), but views diverge. Traditionally this has been read as symbolic reconciliation, a kind of confirmatory handlaying; Hans Hauben, by contrast, argues for real re-ordination. F. J. Thomson already observed in the 1960s that even if we cannot pin down exactly what the Nicene fathers meant by mystikotera cheirotonia, it is obvious they were not satisfied with Meletius’ previous ordinations.  In other words, everyone agrees this was not nothing. At minimum, Nicaea required an extra sacramental step as the price of reintegration; whether you call that “secret” or “sacramental” is as much theology as philology.

What makes the passage so tantalizing is that it is one of the few places where a specifically Alexandrian settlement is articulated in a conciliar document. The same synodal letter that contains μυστικωτέρᾳ χειροτονίᾳ also makes Alexander of Alexandria the hinge on which Egyptian unity turns. The Meletian bishops keep only “the bare name” of their episcopal dignity; they are forbidden to ordain or nominate anyone; and those ordained by them can only act under the canonical bishops “under Alexander.”  This is a sharp assertion of Alexandrian metropolitan authority over a schismatic parallel hierarchy, and the “more mystical ordination” is the ritual mechanism that accomplishes it.

Here is where contemporary Orthodox writers get excited. In several official statements and theological papers responding to the Ukrainian autocephaly crisis, both the Moscow Patriarchate and Albanian church authors reach back to this Nicene clause as a precedent for how to regularize clergy ordained in schism. They quote the Greek phrase μυστικωτέρᾳ χειροτονίᾳ βεβαιωθέντας and then debate whether it implies full re-ordination, a simple cheirothesia, or something in between.  The phrase becomes a kind of Rorschach test: if you want to argue that sacraments performed in schism can be healed without repeating everything from scratch, you emphasize “confirmation” and the lighter sense of cheirothesia; if you want to argue that such ordinations were gravely defective, you stress “more mystical, more sacred” and the necessity of a new act by a canonical bishop. The ambiguity of the Greek is not a bug here, it is a feature: it lets each side find itself in the same conciliar sentence.

If we pull back from the twentieth- and twenty-first-century quarrels and look at the fourth, the Alexandrian coloration of the whole affair comes into focus. The council does not treat Meletius and his clergy as random Egyptian independents; they are a rival network that has to be domesticated under Alexandria. Meletius is allowed to keep his see but forbidden to exercise authority; his bishops and clergy are folded back in under strict conditions, and the ultimate test of their legitimacy is not some abstract notion of succession but whether they act “with the consent of the bishop of the catholic church who is under Alexander.”  The mystikotera cheirotonia is therefore not just about individual conscience; it is about stamping the Alexandrian mark on a previously rogue hierarchy.

Once you see that, the word “mystical” starts to attract other Alexandrian associations. This is the same ecclesial culture that, a century later, will normalize the title “Pope” (Papa) for its patriarch, with Heraclas as the earliest attested “blessed pope Heraclas” in Dionysius’ letter.  It is from Alexandria that the Roman bishop eventually “borrows” the title Papas in the later fourth century, with Siricius often named as the first to use it in a more distinctively Roman and quasi-official way.  In other words, the Alexandrian see has its own sacramental and symbolic grammar of authority: a mystic way of being ordained, a mystic way of naming the patriarch, a mystic story about Mark as its founding apostle and the “throne of St Mark” as a quasi-papal institution long before Old Rome catches up.

This is where the speculative fun begins. Later Latin writers, and some nineteenth-century Protestant antiquarians, noticed scattered references to bishops called “urbis papa” – the “pope of the city” – including claims that the bishop of Constantinople could at times be called “urbis papa” in parallel with the bishop of Rome.  The evidence is far from decisive; there is no solid, continuous tradition of Constantinopolitan bishops styling themselves “Papa” in the way Alexandrian and Roman bishops do. But the mere fact that such language appears in the sources has kept alive the idea that “Papa” was once a more fluid honorific for major urban bishops in the Greek East before Rome locked it down.

If we overlay that with the Nicene Meletian settlement, and with Constantine’s project of founding a New Rome in the East, another possible reading suggests itself. In the standard story, Nicaea in 325 is still operating with the old metropolitan map: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, each with its “ancient customs,” and Constantinople only arrives on the scene as a ranked see at 381 and 451. On that reading, μυστικωτέρᾳ χειροτονίᾳ is simply an Alexandrian housekeeping measure. But one could also ask, more mischievously: what if Alexander of Alexandria was already being drawn into a new role, as a pivot between Old Rome and the emergent New Rome? What if the Nicene “more mystical ordination” is doing double duty, both regularizing Meletian clergy under Alexandria and tacitly aligning them with Constantine’s reconfigured imperial church order?

That is not something the text explicitly says, of course. The synodal letter we have, preserved in Theodoret, Socrates and Gelasius of Cyzicus, is explicitly Alexandrian in its geography and explicitly Nicene in its theology.  But once you start paying attention to how much weight later generations load onto this single phrase, it is hard not to see it as a pressure-point in the transition from a more collegial, metropolitan system to a world of rival patriarchal “papacies” – Old Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople – each claiming some kind of mystic ordination, apostolic throne or Markan/Petrine inheritance as its warrant.

In the modern Orthodox quarrels over Ukraine, that larger game is still visible in miniature. Appeals to the Melitian precedent are not really about fourth-century Egyptians in Lycopolis; they are about who gets to act as the healing center of the Church today. Does the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople have the prerogative to “confirm” schismatic ordinations by a mystikotera cheirotonia, as Basil of Anchialos and his followers suggest? Or does such language actually confirm Moscow’s suspicion that Constantinople is acting like a crypto-papacy, inventing a mystical prerogative over other churches? Everyone wants Nicaea on their side, so everyone reaches for that Greek adverb μυστικωτέρᾳ and twists it half a notch.

For Alexandrian history, though, the real interest of the phrase is more local and older. It witnesses to a moment when the council fathers were willing to concede something quite radical: that a whole rival episcopal network, formed under a schismatic who had even lapsed under persecution, could be salvaged – but only if their ministry was mystically re-stamped under the hand of the Alexandrian bishop. It is “mystical” in precisely that sense: the sacrament does not just confer grace, it inscribes jurisdiction. The hidden mystery here is not the emotional state of a repentant Meletian bishop, but the quiet transfer of his obedience from one center to another.

And for anyone thinking about Alexandrian “mystic” texts – whether a μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον of Mark or later secret catechetical traditions – that little note about mystikotera cheirotonia is a reminder that in this city, secrecy, sacrament and power were never far apart. The same adjective that hovers over a quasi-secret ordination of schismatic bishops also hovers, in later debates, over talk of more advanced gospels, deeper mysteries and inner circles of teaching. Even if we cannot prove a straight line from Nicaea’s mystikotera cheirotonia to any “mystic gospel of Mark,” we can at least say that when Alexandrians talked about things being more mystical, they usually meant more than just poetic. They meant that something real, and usually jurisdictional, had just changed hands.