Metropolitan

The metropolitan office is, organizationally, older than the patriarchate: in the early centuries of Christianity, bishops of Roman provincial capitals gained informal seniority over bishops of smaller towns within the same province simply by virtue of the capital's civil importance, a pattern the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE recognized and regularized rather than invented, decades before any of the five ancient sees had settled into the fixed pentarchy of patriarchates. Several Orthodox churches never developed a patriarchal tier above their metropolitan sees at all: the medieval Church of Cyprus, granted autocephaly as early as the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, remained governed by an archbishop and metropolitans without ever seeking patriarchal status, and Poland's and the Czech and Slovak lands' Orthodox churches, both granted autocephaly in the twentieth century, are likewise headed by a metropolitan rather than a patriarch.

Within Orthodox churches that do have a patriarch, a metropolitan governs a metropolis, a province grouping several dioceses, and in many Slavic and Balkan churches also serves as an honorific title conferred on a diocesan bishop of a historically significant see even where that bishop governs no province of subordinate dioceses at all, a usage that has broadened the title's modern application well beyond its original strictly administrative sense.

The title metropolitan did not stay confined to the Eastern Orthodox churches that use it as an intermediate rank between diocesan bishop and patriarch. Several Eastern Catholic churches, which are in communion with Rome but retain Byzantine or other Eastern liturgical traditions, also organize their bishops into metropolitan provinces headed by a metropolitan archbishop, a structure inherited directly from the same late antique administrative pattern.

The Coptic Orthodox and other Oriental Orthodox churches likewise use metropolitan as a rank above ordinary bishop for sees of particular historical importance. The underlying pattern in every case traces to the late Roman Empire's civil administration, in which a metropolis was the chief city, the seat of government, of a province, and the bishop of that city naturally came to hold a coordinating role over the other bishops of the province at regional synods. As dioceses multiplied and church structures grew more complex in the centuries after Constantine, that coordinating role hardened into a fixed rank with defined rights, including the consecration of new bishops within the province and presidency of the provincial synod. Because the underlying pattern was administrative rather than doctrinal, it transferred cleanly across the later divisions between Chalcedonian and non Chalcedonian churches and, later still, between Rome and the East, so the same word describes a genuinely comparable office in traditions that otherwise differ considerably in theology and liturgy.