The Eastern Orthodox Churches are unique among the Commonwealth of Christianity. Surrounded by governments inimical to their survival, subjected to continual persecution, at war constantly with other denominations and with each other, they have survived and even thrived under the most difficult of conditions. They key to their survivial has been their strongly centralized governments, their sense of purpose and self-identity, and in many cases a melding of religious interests with state nationalism. AT the heart of each church is an elected pope, patriarch, catholicos, archbishop, or metropolitan, a man who has almost total authority in directing the future of each denomination. They are the last bastion in the twentieth century of the absolute monarch.
Lords Temporal is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive list of the Eastern Church leaders since publication of Michel Le Quien's "Oriens Christianus" in 1740. The sixty-four churces are arranged alphabetically by chief see, with brief histories of each denomination, source citations, and a chronolocial checklist of their patriarchs or other elected heads. Also included are a Selected Bibliography, Statistical Tables, Comparative Name Tables, and a complete Index of the 4,700 Primates in alphabetical order by the name under which each is best known. This comprehensive, well-documented guide has been completely revised and reset for the Second Edition [1995], with fifteen new demoninations and 200 additional pages of text added.