Church and Society.

The great dream of Byzantine civilization was a universal Christian society administered by the emperor and spiritually guided by the Church. This idea obviously combined Roman and Christian universalisms in one single socio-political program. It was also based upon the theological presuppositions concerning man which were developed above:³ man, by nature, is God-centred in all aspects of his life, and he is responsible for the fate of the entire creation. As long as Christianity was persecuted, this Biblical assertion could be nothing more than an article of faith, to be realized at the end of history and anticipated in the sacraments. With the “conversion” of Constantine however it suddenly appeared as a concrete and reachable goal. The original enthusiasm with which the Christian Church accepted imperial protection was never corrected by any systematic reflection on the nature and role of the state or of secular societies in the life of fatten humanity. There lies the tragedy of the Byzantine system: it assumed that the state, as such, could become intrinsically Christian.

The official version of the Byzantine social ideal is expressed in the famous text of Justinian’s Sixth Novella:

There are two greatest gifts which God, in his love for man, has granted from on high: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, the second directs and administers human affairs; both however proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind. Hence, nothing should be such a source of care to the emperors as the dignity of the priests, since it is for the [imperial] welfare that they constantly implore God. For if the priesthood is in every way free from blame and possesses access to God, and if the emperors administer equitably and judiciously the state entrusted to their care, general harmony will result, and whatever is beneficial will be bestowed upon the human race.⁴

In the thought of Justinian, the “symphony” between “divine things” and “human affairs” was based upon the Incarnation, which united the divine and human natures, so that the person of Christ is the unique source of the two — the civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The fundamental mistake of this approach was to assume that the ideal humanity which was manifested, through the Incarnation, in the person of Jesus Christ could also find an adequate manifestation in the Roman Empire. Byzantine theocratic thought was, in fact, based upon a form of “realized eschatology,” as if the Kingdom of God had already appeared “in power” and as if the empire were the manifestation of this power in the world and in history. Byzantine Christian thought of course recognized the reality of evil, both personal and social, but it presumed, at least in the official philosophy of imperial legislation, that such evil could be adequately controlled by subduing the whole “inhabited earth” to the power of the one emperor and to the spiritual authority of the one Orthodox priesthood.

The providential significance of the one world-empire was exalted, not only in imperial laws, but also in ecclesiastical hymnography. A Christmas hymn, ascribed to the ninth-century nun Kassia, proclaims a direct connection between the world-empire of Rome and the “recapitulation” of humanity in Christ. Pax Romana is thus made to coincide with Pax Christiana:

When Augustus reigned alone upon earth, the many kingdoms of man came to end: And when Thou wast made man of the pure Virgin, the many gods of idolatry were destroyed. The cities of the world passed under one single rule; And the nations came to believe in one sovereign Godhead. The peoples were enrolled by the decree of Caesar; And we, the faithful, were enrolled in the Name of the Godhead, When Thou, our God, wast made man. Great is Thy mercy: glory to Thee.⁵

As late as 1397, when he had almost reached the nadir of political misery, the Byzantine still understood the universal empire as the necessary support of Christian universalism. Solicited by Prince Basil of Moscow on the issue whether the Russians could omit the liturgical commemoration of the emperor, while continuing to mention the patriarch, Patriarch Anthony iv replied: “It is not possible for Christians to have the Church and not to have the Empire; for Church and Empire form a great unity and community; it is not possible for them to be separated from one another.” ⁶

The idea of the Christian and universal empire presupposed that the emperor had obligations, both as guardian of the faith and as witness of God’s mercy for man. According to the ninth-century Epanagogë, “The purpose of the emperor is to do well, and therefore he is called benefactor, and when he fails in this obligation to do good, he forsakes his imperial dignity.”⁷ The system was an authentic attempt to view human life in Christ as a whole: it did not admit any dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the secular, the individual and the social, or the doctrinal and the ethical, but recognized a certain polarity between “divine things” — essentially the sacramental communion of man with God — and “human affairs.” Yet between the two, there had to be a “symphony” in the framework of a single Christian “society” in which both Church and state cooperated in preserving the faith and in building a society based on charity and humaneness.⁸

This wholeness of the Byzantine concept of the Christian mission in the world reflects the fundamental Chalcedonian belief in the total assumption of humanity by the Son of God in the Incarnation. The Christian faith, therefore, is understood to lead to the transfiguration and “deification” of the entire man; and, as we have seen, this “deification” is indeed accessible, as a living experience, even now, and not merely in a future kingdom. Byzantine ecclesiology and Byzantine political philosophy both assume that baptism endows man with that experience, which transforms not only the “soul” but the whole man, and makes him, already in this present life, a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

One can actually see that the main characteristic of Eastern Christianity, in its ethical and social attitudes, is to consider man as already redeemed and glorified in Christ; by contrast, Western Christendom has traditionally understood the present state of humanity in both a more realistic and a more pessimistic way: though redeemed and “justified” in the eyes of God by the sacrifice of the cross, man remains a sinner. The primary function of the Church, therefore, is to provide him with criteria of thought and a discipline of behaviour, which would allow him to overcome his sinful condition and direct him to good works. On this assumption, the Church is understood primarily as an institution established in the world, serving the world and freely using the means available in the world and appropriate for dealing with sinful humanity, particularly the concepts of law, authority, and administrative power. The contrast between the structures built by the Medieval papacy and the eschatological, experiential, and “other-worldly” concepts which prevailed in the ecclesiological thinking of the Byzantine East helps us to understand the historical fate of East and West. In the West, the Church developed as a powerful institution; in the East, it was seen primarily as a sacramental (or “mystical”) organism in charge of “divine things” and endowed with only limited institutional structures. The structures (patriarchates, metropolitanates, and other officialdom) themselves were shaped by the empire (except for the fundamental tripartite hierarchy — bishop, priest, deacon — in each local church) and were not considered to be of divine origin.

This partial surrender on the “institutional” side of Christianity to the empire contributed to the preservation of a sacramental and eschatological understanding of the Church, but it was not without serious dangers. In its later history the Eastern Church experienced the fact that the state did not always deserve its confidence, and often assumed a clearly demonic face.

Throughout the Byzantine period proper however the Justianian “symphony” worked better than one could expect. The mystical and otherworldly character of Byzantine Christianity was largely responsible for some major characteristics of the state itself. The emperor’s personal power, for example, was understood as a form of charismatic ministry: the sovereign was chosen by God, not by men; hence the absence, in Byzantium, of any legally defined process of imperial succession. Both strict legitimism and democratic election were felt to be limitations to God’s freedom in selecting His appointee.

This charismatic understanding of the state obviously lacked political realism and efficiency. “Providential usurpations” were quite frequent, and political stability was an exception. In political terms, the Byzantine imperial system was indeed a Utopia. Conceived as a universal counterpart of a universal Church, the empire never achieved universality; understood as a reflection of the heavenly kingdom of God, it has a history of bloody revolutions, of wars, and — like all Medieval states — of social injustice. As always and everywhere, the ideals of Christianity proved inapplicable in legal and institutional terms; they only gave hope to individual heroes of the faith and impulse to those who were striving to draw man closer to the ideal of the “life in Christ” which had become accessible to man. The Byzantines recognized this fact, at least implicitly, when they paid such great veneration to the saints, in whom they saw the divine light shining in a “world” which was theoretically Christianized, but which in fact had changed little after the establishment of Christianity. The permanent presence, in the midst of Byzantine society, of innumerable monastic communities, which — at least the best among them — were withdrawing from the world in order to manifest that the Kingdom was not yet there, was another reminder that there could not be any real and permanent “symphony” between God and the world, only an unstable and dynamic polarity.

This polarity was, in fact, nothing else than the opposition between the “old” and the “new” Adam in man. In terms of social ethics, it excluded clear-cut formulae and legal absolutes, and prevented the Church from being fully identified with an institution defined in terms of politics, or sociology; but, at times, it was also interpreted as a Platonic or Manichaean dualism, and it then meant total withdrawal from social responsibility. Occasionally this attitude led to a takeover by the state of the Church’s mission, leaving the monks alone in their witness to the inevitable conflict and polarity between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 768