To the Fall of Constantinople
Vladimir Moss
I would
advise those who seek liberty and shun the yoke of servitude as evil, not to
fall into the plague of despotic rule, to which an insatiable passion of unseasonable
freedom brought their fathers. In excess, servitude and liberty are each wholly
bad; in due measure, each are wholly good. The due measure of servitude is to
serve God; its excess is to serve man. Law is the god of the right-minded man;
pleasure is the god of the fool.
Plato, Letters, viii, 354.
It is he
that shall build the Temple of the Lord, and shall bear royal honour, and shall
sit and rule upon his throne. And there shall be a priest by his throne, and
peaceful understanding shall be between them both.
Zechariah 6.13.
From Him
and through Him [the Word of God] the king who is dear to God receives an image
of the Kingdom that is above and so in imitation of that greater King himself
guides and directs the course of everything on earth…He looks up to see the
archetypal pattern and guides those whom he rules in accordance with that
pattern… The basic principle of kingly authority is the establishment of a
single source of authority to which everything is subject. Monarchy is superior
to every other constitution and form of government. For polyarchy, where
everyone competes on equal terms, is really anarchy and discord.
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, Oration in Honour of
Constantine, 1, 3.
The State consists of parts and members like an
individual person. The most important and necessary parts are the Emperor and
the Patriarch. Therefore unanimity in everything and agreement (sumfwnia) between the Empire and the Priesthood (constitutes)
the spiritual and bodily peace and prosperity of the citizens.
St. Photius the Great,
Patriarch of Constantinople, Epanagoge, III, 8.
Our Tsar is
the representative of the will of God, and not of the will of the people. His
will is sacred for us, as the will of the Anointed of God; we love him because
we love God. If the Tsar gives us glory and prosperity, we receive it from him
as a Mercy of God. But if we are overtaken by humiliation and poverty, we bear
them with meekness and humility, as a heavenly punishment for our iniquities.
And never do we falter in our love for, and devotion to, the Tsar, as long as
they proceed from our Orthodox religious convictions, our love and devotion to
God.
St. Barsonuphius of Optina, Cell-Notes.
CONTENTS
Foreword…………………………………………………………………………5
Part I: The Origins of the Ideal
1. The Pre-Christian
State…………………………………….…………...7
The
Origins of the State – Nimrod’s Babylon – The Egyptian Pharaohs – The Pilgrim
State – From Theocracy to Autocracy – The Davidic Kingdom – Democracy and
Religion – Herodotus on the State – Thucydides on the State - Plato and
Aristotle on the State – Alexander, the Stoics and the Demise of Democracy -
From Zerubbabel to the Maccabees – Herod the Great – Theocracy, Autocracy and
the Jews – The End of the State
2.
Old Rome………..………………………………………………………….65
Christ and the Roman Empire –
Old Rome: Protector or Persecutor? – Why Rome? – Rome and the End of the World
– Church and State in Old Rome
Part II: The Triumph of the Ideal (0-1000)
3.
New Rome: the East..…..…………………………………..………….85
St. Constantine the Great –
The Heretical and Pagan Reaction – Kingship and Tyranny: St. Ambrose of Milan -
Models of Kingship - The Symphony of Powers – The Symphony of Nations - Roman
Patriotism and Anti-Roman Nationalism – Byzantium and the Jews - The Dissonance
of Powers: Monothelitism and Iconoclasm - Perso-Islamic Despotism - St. Photius
the Great: “the Royal Patriarch” - Church Canons vs. Imperial Laws – The
Question of Legitimacy - The First Bulgarian Empire – Georgia under the
Bagratids – St. Vladimir the Great
4.
New Rome: the West…….…………………….………………………152
The Fall of Old Rome – The
Rise of the Popes - The Remnants of Romanity: (1) Britain – The Remnants of
Romanity: (2) Italy and France – The Remnants of Romanity: (3) Spain – Romanity
Restored: Anglo-Saxon England - The Sacrament of Royal Anointing – Romanity
Threatened: (1) Charlemagne – Romanity Threatened: (2) Nicholas I - The Growth
of Feudalism – The English Monarchy – The German Monarchy – The Year 1000: Apex
of Monarchism
Part III: The Waning of the Ideal (1000 TO
1453)
5. Old Rome Resurrected: the Heretical
Papacy………………204
The Germans
and the Filioque – The Reform Movement – The Fall of Orthodox England –
The Gregorian Revolution – The Crusades – The Apotheosis of Papism: Innocent
III – The Resurrection of Roman Law – Natural Law - The Crisis of the Medieval
Papacy - The Conciliar Movement
6. The Fall of New
Rome….........……………………………...……..251
The Slide towards Absolutism –
Church and State in Kievan Rus’ - The Breakup of Kievan Rus’ – Autocracy
Restored: St. Andrew of Bogolyubovo – The Nicaean Empire and Royal Anointing –
Emperor John III Vatatzes - Byzantium and the Unia - The Age of St. Sava -
Russia between the Hammer and the Anvil – Kossovo Polje – The Rise of Muscovy -
The Sultan’s Turban and the Pope’s Tiara – Russia and the Council of Florence –
The Reasons for the Fall
Conclusion:
The Kingship of Christ………………………..…………312
FOREWORD
A famous British politician once remarked that it was
impossible to be both a true Christian and a good politician. If this were
true, then we should have to conclude that there is one extremely important
sphere of life, politics, that is irredeemable by the grace of Christ and
therefore inevitably the domain of the evil one. Such a conclusion might well
be justified in the context of modern democratic politics, when the end of
politics is by definition secular and anti-Christian, and the means to that end
almost inevitably repulsive to the Christian conscience. But it would have been
emphatically rejected by the Christians of the Early Church and the
more-than-1000-year period from the coming of power of St. Constantine in 306
to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the period of the Christian Empire of
New Rome, when Christians of both East and West believed that the best, most
Christian form of government was Autocracy under a truly Christian emperor or
king whose aim was not personal glory or wealth, but the salvation of his
people for eternity. It is this period that is the historical context of this
book, which aims to explicate the ideal of Christian statehood, its triumph and
decline, in the period when most Christians in both East and West fervently
believed in the possibility of a universal Christian empire subject really, and
not merely theoretically, to Christ the King.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers,
Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us. Amen.
January 6/19, 2003.
The Holy Theophany of our
Lord, God and Saviaour Jesus Christ.
PART I: THE ORIGINS OF THE IDEAL
1.
PRE-CHRISTIAN STATEHOOD
The Most
High ruleth in the kingdom of men,
And giveth
it to whomsoever He will,
And
setteth up over it the basest of men.
Daniel 4.17.
My
Kingdom is not of this world.
John 18.36.
The Origins of the State
In the beginning of human history – that
is, in Paradise, - there was no such thing as political life, and no principle
of hierarchical authority except that of Adam over Eve. Thus St. John
Chrysostom writes: “From the beginning He made one sovereignty only, setting
the man over the woman. But after that our race ran headlong into extreme
disorder, He appointed other sovereignties also, those of Masters, and those of
Governors, and this too for love’s sake.”[1]
Again, Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of New York writes: “Political
power appeared on earth only after the fall of the first people. In Paradise
the overseer’s shout was not heard. Man can never forget that he was once
royally free, and that political power appeared as the quit-rent of sin.”[2]
The State, while foreshadowed by the
headship of Adam over Eve even in Paradise, is essentially a product of the
Fall and would never have been necessary if Adam had not sinned. It is
necessary to fallen, sinful man because “the wages of sin is death” (Romans
6.23), and the political order can, if not conquer death in man, – only Christ
in the Church can do that, – at any rate slow down its spread, to enable man to
survive, both as an individual and as a species. For to survive he needs
to unite in communities with other men, forming families, tribes and,
eventually, states.
This process is aided, of course, by the
fact that man is social by nature, and comes into the world already as a member
of a family. So, contrary to the teaching of some heterodox thinkers, such as
Thomas Hobbes, it is not only out of fear that men unite into large groups, but
out of the natural bonds of family life. In this sense the state is simply the
family writ large.
And since the family naturally has a
single head, the father, so the state naturally has a single head, the king.
Hieromonk Dionysius writes: “Both the familial and the monarchical systems are
established by God for the earthly existence of sinful, fallen man. The first-formed
man, abiding in living communion with God, was not subject to anyone except
God, and was lord over the irrational creatures. But when man sinned and
destroyed the Divine hierarchy of submission, having fallen away from God – he
became the slave of sin and the devil, and as a result of this became subject
to a man like himself. The sinful will of man demands submission for the
limitation of his own destructive activity. This Divine establishment has in
mind only the good of man – the limitation of the spread of sin. And history
itself confirms that whatever may be the defects of monarchy, they cannot
compare with the evil brought upon men by revolution and anarchy.”[3]
One of those who expounded this theme
in the most detail and the greatest clarity was Metropolitan Philaret of
Moscow. He emphasis the rootedness of the State in the family, with the State
deriving its essential properties and structure from the family: “The family is
older than the State. Man, husband, wife, father, son, mother, daughter and the
obligations and virtues inherent in these names existed before the family grew
into the nation and the State was formed. That is why family life in relation
to State life can be figuratively depicted as the root of the tree. In order
that the tree should bear leaves and flowers and fruit, it is necessary that
the root should be strong and bring pure juice to the tree. In order that State
life should develop strongly and correctly, flourish with education, and bring
forth the fruit of public prosperity, it is necessary that family life should
be strong with the blessed love of the spouses, the sacred authority of the
parents, and the reverence and obedience of the children, and that as a
consequence of this, from the pure elements of family there should arise
similarly pure principles of State life, so that with veneration for one’s
father veneration for the tsar should be born and grow, and that the love of
children for their mother should be a preparation of love for the fatherland,
and the simplehearted obedience of domestics should prepare and direct the way
to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the laws and sacred
authority of the autocrat…”[4]
This intimate connection between the
family, marriage and the state is expressed still more strongly by S.V.
Troitsky: “Neither the Church nor the State are the origin of marriage. On the
contrary, marriage is the origin of the Church and the State. Marriage precedes
all social and religious organizations. It was established already in paradise,
it was established directly by God Himself. God brings the woman to Adam, and
Adam himself declares his marital union as being independent of any earthly
authority whatever, even parental authority (Genesis 2.24; Matthew
19.6). Thus the first marriage was concluded ‘by the mercy of God’. In the
first marriage the husband and wife are bearers of supreme authority on earth,
they are sovereigns to whom the whole of the rest of the world is subject (Genesis
1.28). The family is the first form of the Church, it is ‘the little church’,
as Chrysostom calls it, and at the same time it is the origin also of the State
as an organization of power, since according to the Bible the basis of every
authority of man over man is to be found in the words of God about the power of
the husband over the wife: ‘he will rule over you’ (Genesis 3.16).”[5]
So the state did exist in paradise after
all? Ideally – yes, in that the ideal of the state is that of a family writ
large, in which the king and queen are the father and mother of their subjects,
an ideal expressed in the Russians’ affectionate name for their tsars,
“batyushka-tsar”, “little father tsar”. However, political life as we know
it undoubtedly begins in the fall, with the issue of laws against crimes,
and with specific punishments for crime. Indeed, without laws against
crime there is no state, according to Metropolitan Philaret: “The State is a
union of free moral beings, united amongst themselves with the sacrifice of
part of their freedom for the preservation and confirmation by the common
forces of the law of morality, which constitutes the necessity of their
existence. The civil laws are nothing other than interpretations of this law in
application to particular cases and guards placed against its violation.”[6] To the extent that the laws are good, that is, in accord with
“the law of morality”, and executed firmly and impartially, the people can live
in peace and pursue the aim for which God placed them on the earth – the
salvation of their souls for eternity. To the extent that they are bad, and/or
badly executed, not only is it much more difficult for men to pursue the
supreme aim of their existence: the very existence of future generations is put
in jeopardy.
The difference between sin and crime is
that whereas sin is transgression of the law of God only, crime is
transgression both of the law of God and of the law of man as defined by the
State. The first sin, that of Adam and Eve in the garden, was punished by their
expulsion from Paradise, or the Church – that is, from communion with God. The
second sin, that of Abel’s murder of his brother Cain, was, according to every
legal code in every civilised state, a crime as well as a sin. But since there
was as yet no state, it was God Himself Who imposed the punishment – expulsion
from the society of men (“a fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth”
(Genesis 4.12)). The paradox is that Cain was the builder of the first
state in recorded history, a city, as he fled from the presence of the Lord (Genesis
4.16,17)[7]…
The fact that the first state was founded
by the first murderer has cast a shadow over statehood ever since.
On the one hand, the State exists in order
to curb sin in its crudest and most destructive aspects, and to that extent
state power is in principle of God, “Who rules in the kingdom of men,
[and] gives it to whomever He will” (Daniel 4.17). For as St. Irenaeus
of Lyons writes: “God imposed upon mankind the fear of man as some do not fear
God. It was necessary that they be subject to the authority of men, and kept
under restraint by their laws whereby they might attain to some degree of
justice and exercise mutual forebearance through dread of the sword…”[8]
Again, St. John Chrysostom says: “Since equality of honour often leads to
fighting, He has made many governments and forms of subjection.”[9] And
again, St. Gregory the Great writes that, although all men are created by
nature equal, God has ordained that “insofar as every man does not have the
same manner of life, one should be governed by another.” Therefore “very often
even holy men desire to be feared by those under their charge – but only when
they discover that by these their subjects God is not feared, so that by the
dread of man at any rate they may fear to sin, who do not dread His
judgements.”[10]
On the other hand, the greatest and most
destructive crimes known to man have been committed precisely by the State, and
to that extent it is an evil phenomenon, permitted but not blessed by God – for
God sometimes “sets over it the lowest of men” (Daniel 4.17). Moreover,
since Cain and at least until Saul and the kings of Israel, all states known to
man were not only the main agents both of mass murder and of slavery, but were
also worshippers of demons who compelled their citizens to worship demons, too.
And if Blessed Augustine, in his famous book, The City of God, could see
the Providence and Justice of God working even in the most antichristian states
and institutions, this could not prevent him from taking a most pessimistic
view of the origin and nature of most states (even the Roman). [11]
St. Augustine traced the history of two
lines of men descending from Seth and Cain respectively - the City of God, or
the community of those who are saved, and the City of Man, or the community of
those who are damned. The City of God is not to be identified with the Church
(because the Church contains both good and bad), nor is the City of Man to be
identified with the State (because the State contains both good and bad).
Nevertheless, the Church is clearly closer to the first pole as the State is to
the second….
This is the reason why the history of
Church-State relations until Constantine the Great is a history of almost
perpetual conflict. Thus until David and the foundation of the state of Israel,
the people of God – that is, the Church – was not associated with any state,
but was constantly being persecuted by contemporary rulers, as Moses and the
Israelites were by Pharaoh.
And this symbolises a deeper truth: that
the people of God, spiritually speaking, have never lived in states, but
have always been stateless wanderers, desert people, as it were; “for here have
we no continuing city, but we seek one to come" (Hebrews 13.14). We
seek, that is, the City of God, the new Jerusalem, which is to be fully
revealed only in the age to come (Revelation 21-22).
On the other hand, the people who reject
God are spiritually speaking citizens of the kingdoms of this earth, rooted in
the earth of worldly cares and desires. That is why they like to build huge
urban states and civilisations that enable them to satisfy these desires to the
maximum extent. It is not by accident, therefore, that Cain and his immediate
descendants were the creators not only of cities, but also of all the cultural
and technological inventions that make city life so alluring to fallen man.
For, as New Hieroconfessor Barnabas,
Bishop of Pechersk, writes: "In its original source culture is the fruit,
not of the fallen human spirit in general, but a consequence of its exceptional
darkening in one of the primordial branches of the race of Adam... The Cainites
have only one aim - the construction of a secure, carnal, material life,
whatever the cost. They understood, of course, that the Seed of the Woman, the
Promised Deliverer from evil that is coming at the end of the ages, will never
appear in their descendants, so, instead of humbling themselves and repenting,
the Cainites did the opposite: in blasphemous despair and hatred towards God,
they gave themselves over irrevocably to bestial passions and the construction
on earth of their kingdom, which is continually fighting against the Kingdom of
God."[12]
The Cainites eventually became the
overwhelming majority of mankind, corrupting even most of the Sethites. Thus
Josephus writes: “This posterity of Seth continued to esteem God as the Lord of
the universe, and to have an entire regard to virtue, for seven generations;
but in process of time they were perverted…
“But Noah was very uneasy at what they
did; and being displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their
disposition, and their actions for the better: but seeing they did not yield to
him, but were slaves to wicked pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him,
together with his wife and children, and those they had married; so he departed
out of the land.”[13]
He departed, and entered, the Ark. And
then God destroyed the whole Cainite civilisation in the Great Flood. So
statehood in its first historical examples was demonic and antichristian and
was destroyed by the just judgement of God.
Immediately after the Flood God commands
Noah to establish a system of justice that is the embryo of statehood as it
should be: “The blood of your lives will I require: at the hand of every beast
will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother
will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his
blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man” (Genesis 9.5-6). Commenting
on these words, Protopriest Basil Boshchansky writes, that they “give the
blessing of God to that institution which appeared in defence of human life” –
that is, the State.[14]
As Henry Morris explains: “The word
‘require’ is a judicial term, God appearing as a judge who exacts a strict and
severe penalty for infraction of a sacred law. If a beast kills a man, the
beast must be put to death (note also Exodus 21.28). If a man kills
another man (wilfully and culpably, it is assumed), then he also must be put to
death by ‘every man’s brother’. This latter phrase is not intended to initiate
family revenge slayings, of course, but rather to stress that all men are
responsible to see that this justice is executed. At the time these words were
first spoken, all men indeed were blood brothers; for only the three sons of
Noah were living at the time, other than Noah himself. Since all future people
would be descended from these three men and their wives, in a very real sense
all men are brothers, because all were once in the loins of these three
brothers. This is in essence a command to establish a formal system of human
government, in order to assure that justice is carried out, especially in the
case of murder. The authority to execute this judgement of God on a murderer
was thus delegated to man.”[15]
But not to every man. The authority to
pronounce the judgement of God on a man can only be given to men whom God has
appointed to judge – that is, to political rulers. We see this clearly in the
story of Moses: “And he went out the second day and behold, two Hebrews were
quarrelling; and he said to the one who did the wrong, “Why are you striking
your companion?” Then he said, Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do
you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”’ (Exodus 2.13-14).
And indeed, Moses had not at that time received the power to judge Israel. Only
when he had fled into the wilderness and been given power by true King of
Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was he accepted as having true
authority. Only then was he able to deliver his people from the false
authority, Pharaoh, who had usurped power over God’s own people…[16]
Thus all
true political authorities are established by God: “there is no authority that
is not from God” (Romans
13.1). This is true to a special degree of the political leaders of the people
of God, for whom the Lord established a special sacrament, the anointing to the
kingdom: “I have found David My servant, with My holy oil have I anointed him”
(Psalm 88.19).
Even certain pagan kings were given an invisible anointing to rule justly and
help the people of God, such as Cyrus of Persia (Isaiah 45.1).
However, while all true political
authorities are established by God, there are some political authorities that
are not established by God, but are simply allowed or tolerated by Him
in His providential wisdom. The main forms of political organisation in the
ancient world, Absolutism (or Despotism) and Democracy,
were not established by God. Only the form of political organisation of the
Hebrew people - Theocracy, or Autocracy (“delegated Theocracy”,
as Tikhomirov calls it) – was established and blessed by Him.
These three fundamental forms of political
organisation were believed by the nineteenth-century Russian religious
philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to operate throughout human history. The first, Absolutism,
he defined as “the striving to subject humanity in all its spheres and at every
level of its life to one supreme principle which in its exclusive unity strives
to mix and confuse the whole variety of private forms, to suppress the
independence of the person and the freedom of private life.” The second, Democracy,
he defined as “the striving to destroy the stronghold of dead unity, to give
freedom everywhere to private forms of life, freedom to the person and his
activity;… the extreme expression of this force is general egoism and anarchy,
and a multitude of separate individuals without an inner bond.” The third
force, Autocracy, he defined as “giving positive content to the other
two forces, freeing them from their exclusivity, and reconciling the unity of
the higher principle with the free multiplicity of private forms and elements.”[17]
Absolutism was
both the earliest and the most widespread form of political organisation in the
ancient world, being found in Babylon and Egypt, the Indus valley, China and
Central and South America. The great civilisations of the early postdiluvian
period were all absolutist and pagan in character – that is, they were based on
submission to the will of one man, who in turn was in submission to the demons;
for “the gods of the pagans are demons” (Psalm 95.5). The most famous of
these early despotic rulers was Nimrod, who was by tradition also the founder
of pagan religion.
Paganism consists of two main elements, according to Lev Alexandrovich
Tikhomirov: (1) the deification of the forces of nature, and (2) the cult of
ancestors – to which may be added, as we shall see, the cult of children.
“The belief in the immortality of the
soul, and the conviction of the benevolence of the heads of families, led to
people seeing their protectors in the spirits of their ancestors, and they
addressed them with petitions for defence, offered sacrifices to them, built
temples to them, etc. They conformed their behaviour and public life in
accordance with their indications and wishes.
“The deification of the forces of nature
is no more than a crude penetration into the sphere of spiritual beings. Here
people worship both evil forces and good ones, and are particularly easily led
away from an understanding of the Divine essence itself. His essence, as we
know from Revelation, is moral in nature. In the deification of nature, on the
contrary, they worship only force, whether or not it is moral or even immoral,
and in this way they are particularly easily led away from the true God.
“These various kinds of religious beliefs
cannot fail to have varying influences on human life in general, and on man’s
understanding of the supreme power in political life in particular.”[18]
Nature-worship and ancestor-worship can be
combined. For example, among today’s Solomon islanders, tiger sharks are
worshipped as gods because they are believed to be the habitations of the souls
of revered ancestors.[19] The
religion of Nimrod’s Babylon, from which, by tradition, all the major pagan
religious systems derive, appears to have been a mixture of nature-worship and
ancestor-worship. Thus, on the one hand, the Babylonians worshipped the stars
and planets, and practised astrology as a means of discovering the will of the
gods. "They believed," writes Smart, "that they could predict
not merely by earthly methods of divination, but also by a study of the stars
and of planets and the moon".[20] One
of the purposes of the temples or towers or ziggurats, whose remains can still
be seen in the Iraqi desert, may have been as platforms from which to observe
the signs of the zodiac. On the other hand, the chief god, Marduk or Merodach,
meaning “brightness of the day”, seems to have been identified with none other
than Nimrod himself. We know, moreover, that the later kings of Babylon were
also identified with the god Marduk. So the divinity seems to have reincarnated
himself in every member of the dynasty.[21]
It was probably Nimrod who invented the
traditions of nature-worship and ancestor-worship, or at least combined them in
a uniquely powerful and dangerous way. Having risen to power as a hunter or
leader in war (he is described in the Holy Scriptures as “a mighty hunter
before the Lord” (Genesis 10.9)), he then consolidated his power by
giving himself divine honours. By imposing false religion in this way he led
men away from God, which earned him the title given him by the Jerusalem Targum
of “hunter of the sons of men”; for he said: “Depart from the judgement of the
Lord, and adhere to the judgement of Nimrod!”[22]
The great spring festival of Marduk took
place at Babylon, at the splendid temple with ascending steps which is called
in the Bible the Tower of Babel,[23] and
which by tradition was built by Nimrod himself. In Genesis (11.8-9) we
read that God destroyed this Tower, divided the languages of its builders so
that they could not understand each other, and scattered them in different
directions across the face of the earth. This explains both the existence of
different nations speaking different languages and the fact that, at least in
the earliest phase of their existence, all nations known to anthropologists have
been pagan, worshipping a multiplicity of gods which often bear a close
relationship to the gods of other nations.
"If, before the flood,” write two
Catacomb Church nuns, “the impious apostates were the Cainites, the descendants
of the brother-murderer, then after the flood they became the sons of the
lawless Ham. The Hamites founded Babylon, one of the five cities of the
powerful hunter Nimrod (Genesis 10.8). 'Nimrod, imitating his
forefather, chose another form of slavery...' (St. John Chrysostom, Word 29
on Genesis). Nimrod invented a form of slavery at which 'those who boast of
freedom in fact cringe' (ibid.). He rebelled against God, against the
Divine patriarchal order of governing families and governing peoples. The times
of Nimrod were characterized by the appearance of the beginnings of godless
monarchism and future imperialism. Having rejected God, this eastern usurper
created a kingdom based on his own power.”[24]
“Nimrod” means "let us rebel",
and "it was Nimrod,” according to Josephus, “who excited them to such an
affront and contempt of God; he was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a
bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to
God, as if it were through his means that they were happy, but to believe that
it was their own courage that procured their happiness. He also gradually
changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other method of turning men from
the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own
power."[25]
Nimrod’s Babylon, like all the early urban
civilisations, was characterised by, on the one hand, a totalitarian state
structure, and, on the other hand, a pagan system of religion. Statehood and
religion were very closely linked; for both the governmental and the priestly
hierarchies culminated in one man, the king-priest-god. This deification of the
ruler of the City of Man was, of course, a direct challenge to the truly Divine
Ruler of the City of God.
The deification of the ruler was a great
support for his political power. For, as Tikhomirov writes, “how can one man
become the supreme authority for the people to which he himself belongs, and
which is as many times stronger than any individual person as millions are
greater than a single unit?
“This can only take place through the
influence of the religious principle - through that fact or presumption that
the monarch is the representative of some higher power, against which millions
of men are as nothing. The participation of the religious principle is
unquestionably necessary for the existence of the monarchy, as the supreme
authority in the State. Without the religious principle rule by one man, even
if he were the greatest genius, can only be a dictatorship, power that is
limitless but not supreme, but rather administrative, having received all
rights only in his capacity as representative of the people’s authority.
“Such was the origin of monarchies in
history. One-man rule is often promoted in the sense of a highest ruler,
dictator, leader - for very various reasons: because of his legislative or
judicial wisdom, his energy and talents for the maintenance of internal order,
his military abilities , - but all these rulers could receive the title of
supreme authority only if the religious idea, which indicated to the people
that the given person represented a supreme, superhuman power, played a part in
their exaltation.”[26]
The Catacomb Church nuns continue: “Nimrod's very idea of founding a
universal monarchy was a protest against Noah's curse of Canaan.. A sign of
protest and at the same time of power was the huge tower which the Hamites
attempted to raise. God punished them, confusing the language of the proud
builders, so that they no longer understood each other...
“Herodotus writes in his History that they built small ziggurats in Babylon (evidently in memory of the first failure) consisting of towers placed on top of each other. On the top of the small ziggurat E-temen-anki was raised a statue of the idol Marduk weighing 23.5 tons. Many centuries later the notable tyrant Nebuchadnezzar said: 'I laid my hand to finishing the construction of the tope of E-temen-anki, so that it might quarrel with heaven.’”[27]
By the end of the third millenium BC, most
of present-day Iraq was united under the rule of what is known as the third Ur
dynasty, from its capital city, the Bible’s “Ur of the Chaldees”. This city,
too, has a ziggurat and was therefore a centre of the worship of Marduk.
Shafarevich has shown that the political and economic life of this state was
purely totalitarian in character: “Archaeologists have discovered a huge
quantity of cuneiform tablets which express the economic life of that time.
From them we know that the basis of the economy remained the temple households.
However, they had completely lost their independence and had been turned into
cells of a single state economy. Their managers were appointed by the king,
they presented detailed accounts to the capital, and they were controlled by
the king's inspectors. Groups of workers were often transferred from one
household to another.
"The workers occupied in agriculture,
men, women and children, were divided into parties led by inspectors. They
worked all the year round, from one field to another, receiving seeds, tools
and working animals from the temple and state warehouses. In the same way, they
came to the warehouses for food in parties with their bosses leading them. The
family was not seen as an economic unit; food was handed out not to the head of
the family, but to each worker - more often, even, to the head of the party. In
some documents they talk about men, in others - of women, in others - of
children, in others - of orphans. Apparently, for this category of workers
there could be no question of owning property or of using definite plots of
land...
"In the towns there existed state
workshops, with particularly large ones in the capital, Ur. The workers
received tools, raw materials and semi-finished products from the state. The
output of these workshops went into state warehouses. The craftsmen, like the
agricultural workers, were divided into parties headed by observers. They
received their food in accordance with lists from state warehouses.
"The workers occupied in agriculture and manufacture figure in the
accounts as workers of full strength, 2/3rds strength, and 1/6th strength. On
this depended the norms of their food. There were also norms of work, on the
fulfilment of which also depended the amount of rations the workers received.
The households presented lists of dead, sick and absentees from work (with
indication of the reasons for their truancy). The workers could be transferred
from one field to another, from one workshop to another, sometimes - from one
town into another. The agricultural workers were sent to accessory work in
workshops, and the craftsmen - to agricultural work or barge-hauling. The
unfree condition of large sections of the population is underlined by the large
number of documents concerning flight. Information concerning flights (with
names of relatives) is provided - and not only of a barber or a shepherd's son,
but also of the son of a priest or priest... A picture of the life of the
workers is unveiled by regular information concerning mortality... In one
document we are told that in one party in one year there died 10% of the
workers, in another - 14%, in a third - 28%. Mortality was especially great
among women and children..."[28]
Thus here we find all the major elements
of twentieth-century communism - the annihilation of private property and the
family, slave-labour, gulags, the complete control of all political, economic
and religious life by an omnipotent state. Even the cult of personality is
here, in the form of the worship of the king-god. It was fitting, therefore,
that it was from Ur that Abraham was called out by God in order to re-establish
the religion of the one True God. For the worshippers of God, who wish to be at
peace with heaven, cannot co-exist in peace with the worshippers of man, who
seek to “quarrel with heaven” and with heaven’s followers. It was fitting,
moreover, that it was precisely after Abraham had been forced to fight against
a coalition of mainly Babylonian kings in the first recorded physical battle
between the Church and the State (Genesis 14.17), that he was met by the
first recorded true king and “priest of the Most High God… Possessor of heaven
and earth”, Melchizedek (Genesis 14.18). Thus it is only after they have
proved themselves in refusing to submit to the false ruler of this world, whose
power is not of God, but of the devil (Revelation 13.2), that the people
of God are counted worthy of receiving a king anointed by God Himself, being in
the image of God’s own supreme sovereignty.
The second battle between the Church and
the State took place took place hundreds of years later, between the people of
God led by Moses, on the one hand, and the Egyptian Pharoah, on the other. For
Egypt was another totalitarian society which rose up against the True God and
was defeated (although the Egyptians did not record the fact, since gods cannot
fail).[29] Its
apex was the cult of the Pharaoh, the god-king who was identified with one or
another of the gods associated with the sun.
Egyptian religion was a very complicated
mixture of creature-worship and ancestor-worship. Thus Diodorus Siculus writes:
“The gods, they say, had been originally mortal men, but gained their
immortality on account of wisdom and public benefits to mankind, some of them
having also become kings; and some have the same names, when interpreted, with
the heavenly deities… Helios [Re], they say, was the first king of the
Egyptians, having the same name with the celestial luminary [the sun]…”[30]
“Although Egypt had a pantheon of gods,”
writes Phillips, “the principal deity was the sun god Re (also called Ra), for
whose worship a massive religious centre had grown up at Heliopolis, some fifty
kilometres to the north of Memphis. It was believed that Re had once ruled over
Egypt personally but, wearied by the affairs of mankind, had retired to the
heavens, leaving the pharaohs to rule in his stead. Called ‘the son of Re’, the
pharaoh was considered a half-human, half-divine being, through whose body Re
himself could manifest.[31]
However, as the falcon god Horus was the protector of Egypt, the king was also
seen as his personification. By the Third Dynasty, therefore, Re and Horus had
been assimilated as one god: Re-Herakhte. Depicted as a human male with a
falcon’s head, this composite deity was considered both the god of the sun and
the god of Egypt, and his incarnation on earth was the pharaoh himself. Only
the king could expect an individual eternity with the gods, everyone else could
only hope to participate in this vicariously, through their contribution to his
well-being.”[32]
The Egyptian Pharaoh was, according to
Bright, “no viceroy ruling by divine election, nor was he a man who had been
deified: he was god – Horus visible among his people. In theory, all Egypt was
his property, all her resources at the disposal of his projects”[33] –
and these, as the whole world knows, were on the most massive scale. “The
system was an absolutism under which no Egyptian was in theory free,… the lot
of the peasant must have been unbelievably hard.”[34]
Thus according to Herodotus the largest of
the pyramids, that of Pharaoh Khufu, was built on the labour of 100,000 slaves.
It is far larger than any of the cathedrals or temples built by any other
religion in any other country, and it has recently been discovered to contain
the largest boat found anywhere in the world.[35]
Pharaoh was the mediator between heaven
and earth. Without him, it was believed, there would be no order and the world
would descend into chaos. He guaranteed that the sun shone, the Nile inundated
the land and the crops grew. As Silverman writes: “The king’s identification
with the supreme earthly and solar deities of the Egyptian pantheon suggests
that the king in death embodied the duality that characterized the ancient
Egyptian cosmos. The deified ruler represented both continuous regeneration
(Osiris) and the daily cycle of rebirth (as Re). In their understanding of the
cosmos, the ancient Egyptians were accustomed to each of their deities
possessing a multiplicity of associations and roles. It was a natural extension
of this concept for them to view the deified Pharaoh in a simì[v1]lar way”.[36]
All the dead Pharaohs (with the exception
of the “disgraced” Hatshepsut and the “heretic” Akhenaton) were worshipped in
rites involving food offerings and prayers. Even some non-royal ancestors were
worshipped; they were called “able spirits of Re” because it was thought that
they interceded for the living with the sun god.
Rohl has put forward the fascinating
theory that Egypt was conquered in pre-dynastic times by Hamites arriving from
Mesopotamia by sea around the Arabian peninsula, who left a profound mark on
Egyptian religion and civilisation. Thus Cush, the son of Ham and father of
Nimrod, arrived in Ethiopia, giving that country its ancient name. Another son
of Ham, Put, gave his name to Eritrea and the south-west corner of Arabia;
while another son, Mizraim, gave his name to Egypt, becoming the first of the
Egyptian falcon kings, the descendants of Horus, “the Far Distant One”. Now the
name “Mizraim” means “follower of Asar” – in other words, according to Rohl’s
theory, follower of the Babylonian god Marduk insofar as Marduk is to be
identified with Ashur, the grandson of Noah[38]!
This places the Egyptian god-kings in the
closest spiritual relationship with the Babylonian god-kings, being all deified
followers or reincarnations of Marduk-Osiris-Ashur.[39]
Noah himself seems to have been deified by
the Sumerians, according to Rohl. Thus in the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, Utnapishtim,
the Akkadian name for Noah, is elevated to divine status by the gods after
leaving the ark and sacrificing to the gods. “Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but
a man, but now Utnapishtim shall be as the gods.”[40]
Now the original supreme deity of Egypt
was Atum, later Re-Atum, which means “the all”. “Atum,” writes Rohl, “was both
man and god. He was the first being on earth who brought himself into the world
– the self-created one… Atum as the first being – and therefore the first ruler
on earth – was regarded as the patron deity of royalty – the personal protector
of the pharaoh and all kingship rituals… The name Atum is written A-t-m with
the loaf-of-bread sign for the letter ‘t’. However, it is recognised by
linguists that the letters ‘t’ and ‘d’ are often interchangeable within the
different language groups of the ancient Near East… The Sumerian Adama becomes
Atamu in Akkadian. So I believe we are justified in substituting the Egyptian
‘t’ in A-t-m with a ‘d’ – giving us Adam!”[41]
This theory, if true, it sheds a very
interesting light on the early Biblical account. Thus if the Babylonian cult of
the god-king goes back to the self-deification of Nimrod, which is in turn
based on the deification of his ancestors Ashur (Marduk) and Noah (Utnapishtim),
then the Egyptian cult of the god-king, while receiving its first impetus from
Babylonian Marduk-worship, went one step further in deifying the ancestor of
the whole human race, Adam, and placing him at the peak of their religious
pantheon. Eve fell through believing the word of the serpent that they would be
“as gods”. The descendants of Noah and Ham fell through believing that Adam and
Eve – and so they themselves, too - were “as gods”.
Similar systems to the Babylonian and
Egyptian seem to have been in vogue in other "civilised" parts of the
ancient world - in India, in China, and, somewhat later, in Central and South
America. Everywhere we find the cult of the god-king, together with a
totalitarian system of government and a religion characterised by astrology,
magical practices, ancestor-worship and, very often, blood-sacrifices and
immorality of various kinds. In Central America, in particular, the numbers of
blood-sacrifices were extraordinarily large.
Thus Alexeyev writes: "The cult of
the god-king was confessed by nations of completely different cultures.
Nevertheless, at its base there lies a specific religious-philosophical
world-view which is the same despite the differences of epochs, nations and
cultural conditions of existence. The presupposition of this world-view is an
axiom that received perhaps its most distinct formulation in the religion of
the Assyro-Babylonians. The Assyro-Babylonians believed that the whole of
earthly existence corresponds to heavenly existence and that every phenomenon
of this world, beginning from the smallest and ending with the greatest, must
be considered to be a reflection of heavenly processes. The whole Babylonian
world-view, all their philosophy, astrology and magic rested on the recognition
of this axiom. In application to politics it meant that …the earthly king was
as it were a copy of the heavenly king, an incarnation of divinity, an earthly
god."[42]
Thus the religion of the ancient pagan
empires was inextricably linked with the form of their political organisation.
And conversely, the stability of their political organisation was inextricably
linked with their religion. For as long as the people believed in the divinity
of their king, they obeyed him. It was only when the king showed signs, not so
much of human fallibility, as of doctrinal heresy, that the State was
threatened from within. Thus the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton’s “heresy” caused
temporary instability in Egypt. And the Babylonian King Nabonidus’ attempt to
remove the New Year festival aroused the enmity of the people as a whole and
the priests of Marduk in particular, leading to the fall of Babylon to Cyrus
the Persian.[43]
This similarity between the different
pagan states amidst their superficial diversity was the result of their all
being ultimately derived from a single source – Nimrod’s Babylon, from where
they were spread all over the world after the destruction of the Tower of Babel
– to Egypt, to India, to Greece, and, still further afield, to China, Mexico
and Peru, and even, in modern times, to Mikado Japan…
The Hebrew autocracy arose out of the
midst of the prototypically absolutist States of Babylon and Egypt. Its
distinguishing mark was its claim, quite contrary to the claims of the Babylonian
and Egyptian despotisms, that its origin and end lay outside itself, in the
Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
It took its origin from a direct call by God to Abraham to leave his homeland,
the Sumerian city of Ur, and go into a land which God had promised him.
The God of Abraham was
different from the gods of polytheism in several ways. First, He revealed
Himself as completely transcendent to the material world, being worshipped
neither in idols nor in men nor in the material world as a whole, but rather as
the spiritual, immaterial Creator of all things, visible and invisible.
Secondly, He did not reveal Himself to all, nor could anyone acquire faith in
Him by his own efforts, but He revealed Himself only to those with whom He
chose to enter into communion - Abraham, first of all. Thirdly, He was a
jealous God Who required that His followers worship Him alone, as being the
only true God. This was contrary to the custom in the pagan world, where
ecumenism was the vogue - that is, all the gods, whoever they were and wherever
they were worshipped, were considered true.
The nation of the Hebrews, therefore, was
founded on an exclusively religious - and religiously exclusive - principle. In
Ur, and the other proto-communist states of the ancient world, the governing
principle of life was not religion, still less the nation, but the state. Or
rather, its governing principle was a religion of the state as incarnate
in its ruler; for everything, including religious worship, was subordinated to
the needs of the state, and to the will of the leader of the state, the
god-king.
But Israel was founded upon a rejection of
this idolatry of the state and its leader, and an exclusive subordination to
the will of the God of Abraham, Who could in no way be identified with any man
or state or material thing whatsoever. It followed that the criterion for
membership of the nation of the Hebrews was neither race (for the Hebrews were
not clearly distinguished racially from the other Semitic tribes of the Fertile
Crescent, at any rate at the beginning, and God promised not only to multiply
Abraham’s seed, but also that “in thy seed shall all the nations of the
earth be blessed” (Genesis 22.18)), nor citizenship of a certain state
(for they had none at the beginning), nor residence in a certain geographical
region (for it was not until 500 years after Abraham that the Hebrews conquered
Palestine). The foundation of the nation, and criterion of its membership, was faith,
faith in the God Who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - and
acceptance of the rite of circumcision. At the same time, the very exclusivity
of this faith meant that Israel was chosen above all other nations to be the
Lord’s special people: “in the division of the nations of the whole earth, He
set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord’s portion.” (Sirach
17.17).
Some half a millenium later, in the time
of Moses, the Hebrews were again living under another absolutist regime - this
time, Pharaonic Egypt. And God again called them out of the despotism - this
time, through Moses. He called them to leave Egypt and return to the promised
land.
Now during the life of Moses, a third important element besides faith
and circumcision was added to the life of Israel: the law. The law was
necessary for several reasons. First, by the time of Moses, the Israelites were
no longer an extended family of a few hundred people, as in the time of Abraham
and the Patriarchs, which could be governed by the father of the family without
the need of any written instructions or governmental hierarchy. Since their
migration to Egypt in the time of Joseph, they had multiplied and become a
nation of several hundred thousand people, which no one man could rule unaided.
Secondly, the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt had introduced them again to
the lures of the pagan world, and a law was required to protect them from these
lures. And thirdly, in order to escape from Egypt, pass through the desert and
conquer the Promised Land in the face of many enemies, a quasi-military
organisation and discipline was required.
For these reasons among others, the law
was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Its God-givenness was vitally
important. It meant, as Paul Johnson points out, that “the Israelites were
creating a new kind of society. Josephus later used the word ‘theocracy’. This
he defined as ‘placing all sovereignty in the hands of God’… The Israelites
might have magistrates of one kind or another but their rule was vicarious
since God made the law and constantly intervened to ensure it was obeyed. The
fact that God ruled meant that in practice his law ruled. And since all were
equally subject to the law, the system was the first to embody the double
merits of the rule of law and equality before the law. Philo called it
‘democracy’, which he described as ‘the most law-abiding and best of
constitutions’. But by democracy he did not mean rule by all the people; he
defined it as a form of government which ‘honours equality and has law and
justice for its rulers’. He might have called the Jewish system, more
accurately, ‘democratic theocracy’, because in essence that is what it was.”[44]
And yet the “democratic” element should
not be exaggerated. Although every man was equal under the law of God, which
was also the law of Israel, there were no elections, every attempt to rebel
against Moses’ leadership was fiercely punished (Numbers 16), and there
was no way in which the people could alter the law to suit themselves, which is
surely the essence of democracy in the modern sense. Even when, at Jethro’s
suggestion, lower-level magistrates and leaders were appointed, they were
appointed by Moses, not by any kind of popular vote (Deuteronomy 1).
One of the major characteristics of the
Mosaic law, notes Johnson, is that “there is no distinction between the
religious and the secular – all are one – or between civil, criminal and moral
law.
“This indivisibility had important
practical consequences. In Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend
God. All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes. Offences are absolute
wrongs, beyond the power of man unaided to pardon or expunge. Making
restitution to the offended mortal is not enough; God requires expiation, too,
and this may involve drastic punishment. Most law-codes of the ancient Near
East are property-orientated, people themselves being forms of property whose
value can be assessed. The Mosaic code is God-oriented. For instance, in other
codes, a husband may pardon an adulterous wife and her lover. The Mosaic code,
by contrast, insists both must be put to death…
“In Mosaic theology, man is made in God’s
image, and so his life is not just valuable, it is sacred. To kill a man is an
offence against God so grievous that the ultimate punishment, the forfeiture of
life, must follow; money is not enough. The horrific fact of execution thus
underscores the sanctity of human life. Under Mosaic law, then, many men and
women met their deaths whom the secular codes of surrounding societies would
have simply permitted to compensate their victims or their victims’ families.
“But the converse is also true, as a
result of the same axiom. Whereas other codes provided the death penalty for
offences against property, such as looting during a fire, breaking into a
house, serious trespass by night, or theft of a wife, in the Mosaic law no
property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of
property alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment: the
offences of parents must not be punished by the execution of sons or daughters,
or the husband’s crime by the surrender of the wife to prostitution… Moreover,
not only is human life sacred, the human person (being in God’s image) is
precious… Physical cruelty [in punishment] is kept to the minimum.”[45]
A major part of the Mosaic law concerned
the institution of a priesthood and what we would now call the Church with its
rites and festivals. The priesthood was entrusted to Moses' brother Aaron and
one of the twelve tribes of Israel, that of the Levites. Thus already in the
time of Moses we have the beginnings of a separation between Church and State,
and of what the Byzantines called the "symphony" between the two
powers, as represented by Moses and Aaron.
That the Levites constituted the beginnings of what we would now call
the clergy of the Church was indicated by Patriarch Nicon of Moscow in his
polemic against the attempts of the tsar to confiscate church lands: “Have you
not heard that God said that any outsider who comes close to the sacred things
will be given up to death? By outsider here is understood not only he who is a
stranger to Israel from the pagans, but everyone who is not of the tribe of
Levi, like Kore, Dathan and Abiram, whom God did not choose, and whom, the
impious ones, a flame devoured; and King Uzziah laid his hand on the ark to
support it, and God struck him and he died (II Kings 6.6,7).”[46]
However, it is important to realise that there was no radical separation
of powers in the modern sense. Israel was a theocratic state ruled directly by
God, Who revealed His will through His chosen servants Moses and Aaron. The
Church, the State and the People were not three different entities or
organisations, but three different aspects of a single organism, the whole of
which was subject to God alone.
That is why it was so important that the leader should be chosen by God.
In the time of the judges, this seems always to have been the case; for when an
emergency arose God sent His Spirit upon a man chosen by Him (cf. Judges
6.34), and the people, recognising this, then elected him as their judge (cf. Judges
11.11). And if there was no emergency, or if the people were not worthy of a
God-chosen leader, then God did not send His Spirit and no judge was elected.
In those circumstances "every man did that which was right in his own
eyes" (Judges 21.25) - in other words, there was anarchy. The
lesson was clear: if theocracy is removed, then sooner or later there will be
anarchy - that is, no government at all.
The unity of Israel was therefore
religious, not political - or rather, it was religio-political. It was created
by the history of deliverance from the satanocracies of Babylon and Egypt and
maintained by a continuing allegiance to God - the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, the God Who appeared to Moses and Joshua, - as their only King. Early
Israel before the kings was therefore not a kingdom - or rather, it was a
kingdom whose king was God alone. It had rulers, but these rulers were neither
hereditary monarchs nor like presidents or prime ministers, who are elected to
serve the will of the people. They were charismatic leaders who were elected
because they served the will of God alone.
We see this most clearly in the story of Abraham, who always acted at
the direct command of God; we read of no priest or king to whom he deferred.
The only possible exception to this rule was Melchisedek, the mysterious
king-priest of Jerusalem, who blessed him on his return from the slaughter of the
kings. However, Melchisedek was the exception that proved the rule; for he was
both the first and the last man in the history of the People of God to combine
the roles of king and priest[47],
which shows, as St. Paul indicates (Hebrews 7.3), that he was the type,
not of any merely human king, but of Christ God, the Supreme King and Chief
High Priest of the People of God.[48] Nor
was Abraham the king of his people. Rather it was said to him by God:
"Kings will come from you" (Genesis 17.6; cf. 17.16, 35.2).
As L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “According to the
law of Moses, no state was established at that time, but the nation was just
organised on tribal principles, with a common worship of God. The Lord was
recognised as the Master of Israel in a moral sense, as of a spiritual union,
that is, as a Church.”[49] Ancient Israel, in other words, was a Theocracy, ruled not by a king or priest, but by God Himself.
And strictly speaking the People of God
remained a Theocracy, without a formal state structure, until the time of the
Prophet Samuel, who anointed the first King of Israel, Saul. Early Israel
before the kings had rulers, but these rulers were neither hereditary monarchs
nor were they elected to serve the will of the people. They were charismatic
leaders, called judges, who were elected because they served the will of God
alone.
And they were elected by God, not the
people, whose role was simply to recognise and follow the man God had elected,
as when He elected Gideon, saying: “Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save
Israel from the Midianites: have I not sent thee?” (Judges 6.14). That
is why, when the people offered to make Gideon and his descendants kings in a
kind of hereditary dynasty, he refused, saying: "I shall not rule over
you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you" (Judges
8.23).
The seeds of the Israelite Autocratic
State can be discerned already in the time of Moses. By that time the
Israelites had grown far beyond the size of unit that a single patriarchal
figure could know and control unaided, and had become a People with its own
internal structure of twelve tribes. They needed order, and
consequently, both a law and a judicial system to administer it.
God as the Supreme Ruler of Israel
provided that law, a law which governed the life of the People in all its
spheres, including the religious (Exodus 20 et seq.). And in
obedience to God Moses created a quasi-governmental judicial system to
administer it, delegating the power of resolving disputes to “the chief of your
tribes, wise men, and known,” making them “captains over thousands, and
captains over hundreds, and captains over fifties, and captains over tens, and
officers among your tribes” (Deuteronomy 1.15), while reserving for
himself the final court of appeal.
While delegating power in the
judicial sphere, Moses also entrusted the priesthood, at God’s command, to his
brother Aaron, who became the head of the Levitical priesthood. Thus in the
relationship between Moses and Aaron we see the first clear foreshadowing of
the relationship between the State and the Church, the monarchy and the
priesthood. The symphony of these blood brothers foreshadowed the spiritual
symphony of powers in both the Israelite and the Christian theocracies.
However, while the Church was already a
reality, with a real high priest under God, the “State” did not yet have a
human king, but only a lawgiver and prophet in Moses. A king would have to wait
until the Israelites acquired a land. For as the Lord said to the People
through Moses: “When thou shalt come unto the land which the Lord thy God shall
choose, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will
set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me: thou shalt in
any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from
among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a
stranger over thee, which is not thy brother... And it shall be, when he
sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this
law in a book out of that which is before the priests, the Levites. And it
shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he
may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these
statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and
that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left:
to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children,
in the midst of Israel” (Deuteronomy 17.14-15,18-20).
Thus God blessed the institution
of the monarchy, but stipulated three conditions if His blessing was to
continue to rest on it. First, the people must itself desire to have a king
placed over it. Secondly, the king must be someone “whom the Lord thy God shall
choose”; a true king is chosen by God, not man. Such a man will always be a
“brother”, that is a member of the People of God, of the Church: if he is not,
then God has not chosen him. Thirdly, he will govern in accordance with the Law
of God, which he will strive to fulfil in all its parts.
In the period from Moses to Saul, the
people were ruled by the Judges, many of whom, like Joshua, Jephtha and Gideon,
were holy, truly charismatic leaders. However, towards the end of the period,
since “there was no king in Israel; everyone did what seemed right to him” (Judges
21.25), and barbaric acts, such as that which almost led to the extermination
of the tribe of Benjamin, are recorded. In their desperation at the mounting
anarchy, the people called on God through the Prophet Samuel to provide them
with a king.
God fulfilled their request. However, since the people’s motivation in
seeking a king was not pure, not for the sake of being able to serve God more
faithfully, He gave them at first a king who brought them more harm than good.
For while Saul was a mighty man of war and temporarily expanded the frontiers
of Israel at the expense of the Philistines and Ammonites, he persecuted True
Orthodoxy, as represented by the future King David and his followers, and he
allowed the Church, as represented by the priesthood serving the Ark at Shiloh,
to fall into the hands of unworthy men (the sons of Eli).
Some Christian democrats have argued that
the Holy Scriptures do not approve of kingship. This is not true. Kingship as
such is never condemned in Holy Scripture: rather, it is considered the norm of
political leadership. Let us consider the following passages: "In all, a
king is an advantage to a land with cultivated fields" (Ecclesiastes
5.8); “Blessed are thou, O land, when thou hast a king from a noble family” (Ecclesiastes
10.17); "The heart of the king is in the hand of God: He turns it wherever
He wills (Proverbs 21.1); "He sends kings upon thrones, and girds
their loins with a girdle" (Job 12.18); "He appoints kings and
removes them" (Daniel 2.21); "Thou, O king, art a king of
kings, to whom the God of heaven has given a powerful and honourable and strong
kingdom in every place where the children of men dwell" (Daniel
2.37-38); "Listen, therefore, O kings, and understand...; for your
dominion was given you from the Lord, and your sovereignty from the Most
High" (Wisdom 6.1,3).
The tragedy of the story of the first
Israelite king, Saul did not consist in the fact that the Israelites sought a
king for themselves - as we have seen, God did not condemn kingship as long as He
was recognised as the true King of kings. The sacrament of kingly anointing,
which was performed for the first time by the Prophet Samuel on Saul, gave the
earthly king the grace to serve the Heavenly King as his true Sovereign. The
tragedy consisted in the fact that the Israelites sought a king "like
[those of] the other nations around" them (Deuteronomy 17.14), - in
other words, a pagan-style king who would satisfy the people’s notions of
kingship rather than God’s, - and that this desire for a non-theocratic king
amounted to apostasy in the eyes of the Lord, the only true King of Israel.
Thus the Lord said to Samuel: "Listen to
the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected
you, but they have rejected Me, that I should rule over them... Now therefore
listen to their voice. However, protest solemnly to them, and show them the
manner of the king that shall reign over them" (I Kings 8.4-9). And
then Samuel painted for them the image of a harsh, totalitarian ruler of the
kind that was common in the Ancient World. These kings, as well as having total
political control over their subjects, were often worshipped by them as gods;
so that "kingship" as that was understood in the Ancient World meant
both the loss of political freedom and alienation from the true and living God.
As the subsequent history of Israel shows,
God in His mercy did not always send such totalitarian rulers upon His people,
and the best of the kings, such as David, Josiah and Hezekiah, were in
obedience to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Nevertheless, since kingship
was introduced into Israel from a desire to imitate the pagans, it was a
retrograde step. It represented the introduction of a second, worldly principle
of allegiance into what had been a society bound together by religious bonds
alone, a schism in the soul of the nation which, although seemingly inevitable
in the context of the times, meant the loss for ever of that pristine
simplicity which had characterised Israel up to then.
It is important to realise that the worldly principle was introduced
because the religious principle had grown weak. For the history of the kings
begins with the corruption of the priests, the sons of Eli, who were in
possession of the ark at the time of its capture. Thus for the kings'
subsequent oppression of the people the spiritual leaders had some
responsibility - and also the people, to whom the principle applied: "like
people, like priest" (Hosea 4.9).
And yet everything seemed to go well at
first. Samuel anointed Saul, saying: “The Lord anoints thee as ruler of His
inheritance of Israel, and you will rule over the people of the Lord and save
them from out of the hand of their enemies” (I Kings 10.1). Filled with
the Spirit of the Lord, Saul defeated the enemies of Israel, the Ammonites and
the Philistines. But
the schism which had been introduced into the life of the nation began to
express itself also in the life of their king, with tragic consequences. First,
before a major battle with the Philistines, the king made a sacrifice to the
Lord without waiting for Samuel. For this sin, the sin of “caesaropapism”, as
western scholars term it, the sin of the invasion of the Church's sphere by the
State, Samuel prophesied that the kingdom would be taken away from Saul and
given to a man after God's heart.
This example was also quoted by Patriarch
Nicon of Moscow: “Listen to what happened to Saul, the first king of Israel.
The Word of God said to Samuel: ‘I have repented that I sent Saul to the
kingdom, for he has ceased to follow Me.’ What did Saul do that God should
reject him? He, it is said, ‘did not follow My counsels’ (I Kings
15.10-28)…This is the Word of God, and not the word of man: ‘I made you ruler
over the tribes of Israel and anointed you to the kingdom of Israel, and not to
offer sacrifices and whole-burnt offerings,’ teaching for all future times that
the priesthood is higher than the kingdom, and that he who wishes for more
loses that which is his own.”[50]
Then Saul spared Agag, the king of the Amalekites, together with the
best of his livestock, instead of killing them all, as God had commanded. His
excuse was: "because I listened to the voice of the people" (I
Kings 15.20). In other words, he abdicated his God-given authority and became,
spiritually speaking, a democrat, listening to the people rather than to God.
And so Samuel said: "Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, the
Lord also shall reject thee from being king over Israel" (I Kings
15.23).
By modern standards, Saul's sins seem
small. However, they must be understood in the context of the previous history
of Israel, in which neither Moses nor any of the judges (except, perhaps,
Samson), had disobeyed the Lord. That is why Samuel said: "To obey is
better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as
the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as iniquity and idolatry" (I
Kings 15.22-23). For even a king can rebel, even a king is in obedience –
to the King of kings Who gave him his power. Only the despot feels that there
is nobody above him, that there is no law that he, too, must obey. His power is
absolute; whereas the power of the autocrat is limited, if not by man and the
laws of men, at any rate by the law of God.
The anointing of Saul raises the question:
are only those kings anointed with a visible anointing recognised by God? The
answer to this is: no. There is also an invisible anointing. Thus Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow writes: “The name ‘anointed’ is often given by the word of
God to kings in relation to the sacred and triumphant anointing which they receive,
in accordance with the Divine establishment, on their entering into possession
of their kingdom… But it is worthy of especial note that the word of God also
calls anointed some earthly masters who were never sanctified with a visible
anointing. Thus Isaiah, announcing the will of God concerning the king of the
Persians, says: ‘Thus says the Lord to His anointed one, Cyrus’ (Isaiah 45.1);
whereas this pagan king had not yet been born, and, on being born, did not know
the God of Israel, for which he was previously rebuked by God: ‘I girded thee,
though thou hast not known Me’ (Isaiah 45.5). But how then could this
same Cyrus at the same time be called the anointed of God? God Himself
explains this, when He prophesies about him through the same prophet: ‘I have
raised him up…: he shall build My city, and He shall let go My captives’ (Isaiah
45.13). Penetrate, O Christian, into the deep mystery of the powers that be!
Cyrus is a pagan king; Cyrus does not know the true God; however Cyrus is the anointed
of the true God. Why? Because God, Who “creates the future” (Isaiah
45.11), has appointed him to carry out His destiny concerning the
re-establishment of the chosen people of Israel; by this Divine thought,
so to speak, the Spirit anointed him before bringing him into the world:
and Cyrus, although he does not know by whom and for what he has been anointed,
is moved by a hidden anointing, and carries out the work of the Kingdom
of God in a pagan kingdom. How powerful is the anointing of God! How majestic
is the anointed one of God!”[51]
Thus we can trace the beginnings of the
division of Church and State to the fall from theocracy in Saul’s reign. The
original fall, that of Adam and Eve, divided the original unity of mankind into
the people of God (the Sethites) and the people of the devil (the Cainites).
The second fall, that of Saul, divided the people of God into the sacred and
the profane, the Church as the sacred aspect of the people's life and the State
as its profane, worldly aspect, a division that was only partly healed by the
Church’s anointing of the king, which made him a sacred person.
The Davidic Kingdom
The falling away of Saul led directly to
the first major schism in the history of the State of Israel. For after Saul's
death, the northern tribes supported the claim of Saul's surviving son to the
throne, while the southern tribes supported David. Although David suppressed
this rebellion, and although, for David's sake, the Lord did not allow a schism
during the reign of his son Solomon, it erupted again and became permanent
after Solomon's death...
The greatness of David lay in the fact that in his person he represented
the true autocrat, who both closed the schism between north and south, and
closed the schism that was just beginning to open up between the sacred and the
profane, the Church and the State. For while being unequalled as a political
leader, his zeal for the Church, and for the house of God, was also second to
none. For “like Gideon,” notes Johnson, “he grasped that [Israel] was indeed a
theocracy and not a normal state. Hence the king could never be an absolute
ruler on the usual oriental pattern. Nor, indeed, could the state, however
governed, be absolute either. It was inherent in Israelite law even at this stage
that, although everyone had responsibilities and duties to society as a whole,
society – or its representative, the king, or the state – could under no
circumstances possess unlimited authority over the individual. Only God could
do that. The Jews, unlike the Greeks and later the Romans, did not recognize
such concepts as city, state, community as abstracts with legal personalities
and rights and privileges. You could commit sins against man, and of course
against God; and these sins were crimes; but there was no such thing as a
crime/sin against the state.
“This raises a central dilemma about Israelite, later Judaic, religion
and its relationship with temporal power. The dilemma can be stated quite
simply: could the two institutions coexist, without one fatally weakening the
other?”[52]
The reign of David proved that State and Church could indeed coexist,
and not only not weaken each other, but strengthen each other. This is most
clearly seen in the central act of his reign, his conquest of Jerusalem and
establishment of the city of David on Zion as the capital and heart of the
Israelite kingdom. This was, on the one hand, an important political act,
strengthening the centralising power of the state; for as the last part of the
Holy Land to be conquered, Jerusalem did not belong to any of the twelve
tribes, which meant that its ruler, David, was elevated above all the tribes,
and above all earthly and factional interests. But, on the other hand, it was
also in important religious act; for by establishing his capital in Jerusalem,
David linked his kingship with the mysterious figure of Melchisedek, both
priest and king, who had blessed Abraham at Salem (Jerusalem). Thus David could
be seen as following in the footsteps of Abraham in receiving the blessing of
the priest-king in his own city.
Moreover, by bringing the ark of the covenant, the chief sanctum of the
priesthood, to a permanent resting-place in Zion, David showed that the Church
and the priesthood would find rest and protection on earth only under the aegis
of the Jewish autocracy. As John Bright writes: “The significance of this
action cannot be overestimated. It was David’s aim to make Jerusalem the
religious as well as the political capital of the realm. Through the Ark he
sought to link the newly created state to Israel’s ancient order as its
legitimate successor, and to advertise the state as the patron and protector of
the sacral institutions of the past. David showed himself far wiser than Saul.
Where Saul had neglected the Ark and driven its priesthood from him, David
established both Ark and priesthood in the official national shrine.” [53]
The Ark was a symbol of the Church; and it is significant that the birth
of the Church, at Pentecost, took place on Zion, beside David’s tomb (Acts
2). For David prefigured Christ not only in His role as anointed King of the
Jews, Who inherited “the throne of His father David” and made it eternal (Luke
1.32-33), but also as Sender of the Spirit and establisher of the New Testament
Church. For just as David brought the wanderings of the Ark to an end by giving
it a permanent resting-place in Zion, so Christ sent the Spirit into the upper
room in Zion, giving the Church a firm, visible beginning on earth.
Only it was not given to David (since he
had soiled his hands with blood and war) to complete the third act which was to
complete this symbolism, the building of the Temple to house the ark. That was
reserved for his son Solomon, who consecrated the Temple on the feast of
Tabernacles, the feast signifying the end of the wanderings of the children of
Israel in the desert and the ingathering of the harvest fruits. Such was the
splendour of Solomon’s reign that he also became a type of Christ, and of
Christ in His relationship to the Church.
Only whereas David forefigures Christ as
the Founder of the Church in Zion, Solomon, through his relationship with
foreign rulers in Egypt, Tyre and Sheba, and his expansion of Israel to its
greatest geographical extent and splendour, forefigures the Lord’s sending out
of the apostles into the Gentile world and the expansion of the Church
throughout the oikoumene. Thus David sang of his son as the type of Him
Whom “all the kings of the earth shall worship, and all the nations shall
serve” (Psalm 71.11). Moreover, at the very moment of the consecration
of the Temple, the wise Solomon looks forward to that time when the Jewish
Temple-worship will be abrogated and the true worship of God will not be
concentrated in Jerusalem or any single place, but the true worshippers will
worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4. 21-23): “for will God
indeed dwell on earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain
Thee: how much less this house that I have builded?” (I Kings 8.27).
But Solomon, while forefiguring Christ in
these ways, in other ways – his luxury, pagan wives and inclination to
idolatry, and vast military projects involving forced labour, - rather
displayed the image of the absolutist
pagan despot that the Prophet Samuel had warned against. And after his
death, the schism between Church and State that had begun to open up in Saul’s
reign, but had then been closed by David, began to reopen. The body politic was
divided between the two tribes of the southern kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam
and the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam. The
political schism was mirrored by a religious schism when Jeroboam built a rival
altar and priesthood to the altar and priesthood in Jerusalem.
Although the northern kingdom was accorded
some legitimacy by the prophets, this changed when King Ahab’s Tyrian wife
Jezabel tried to make Baalism the official religion of the State and began to
persecute those who resisted her. In this, probably the first specifically
religious persecution in history, the holy Prophet Elijah rose up in defence of
the true faith, working miracles in the sight of all and slaughtering the
priests of Baal and the soldiers whom Ahab sent against him. After his
ascension to heaven his disciple Elisha continued the struggle in a new and
highly significant way: he ordered the anointing of a new king, Jehu, in the
place of Ahab’s dynasty. Jehu led the counter-revolution which killed Jezabel
and restored the true faith to Israel. Here, then, we see the first application
of a very important principle, namely, that loyalty to autocracy is conditional
on its loyalty to the true faith.
Both Israel and Judah enjoyed a certain
recovery in the first half of the eighth century. However, idolatry continued,
combined with greed, injustice and debauchery. Then Israel descended into a
time of time of troubles and civil war in which many illegitimate rulers came
briefly to power and then disappeared – “they have set up kings, but not by
Me,” said the Lord through the Prophet Hosea (8.3). Instead of relying on the
Lord alone, Israel turned to the foreign powers, and even invaded its
brother-state of Judah. Therefore God permitted its conquest by despotic
Assyria and the deportation of its inhabitants to the east, which spiritually
speaking constituted a reversal of the exodus from Egypt – “now will He
remember their iniquity, and visit their sins; they shall return to Egypt” (Hosea
8.13).
Judah was spared for a time, though as a
vassal of Assyria. King Hezekiah reversed the syncretistic policies of Ahaz,
and Josiah – those of Manasseh, which attracted Divine protection. Thus in one
famous incident the angel of the Lord struck down 185,000 of the warriors of
Sennacherib in one night. This showed what could be done if faith was placed,
not in chariots and horses, but in the name of the Lord God (Psalm
19.7). Moreover, Judah even survived her tormentor Assyria, which, having been
used to punish the sins of the Jews, was then cast away (Isaiah 10.15).
In this period, as the people became
weaker in faith, the kingship became stronger. This was good if the king was
good, for his strength and piety could in part compensate for the weakness of
the Church. But if the king worshipped idols, then, like Ahaz, he might reign
during his lifetime, but after his death “they did not bring him into the
sepulchres of the kings of Israel” (II Chronicles 28.27). And if he did
not understand his role, and was not kept in his place by a good high priest,
then the results could be catastrophic.
Thus in the reign of King Ozias (Uzziah)
the kingship began to encroach on the altar. Blessed Jerome explains: “As long
as Zacharias the priest, surnamed the Understanding, was alive, Ozias pleased
God and entered His sanctuary with all reverence. But after Zacharias died,
desiring to make the religious offerings himself, he infringed upon the
priestly office, not so much piously as rashly. And when the Levites and the
other priests exclaimed against him: ‘Are you not Ozias, a king and not a
priest?’ he would not heed them, and straightway was smitten with leprosy in
his forehead, in accordance with the word of the priest, who said, ‘Lord, fill
their faces with shame’ (Psalm 82.17)… Now Ozias reigned fifty-two
years… After his death the prophet Isaias saw the vision [Isaiah 6.1]…
While the leprous king lived, and, so far as was in his power, was destroying
the priesthood, Isaias could not see the vision. As long as he reigned in
Judea, the prophet did not lift his eyes to heaven; celestial matters were not
revealed to him.”[54]
But betrayal did not only come from the
kings: it could come from the high priesthood. Thus the high priest and temple
treasurer in the time of King Hezekiah of Judah was called Somnas. Jewish
tradition relates that Somnas wished to betray the people of God and flee to
the Assyrian King Sennacherib; and St. Cyril of Alexandria says of him:
"On receiving the dignity of the high-priesthood, he abused it, going to
the extent of imprisoning everybody who contradicted him."[55]
Ozias and Somnas represent what have come
to be called in Christian times caesaropapism and papocaesarism, respectively –
distortion to the right and to the left of the ideal of Church-State symphony.
The prominent role played by the kings in
restoring religious purity foreshadowed the similarly prominent role that the
Orthodox autocrats would play in defence of the faith in New Testament times.
Thus when the Emperor Justinian pressed for the anathematization of the works
of three dead heretics, his supporters pointed to the fact that King Josiah had
repressed the living idolatrous priests, and burned the bones of the dead ones
upon the altar (II Kings 23.16).[56]
But the same spiritual sicknesses that had
afflicted Israel continued to undermine Judah, and so the Lord raised another
despot to punish her – the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the
Temple and exiled the people to Babylon in 586 BC. The Jews had hoped to rebel
against the Babylonians by appealing to the other despotic kingdom of Egypt.
But the Prophet Jeremiah rebuked them for their lack of faith. If God wills it,
he said, He can deliver the people on His own, without any human helpers, as He
delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrians in the time of Hezekiah.
However, national independence had become a higher priority for the Jews
than the true faith. The only remedy, therefore, was to humble their pride by
removing even their last remaining vestige of independence. Therefore “bring
your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and live! Why
will you die, you and your people, by the sword, by the famine, and by the
pestilence, as the Lord has spoken against the nation that will not serve the
king of Babylon… And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be
carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will
have peace…” (Jeremiah 27.12-13, 29.7).
Each of the main political systems is the
reflection of a particular religious (or or anti-religious) outlook on the
world. Greek democracy, which appeared at the time of the Babylonian captivity
of the Jews, was no exception. It was the expression of a particularly human
view of God or the gods.
J.M. Roberts writes: “Greek gods and
goddesses, for all their supernatural standing and power, are remarkably human.
They express the humanity-centred quality of later Greek civilization. Much as
it owed to Egypt and the East, Greek mythology and art usually presents its
gods as better, or worse, men and women, a world away from the monsters of
Assyria and Babylonia, or from Shiva the many-armed. Whoever is responsible,
this is a religious revolution; its converse was the implication that men could
be godlike. This is already apparent in Homer; perhaps he did as much as anyone
to order the Greek supernatural in this way and he does not give much space to
popular cults. He presents gods taking sides in the Trojan war in postures all
too human. They compete with one another; while Poseidon harries the hero of The
Odyssey, Athena takes his part. A later Greek critic grumbled that Homer
‘attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among
men: theft, adultery and deceit’. It was a world which operated much like the actual
world.”[57]
If the gods were such uninspiring figures,
it was hardly surprising that the kings (whether god-kings or not) should cease
to inspire awe. Hence the trend, apparent from Homeric times, to desacralise
kingship and remove it from the centre of political power. For if in religion
the universe was seen as “one great City of gods and men”, differing from each
other not in nature but in power, why should there be any greater differences
in the city of man? Just as gods can be punished by other gods, and men like
Heracles can become gods themselves, so in the politics of the city-state
rulers can be removed from power and those they ruled take their place. There
is no “divine right” of kings because even the gods do not have such
unambiguous rights over men.
As we pass from Homer to the fifth-century
poets and dramatists, the same religious humanism, tending to place men on a
par with the gods, is evident. Thus the conservative poet Pindar writes:
“Single is the race, single / of men and gods: / From a single mother we both
draw breath. / But a difference of power in everything / Keeps us apart.”
Although cosmic justice must always be satisfied, and the men who defy the laws
of the gods are always punished for their pride (hubris), nevertheless,
in the plays of Aeschylus, for example, the men who rebel (e.g. Prometheus),
are sometimes treated with greater sympathy than the gods against whom they
rebel, who are depicted like the tyrannical capitalists of nineteenth-century
Marxism. Even the conservative Sophocles puts a man-centred view of the
universe into the mouth of his characters, as in the chorus in Antigone:
“Many wonders there are, but none more wonderful / Than man, who rules the
ocean…/ He is master of the ageless earth, to his own will bending / The
immortal mother of gods.”
This tendency led, in Euripides, to open
scepticism about the gods. Thus Queen Hecabe in The Trojan Women
expresses scepticism about Zeus in very modern, almost Freudian tones: “You are
past our finding out – whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of
human beings”. “[Euripides’] gods and goddesses,” writes Michael Grant, “emerge
as demonic psychological forces – which the application of human reason cannot
possibly overcome – or as nasty seducers, or as figures of fun. Not
surprisingly, the playwright was denounced as impious and atheistic, and it was
true that under his scrutiny the plain man’s religion crumbled to pieces.”[58]
If the dramatists could take such liberties, in spite of the fact that their dramas were staged in the context of a religious festival, it is not to be wondered at that the philosophers went still further. Thus Protagoras, the earliest of the sophists, wrote: “I know nothing about the gods, whether they are or are not, or what their shapes are. For many things make certain knowledge impossible – the obscurity of the theme and the shortness of human life.” And again: “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not.” Protagoras did not question the moral foundations of society in a thorough-going way, preferring to think that men should obey the institutions of society, which had been given them by the gods.[59] Thus he did not take the final step in the democratic argument, which consists in cutting the bond between human institutions and law (nomoV) and the Divine order of things (jusiV) – a step that was not taken unequivocally until the French revolution in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, his example shows that already in the fifth century, when the Greek city-states were by no means all democratic, and monarchical and aristocratic models were still plentiful, the movement towards democracy went hand in hand with religious scepticism.[60]
Herodotus on the State
It is in the context of this gradual loss of faith in the official “Olympian” religion that Democracy arose. But just as Athens was not the whole of Greece, so Democracy was not the only form of government to be observed among the Greek city-states. In Sicily and on the coast of Asia Minor Monarchy still flourished; and on mainland Europe mixed constitutions including elements of all three forms of government were also to be found, most notably in Sparta.
This naturally led to a debate on which
form was the best; and we find one debate on this subject recorded by the
“Father of History”, Herodotus, who placed it, surprisingly, in the court of
the Persian King Darius. Was this merely a literary device (although Herodotus,
who had already encountered this objection, insisted that he was telling the
truth)? Or did this indicate that the Despotism of Persia tolerated a freer
spirit of inquiry and debate than is generally supposed? We do not know. But in
any case the debate – the first of its kind in western literature - is worth
quoting at length:-
“The first speaker was Otanes, and his
theme was to recommend the establishment in Persia of popular government. ‘I
think,’ he said, ‘that the time has passed for any one man amongst us to have
absolute power. Monarchy is neither pleasant nor good. You know to what lengths
the pride of power carried Cambyses, and you have personal experience of the
effect of the same thing in the conduct of the Magus [who had rebelled against
Cambyses]. How can one fit monarchy into any sound system of ethics, when it
allows a man to do whatever he likes without any responsibility or control?
Even the best of men raised to such a position would be bound to change for the
worse – he could not possibly see things as he used to do. The typical vices of
a monarch are envy and pride; envy, because it is a natural human weakness, and
pride, because excessive wealth and power lead to the delusion that he is
something more than a man. These two vices are the root cause of all
wickedness: both lead to acts of savage and unnatural violence. Absolute power
ought, by rights, to preclude envy on the principle that the man who possesses
it has also at command everything he could wish for; but in fact it is not so,
as the behaviour of kings to their subjects proves: they are jealous of the
best of them merely for continuing to live, and take pleasure in the worst; and
no one is readier than a king to listen to tale-bearers. A king, again, is the
most inconsistent of men; show him reasonably respect, and he is angry because
you do not abase yourself before his majesty; abase yourself, and he hates you
for being a toady. But the worst of all remains to be said – he breaks up the
structure of ancient tradition and law, forces women to serve his pleasure, and
puts men to death without trial. Contrast this with the rule of the people:
first, it has the finest of all names to describe it – equality under the law (isonomia); and,
secondly, the people in power do none of the things that monarchs do. Under a
government of the people a magistrate is appointed by lot and is held
responsible for his conduct in office, and all questions are put up for open
debate. For these reasons I propose that we do away with the monarchy, and
raise the people to power; for the state and the people are synonymous terms.’”[61]
Otanes’ main thesis is true as regards
Despotic power, but false as regards Autocratic power, as we shall see; for
Autocracy’s rule over the people is not absolute in that it is wielded only in
“symphony” with the Church, which serves as its conscience and restraining
power. The theme of “equality under the law” is also familiar from modern
Democracy; it was soon to be subjected to penetrating criticism by Plato and
Aristotle. As for the assertion that “the people in power do none of the things
that monarchs do”, this was to be disproved even sooner by the experience of
Athenian Democracy in the war with Sparta.
“Otanes was followed by Megabyzus, who
recommended the principle of oligarchy in the following words: ‘Insofar as
Otanes spoke in favour of abolishing monarchy, I agree with him; but he is
wrong in asking us to transfer political power to the people. The masses are a
feckless lot – nowhere will you find more ignorance or irresponsibility or
violence. It would be an intolerable thing to escape the murderous caprice of a
king, only to be caught by the equally wanton brutality of the rabble. A king
does at least act consciously and deliberately; but the mob does not. Indeed how
should it, when it has never been taught what is right and proper, and has no
knowledge of its own about such things? The masses handle affairs without
thought; all they can do is to rush blindly into politics like a river in
flood. As for the people, then, let them govern Persia's enemies; but let us
ourselves choose a certain number of the best men in the country, and give them
political power. We personally shall be amongst them, and it is only natural to
suppose that the best men will produce the best policy.’
“Darius was the third to speak. ‘I
support,’ he said, ‘all Megabyzus’ remarks about the masses but I do not agree
with what he said of oligarchy. Take the three forms of government we are
considering – democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy – and suppose each of them to
be the best of its kind; I maintain that the third is greatly preferable to the
other two. One ruler: it is impossible to improve upon that – provided he is
the best. His judgement will be in keeping with his character; his control of
the people will be beyond reproach; his measures against enemies and traitors
will be kept secret more easily than under other forms of government. In an
oligarchy, the fact that a number of men are competing for distinction in the
public service cannot but lead to violent personal feuds; each of them wants to
get to the top, and to see his own proposals carried; so they quarrel. Personal
quarrels lead to civil wars, and then to bloodshed; and from that state of
affairs the only way out is a return to monarchy – a clear proof that monarchy
is best. Again, in a democracy, malpractices are bound to occur; in this case,
however, corrupt dealings in government services lead not to private feuds, but
to close personal associations, the men responsible for them putting their
heads together and mutually supporting one another. And so it goes on, until
somebody or other comes forward as the people’s champion and breaks up the
cliques which are out for their own interests. This wins him the admiration of
the mob, and as a result he soon finds himself entrusted with absolute power –
all of which is another proof that the best form of government is monarchy. To
sum up: where did we get our freedom from, and who gave it us? Is it the result
of democracy, or of oligarchy, or of monarchy? We were set free by one man, and
therefore I propose that we should preserve that form of government, and,
further, that we should refrain from changing ancient ways, which have served
as well in the past. To do so would not profit us.’”[62]
This to a western ear paradoxical argument
that monarchy actually delivers freedom – freedom from the scourge of civil
war, especially, but freedom in other senses, too – actually has strong
historical evidence in its favour. Several of the Greek kings were summoned to
power by the people in order to deliver them from oppressive aristocratic rule.
Darius himself freed the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, allowing them to
go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Augustus, the first Roman emperor,
freed the Romans from the ravages of civil war. So did St. Constantine, the
first Christian Roman emperor, who also granted them religious freedom. Rurik,
the first Russian king, was summoned from abroad to deliver the Russians from
the misery and oppression that their “freedom” had subjected them to. Tsar
Nicolas II freed Serbia and the Yugoslavs from Austro-Hungarian Despotism, and
died trying to save his people from the worst of all despotisms, Communism…
Of course, these men were exceptional
rulers: examples of monarchs who enslaved their subjects rather than liberating
them are easy to find. So the problem of finding the good monarch – or,
at any rate, of finding a monarchical type of government which is good for the
people even if the monarch himself is bad – remains. But the argument in favour
of monarchy as put into the mouth of an oriental despot by a Greek democratic
historian also remains valid in its essential point. It should remind us that
Greek historical and philosophical thought was more often critical of democracy
than in favour of it. Indeed, in its greatest historian, Thucydides, and its
greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, we find some of the most
penetrating criticisms of democracy ever penned…
Thucydides on the State
The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian
war, and the many negative phenomena that war threw up, led not only to a
slackening in the creative impulse that had created Periclean Athens, but also,
eventually, to a questioning of the superiority of Democracy over other forms
of government.
The first and most obvious defect it
revealed was that democracy tends to divide rather than unite men – at any rate
so long as there are no stronger bonds uniting them than were to be found in
Classical Greece. The Greeks had united to defeat Persia early in the fifth
century B.C., and this had provided the stimulus for the cultural efflorescence
of Periclean Athens. But this was both the first and the last instance of such
unity. For the next one hundred and fifty years, until Alexander the Great
reimposed despotism on the city-states, they were almost continually at war
with each other. Nor was this disunity manifest only between
city-states: within them traitors were also frequent (the Athenian
Alcibiades is the most famous example).
Evidently, attachment to the idea of
democracy does not necessarily go together with attachment to the idea
of the Nation, with patriotism and loyalty. This fact elicited
Aristotle’s famous distinction between behaviour that is characteristic of
democracy and behaviour that is conducive to the survival of Democracy.
The same dilemma was to confront democracy
in its struggle with communism in the twentieth century, when large numbers of
citizens of the western democracies were prepared to work secretly (and not so
secretly) for the triumph of the most evil despotism yet seen in history.
This element of selfish, destructive
individualism is described by Roberts: “Greek democracy… was far from being
dominated, as is ours, by the mythology of cooperativeness, and cheerfully paid
a larger price in destructiveness than would be welcomed today. There was a
blatant competitiveness in Greek life apparent from the Homeric poems onwards.
Greeks admired men who won and though men should strive to win. The consequent
release of human power was colossal, but also dangerous. The ideal expressed in
the much-used word [areth] which we inadequately translate as ‘virtue’ illustrates this. When
Greeks used it, they meant that people were able, strong, quick-witted, just as
much as just, principled, or virtuous in a modern sense. Homer’s hero,
Odysseus, frequently behaved like a rogue, but he is brave and clever and he
succeeds; he is therefore admirable. To show such quality was good; it did not
matter that the social cost might sometimes be high. The Greek was concerned
with ‘face’; his culture taught him to avoid shame rather than guilt and the
fear of shame was never far from the fear of public evidence of guilt. Some of
the explanation of the bitterness of faction in Greek politics lies here; it
was a price willingly paid.”[63]
Another defect was the fact that while, as
Aristotle said, democracy arose from the belief that men who are equally free
should be equal in all respects, in practice democracy could be as cruel and
unjust and imperialistic as any despotism. This may be linked with the
irrational, Dionysian strain in Greek religion, which was sometimes accompanied
by the ecstatic tearing apart of animals. It was exemplified in the Athenians’
mass slaughter of the inhabitants of the little island of Melos simply because
they did not want to become part of the Athenian empire.
The dialogue between the Melians and
Athenians was recorded by Thucydides:-
“Athenians. You know as well as we
do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of
justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong
do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept…
What we shall do now is to show you that
it is for the good of our own empire that we are here and that it is for the
preservation of your city that we shall say what we are going to say. We do not
want any trouble in bringing you into our empire, and we want you to be spared
for the good both of yourselves and of ourselves.
“Melians. And how could it be just
as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?
“Athenians. You, by giving in,
would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would be able
to profit from you.
“Melians. So you would not agree to
our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?
“Athenians. No, because it is not
so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were
on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of
weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.
“Melians. Is that yours subjects’
idea of fair play – that no distinction should be made between people who are
quite unconnected with you and people who are mostly your own colonists or else
rebels whom you have conquered?
“Athenians. So far as right and
wrong are concerned they think that there is no difference between the two,
that those who still preserve their independence do so because they are strong,
and that if we fail to attack them it is because we are afraid.”[64]
When the Melians expressed their faith in
the gods to save them “because we are standing for what is right against what
is wrong”, the Athenians replied: “So far as the favour of the gods is
concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. Our aims and our
actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with
the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our
knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of
nature to rule whatever one can…”[65]
Finally, all the Melian males of military
age were slaughtered, and all the women and children were driven into slavery.
Thus in the end the ideal of freedom which had given birth to Athenian
Democracy proved weaker than Realpolitik and the concrete examples
provided by the Olympian gods and the Dionysian frenzies.
The Melian episode demonstrates that even
the most just and democratic of constitutions are powerless to prevent their
citizens from descending to the depths of barbarism unless the egoism of human
nature itself is overcome, which in turn depends crucially on the quality of
the religion that the citizens profess.
Plato and Aristotle on the State
According to Plato in his most famous
work, The Republic, the end of the state is happiness, which is achieved
if it produces justice, since justice is the condition of happiness. It was
therefore greatly to the discredit of Athenian democracy that it condemned to
death its finest citizen and Plato’s own teacher, Socrates. This tragic fact,
combined with the fact of the defeat of democratic Athens at the hands of
aristocratic Sparta in the Peloponnesian war, decisively influenced Plato
against democracy[66]
and in favour of that ideal state which would place the most just of its
citizens, not in the place of execution and dishonour, but at the head of the
corner of the whole state system.
We shall come to Plato’s ideal in a
moment. Let us consider first why democracy was for him, not simply not the
ideal, but a long way from the ideal, being the penultimate stage in the
degeneration of the state from the ideal to a meritocracy to an oligarchy to a
democracy, and finally to a tyranny.
The process of degradation is
approximately as follows. A meritocracy – the highest form of government yet
found in Greece, and located, if anywhere, in Sparta - tends to be corrupted,
not so much by power, as by money (Spartan discipline collapsed when exposed to
luxury). This leads to a sharp division between the rich and the poor. Then the
poor rise up against the rich and bring in democracy, which is “feeble in every
respect, and unable to do either any great good or any great evil.”[67]
For democracy’s great weakness is its lack of discipline: “You are not obliged
to be in authority, however competent you may be, or to submit to authority, if
you do not like it; you need not fight when your fellow-citizens are at war,
nor remain at peace when they do, unless you want peace…A wonderfully pleasant
life, surely – for the moment.”[68]
“For the moment” only, because a State founded on such indiscipline is inherently
unstable. Indiscipline leads to excess, which in turn leads to the need to
reimpose discipline through despotism, the worst of all evils. For Plato, in
short, democracy is bad is because it is unstable, and paves the way for the
worst, which is despotism or tyranny.
Plato compares the democratic state to a
ship, the people to the captain and the politicians to the crew: “Suppose the
following to be the state of affairs on board a ship or ships. The captain is
larger and stronger than any of the crew, but a bit deaf and short-sighted, and
similarly limited in seamanship. The crew are all quarrelling with each other
about how to navigate the ship, each thinking he ought to be at the helm; they
have never learned the art of navigation and cannot say that anyone ever taught
it them, or that they spent any time studying it studying it; indeed they say
it can’t be taught and are ready to murder anyone who says it can [i.e.
Socrates, who recommended the study of wisdom]. They spend all their time
milling round the captain and doing all they can to get him to give them the
helm. If one faction is more successful than another, their rivals may kill
them and throw them overboard, lay out the honest captain with drugs or drink
or in some other way, take control of the ship, help themselves to what’s on
board, and turn the voyage into the sort of drunken pleasure-cruise you would
expect. Finally, they reserve their admiration for the man who knows how to
lend a hand in controlling the captain by force or fraud; they praise his
seamanship and navigation and knowledge of the sea and condemn everyone else as
useless. They have no idea that the true navigator must study the seasons of
the year, the sky, the stars, the winds and all the other subjects appropriate
to his profession if he is to be really fit to control a ship; and they think
that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such
control (whether or not they want it exercised) and that there’s no such thing
as an art of navigation. With all this going on aboard aren’t the sailors on
any such ship bound to regard the true navigator as a word-spinner and a
star-gazer, of no use to them at all?”[69]
David Held comments on this metaphor, and
summarises Plato’s views on democracy, as follows: “The ‘true navigator’
denotes the minority who, equipped with the necessary skill and expertise, has
the strongest claim to rule legitimately. For the people.. conduct their
affairs on impulse, sentiment and prejudice. They have neither the experience
nor the knowledge for sound navigation, that is, political judgement. In
addition, the only leaders they are capable of admiring are sycophants:
‘politicians… are duly honoured.. [if] they profess themselves the people’s
friends’ (The Republic, p. 376). All who ‘mix with the crowd and want to
be popular with it’ can be directly ‘compared… to the sailors’ (p. 283). There
can be no proper leadership in a democracy; leaders depend on popular favour
and they will, accordingly, act to sustain their own popularity and their own
positions. Political leadership is enfeebled by acquiescence to popular demands
and by the basing of political strategy on what can be ‘sold’. Careful
judgements, difficult decisions, uncomfortable options, unpleasant truths will
of necessity be generally avoided. Democracy marginalises the wise.
“The claims of liberty and political
equality are, furthermore, inconsistent with the maintenance of authority,
order and stability. When individuals are free to do as they life and demand equal
rights irrespective of their capacities and contributions, the result in the
short run will be the creation of an attractively diverse society. However, in
the long run the effect is an indulgence of desire and a permissiveness that
erodes respect for political and moral authority. The younger no longer fear
and respect their teachers; they constantly challenge their elders and the
latter ‘ape the young’ (The Republic, p. 383). In short, ‘the minds of
citizens become so sensitive that the
least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable, till finally… in their
determination to have no master they disregard all laws…’ (p. 384). ‘Insolence’
is called ‘good breeding, licence liberty, extravagance generosity, and
shamelessness courage’ (p. 380). A false ‘equality of pleasures’ leads
‘democratic man’ to live from day to day. Accordingly, social cohesion is
threatened, political life becomes more and more fragmented and politics
becomes riddled with factional disputes. Intensive conflict between sectional
interests inevitably follows as each faction presses for its own advantage
rather than that of the state as a whole. A comprehensive commitment to the
good of the community and social justice becomes impossible.
“This state of affairs inevitably leads to
endless intrigue, manoeuvring and political instability: a politics of
unbridled desire and ambition. All involved claim to represent the interests of
the community, but all in fact represent themselves and a selfish lust for
power. Those with resources, whether from wealth or a position of authority,
will, Plato thought, inevitably find themselves under attack; and the conflict
between rich and poor will become particularly acute. In these circumstances,
the disintegration of democracy is, he contended, likely. ‘Any extreme is
likely to produce a violent reaction… so from an extreme of liberty one is
likely to get an extreme of subjection’ (The Republic, p. 385). In the
struggle between factions, leaders are put forward to advance particular
causes, and it is relatively easy for these popular leaders to demand ‘a
personal bodyguard’ to preserve themselves against attack. With such assistance
the popular champion is a short step from grasping ‘the reins of state’. As
democracy plunges into dissension and conflict, popular champions can be seen
to offer clarity of vision, firm directions and the promise to quell all
opposition. It becomes a tempting option to support the tyrant of one’s own
choice. But, of course, once possessed of state power tyrants have a habit of
attending solely to themselves.”[70]
Plato’s solution to the problem of
statecraft was the elevation to leadership in the state of a philosopher-king,
who would neither be dominated by personal ambitions, like the conventional
tyrant, nor swayed by demagogues and short-term, factional interests, like the
Athenian democracy. This king would have to be a philosopher, since he would
frame the laws in accordance, not with passion or factional interest, but with
the idea of the eternal Good. His “executive branch” would be highly educated
and disciplined guardians, who would not make bad mistakes since they would
carry out the supremely wise intentions of the king and would be carefully
screened from many of the temptations of life.
Plato had the insight to see that society
could be held together in justice only by aiming at a goal higher than itself,
the contemplation of the Good. He saw, in other words, that the problem of
politics is soluble only in the religious domain; and while he was realistic
enough to understand that the majority of men could not be religious in this
sense, he hoped that at any rate one man could be trained to reach that level,
and, having attained a position of supreme power in the state, spread that
religious ideal downwards.[71]
“Until philosophers are kings,” he wrote, “or the kings and princes of this
world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and
wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the
exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have
rest from their evils, - no, nor the human race, as I believe, - and then only
will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.”[72]
This represents a major advance on all
previous pagan systems of statehood or political philosophies. For while all
the states of pagan antiquity were religious, they located the object of their
worship within the political system, deifying the state itself, or, more
usually, its ruler. But Plato rejected every form of man-worship, since it
inevitably led to despotism. Contrary to what many of his critics who see him
as the godfather of totalitarianism imply, he was fully aware of the fact that,
as Lord Acton put it much later, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely”.[73] But he was also
enough of a “Platonist”, as it were, to know that the end of human society must
transcend human society.
Having said that, one cannot that there
are elements of utopianism – and worse - in Plato’s system. Thus his approach
to statecraft presupposed either that existing kings could be educated in the
Good (which Plato tried, but failed to do in Syracuse) or that there was a
rational method of detecting the true lovers of wisdom and then promoting them
to the height of power.
However, as Bertrand Russell noted, this
is easier said than done: “Even if we supposed that there is such a thing as
‘wisdom,’ is there any form of constitution which will give the government to
the wise? It is clear that majorities, like general councils, may err, and in
fact have erred. Aristocracies are not always wise; kings are often foolish;
Popes, in spite of infallibility, have committed grievous errors. Would anybody
advocate entrusting the government to university graduates, or even to doctors
of divinity? Or to men who, having been born poor, have made great fortunes?…
It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable
training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this
would turn out to be a party question. The problem of finding a collection of
‘wise’ men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one…”[74]
To be fair to Plato, he was quite aware of
the difficulty of finding a man fit to be philosopher-king. He emphasised
training in character as well as intellect, and acknowledged, as we have seen,
that such a man, if found and elevated to power, could still be corrupted by
his position. What his philosophy lacked was the idea that the Good Itself
could come down to the human level and inspire Its chosen one with wisdom and
justice.
The problem here was that the scepticism
engendered by the all-too-human antics of the Olympian gods revealed its
corrosive effect on Plato, as on all subsequent Greek philosophers. Greek
religion recognised that the gods could come down to men and inspire them, but
the gods who did this, like Dionysius, were hardly the wise, soberly rational
beings who alone could inspire wise and soberly rational statecraft. As for the
enthusiasms of the Orphic rites, these took place only in a condition that was
the exact opposite of sobriety and rationality. So Wisdom could not come from
the gods.
But what if there was another divinity
higher than these vengeful lechers and demonic buffoons, a divinity that would
incorporate, as it were, the eternal ideas of the Good, the True and the
Beautiful? Now Plato did indeed come to some such conception of the One God.
But this was an impersonal God who did not interfere in the affairs of men. Man
may attempt to reach the eternal ideas and God through a rigorous programme of
intellectual training and ascetic endeavour. But that Divine Wisdom should
Himself bow down the heavens and manifest Himself to men was an idea that had to
await the coming of Christianity…
So Plato turned to the most successful
State known to him from the Greek world, Sparta, and constructed his utopia at
least partly in its likeness. Thus society was to be divided into the common
people, the soldiers and the guardians. All life, including personal and
religious life, was to be subordinated to the needs of the State. In economics
there was to be a thoroughgoing communism, with no private property, Women and
children were to be held in common, marriages arranged on eugenic lines with
compulsory abortion and infanticide of the unfit. There was to be a rigorous
censorship of the literature and the arts, and the equivalent of the modern
inquisition and concentration camps. Lying was to be the prerogative of the
government, which would invent a religious myth – the myth that “all men are
children of the same mother who has produced men of gold, silver and bronze
corresponding to the three different classes into which Plato divides his idea
community.”[75] This myth would
reconcile each class to its place in society.
It is here that that the charge that Plato
is an intellectual ancestor of the totalitarian philosophies of the twentieth
century is seen to have some weight. For truly, in trying to avert the failings
of democracy, he veered strongly towards the despotism that he feared above
all. Plato’s path to heaven – the ideal state of the philosopher-king - was
paved with good intentions. But it led just as surely to hell as the Near
Eastern despotisms that all Greeks despised. It was all for the sake of
“justice” – that is, in his conception, each man doing what he is best fitted
to do, for the sake of the common good. But, being based on human reasoning and
human efforts alone, it became the model for that supremely unjust system that
we see in Soviet and Chinese communism. Moreover, it anticipated communism in
its subordination of truth and religion to expediency, and in its use of the
lie for the sake of the survival of the State.
Aristotle avoided the extremes of Plato,
dismissing his communism on the grounds that it would lead to disputes and
inefficiency. He agreed with him that the best constitution would be a monarchy
ruled by the wisest of men. But since such men are rare at best, other alternatives
had to be considered.
Aristotle divided political systems into
three pairs of opposites: the three “good” forms of monarchy, aristocracy and politeia,
and the three “bad” forms of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (or what Polybius
was later to call “ochlocracy”, “rule by the mob).[76]
The fact that Aristotle was prepared to consider the possibility of a good kind
of monarchy may have something to do with the fact that one of his pupils was
the future King of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, whose father, Philip took
advantage of the perennial disunity of the Greek city-states to assume a de
facto dominion over them. However, Aristotle’s favourite form of government
was politeia, in which, in Copleston’s words, “there naturally exists a
warlike multitude able to obey and rule in turn by a law which gives office to
the well-to-do according to their desert”.[77]
Like Plato, Aristotle was highly critical
of democracy. He defined it in terms of two basic principles, the first of
which was liberty. “People constantly make this statement, implying that
only in this constitution do men share in liberty; for every democracy, they
say, has liberty for its aim. ‘Ruling and being ruled in turn,’ is one element
in liberty, and the democratic idea of justice is in fact numerical liberty,
not equality based on merit; and when this idea of what is just prevails, the
multitude must be sovereign, and whatever the majority decides is final and
constitutes justice. For, they say, there must be equality for each of the
citizens. The result is that in democracies the poor have more sovereign power
than the rich; for they are more numerous, and the decisions of the majority
are sovereign. So this is one mark of liberty, one which all democrats make a
definitive principle of their constitution.”
The second principle was licence,
“to live as you like. For this, they say, is a function of being free, since
its opposite, living not as you like, is the function of one enslaved.”[78]
The basic problem here, Aristotle argued, following Plato, was that the first
principle conflicted with the second. For licence must be restrained if
liberty is to survive. Once again, history was the teacher: licence had led
to Athens’ defeat at the hands of the more disciplined Spartans. Not only must
restraints be placed upon individual citizens so that they do not restrict each
other’s liberty. The people as a whole must give up some of its “rights” to a
higher authority if the state is to acquire a consistent, rational direction.
Not only liberty, but equality, too, must
be curtailed – for the greater benefit of all. Aristotle pointed out that “the
revolutionary state of mind is largely brought about by one-sided notions of
justice – democrats thinking that men who are equally free should be equal in
everything, oligarchs thinking that because men are unequal in wealth they
should be unequal in everything.”[79]
What is most valuable in Aristotle’s
politics is that “in his eyes the end of the State and the end of the
individual coincide, not in the sense that the individual should be entirely
absorbed in the State but in the sense that the State will prosper when the
individual citizens are good, when they attain their own proper ideal. The only
real guarantee of the stability and prosperity of the State is the moral
goodness and integrity of the citizens, while conversely, unless the State is
good, the citizens will not become good.”[80]
In this respect Aristotle was faithful to the thought of Plato, who wrote:
“Governments vary as the dispositions of men vary. Or do you suppose that
political constitutions are made out of rocks or trees, and not out of the
dispositions of their citizens which turn the scale and draw everything in
their own direction?[81]
This attitude was inherited by the Romans,
who knew “that good laws make good men and good men make good laws. The good
laws which were Rome’s internal security, and the good arms which made her
neighbours fear her, were the Roman character writ large. The Greeks might be
very good at talking about the connection between good character and good
government, but the Romans did not have to bother much about talking about it
because they were its living proof.”[82]
However, the close link that Aristotle
postulated to exist between the kinds of government and the character of people
led him to some dubious conclusions. Thus democracy existed in Greece,
according to him, because the Greeks were a superior breed of men, capable of
reason. Barbarians were inferior – which is why they were ruled by despots.
Similarly, women could not take part in democratic government because the
directive faculty of reason, while existing in them, was “inoperative”. And
slaves also could not participate because they did not have the faculty of
reason.[83]
A more fundamental criticism of
Aristotle’s politics, and one that was to bring him into implicit conflict with
Christian theorists, was his view that “the state is teleologically autonomous:
the polis has no ends outside itself. A polis ought to be self-sufficiently
rule-bound for it to need no law except its own.”[84]
For Aristotle it was only in political life that man achieved the fulfilment of
his potentialities – the good life was inconceivable outside the Greek
city-state. Thus “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need
because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god; he is no
part of a polis.”[85]
This highlights perhaps the fundamental
difference between almost all pagan theorising on politics (with the partial
exception of Plato’s) and the Christian attitude. For the pagans the life of
the well-ordered state was the ultimate aim; it did not exist for any higher
purpose. For the Christian, on the other hand, political life is simply a means
to an end, an end that is other-worldly and transcends politics completely.
This is not to say that Aristotle’s
politics was irreligious in a general sense. As Zyzykin points out, when
Aristotle wrote that prwton h peri twn qewn epimeleia, that is, ”the first duty of the State is concern over the gods”,
he recognised that politics cannot be divorced from religion.[86]
But Greek religion, as we have seen, was a very this-worldly species of belief,
in which the gods were seen as simply particularly powerful players in human
affairs. The gods had to be placated, otherwise humans would suffer; but the
accent was always on happiness, eudaimonia, in this life. Even Plato,
for all his idealism, subordinated religious myth to the needs of the state and
the happiness of people in this life; and Aristotle, for all his philosophical
belief in an “unmoved Mover”, was a less other-worldly thinker than Plato.
At the same time, it would be wrong to
suppose that Greek democracy was as irreligious and individualistic as modern
democracy is. As Hugh Bowden writes: “Modern democracy is seen as a secular
form of government and is an alternative to religious fundamentalism, taking
its authority from the will of the human majority, not the word of god or gods.
In Ancient Greece matters were very different…
“Within the city-state religious rituals
entered into all areas of life… There was no emphasis in the Greek world on the
freedom of the individual, if that conflicted with obligations to larger
groups… Religion was bound up with the political process. High political
offices carried religious as well as civic and military duties. Thus the two
kings of Sparta were generals and also priests of Zeus...
“Plato was no supporter of democracy,
because he thought it allowed the wrong sort of people to have access to
office. However, in the Laws he advocates the use of the lot as a means
of selecting candidates for some offices, specifically because it is a method
that puts the decision in the hands of the gods. Furthermore, where there are
issues which Plato considers beyond his powers to legislate for, he suggests
that these should be referred to Delphi. For Plato, then, the use of apparently
random selection, and the consultation of oracles was a preferable alternative
to popular decision-making, because the gods were more to be trusted than the
people. This view was not limited to anti-democratic philosophers…
“Greek city-states took oracles seriously,
and saw them as the mouthpieces of the gods who supported order and
civilisation. Although it was the citizen assemblies that made decisions, they
accepted the authority of the gods, and saw the working of the divine hand
where we might see the action of chance…”[87]
Alexander, the Stoics and the Demise of
Democracy
Classical Greek Democracy, undermined not
only by the disunity, instability and licence highlighted by the critiques of
Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, but also by its narrow nationalism
and pride in relation to the “barbarian” world, ended up by succumbing to that
same barbarian world – first, the “Greek barbarism” of Macedon, and then the
iron-clad savagery of Rome. And if the glittering civilisation made possible by
Classical Greek democracy eventually made captives of its captors culturally
speaking, politically and morally speaking it had been decisively defeated. Its
demise left civilised mankind dazzled, but still thirsting for the ideal
polity.
Most of the essential issues relating to
democracy were raised in the Classical Greek period. So when the West turned
again to democratic ideas in the early modern period, it was to the Greek
classical writers that they turned for inspiration. Thus Marx and Engels turned
to Aristotle’s description of democracy when they planned the Paris Commune of
1871[88],
while Plato’s ideas about philosopher-kings and guardians, child-rearing,
censorship and education found a strong echo in the “people’s democracies” of
communist Eastern Europe.
In the intervening period, only two major
ideas made a significant contribution to thinking on democracy (and politics in
general). One was Christianity, which we shall discuss in detail in the
next part. The second was Stoicism, which extended the notion of who was
entitled to equality and democracy beyond the narrow circle of free male Greeks
to every human being.
Copleston has summarised the Stoic
cosmopolitan idea as follows: “Every man is naturally a social being, and to
live in society is a dictate of reason. But reason is the common essential
nature of all men: hence there is but one Law for all men and one Fatherland.
The division of mankind into warring States is absurd: the wise man is a
citizen, not of this or that particular State, but of the World. From this
foundation it follows that all men have a claim to our goodwill, even slaves
having their rights and even enemies having a right to our mercy and
forgiveness.”[89]
Another important element in Stoicism,
which it took from Classical Greek religion, was the belief in fate. Stoicism
took the idea of fate, and as it were made a virtue of it. Since men cannot
control their fate, virtue lies in accepting fate as the expression of the
Divine Reason that runs through the whole universe. Moreover, virtue should be
practised for its own sake, and not for any benefits it might bring, because
fate may thwart our calculations. This attitude led to a more passive, dutiful
approach to politics than had been fashionable in the Classical Greek period.
The political event that elicited this
important broadening in political thought was the rise of the Hellenistic
empire founded by Alexander the Great. Alexander, writes Paul Johnson, “had
created his empire as an ideal: he wanted to fuse the races and he ‘ordered all
men to regard the world as their country… good men as their kin, bad men as
foreigners’. Isocrates argued that ‘the designation ‘Hellene’ is no longer a
matter of descent but of attitude’; he thought Greeks by education had better
titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth’.”[90]
Alexander’s career is full of ironies.
Setting out, in his famous expedition against the Persians, to free the Greek
democratic city-states on the Eastern Aegean seaboard from tyranny, and to take
final revenge on the Persians for their failed invasion of Greece in the fifth
century, Alexander not only replaced Persian despotism with another, hardly
less cruel one, but depopulated his homeland of Macedonia and destroyed
democracy in its European heartland. In spreading Greek civilisation throughout
the East, he betrayed its greatest ideal, the dignity of man, by making himself
into a god (the son of Ammon-Zeus) and forcing his own Greek soldiers to
perform an eastern-style act of proskynesis to their fellow man.[91]
He married the daughter of Darius, proclaimed himself heir to the Persian “King
of kings” and caused the satraps of Bithynia, Cappadocia and Armenia to pay
homage to him as to a typical eastern despot.[92]
Thus Alexander, like the deus ex machina of a Greek tragedy, brought the
curtain down on Classical Greek civilisation, merging it with its great rival,
the despotic civilisations of the East.
Alexander’s successor-kingdoms of the
Ptolemies and Seleucids went still further in an orientalising direction. Thus
Roberts writes: “’Soter’, as Ptolemy I was called, means ‘Saviour’. The
Seleucids allowed themselves to be worshipped, but the Ptolemies outdid them;
they took over the divine status and prestige of the Pharaohs (and practice,
too, to the extent of marrying their sisters).”[93]
Classical Greek civilisation began with the
experience of liberation from despotism; it ended with the admission that
political liberation without individual, spiritual liberation cannot
last. It was born in the matrix of a religion whose gods were little more than
super-powerful human beings, with all the vices and frailty of fallen humanity;
it died as its philosophers sought to free themselves entirely from the bonds
of the flesh and enter a heaven of eternal, incorruptible ideas, stoically
doing their duty in the world of men but knowing that their true nature lay in
the world of ideas. It was born in the conviction that despotism is hubris
which is bound to be struck down by fate; it died as the result of its own hubris,
swallowed up in the kind of despotism it had itself despised and in opposition
to which it had defined itself.
And yet this death only went to
demonstrate the truth of the scripture that unless a seed falls into the earth
and dies it cannot bring forth good fruit (John 12.24). For, in the new
political circumstances of empire, and through the new religious prism, first
of Stoicism and then of Christianity, Greek democratic thought did bring forth
fruit.
For, as McClelland perceptively argues:
“The case for Alexander is that he made certain political ideas possible which
had never had a chance within the morally confining walls of the polis
classically conceived. Prominent among these is the idea of a multi-racial
state. The idea comes down to us not from any self-conscious ‘theory’ but from
a story about a mutiny in Alexander’s army at Opis on the Tigris, and it is a
story worth the re-telling. Discontent among the Macedonian veterans had come
to a head for reasons we do not know, but their grievances were clear enough:
non-Macedonians, that is Persians, had been let into the crack cavalry regiment
the Companions of Alexander, had been given commands which involved ordering
Macedonians about, and had been granted the (Persian) favour of greeting
Alexander ‘with a kiss’. The Macedonians formed up and stated their grievances,
whereupon Alexander lost his temper, threatened to pension them off back to
Macedonia, and distributed the vacant commands among the Persians. When both
sides had simmered down, the soldiers came back to their allegiance, Alexander
granted the Macedonians the favour of the kiss, and he promised to forget about
the mutiny. But not quite. Alexander ordered up a feast to celebrate the
reconciliation, and the religious honours were done by the priests of the
Macedonians and the magi of the Persians. Alexander himself prayed for omonoia
[unanimity] concord, and persuaded 10,000 of his Macedonian veterans to marry
their Asiatic concubines…
“The plea for omonoia has come to
be recognised as a kind of turning point in the history of the way men thought
about politics in the Greek world, and, by extension, in the western world in
general. The ancient Greeks were racist in theory and practice in something
like the modern sense. They divided the world, as Aristotle did, between Greeks
and the rest, and their fundamental category of social explanation was race.
Race determined at bottom how civilised a life a man was capable of living. The
civilised life was, of course, only liveable in a properly organised
city-state. Only barbarians could live in a nation (ethnos) or in
something as inchoate and meaningless as an empire. The Greeks also seem to
have had the modern racist’s habit of stereotyping, which simply means going
from the general to the particular: barbarians are uncivilised, therefore this
barbarian is uncivilised. The race question was inevitably tied up with
slavery, though is by no means clear that the ancient Greeks had a ‘bad
conscience’ about slavery, as some have claimed. From time to time, they may
have felt badly about enslaving fellow Greeks, and that was probably the reason
why thinkers like Aristotle troubled themselves with questions about who was
most suitable for slavery and who the least. Low-born barbarians born into
slavery were always at the tope of the list of good slave material. Most Greeks
probably believed that without ever thinking about it much.
“The Macedonians may have lacked the
subtlety of the Hellenes, but Alexander was no fool. Whatever the Macedonians
may have thought to themselves about the races of the East, Alexander would
have been asking for trouble if he had arrogantly proclaimed Macedonian racial
superiority over conquered peoples, and it would have caused a snigger or two
back in Hellas. What better way for the conqueror of a multi-racial empire to
conduct himself than in the name of human brotherhood? Imperialism then becomes
a gathering-in of the nations rather than the imposition of one nation’s will
upon another and this thought follows from the empire-builder’s real desire:
secretly, he expects to be obeyed for love. This was Alexander’s way of showing
that he was not a tyrant…”[94]
In Alexander’s empire, therefore,
something like a creative fusion of the despotic and democratic principles took
place. It was an empire in form like the pagan empires of old, with a god-king
possessing in principle unlimited power. But the Greek idea of the godlike
possibilities of ordinary men able to direct their own lives in rationality and
freedom passed like a new, more humane leaven through the heartless old lump of
despotism, cutting down the idea that rulers had of themselves (to the extent
that they were Greek in culture), while raising the idea that the ruled had of
themselves (to the extent, again, that they were Greek in culture).
Conversely, the eastern experience of many
nations living in something like equality with each other under one rule - we
remember the honour granted to the Jewish Prophet Daniel by the Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persian King Cyrus’ command that the Jews be allowed to
return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple - expanded the consciousness of the
Greeks beyond the narrow horizons of the individual city-state or the one
civilisation of the Greeks to the universal community and civilisation of all
mankind (or, at any rate, of the oikoumene), and from the narrow worship
of Athene of Athens or Diana of the Ephesians to the One God Who created all
men, endowed them all with reason and freewill and brought them all
together under one single dominion. Thus, as McClelland writes, “polis
had given way to cosmopolis. Henceforward, men were going to have to
stop asking themselves what it meant to be a citizen of a city, and begin to
ask what it meant to be a citizen of the world…”[95]
Although the political schism between
Israel and Judah had been “healed” by the disappearance of the northern kingdom
of Israel, and then the political passions of Judah had been at least partially
quenched by the exile to Babylon, the spiritual “schism in the soul”, the
schism between faithfulness to the God of Israel and the opposite tendency,
remained. For while a part of the people repented and strengthened their
spiritual unity, forming the core of those who returned to Jerusalem under
Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple, a still larger part stayed among the pagans –
although the book of Esther shows that piety was not completely
extinguished among those Jews who stayed in Persia.
However, the restoration of the autocracy
under Zerubbabel, brief though it was (he was the last ruler of the Davidic
line before Christ), was very important as demonstrating the power of God to
transform the political situation – even with the aid of pagan rulers, such as
Cyrus, whose service to the people earned him the title of the anointed of the
Lord (Isaiah 45.1).
We know little about the period that
followed the rebuilding of the Temple in 515. In spite of an attempt to revive
observance of the law under Ezra and Nehemiah, piety declined, especially after
the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander the Great. Not that he harmed
Judah: on the contrary, he even gave equal citizenship to the Jews of
Alexandria. The trouble began only after Alexander’s death, when “his servants
[the Ptolemys and Seleucids] bore rule every one in his place. And.. they all
put crowns upon themselves: so did their sons after them many years: and evils
were multiplied in the earth…” (I Maccabees 1.7-9). The image of
“putting crowns upon themselves” reminds us of the difference between the true,
autocratic king, whose crown is given him by God, and the false, despotic king,
who takes the crown for himself in a self-willed manner.
The pagan idea of kingship was only one of
the aspects of pagan culture that now began to penetrate Jewry, leading to
conflicts between conservative, law-based and reformist, Hellenist-influenced
factions among the people.
In 175 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a god-king
on the Middle Eastern despotic model, came to power. As US Senator Joseph
Lieberman points out, “The ruler’s name hinted at imminent struggle; Antiochus
added the title to his name because it meant, ‘A Divine Manifestation’. That
underscored the primary difference between the ancient Greeks and Jews: The
Greeks glorified the magnificence of man, while the Jews measured man’s
greatness through his partnership with the Creator.
“For the children of Israel, man was
created in the image of God; for the ancient Greeks, the gods were created in
the likeness of man.”[96]
Johnson has developed this distinction,
one of the most important in the history of ideas: "The Jews drew an
absolute distinction between human and divine. The Greeks constantly elevated
the human – they were Promethean – and lowered the divine. To them gods were
much more than revered and successful ancestors; most men sprang from gods.
Hence it was not for them a great step to deify a monarch, and they began to do
so as soon as they embraced the orient [where, as we have seen, kings were
commonly deified]. Why should not a man of destiny undergo apotheosis?
Aristotle, Alexander's tutor, argued in his Politics: ‘If there exists
in a state an individual so pre-eminent in virtue that neither the virtue nor
the political capacity of all the other citizens is comparable with his... such
a man should be rated as a god among men.' Needless to say, such notions were
totally unacceptable to Jews of any kind. Indeed, there was never any
possibility of a conflation between Judaism and Greek religion as such; what
the reformers [the Hellenising Jews] wanted was for Judaism to universalize
itself by pervading Greek culture; and that meant embracing the polis.”[97]
Antiochus was soon acting, not as
“Epiphanes”, “divine manifestation”, but as his enemies called him, “Epimanes”,
“raving madman”. In his eagerness to speed up the Hellenization of Judaea, he
removed the lawful Jewish high-priest Onias and replaced him by his brother
Jason, who proceeded to introduce pagan Hellenistic practices. After a struggle
for power between Jason and Menelaus, another hellenizing high-priest,
Antiochus invaded Jerusalem in 168. He plundered the Temple, led many of the
people away into slavery, banned circumcision, Sabbath observance and the
reading of the law, declared that the Temple should be dedicated to the worship
of Zeus, that pigs should be sacrificed on the altar, and that non-Jews should
be permitted to worship there with Jews. Those who resisted him were killed.
Lieberman continues: “The Jews resisted
Antiochus’ edict and worshipped in secret. The conflict festered before finally
coming to a head in Modi’in, a small village outside Jerusalem, where a priest
named Matityahu rose up against a Greek soldier who dared sacrifice a swine on
the village altar. Soon thereafter, Antiochus’ army swept through Jerusalem and
ravaged the Holy Temple, torturing and murdering many Jews along the way.”[98]
However, a liberation movement led by
Matityahu (Mattathias) and his sons (known as the Maccabees after the third
son, Judas Maccabeus) succeeded in expelling the Greeks from Israel, purifying
the Temple and restoring the True Faith. This victory was celebrated in the
feast of Hannukah, or Purification. It remains a clear example of how, in
certain extreme circumstances when the faith is under direct attack, God blesses
the taking up of arms in defence of the faith.
This great victory of Autocracy over
Despotism was not sustained, however. A true autocracy on the Davidic model was
not re-established, for the Maccabees (or Hasmoneans, as they were later called,
after Matityahu’s surname, Hasmon) illegally combined the roles of king and
high priest (they were, in any case, of the tribe of Levi, so they could only
be priests, not kings). Thus the last of the Maccabee brothers, Simon, was
described as “great high-priest, military commissioner, and leader of the Jews”
(I Maccabees 13.42).
Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus, writes
Johnson, “accepted as literal truth that the whole of Palestine was the divine
inheritance of the Jewish nation, and that it was not merely his right but his
duty to conquer it. To do this he created a modern army of mercenaries.
Moreover, the conquest, like Joshua’s, had to extirpate foreign cults and
heterodox sects, and if necessary slaughter those who clung to them. John’s
army trampled down Samaria and razed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. He
stormed, after a year’s siege, the city of Samaria itself, and ‘he demolished
it entirely, and brought streams to it to drown it, for he dug ditches to turn
it into floods and water-meadows; he even took away the very marks which showed
a city had been there.’ In the same way he pillaged and burned the Greek city
of Scythopolis. John’s wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city
populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking. The province of
Idumaea was conquered and the inhabitants of its two main cities, Adora and
Marissa, were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused.
“Alexander Jannaeus, John’s son, took this
policy of expansion and forcible conversion still further. He invaded the
territory of the Decapolis, the league of ten Greek-speaking cities grouped
around the Jordan. He swept into Nabataea and took Petra, the ‘rose-red city
half as old as time’. He moved into the province of Gaulanitis. The Hasmoneans
pushed north into the Galilee and Syria, west to the coast, south and east into
the desert. Behind their frontiers they eliminated pockets of non-Jewish people
by conversion, massacre or expulsion. The Jewish nation thus expanded vastly
and rapidly in terms of territory and population, but in doing so it absorbed
large numbers of people who, though nominally Jewish, were also half Hellenized
and in many cases were fundamentally pagans or even savages.
“Moreover, in becoming rulers, kings and
conquerors, the Hasmoneans suffered the corruptions of power. John Hyrcanus
seems to have retained a reasonably high reputation in Jewish traditional.
Josephus says he was considered by God ‘worthy of the three greatest
privileges: government of the nation, the dignity of the high-priesthood, and
the gift of prophecy’. But Alexander Jannaeus, according to the evidence we
have, turned into a despot and a monster, and among his victims were the pious
Jews from whom his family had once drawn its strength. Like any ruler in the
Near East at this time, he was influenced by the predominantly Greek modes and
came to despise some of the most exotic, and to Greek barbarous, aspects of the
Yahweh cult. As high-priest, celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem,
he refused to perform the libation ceremony, according to ritual custom, and
the pious Jews pelted him with lemons. ‘At this,’ Josephus wrote, ‘he was in a
rage, and slew of them about six thousand.’ Alexander, in fact, found himself
like his hated predecessors, Jason and Menelaus, facing an internal revolt of
rigorists. Josephus says the civil war lasted six years and cost 50,000 Jewish
lives.
“It is from this time we first hear of the
Perushim or Pharisees, ‘those who separated themselves’, a religious
party which repudiated the royal religious establishment, with its high-priest,
Sadducee aristocrats and the Sanhedrin, and placed religious observance before
Jewish nationalism. Rabbinic sources record the struggle between the monarch and
this group, which was a social and economic as well as a religious clash. As
Josephus noted, ‘the Sadducees draw their following only from the rich, and the
people do not support them, whereas the Pharisees have popular allies.’ He
relates that at the end of the civil war, Alexander returned in triumph to
Jerusalem, with many of his Jewish enemies among his captives and then ’did one
of the most barbarous actions in the world… for as he was feasting with his
concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of
them to be crucified, and while they were living he ordered the throats of
their children and wives to be cut before their eyes’…
“Hence, when Alexander died in 76 BC,
after he had (according to Josephus) ‘fallen into a distemper by hard
drinking’, the Jewish world was bitterly divided and, though much enlarged,
included many half-Jews whose devotion to the Torah was selective and suspect…”[99]
It was at this point that the shadow of
Roman power (with whom the Maccabees had maintained friendly relations) began
to fall across the scene, taking the place of the already severely weakened
Seleucids. In 64 the Roman general Pompey arrived in Antioch and deposed the
last of the Seleucid kings. The two sons of Alexander Jannaeus, Hyrcanus II and
Aristobulus II, were fighting each other for the kingship and high priesthood
at this time, and they both appealed to Pompey for help. The Pharisees also
sent a delegation to him; but they asked him to abolish the monarchy in Judaea,
since they said it was contrary to their traditions. In 63 Pompey, taking the
side of Hyrcanus, captured Jerusalem and, to the horror of the Jews, entered
the Holy of Holies.
Although Hyrcanus II, remained formally in
power, under Pompey and then Julius Caesar, the real ruler of Judaea, with the
title of Roman procurator, became an Idumaean named Antipater. His son, who was
placed in charge of Galilee, was named Herod, known in history as “the Great”,
the first persecutor of Christianity, and the man who finally destroyed the
Israelite autocracy…
In 43 BC, Antipater was poisoned by the
Jewish nationalist party. However, this did not hinder his son Herod’s rise.
Although the Sanhedrin forced him temporarily to flee Palestine, his friendship
with Mark Antony ensured his return. Thus when the Hasmonean Antigonus with the
help of the Parthians conquered Jerusalem in 37, Herod was in Rome being feted
by Antony and Octavian. In a triumphant procession they led him to the Capitol,
“and there, as A. Paryaev writes, “amid sacrifices to Jupiter of the Capitol
that were impermissible for a Jew, and which caused deep consternation among
the Jews, he was formally raised onto the Jewish throne.”[100]
Three years later, after a bloody civil war in which the Jews supported
Antigonus, Herod was installed in Jerusalem with the aid of the Roman legions.
Now Herod, as we have seen, was not only
not of the line of David: he was not even a Jew by birth, being a descendant of
the Edomites (Idumeans).[101] Therefore
pious Jews must inevitably have wondered how the promises made by God to David
about the eternity of his dynasty could be fulfilled: “The Lord hath sworn in
truth unto David, and He will not annul it: Of the fruit of thy loins will I
set upon thy throne. If thy sons keep My covenant and these testimonies which I
will teach them, their sons also shall sit for ever on thy throne. For the Lord
hath elected Sion, He hath chosen her to be a habitation for Himself. This is
My rest for ever and ever; her will I dwell for I have chosen her” (Psalm
131.11-15). Moreover, there was another prophecy, by the Patriarch Jacob: “The
sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet,
until Shiloh come; and unto Him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis
49.10). Now that the sceptre, in the form of the Jewish kingship, appeared to
have departed from Judah, was it not time for the appearance of Shiloh?[102]
Again, there was another Old Testament prophecy indicating the imminent coming
of the Messiah - the “seventy times seven” prophecy of Daniel (9.24-27). This
declared that from the rebuilding of Jerusalem, which took place in 453 BC,
until the coming of Christ there would be sixty-nine weeks of years, that is
483 years – which brings us to 30 AD, the beginning of Jesus Christ’s ministry.
Then, in the last week of years “the Anointed One shall be destroyed” – that
is, Christ will be crucified.[103]
Herod tried to remedy the fault of his non-Jewish blood by marrying the
Hasmonean princess Mariamne, the grand-daughter of King Aristobulus and
Hyrcanus II on her mother’s side. He also rebuilt the Temple with unparalleled
splendour. But his Jewish faith was superficial. When Octavian declared himself
divine, he built a temple in his honour in Samaria, renaming it Sebaste, the
Greek equivalent of the emperor’ new title, Augustus. And he built so many
fortresses, gymnasia, temples and other buildings that Palestine under Herod
(Octavian made him procurator of Syria, too) became the most powerful Jewish
kingdom since Solomon and the wonder of the East.
Under Herod, the Jews, though under Roman
dominion, reached the peak of their power and influence in the ancient world.
Johnson writes: “The number of Jews, both born and converts, expanded everywhere,
so that, according to one medieval tradition, there were at the time of the
Claudian recensus in 48 AD some 6,944,000 Jews within the confines of the
empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and
elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there
were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000
lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 per cent of the Roman
empire.”[104]
But of course the essence of the kingdom
was quite different from that of David and Solomon. Apart from the fact that
the real ruler was Rome, and that outside Jerusalem itself Herod showed himself
to be a thorough-going pagan (for example, he rebuilt the temple of Apollo in
Rhodes), the whole direction of Herod’s rule was to destroy the last remnants
of the Jewish Church and monarchy. Thus he killed most of the Sanhedrin and all
of the Hasmonean family, not excluding his own wife Mariamne and their sons
Alexander and Aristobulus. He was, in fact, the closest type of the Antichrist
in Old Testament history…
“The last years of the life of Herod,”
writes Paryaev, “were simply nightmarish. Feeling that his subjects profoundly
hated him, haunted at night by visions of his slaughtered wife, sons and all
the Hasmoneans, and conscious that his life, in spite of all its external
successes and superficial splendour, was just a series of horrors, Herod
finally lost his mental stability and was seized by some kind of furious
madness.”[105] The final product of his madness was his attempt to kill the Lord Jesus Christ and his slaughter of the 14,000 innocents of Bethlehem (it was his son, Herod Antipas, who killed John the Baptist).
Perhaps the clearest sign of the degeneration of the Jews under Herod
was the behaviour of the Pharisees. We have seen that they had led the movement
against Hellenising influences in the first century BC, and were zealots of the
purity of the law. But just as the Maccabee movement for renewal of the true
faith degenerated into its opposite, so did that of the Pharisees. They even
once sent a delegation to Rome asking for the establishment of a republic
in Judaea under the sovereignty of Rome.[106]
Moreover, they supported Herod, and, like him, persecuted Christ, the True King
of the Jews, leading to the abandonment of the Jewish people by God.
Theocracy, Autocracy and the Jews
The people of God can be ruled by none
other than God, or by a man directly appointed by God. Rule by God alone is Theocracy.
Rule by a man appointed by God is sometimes also called Theocracy, but it is
more called, in Lev Tikhomirov’s phrase, “delegated Theocracy”, or Autocracy.
A true autocrat is a man who is appointed
to rule by God and who strives to rule in accordance with the true faith and
the commandments of God. Under these conditions God blesses one-man rule. It is
God Himself Who places true autocrats on their thrones. For "He sends
kings upon thrones, and girds their loins with a girdle" (Job
12.18); "He appoints kings and removes them" (Daniel 2.21);
"Thou, O king, art a king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given a
powerful and honourable and strong kingdom in every place where the children of
men dwell" (Daniel 2.37-38); "Listen, therefore, O kings, and
understand....; for your dominion was given you from the Lord, and your
sovereignty from the Most High" (Wisdom 6.1,3).
As Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow
demonstrates, the superiority of the Israelite Autocracy makes of it a model
for all nations in all times: “It is in the family that we must seek the
beginnings and first model of authority and submission, which are later opened
out in the large family which is the State. The father is.. the first master..
but since the authority of the father was not created by the father himself and
was not given to him by the son, but came into being with man from Him Who
created man, it is revealed that the deepest source and the highest principle
of the first power, and consequently of every later power among men, is in God –
the Creator of man. From Him ‘every family in heaven and on earth is named’ (Ephesians
3.15). Later, when sons of sons became a people and peoples, and from the
family there grew the State, which was too vast for the natural authority of a
father, God gave this authority a new artificial image and a new name in the
person of the King, and thus by His wisdom kings rule (Proverbs 8.15).
In the times of ignorance, when people had forgotten their Creator… God,
together with His other mysteries, also presented the mystery of the origin of
the powers that be before the eyes of the world, even in a sensory image, in
the form of the Hebrew people whom He had chosen for Himself; that is: in the
Patriarch Abraham He miraculously renewed the ability to be a father and gradually
produced from him a tribe, a people and a kingdom; He Himself guided the
patriarchs of this tribe; He Himself raised judges and leaders for this people;
He Himself ruled over this kingdom (I Kings 8.7). Finally, He Himself
enthroned kings over them, continuing to work miraculous signs over the kings,
too. The Highest rules over the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He wills.
‘The Kingdom is the Lord’s and He Himself is sovereign of the nations’ (Psalm
21.29). ‘The power of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and in due time He
will set over it one that is profitable’ (Sirach 10.4).”
“A non-Russian would perhaps ask me now:
why do I look on that which was established by God for one people (the Hebrews)
and promised to one King (David) as on a general law for Kings and peoples? I
would have no difficulty in replying: because the law proceeding from the
goodness and wisdom of God is without doubt the perfect law; and why not
suggest the perfect law for all? Or are you thinking of inventing a law which
would be more perfect than the law proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of
God?”
“As heaven is indisputably better than the
earth, and the heavenly than the earthly, it is similarly indisputable that the
best on earth must be recognised to be that which was built on it in the image
of the heavenly, as was said to the God-seer Moses: ‘Look thou that thou make
them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount’ (Exodus
25.40). Accordingly God established a King on earth in to the image of His
single rule in the heavens; He arranged for an autocratic King on earth in the
image of His heavenly omnipotence; and ... He placed an hereditary King on
earth in the image of His royal immutability. Let us not go into the sphere of
the speculations and controversies in which certain people – who trust in their
own wisdom more than others – work on the invention… of better, as they
suppose, principles for the transfiguration of human societies… But so far they
have not in any place or time created such a quiet and peaceful life… They can
shake ancient States, but they cannot create anything firm… They languish under
the fatherly and reasonable authority of the King and introduce the blind and
cruel power of the mob and the interminable disputes of those who seek power.
They deceive people in affirming that they will lead them to liberty; in actual
fact they are drawing them from lawful freedom to self-will, so as later to
subject them to oppression with full right. Rather than their self-made theorising
they should study the royal truth from the history of the peoples and kingdoms…
which was written, not out of human passion, but by the holy prophets of God,
that is – from the history of the people of God which was from of old chosen
and ruled by God. This history shows that the best and most useful for human
societies is done not by people, but by a person, not by many, but by one.
Thus: What government gave the Hebrew people statehood and the law? One man –
Moses. What government dealt with the conquest of the promised land and the
distribution of the tribes of the Hebrew people on it? One man – Joshua the son
of Nun. During the time of the Judges one man saved the whole people from
enemies and evils. But since the power was not uninterrupted, but was cut off
with the death of each judge, with each cutting off of one-man rule the people
descended into chaos, piety diminished, and idol-worship and immorality spread;
then there followed woes and enslavement to other peoples. And in explanation
of these disorders and woes in the people the sacred chronicler says that ‘in
those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was pleasing in his
own eyes’ (Judges 21.25). Again there appeared one man, Samuel, who was
fully empowered by the strength of prayer and the prophetic gift; and the
people was protected from enemies, the disorders ceased, and piety triumphed.
Then, to establish uninterrupted one-man rule, God established a King in His
people. And such kings as David, Josaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah present images
of how successfully an autocratic Majesty can and must serve for the
glorification of the Heavenly King in the earthly kingdom of men, and together
with that – for the strengthening and preservation of true prosperity in his
people… And during the times of the new grace the All-seeing Providence of God
deigned to call the one man Constantine, and in Russia the one man Vladimir,
who in apostolic manner enlightened their pagan kingdoms with the light of the
faith of Christ an thereby established unshakeable foundations for their might.
Blessed is that people and State in which, in a single, universal, all-moving
focus there stands, as the sun in the universe, a King, who freely limits his
unlimited autocracy by the will of the Heavenly King, and by the wisdom that
comes from God.”[107]
The people can survive under other
systems of government than autocracy, but not prosper. Thus Hieromonk
Dionysius writes: “The Church can live for some time even in conditions of
persecution, just as a dying man can remain among the living for a certain
period of time. But just as the latter desires deliverance from his illness, so
the Church has always wished for such a situation in which there will be
flocks, not individuals, of those being saved – and this can be attained only
if she is fenced around by the power of ‘him who restraineth’”[108]
– that is, the Autocracy.
In the Old
Testament the loss of autocracy, and its replacement by foreign despotic rule,
was a sign of the wrath of God. The classic example was the Babylonian
captivity. However, God’s purpose in subjecting His people to foreign rule was
always ultimately positive – to draw the people back to Him through repentance.
The sign of the remission of God’s wrath and the manifestation of His mercy and
forgiveness was His return of autocratic rule, as when the Jews returned from
Babylon to Jerusalem under Zerubbabel.
It is possible for the people of God to
serve a foreign despotic ruler with a good conscience – as Joseph served
Pharaoh, and Daniel served Darius. Indeed, it may be sinful to rebel against
such rule, as it was sinful for King Zedekiah to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar.
However, such service is possible only so long as the foreign ruler does not
compel the people of God to worship his false gods or transgress the law of the
one true God. If he does, then resistance – at any rate of the passive kind -
becomes obligatory, as when the Three Holy Children refused to worship
Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol. And in certain circumstances even armed rebellion
may be blessed by God, as when the Maccabees rebelled against Antiochus
Epiphanes. Even if the ruler was originally a true autocrat, if he later turns
against the God of Israel he must be resisted, as when the Prophet Elijah
rebelled against Ahab and Jezabel, and the Prophet Elisha anointed Jehu as king
in their stead.
The essential differences between the
autocrat and the absolutist despot are, first: the autocrat, having been
appointed by God and being in obedience to Him, will never ascribe divine
honours to himself; whereas the despot either commands that he be worshipped as
a god, or acts as if he were God by rejecting any criticism of his actions
based on the law of God. Secondly, the autocrat will always respect the
priesthood and will yield it authority in the sphere of Divine worship and the
spiritual life generally, whereas the despot will attempt to subject the
priesthood to himself, perhaps by making himself high priest. Although the
relationship between the autocracy and the priesthood is not clearly defined in
the Old Testament, the embryo of the Christian symphony of powers is already to
be seen in the relationships between Moses and Aaron, David and Abiathar, and
Zerubbabel and Joshua. And encroachment by the autocrat on the priestly
prerogatives is already severely punished, as when King Uzziah of Judah
(otherwise a good king) was struck with leprosy for burning incense upon the
altar of incense (II Chronicles 27.16-19). It was the Hasmonean
combination of the roles of king and high-priest, and the degeneration that
followed, that finally ushered in the end of the Israelite autocracy.
The autocrat can sin in either of two
directions: by becoming a despot on the pagan model, or by becoming a democrat
on the Classical Greek model. For, on the one hand, autocratic power is not
arbitrary, but subject to a higher power, that of God – as Metropolitan
Philaret puts it, the king “freely limits his unlimited autocracy by the will
of the Heavenly King”. And on the other, it neither derives from the people nor
can it be abolished by the people.
The final test of a true autocracy is its
recognition of, and obedience to, the true Ruler, the King of kings, when He
comes to take possession of His Kingdom. The Jews failed this test. As Blessed
Theophylactus writes: “Some expected and waited for Christ to come and be their
King. But these Jews did not want to be ruled by a king and so they slew this
holy man, Zacharias, who confirmed that the Virgin had given birth and that the
Christ had been born Who would be their King. But they rejected Him because
they did not want to live under a king”.[109]
The Jews both crucified their True King,
God Himself, and said to Pilate: "We have no other king but Caesar" (John
19.15). At that moment they became no different spiritually from the other
pagan peoples; for, like the pagans, they had come to recognise a mere man, the
Roman emperor, as higher than God Himself. As St. John Chrysostom writes: “Here
they declined the Kingdom of Christ and called to themselves that of Caesar.”[110]
What made this apostasy worse was the fact
that they were not compelled to it by any despotic decree. Pilate not only did
not demand this recognition of Caesar from them, but had said of Christ
– “Behold your king” (John 19.14), and had then ordered the sign, “Jesus
of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, to be nailed above the cross. The Jews had in
effect carried out both a democratic revolution against their True King,
and, at the same time, a despotic obeisance to a false god-king. Thus
did the City of God on earth become the City of Man, and the stronghold of
Satan. Thus did the original sin committed under Saul, when the people of God
sought a king who would rule them "like all the nations", reap its final
wages in submission to "the god of this world" and the spiritual
ruler of the pagan nations.
In 66-70 AD the Jews rebelled against Rome
and were ruthlessly suppressed; perhaps a million Jews were killed, and the
Temple was destroyed. In 130, the Emperor Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia
Capitolina after himself, and planned to erect a temple to Jupiter on the site
of the Temple. In 135, after another rebellion under Bar Koseba was crushed
with the deaths of 580,000 Jewish soldiers, the city and ruins were ploughed
over and a completely Hellenic city built in its place…
The history of Israel provides us with the
answer to a question which neither the despots of the east nor the democrats of
the west could answer, the question, namely: what is the end of the State? This
question can be divided into two further questions: what is the end, in the
sense of the purpose of the State? And what is the end, in the sense of
the destroyer of the State, that which brings the State to an end? The two
questions are logically as well as linguistically related. For that which
brings the State to an end is its failure to carry out the end or purpose for
which it was created by God.
Now it will be recalled that the origin of
the State lies in its ability to save men from death – in other words, its survival
value. Man as an individual, and even in small groups or families, cannot
survive for long; he has to combine into larger groups that are self-sufficient
in order to provide for his basic needs and protect himself against external
enemies. That is why Aristotle defined the State as a large community that is
“nearly or completely self-sufficient”.[111]
However, for the Classical Greeks, and in particular for Aristotle, the
State had a positive as well as a negative purpose. It was not distinguished
from the smaller units of the family or the village simply because it was
better able to guarantee survival. It was qualitatively as well as
quantitatively distinct from them insofar as it enabled man to fulfil his
potential as a human being. Hence Aristotle’s famous definition of man as
“a political animal”, that is, an animal who reaches his full potential only by
living in “polities” (literally: “cities”, for city states were the dominant
form of political organisation in the Greece of Aristotle’s time). For it is
only in states that man is able to develop that free spirit of rational inquiry
that enables him to know the True, the Beautiful and the Good. It is only in
states that he has the leisure and the education to pursue such uniquely human
activities as art, science, organised religion and philosophy, which constitute
his true happiness, eudaemonia.
The problem was that Greek democracy did
not attain its positive end, that is, happiness, and even failed to attain its
negative end, survival. First, Athenian democracy was defeated by the Spartan
dual kingship and aristocracy, a kind of political organisation that
theoretically should have been much inferior to democracy. And then the Greek city-states
as a whole were defeated by, and absorbed into, Alexander the Great’s despotic
empire, a kind of political organisation which the Greek philosophers agreed
was the worst and most irrational of all.
Israel was a completely different kind of
state: a theocracy that evolved in time into an autocracy. The distinguishing
mark of this kind of state is that its origin is not the need to survive but the
call of God to leave the existing states and their settled way of life and
enter the desert on the way to the Promised Land. Here physical
survival may actually be more difficult than before: but the prize is spiritual
survival, life with God. Thus we may say that the negative end of Israelite
autocracy is the avoidance of spiritual death (Babylon, Egypt, the kingdom of
sin and death), and its positive end is the attainment of spiritual life (the
Promised Land, Israel, the Kingdom of righteousness and life).
It follows that since neither spiritual
life nor spiritual death are political categories attainable by purely
political means, the end of the autocratic state is not in fact political at
all as the word “political” is usually understood, but religious. Its aim is
not happiness in this life, the peace and prosperity of its citizens in this world,
but the blessedness of its citizens in the world to come, in which there will
be no politics and no states, but only Christ and the Church. Thus the
end of the state is beyond itself, to serve the Church, which alone can lead
the people into the Promised Land.
The Israelite state survived so long as it
placed spiritual ends above purely political ones and was faithful to the Lord
God of Israel. When it faltered in this faithfulness it was punished by God
with exile and suffering. When it faltered to such a degree that it killed its
true King, the Lord Jesus Christ, it was finally destroyed.
But since the purpose of God remained
unchanging, the salvation of men for the Kingdom of heaven, autocracy was
re-established on a still firmer and wider base, in the very state that had
destroyed the old Israel – Rome…
2.
OLD ROME
Render unto Caesar the
things which are Caesar’s,
And unto God the things
that are God’s.
Matthew 22.21.
There is
no power that is not from God,
And the
powers that be have been instituted by God.
Romans 13.1.
Christ and the Roman Empire
When the Lord Jesus Christ, the King of
heaven, was born as a man on earth, He was immediately enrolled as a citizen of
an earthly kingdom, the Roman Empire. In fact, His birth, which marked the
beginning of the Eternal Kingdom of God on earth, coincided almost exactly with
the birth of the Roman Empire under its first emperor, Augustus. For several of
the Holy Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, this coincidence pointed to a
certain special mission of the Roman empire, as if the Empire, being born at
the same time as Christ, was Divinely established to be a vehicule for the
spreading of the Gospel to all nations.
Thus in the third century Origen wrote:
“Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, the one who reduced to
uniformity, so to speak, the many kingdoms on earth so that He had a single
empire. It would have hindered Jesus’ teaching from being spread throughout the
world if there had been many kingdoms… Everyone would have been forced to fight
in defence of their own country.”[112]
Origen considered that the temporal peace of Augustus, which was prophesied in
the scriptural verse: “He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the
rivers even unto the ends of the inhabited earth” (Psalm 71.7),
prefigured the spiritual peace of Christ. Moreover, under the reigns of
Augustus’ successors, the differences between the peoples had been reduced, so
that by the time of Christ’s Second Coming they would all call on the name of
the Lord with one voice and serve Him under one yoke.[113]
Again, in the fourth century St. Gregory
the Theologian said: “The state of the Christians and that of the Romans grew
up simultaneously and Roman supremacy arose with Christ’s sojourn upon earth, previous
to which it had not reached monarchical perfection.”[114]
Again, in the fifth century the Spanish
priest and friend of St. Augustine, Orosius, claimed that the Emperor Augustus
had paid a kind of compliment to Christ by refusing to call himself Lord at a
time when the true Lord of all was becoming man. Christ returned the compliment
by having himself enrolled in Augustus’ census. In this way He foreshadowed
Rome’s historical mission.[115]
Also in the fifth century, St. Leo the
Great, Pope of Rome, wrote: "Divine Providence fashioned the Roman Empire,
the growth of which was extended to boundaries so wide that all races
everywhere became next-door neighbours. For it was particularly germane to the
Divine scheme that many kingdoms should be bound together under a single
government, and that the world-wide preaching should have a swift means of
access to all people, over whom the rule of a single state held sway."[116]
This
teaching was summed up in a liturgical verse as follows: "When Augustus reigned
alone upon earth, the many kingdoms of men came to an end: and when Thou was
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.”[117]
Thus the Roman Empire came into existence, according to the Fathers,
precisely for the sake of the Christian Church, creating a political unity that
would help and protect the spiritual unity created by the Church. It was to be the Guardian of the Ark.
On the face of it, this was a very bold
and paradoxical teaching. After all, the people of God at the beginning of the
Christian era were the Jews, not the Romans. The Romans were pagans; they
worshipped demons, not the True God Who had revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob. In 63 BC they had actually conquered the people of God, and their
rule was bitterly resented. In 70 AD they destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in
a campaign of appalling cruelty and scattered the Jews over the face of the
earth. How could Old Rome, the Rome of Nero and Titus and Domitian and
Diocletian, possibly be construed as working with God rather than against Him?
The solution to this paradox is to be
found in an examination of two encounters recounted in the Gospel between
Christ and two “rulers of this world” – Satan and Pontius Pilate.
In the first, Satan takes Christ onto a
high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time.
“And the devil said to Him, ‘All this authority I will give You, and their
glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish.
Therefore, if You will worship before Me, all will be Yours.’ And Jesus
answered and said to him: ‘Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, You shall
worship the Lord your God, and Him only will you serve.’” (Luke 4.6-8).
Here we see that Satan up to that time had
control over all the kingdoms of the world – but by might, the might given him
by the sins of men, not by right. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria exclaims: “How
dost thou promise that which is not thine? Who made thee heir of God’s kingdom?
Who made thee lord of all under heaven? Thou hast seized these things by fraud.
Restore them, therefore, to the incarnate Son, the Lord of all…”[118]
And indeed, the Lord accepted neither
Satan’s lordship over the world, nor the satanism that was so closely
associated with the pagan statehood of the ancient world (insofar as the pagan
god-kings often demanded worship of themselves as gods). He came to restore
true statehood, which recognises the ultimate supremacy only of the one true
God, and which demands veneration of the earthly ruler, but worship only of the
Heavenly King. And since, by the time of the Nativity of Christ, all the major
pagan kingdoms had been swallowed up in Rome, it was to the transformation of
Roman statehood that the Lord came in the first place.
For, as K.V. Glazkov writes: “The good
news announced by the Lord Jesus Christ could not leave untransfigured a single
one of the spheres of man’s life. One of the acts of our Lord Jesus Christ
consisted in bringing the heavenly truths to the earth, in instilling them into
the consciousness of mankind with the aim of its spiritual regeneration, in
restructuring the laws of communal life on new principles announced by Christ
the Saviour, in the creation of a Christian order of this communal life, and,
consequently, in a radical change of pagan statehood. Proceeding from here it
becomes clear what place the Church must occupy in relation to the state. It is
not the place of an opponent from a hostile camp, not the place of a warring
party, but the place of a pastor in relation to his flock, the place of a
loving father in relation to his lost children. Even in those moments when
there was not and could not be any unanimity or union between the Church and
the state, Christ the Saviour forbade the Church to stand on one side from the
state, still less to break all links with it, saying: ‘Give to Caesar what is
Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’ (Luke 20.25).[119]
Thus Christ is the true King of the world,
Who nevertheless grants a qualified authority to earthly kings. For Christians
in the pagan Roman empire, this meant an attitude of qualified loyalty to the
empire without full or permanent integration into it. The latter was
impossible, for, as Fr. George Florovsky writes, “in ‘this world’ Christians
could be but pilgrims and strangers. Their true ‘citizenship’, politeuma, was
‘in heaven’ (Philippians 3.20). The Church herself was peregrinating
through this world (paroikousa). ‘The Christian fellowship was a bit of
extra-territorial jurisdiction on earth of the world above’ (Frank Gavin). The
Church was ‘an outpost of heaven’ on earth, or a ‘colony of heaven’. It may be
true that this attitude of radical detachment had originally an ‘apocalyptic’
connotation, and was inspired by the expectation of an imminent parousia.
Yet, even as an enduring historical society, the Church was bound to be
detached from the world. An ethos of ‘spiritual segregation’ was inherent in
the very fabric of the Christian faith, as it was inherent in the faith of
Ancient Israel. The Church herself was ‘a city’, a polis, a new and
peculiar ‘polity’. In their baptismal profession Christians had ‘to renounce’
this world, with all its vanity, and pride, and pomp, - but also with all its
natural ties, even family ties, and to take a solemn oath of allegiance to
Christ the King, the only true King on earth and in heaven, to Whom all
‘authority’ has been given. By this baptismal commitment Christians were
radically separated from ‘this world’. In this world they had no ‘permanent
city’. They were ‘citizens ‘ of the ‘City to come’, of which God Himself was
builder and maker (Hebrews 13.14; cf. 11.10).
“The Early Christians were often suspected
and accused of civic indifference, and even of morbid ‘misanthropy’, odium
generis humani, - which should probably be contrasted with the alleged
‘philanthropy’ of the Roman Empire. The charge was not without substance. In
his famous reply to Celsus, Origen was ready to admit the charge. Yet, what
else could Christians have done, he asked. In every city, he explained, ‘we
have another system of allegiance’, allo systema tes patridos (Contra
Celsum, VIII.75). Along with the civil community there was in every city
another community, the local Church. And she was for Christians their true
home, or their ‘fatherland’, and not their actual ‘native city’. The anonymous
writer of the admirable ‘Letter to Diognetus’, written probably in the early
years of the second century, elaborated this point with an elegant precision.
Christians do not dwell in cities of their own, nor do they differ from the
rest of men in speech and customs. ‘Yet, while they dwell in the cities of
Greeks and Barbarians, as the lot of each is cast, the structure of their own polity
is peculiar and paradoxical… Every foreign land is a fatherland to them, and
every fatherland is a foreign land… Their conversation is on the earth, but
their citizenship is in heaven.’ There was no passion in this attitude, no
hostility, and no actual retirement from daily life. But there was a strong
note of spiritual estrangement: ‘and every fatherland is a foreign land.’
It was coupled, however, with an acute sense of responsibility. Christians were
confined in the world, ‘kept’ there as in a prison; but they also ‘kept the
world together,’ just as the soul holds the body together. Moreover, this was
precisely the task allotted to Christians by God, ‘which it is unlawful to
decline’ (Ad Diognetum, 5, 6). Christians might stay in their native
cities, and faithfully perform their daily duties. But they were unable to give
their full allegiance to any polity of this world, because their true
commitment was elsewhere….”[120]
Let us now turn to the second time Christ
confronted a ruler of this world – His trial before Pilate. While acknowledging
that the power of this representative of Caesar was lawful, the Lord at the
same time insists that Pilate’s and Caesar’s power derived from God, the true
King and Lawgiver. For “you could have no power at all against Me,” He says to
Pilate, “unless it had been given to you from above” (John 19.11). These
words, paradoxically, both limit Caesar’s power, insofar as it is subject to
God’s, and strengthen it, by indicating that it has God’s seal and blessing in
principle (if not in all its particular manifestations).
Nor is this conclusion contradicted by His
earlier words: “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36). For, as
Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich writes, “Let no-one imagine that Christ the Lord
does not have imperial power over this world because He says to Pilate: ‘My
Kingdom is not of this world.’ He who possesses the enduring has power also
over the transitory. The Lord speaks of His enduring Kingdom, independent of
time and of decay, unrighteousness, illusion and death. Some man might say: ‘My
riches are not on paper, but in gold.’ But does he who has gold not have paper
also? Is not gold as paper to its owner? The Lord, then, does not say to Pilate
that He is not a king, but, on the contrary, says that He is a higher king than
all kings, and His Kingdom is greater and stronger and more enduring than all
earthly kingdoms. He refers to His pre-eminent Kingdom, on which depend all
kingdoms in time and in space…”[121]
And He continues: “Therefore the one who
delivered Me to you has the greater sin.” The one who delivered Christ to
Pilate was Caiaphas, chief priest of the Jews. For, as is well known (to all
except contemporary ecumenist Christians), it was the Jews, His own people, who
condemned Christ for blasphemy and demanded His execution at the hands of the
Roman authorities in the person of Pontius Pilate. Since Pilate was not
interested in the charge of blasphemy, the only way in which the Jews could get
their way was to accuse Christ of fomenting rebellion against Rome – a
hypocritical charge, since it was precisely the Jews, not Christ, who were
planning revolution.[122]
Not only did Pilate not believe this accusation: he did everything he could to
have Christ released, giving in only when he feared that the Jews were about to
start a riot and denounce him to the emperor in Rome. Thus it was the Jews, not
the Romans, who were primarily responsible for the death of Christ. This fact
has the consequence that, insofar Pilate could have used his God-given power to
save the Lord from an unjust death, Roman state power appears in this situation
as the potential, if not yet the actual, protector of Christ from His fiercest
enemies. In other words, already during the life of Christ, we see the future
role of Rome as “he who restrains” the Antichrist (II Thessalonians 2.7)
and the guardian of the Body of Christ.
Rome:
Protector or Persecutor?
In the trial of Christ before Pilate,
Roman power, still spiritually weak, did not use its power for the good; but
its sympathies were clearly already with Christ, and this sympathy would later,
under Constantine the Great, be turned into full and whole-hearted support
In fact, we do not have to wait that long
to see Roman power fulfilling the role of protector of the Christians. Thus
already in 35, on the basis of a report sent to him by Pilate, the Emperor
Tiberius proposed to the senate that Christ should be recognised as a god. The
senate refused this request, and declared that Christianity was an “illicit superstition”;
but Tiberius ignored this and imposed a veto on any accusations being brought
against the Christians in the future. More than that: when St. Mary Magdalene
complained to the emperor about the unjust sentence passed by Pontius Pilate on
Christ, the emperor moved Pilate from Jerusalem to Gaul, where he died after a
terrible illness.[123] In
36 or 37 the Roman legate to Syria, Vitellius, deposed Caiaphas for his
unlawful execution of the Archdeacon and Protomartyr Stephen (in 34), and in 62
the High Priest Ananias was similarly deposed for executing St. James the Just,
the first Bishop of Jerusalem. In between these dates the Apostle Paul was
saved from a lynching at the hands of the Jews by the Roman authorities (Acts
21, 23.28-29, 25.19).[124]
So for at least a generation after the
Resurrection of Christ the Romans, far from being persecutors of the
Christians, were their chief protectors against the Jews – the former people of
God who had now become the chief enemies of God. It is therefore not surprising
that the Apostles, following in the tradition of Christ’s own recognition of
the Romans as a lawful power, exhorted the Christians to obey Caesar in
everything that did not involve transgressing the law of God. Thus St. Paul
commands Christians to give thanks for the emperor "and for all that are
in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life in all godliness and
honesty" (I Timothy 2.1-2). For it is precisely the emperor's
ability to maintain law and order, "a quiet and peaceful life", which
makes him so important for the Church. "Be subject for the Lord's
sake," says St. Peter, "to every human institution, whether it be to
the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do
wrong and praise those who do right... Fear God. Honour the emperor" (I
Peter 2.13, 17). The emperor is to be obeyed "not only because of
wrath, but for conscience's sake" (Romans 13.5). For he is
"the servant of God for good" and "wields not the sword in
vain" (Romans 13.4).
At the same time, submission to the
emperor was never considered to be unconditional.
Thus in the third century Hieromartyr Hippolytus, Pope of Rome, wrote:
““Believers in God must not be hypocritical, nor fear people invested in
authority, with the exception of those cases when some evil deed is committed [Romans
13.1-4]. On the contrary, if the leaders, having in mind their faith in God,
force them to do something contrary to this faith, then it is better for them
to die than to carry out the command of the leaders. After all, when the
apostle teaches submission to ‘all the powers that be’ (Romans 13.1), he
was not saying that we should renounce our faith and the Divine commandments,
and indifferently carry out everything that people tell us to do; but that we,
while fearing the authorities, should do nothing evil and that we should not
deserve punishment from them as some evildoers (Romans 13.4). That is
why he says: ‘The servant of God is an avenger of [those who do] evil’ (I
Peter 2.14-20; Romans 13.4). And so? ‘Do you not want to fear the
authorities? Do good and you will have praise from him; but if you do evil,
fear, for he does not bear the sword without reason’ (Romans 13.4).
Consequently, insofar as one can judge from the cited words, the apostle
teaches submission to a holy and God-fearing life in this life and that we
should have before our eyes the danger that the sword threatens us. [But] when
the leaders and scribes hindered the apostles from preaching the word of God,
they did not cease from their preaching, but submitted ‘to God rather than to
man’ (Acts 5.29). In consequence of this, the leaders, angered, put them
in prison, but ‘an angel led them out, saying: God and speak the words of this
life’ (Acts 5.20).”)[125]
Even when the Empire had become Christian,
St. Basil the Great wrote: “It is right to submit to higher authority whenever
a command of God is not violated thereby.”[126]
And Blessed Theodoret of Cyr wrote: “Paul does not incite us to obey even if we
are being constrained to impiety; he has, in fact, clearly defined the function
of the power and the manner in which God has regulated human affairs, so that
promulgating laws contrary to piety is not part of the function of the power,
but rather belongs to the will of those who exercise power badly. For that
which concerns God does not belong to the judgement of those who exercise
power; they have not been established for that; they have been established as
intercessors and guarantors of justice in that which concerns the affairs of
men and their mutual rights.”[127]
Again, St. John Chrysostom, commenting on Romans 13.1, asked: “Is every
ruler, then, elected by God? This I do not say, he [Paul] answers. Nor am I now
speaking about individual rulers, but about the thing in itself. For that there
should be rulers, and some rule and others be ruled, and that all things should
not just be carried on in one confusion, the people swaying like waves in this
direction and that; this, I say, is the work of God’s wisdom. Hence he does not
say, ‘for there is no ruler but of God’, but it is the thing [political power
as such] he speaks of, and says, ‘there is no power but of God’.”[128]
Again, as Archbishop Theophan of Poltava writes, “St. Isidore of Pelusium,
after pointing to the order of submission of some to others established
everywhere by God in the lives or rational and irrational creatures, concludes
therefrom: ‘Therefore we are entitled to say that… power, that is, royal
leadership and authority, is established by God.»[129]
However, it is not only under the image of
the lawful protector of Christianity that Rome is portrayed in the Holy
Scriptures. In Revelation the seven-hilled city is portrayed as Babylon, “the mother of harlots and
abominations of the earth”, “a woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with
the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (17.5,6). In other words, Rome is seen, not
as a lawful monarchy or future Christian autocracy, but as a bloody and
blasphemous despotism, in the
tradition of all the ancient despotisms that took their origin from Nimrod’s
Babylon.[130]
Typical of this attitude is Hieromartyr Victorinus of Petau, who wrote that the
whore’s downfall was “the ruin of great Babylon, that is, of the city of Rome.”[131]
The reason for this change is not
difficult to find. In the generation after Saints Peter and Paul wrote their
epistles and before the writing of Revelation, the Roman empire had
changed from a benevolent dictatorship with democratic leanings into a
despotism headed by a god-king on the Babylonian model. It was Nero who initiated
the first specifically Roman (as
opposed to Jewish or popular pagan) persecution of the Christians, while it was
Domitian who initiated the first persecution of Christians for specifically religious reasons – that is, because
they refused to worship the gods in general, and the divinity of Domitian in
particular.
Early in the second century the Emperor
Hadrian deified his favourite Antinous, of whom St. Athanasius the Great
writes: “Although they knew he was a man, and not an honourable man but one
filled with wantonness, yet they worship him through fear of the ruler… So do
not be surprised or think that what we have said is improbable, for quite
recently, and perhaps even up to now, the Roman senate decrees that their
emperors who reigned from the beginning – either all of them or whomever they
choose and decide upon – are among the gods, and prescribes that they be
worshipped as gods.”[132]
Now religion in Rome had always been a department of State. As J.M.
Roberts writes: “It had nothing to do with individual salvation and not much
with individual behaviour; it was above all a public matter. It was a part of
the res publica, a series of rituals whose maintenance was good for the
state, whose neglect would bring retribution. There was no priestly caste set
apart from other men (if we exclude one or two antiquarian survivals in the
temples of a few special cults) and priestly duties were the task of the
magistrates who found priesthood a useful social and political lever.[133]
Nor was there creed or dogma… Men genuinely felt that the peace of Augustus was
the pax deorum, a divine reward for a proper respect for the gods which
Augustus had reasserted. Somewhat more cynically, Cicero had remarked that the
gods were needed to prevent chaos in society…”[134]
An important change in Roman religion came with Augustus’ introduction
of Hellenistic and eastern ideas of divine kingship, with which he had become
acquainted after his conquest of Egypt in 31 BC. Clearly impressed, as had been
his rival Mark Anthony, by the civilisation he found there, and by its queen,
Cleopatra, he brought back an obelisk to Rome and named himself after the month
in which Cleopatra died, August, rather than the month of his own birth,
September, which would have been more usual.
“Under Augustus,” continues Roberts, “there was a deliberate attempt to
reinvigorate old belief, which had been somewhat eroded by closer acquaintance
with the Hellenistic East and about which a few sceptics had shown cynicism
even in the second century BC. After Augustus, emperors always held the office
of chief priest (pontifex maximus) and political and religious primacy
were thus combined in the same person. This began the increasing importance and
definition of the imperial cult itself. It fitted well the Roman’s innate
conservatism, his respect for the ways and customs of his ancestors. The
imperial cult linked respect for traditional patrons, the placating or invoking
of familiar deities and the commemoration of great men and events, to the ideas
of divine kingship which came from the East, from Asia. It was there that
altars were first raised to Rome or the Senate, and there that they were soon
reattributed to the emperor. The cult spread through the whole empire, though
it was not until the third century AD that the practice was whole respectable
at Rome itself, so strong was the republican sentiment. But even there the
strains of empire had already favoured a revival of official piety which
benefited the imperial cult.”[135]
Dio Cassius writes that Augustus “gave
permission for sacred precincts to be set up in both Ephesus and Nicaea,
dedicated to Rome and his father [Julius] Caesar, to whom he had given the
title, the Divine Julius. These cities at that time held pre-eminent positions
in Asia and Bithynia respectively. The Romans who lived there he bade pay
honour to these two divinities, but he allowed the provincials, whom he styled
Greeks, to consecrate precincts to himself, the Asians in Pergamum, the
Bithynians in Nicomedia. From such a beginning this practice has also occurred
under other emperors, and not only in the Greek provinces but also in the
others that are subject to Rome. In the city of Rome itself and the rest of
Italy, however, no emperor, no matter how deserving of praise, has dared to do
this (i.e. style himself a god). Yet even there divine honours are accorded and
shrines set up to emperors who have ruled well, after their demise."[136]
It is no accident that the only martyr
mentioned by name in Revelation is Antipas, Bishop of Pergamum, “where
Satan’s seat is” (2.13). Pergamum is called “Satan’s seat” because it was there
that the worship of Augustus was first instituted, and Lenin’s mausoleum in Red
Square, Moscow, was modelled on Augustus’ temple in Pergamum. As for Nicomedia,
this was the city from which Diocletian initiated the last and most bloody of
the persecutions against the Christians. Thus the seeds of emperor-worship, and
therefore of conflict between the Church and the Empire, were sown in the reign
of the very first Roman emperor.
However, the same emperor – together with
most of his successors – was compelled to curb any excessive tendencies in this
direction by his regard for the traditions of republican Rome, which tended in
just the opposite direction. “King” was a dirty word in Republican Rome, and sovereign power was
deemed to belong jointly to the Senate and the People. Julius Caesar had been
murdered precisely because he violated this democratic tradition by making
himself dictator.
For the
Roman state before Augustus was, in J.S. McClelland’s words, “a fortunate
mixture of the three basic types of government: monarchy, aristocracy and
democracy. The Roman consuls were its kings, the Senate its aristocracy, and
its people and their tribunes its democracy. It was standard doctrine in the
ancient world that ‘pure’ forms of government were not likely to last. Even the
best of monarchies eventually became corrupted, self-disciplined aristocracies
degenerated into oligarchies admiring only wealth, and democracies always ended
up in mob rule. Rome was lucky, because in the government of the republic each
part of the state tended to cancel out the vices of the other parts, leaving
only their virtues. The people tempered the natural arrogance of the
aristocrats, the senators tempered the natural turbulence of the people, while
consulship for a year was a constant reminder to the consuls that they were
only temporary kings…. The Romans stopped being the citizens of a free
republic, and became the subjects of an emperor, with their fixed political
ideas largely intact.”[137]
So
Augustus, while wielding all power de facto, still maintained the
fiction that he was merely “first among equals”. And it is probably significant
that Augustus allowed altars to be dedicated to himself only in the provinces,
whose inhabitants “he called Greeks”, and not in Rome itself. The strength of
this republican tradition, allied to other philosophical elements such as
Stoicism, guaranteed that emperor-worship, as opposed to the worship of
“ordinary” gods, remained an intermittent phenomenon. It was felt to be an
essentially alien, non-Roman tradition, throughout the imperial period. Thus if
Augustus had a temple erected to his divinity, Tiberius rejected divine
honours; if Domitian considered himself a god, Trajan emphatically did not.
This intermittency in the cult of the
emperor was reflected in the intermittency of the persecution of Christians.
Thus for the century and a half between Domitian (late first century) and
Decius (mid-third century), although it remained technically illegal to be a
Christian, the Roman emperors initiated no persecution against the Christians,
convinced as they were that they did not constitute a political threat. They
were often more favourably inclined towards the Christians than either the
Senate, which remained for centuries a powerful bastion of paganism, or the
masses, who tended to blame the Christians’ “atheism”, that is, their refusal
to worship the gods, for the disasters that befell the empire. The Roman
authorities generally looked for ways to protect the Christians, and were only
compelled to adopt stricter measures in order to appease the mob – as we see,
for example, in the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. It was
therefore in the Church’s long-term interest to support the imperial power,
enduring the occasional madmen, such as Nero and Domitian, and waiting for the
time when the emperor would not only protect her against her enemies, but take
the lead in converting the body of the empire to Christ.
This looked as if it might happen already
in the mid-third century, under the Emperor Philip the Arab, who was a secret
Christian, converted by Martyr Pontius the Senator, and a little later under
the Emperor Galerius, who declared his faith in Christ after witnessing a
miracle of the Martyrs Cosmas and Damian.[138]
It was probably in order to counter Philip’s influence that the next emperor,
Decius, ordered all the citizens of the empire to worship the pagan gods, which
led to many Christian martyrdoms. However, the persecutions of Decius and
Valerian elicited a wave of revulsion in Roman society, and from the edict of
Gallienus to the persecution of Diocletian, there was even a long period in
which all the old anti-Christian laws were repealed and the Church was
officially recognised as a legal institution
“It is not, perhaps, a coincidence,”
writes Professor Sordi, “that Gallienus’ change of policy towards the senate
went hand in hand with the official recognition of the Christian religion which
the senate had forbidden for the previous two centuries. Gallienus broke
completely with the pro-senate policy of the preceding emperors, he forbade the
senators military command and he cut them off from all the sources of real
power. It was this break with the senate, this decision on the part of
Gallienus to do without its consent, that made it possible for the Emperor to
grant to the Christians the recognition which was so necessary for the
well-being of the empire, but which the traditionalist thinking of the senate
had always feared so much.”[139]
We
see, then, that Rome had a dual, contradictory image in the minds of the early
Christians. On the one hand, as persecutor of the Church and worshipper of demons,
it was a parody of God’s Kingdom, the state of the Antichrist. On the other
hand, as protector of the Church against the Jews and against anarchy in
general, it was an anti-type of God’s Kingdom and a bulwark restraining the
advent of the Antichrist.[140]
Why did God choose the Roman Empire over other States as the special
instrument of His Providence and the special protector of His Church, to the
extent that, from the early fourth century, Christianitas came to be
almost identified with Romanitas? Here we offer some speculative ideas
borrowed from Professor Sordi.
First, as Sordi writes, “the Romans and
the Christians, albeit in different ways and from different points of view,
both represented a way of overcoming the Graeco-Barbarian and Graeco-Jewish
antimony which the Hellenistic culture, despite all its ecumenical claims,
actually contained within itself.”[141]
Christianity is a truly universal religion
in which “there is neither male nor female, …neither Greek nor Jew, neither
circumcised nor uncircumcised, neither barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave
nor freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Galatians 3.28; Colossians
3.11). The Jews were not inclined either to accept or to propagate this
message; for in spite of the universalist hints contained in the prophets, the
racial distinction between the Jews and Gentiles (or goyim) remained a
fundamental divide in Jewish thought. Similarly, the Greeks, even in the
persons of their greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, looked on slaves,
women and barbarians as unable to partake fully in the splendours of Hellenic
civilisation.
True, there was a universalist,
cosmopolitan element in the Hellenistic philosophy of the Stoics. However, it
was not the Greeks, but the Romans
who adopted Stoicism most eagerly, demonstrating thereby that typically Roman
trait of being able, in Polybius’ words, “more than any others before them have
ever been to change their customs and to imitate the best”.[142]
The classical Greek concepts of citizenship and equality before the law were
now given a vastly deeper connotation and wider denotation.
The Romans were able to create a political
framework that gave practical expression to the universalist leanings of the
Roman – and Christian - soul. For “Rome’s greatest triumph,” writes Roberts,
“rested on the bringing of peace and… a second great Hellenistic age in which
men could travel from one end to another of the Mediterranean without
hindrance. The essential qualities of the structure which sustained it were
already there under the republic, above all in the cosmopolitanism encouraged
by Roman administration, which sought not to impose a uniform pattern of life
but only to collect taxes, keep the peace and regulate the quarrels of men by a
common law….
“The empire and the civilization it
carried were unashamedly cosmopolitan. The administrative framework contained
an astonishing variety of contrasts and diversities. They were held together
not by an impartial despotism exercised by a Roman élite or a
professional bureaucracy, but by a constitutional system which took local
elites and romanized them. From the first century AD the senators themselves
included only a dwindling number of men of Italian descent. Roman tolerance in
this was diffused among other peoples. The empire was never a racial unity
whose hierarchies were closed to non-Italians. Only one of its peoples, the
Jews, felt strongly about the retention of their distinction within it and that
distinction rested on religion…”[143]
In 212 Rome offered citizenship to all
free subjects of the empire, which meant that these subjects could both
identify with the empire as their own country and rise to the highest positions
within it. Thus in the first century we hear St. Paul, a member of a savagely
treated subject nation, nevertheless saying without shame or sense of
contradiction: “Civis romanus sum”, “I am a Roman citizen”. And already
from the beginning of the second century, we find non-Roman emperors of Rome;
they came from as far afield as Spain and Arabia, Dacia and Africa. “The
breadth of the East,” wrote the Spanish priest Orosius, “the vastness of the
North, the extensiveness of the South, and the very large and secure seats of
the islands are of my name and law because I, as a Roman and Christian,
approach Christians and Romans.”[144]
Rutilius Namatianus addressed Rome thus:
“You have made out of diverse races one patria”.[145]
And the poet Claudian wrote that “we may drink of the Rhine or the Orontes”,
but “we are all one people”. For the nations had become one in Rome:
The conquered in her arms and cherished all
The human race under a common name,
Treating them as her children, not her slaves.
She called these subjects Roman citizens
And linked far worlds with ties of loyalty.[146]
Secondly, writes Sordi, “the Roman soul
suffered from a perennial nostalgia for the stern moral code and the virtues on
which their culture had been founded and that a religion which called for
rigorous moral commitment and the practice of personal and domestic austerity
would have attracted many of those who were disgusted with the corruption they
saw around them. Equally attractive to those who longed for the security of the
group was, probably, the Christians’ strong community feeling and their
capacity for mutual assistance in times of need; and in fact this kind of
solidarity would be recognisable to the Romans as their own collegia,
enlarged and enriched with new ideas and with a deeper sense of human values…”[147]
For
“the conversion of the pagan world to Christianity,” concludes Sordi, “was
first and foremost a religious conversion and … that immense attraction the new
religion exerted on the greatest of the empires of antiquity and its
cosmopolitan capital grew from the fact that it answered the deepest needs and
aspirations of the human soul.”[148]
In particular, the Romans’ religious
concept of history, so different from the cyclical, naturalistic ideas of the
Greeks and other pagans, fitted in well with the Christian concept. For, like
the Christians, the Romans saw history as having an ethical basis and as moving
towards a definite end in accordance with justice. Thus Sordi writes: “Whereas
Hellenic thinking had always seen the end in terms of natural phenomena based
on the concept of the corruption of the human constitution and the exhaustion
of the world itself, the Romans rarely saw things in these terms. For the
Romans, even before the advent of Christianity, the concept of decadence was
closely linked to morality and religion, so that the end tended to take on
apocalyptic overtones. This concept was to emerge in full force during the
great crisis of the third century, at the time of Decius and Valerian, but
Augustan writers had already diagnosed it in Rome’s first great crisis, the
Gallic catastrophe of 386 BC, and it was equally present in the first century
before Christ. In all three cases, but particularly in the period preceding
Augustus’ accession, the crisis was felt to be a consequence of a sin which had
contaminated the roots of the Roman state and had caused the gods to hate it.
For example, in the first century the civil wars symbolic of the scelus
of Romulus’ fratricide, were thought to be the cause. Equally in all three
cases but particularly in the first century BC it seems that the Romans were
convinced that the sin could be expiated, the punishment postponed and Rome
renewed. With Augustus, the celebration of the return of the golden age follows
punctually on the heels of the crisis, as will happen again under Gallienus.
“This religious concept of history with
its sequence of sin, expiation and redemption, was part of the inheritance
handed on to the Romans by the Etruscans. According to ancient Etruscan
beliefs, every human being and every nation had been given a fixed period of
life, divided into periods (saecula for nations), and marked by moments
of crisis which could be postponed by means of the expiation of the sin which
had originally caused them. The only exception was the supreme crisis, the last
and fatal one, for which there was no remedy…”[149]
Thirdly, as we have seen, the Roman empire
was not a “pure” despotism, but an original mixture of monarchical,
aristocratic and democratic elements which could and would be used to support
that still more original organisation that came into being simultaneously with
it – the Church. On the one hand, its monarchical element served to provide
that strong framework of law and order over a vast area, the pax Romana,
which so greatly assisted the spread and establishment of the Church. As E.
Kholmogorov writes: “Rome set herself an unprecedentedly bold task – to
establish peace throughout the inhabited world and root out barbarism”.[150] On the other hand, its democratic
and humanistic elements served to temper the tendency to deify the ruler which
was so pronounced in all the Near Eastern despotisms.
The
holy Martyr Apollonius expressed the classic Christian attitude towards the
emperor thus: “With all Christians I offer a pure and unbloody sacrifice to
almighty God, the Lord of heaven and earth and of all that breathes, a
sacrifice of prayer especially on behalf of the spiritual and rational images
that have been disposed by God’s providence to rule over the earth. Wherefore
obeying a just precept we pray daily to God, Who dwells in the heavens, on
behalf of [the Emperor] Commodus who is our ruler in this world, for we are
well aware that he rules over the earth by nothing else but the will of the
invincible God Who comprehends all things.”[151] In other words, the only legitimate
sacrifice a Christian to the emperor is the sacrifice of prayer on his behalf,
who rules, not as a god, but “by the will of God”.
Thus
the Christians considered the emperor, in Tertullian’s words, “more truly ours
(than yours) because he was put into power by our God”.[152] Sordi comments: “Paradoxically, we
could say that the Christian empire, made into reality by Constantine and his
successors, was already potentially present in this claim of Tertullian’s, a
claim which comes at the end of such a deeply committed declaration of loyalty
to Rome and its empire that it should surely suffice to disprove the theory
that a so-called ‘political theology’ was the fruit of Constantine’s peace.
Tertullian says that the Christians pray for the emperors and ask for them ‘a
long life, a safe empire, a quiet home, strong armies, a faithful senate,
honest subjects, a world at peace’.”[153]
There was another, very specific reason why the Christians prayed for
the emperors. “Again,” continues Sordi, “they pray ‘for the general strength
and stability of the empire and for Roman power’ because they know that ‘it is
the Roman empire which keeps at bay the great violence which hangs over the
universe and even the end of the world itself, harbinger of terrible
calamities’. The subject here, as we know, was the interpretation given to the
famous passage from the second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2.6-7) on the
obstacle, whether a person or an object, which impedes the coming of the
Anti-Christ. Without attempting to interpret this mysterious passage, the fact
remains that all Christian writers, up to and including Lactantius, Ambrose and
Augustine, identified this restraining presence with the Roman empire, either
as an institution or as an ideology. Through their conviction that the Roman
empire would last as long as the world (Tertullian Ad Scapulam 2) the
early Christians actually renewed and appropriated as their own the concept of Roma
aeterna. ‘While we pray to delay the end’ – it is Tertullian speaking (Apologeticum
32.1) – ‘we are helping Rome to last forever’.”[154]
Thus
St. John Chrysostom wrote about “him that restraineth” or “withholdeth”: “Some
say the grace of the Holy Spirit, but others the Roman rule, to which I much
rather accede. Why? Because if he meant to say the Spirit, he would not have
spoken obscurely, but plainly, that even now the grace of the Spirit, that is
the gifts of grace, withhold him… If he were about come when the gifts of grace
cease, he ought now to have come, for they have long ceased. But he said this
of the Roman rule,… speaking covertly and darkly, not wishing to bring upon
himself superfluous enmities and senseless danger.[155] He says, ‘Only there is the once who restraineth now, until he
should be taken out of the midst’; that is, whenever the Roman empire is taken
out of the way, then shall he come. For as long as there is fear of the empire,
no one will willingly exalt himself. But when that is dissolved, he will attack
the anarchy, and endeavour to seize upon the sovereignty both of man and of
God.”[156]
Of
course, Old Rome did fall – in 410 through Alaric the Visigoth, in 455 through
Genseric the Vandal, and finally and permanently in 476 through Odoacer the
Ostrogoth. Does this not mean that the prophecy was false, insofar as the
Antichrist did not come, and the world still continues in existence? Does this
not mean that the “scoffers” were right, of whom the Apostle Peter says that
they will ask in the last days: “Where is the promise of His coming? For since
the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of
creation” (II Peter 3.3-4)?
Not
so, say the Holy Fathers. First, in a spiritual sense the Antichrist did indeed
come for the West in 476, insofar as most of it was conquered by barbarian
rulers who were Arian in their faith, who denied the Divinity of the Lord Jesus
Christ and were therefore “antichrist” according to the apostle’s definition:
“He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son
does not have the Father either” (I John 2.22-23). All heretical or
apostate regimes that deny the Divinity of the Son and therefore deny the
Father also, are antichrist in this sense. Secondly, Rome did not die finally
in 476, but continued in the New Rome of Constantinople, and, after the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, in the Third Rome of Russia. Rome finally fell during
the Russian revolution of 1917, since when the spirit of Antichrist, not
encountering any major opposition from secular rulers, has had free rein in the
world.[157] Indeed, according to some of the
Holy Fathers, in this passage St. Paul is speaking, from an eschatological
perspective, precisely of the Christian Autocracy from Constantine the Great to
Tsar Nicholas II.
Thus Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow writes: "The
Spirit of God in him foresaw and more or less showed him the future light of
Christian kingdoms. His God-inspired vision, piercing through future centuries,
encounters Constantine, who brings peace to the Church and sanctifies the
kingdom by faith; and Theodosius and Justinian, who defend the Church from the
impudence of heresies. Of course, he also goes on to see Vladimir and Alexander
Nevsky and many spreaders of the faith, defenders of the Church and guardians
of Orthodoxy. After this it is not surprising that St. Paul should write: I
beseech you not only to pray, but also to give thanks for the king and all
those in authority; because there will be not only such kings and authorities
for whom it is necessary to pray with sorrow…., but also those for whom we must
thank God with joy for His precious gift."[158]
Old
Rome was the universal kingdom that summed up the old world of paganism, both
despotic and democratic, and crossed it with the autocratic traditions of
Israel, thereby serving as the bridge whereby it crossed over into the new
world of Christianity. It was universal both in the sense that it encompassed
all the major kingdoms of the Mediterranean basin (except Persia) and in the
sense that it came to embrace all the major forms of political and religious
life of the ancient world. But its external
universalism, ecumenicity, was soon to be transformed and transfigured by
its embracing of internal universalism,
Catholicity, the Catholicity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church…
Ñhurch and State in
Old Rome
The relations between the Christians and the Roman empire in the first
three centuries are often seen, especially in the West, as the classic example
of Church-State conflict. However, as Fr. George Florovsky writes, “it would
be utterly misleading to interpret the tension between Christians and the Roman
Empire as a conflict or clash between the Church and the State. Indeed, the
Christian Church was more than ‘a church’, just as ancient Israel was at once a
‘church’ and a ‘nation’. Christians also were a nation, a ‘peculiar people’,
the People of God, tertium genus, neither Jew nor Greek. The Church was
not just a ‘gathered community’, or a voluntary association, for ‘religious’
purposes alone. She was, and claimed to be, much more than just ‘a state’.
Since the Augustan reconstruction, in any case, Rome claimed to be just the
City, a permanent and ‘eternal’ City, Urbs aeterna, and an ultimate
City also. In a sense, it claimed for itself an ‘eschatological dimension’. It
posed as an ultimate solution of the human problem. It was a Universal
Commonwealth, ‘a single Cosmopolis of the inhabited earth,’ the Oikoumene.
Rome was offering ‘Peace’, the Pax Romana, and ‘Justice’ to all men and
all nations under its rule and sway. It claimed to be the final embodiment of
‘Humanity’, of all human values and achievements. ‘The Empire was, in effect, a
politico-ecclesiastical institution. It was a “church” as well as a “state”; if
it had not been both, it would have been alien from the ideas of the Ancient
World’ (Sir Ernest Barker). In the ancient society – in the ancient polis, in
Hellenistic monarchies, in the Roman republic – ‘religious’ convictions were
regarded as an integral part of the political creed. ‘Religion’ was an integral
part of the ‘political’ structure’. No division of competence and ‘authority’
could ever be admitted, and accordingly no division of loyalty or allegiance.
The State was omnicompetent, and accordingly the allegiance had to be complete
and unconditional. Loyalty to the State was itself a kind of religious
devotion, in whatever particular form it might have been prescribed or imposed.
In the Roman Empire it was the Cult of Caesars. The whole structure of the
Empire was indivisibly ‘political’ and ‘religious’. The main purpose of the
Imperial rule was usually defined as ‘Philanthropy’; and often even as
‘Salvation’. Accordingly, the Emperors were described as ‘Saviours’.
“In retrospect all these
claims may seem to be but utopian delusion and wishful dreams, vain and futile,
which they were indeed. Yet, these dreams were dreamt by the best people of
that time – it is enough to mention Virgil. And the utopian dream of the
‘Eternal Rome’ survived the collapse of the actual Empire and dominated the
political thinking of Europe for centuries. Paradoxically, this dream was often
cherished even by those who, by the logic of their faith, should have been
better protected against its deceiving charm and thrill. In fact, the vision of
an abiding or ‘Eternal Rome’ dominated also the Christian thought in the Middle
Ages, both in the East, and in the West.
“There was nothing
anarchical in the attitude of Early Christians toward the Roman Empire. The
‘divine’ origin of the State and of its authority was formally acknowledged
already by St. Paul, and he himself had no difficulty in appealing to the
protection of Roman magistrates and of Roman law. The positive value and
function of the State were commonly admitted in Christian circles. Even the
violent invective in the book of Revelation was no exception. What was
denounced there was the iniquity and injustice of the actual Rome, but not the
principle of political order. Christians could, in full sincerity and in good
faith, protest their political innocence in the Roman courts and plead their
loyalty to the Empire. In fact, Early Christians were devoutedly praying for
the State, for peace and order, and even for Caesars themselves. One finds a
high appraisal of the Roman Empire even in those Christian writers of that
time, who were notorious for their resistance, as Origen and Tertullian. The
theological ‘justification’ of the Empire originated already in the period of
persecutions. Yet, Christian loyalty was, of necessity, a restricted loyalty.
Of course, Christianity was in no sense a seditious plot, and Christians never
intended to overthrow the existing order, although they did not believe that it
had ultimately to wither away. From the Roman point of view, however,
Christians could not fail to appear seditious, not because hey were in any
sense mixed in politics, but precisely because they were not. Their political
‘indifference’ was irritating to the Romans. They kept themselves away from the
concerns of the Commonwealth, at a critical time of its struggle for existence.
Not only did they claim ‘religious freedom’ for themselves. They also claimed
supreme authority for the Church. Although the Kingdom of God was emphatically
‘not of this world’, it seemed to be a threat to the omnicompetent Kingdom of
Man. The Church was, in a sense, a kind of ‘Resistance Movement’ in the Empire.
And Christians were ‘conscientious objectors’. They were bound to resist any
attempt at their ‘integration’ into the fabric of the Empire. As Christopher
Dawson has aptly said, ‘Christianity was the only remaining power in the world
which could not be absorbed in the gigantic mechanism of the new servile
state.’ Christians were not a political faction. Yet, their religious allegiance
had an immediate ‘political’ connotation. It has been well observed that
monotheism itself was a ‘political problem’ in the ancient world (Eric
Peterson). Christians were bound to claim ‘autonomy’ for themselves and for the
Church. And this was precisely what the Empire could neither concede, nor even
understand. Thus, the clash was inevitable, although it could be delayed…”[159]
PART
II. THE TRIUMPH OF THE IDEAL (0-1000)
3. NEW ROME: THE EAST
The kingdom with which he [Constantine] is invested
is an image of
the heavenly one.
He looks up to see the archetypal pattern
and guides those whom He rules below
in accordance with that pattern.
Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea.[160]
When by Divine decree I was
elected to the empire, then amidst the many needs of the State I was occupied
by none more than the need for the Orthodox and true faith of the Christians,
which is holy and pure, to remain without doubts in the souls of all...
Holy Emperor Marcian.[161]
St. Constantine the Great
“The world,” had said Tertullian a century
before, “may need its Caesars. But the Emperor can never be a Christian, nor a
Christian ever be an Emperor.”[162]
He was wrong; and the fact of his wrongness – the fact, namely, that even the
most powerful, secular and pagan element in Old Roman society, the very apex of
its antichristian system, could be and was become converted by the grace of
Christ – changed that society forever, renewing it in the image of the living
God Whom the emperors now recognised.
The cause of the final clash was a
declaration by the haruspices, the Roman-Etruscan priestly diviners,
that it was the presence of the Christians that prevented the gods from giving
their responses through the entrails of sacrificial victims. Angered by this,
Diocletian ordered that all soldiers and all palatines should sacrifice to the
gods. The real persecution began on February 23, 303, the pagan feast of the Terminalia.
Churches were destroyed, the Holy Scriptures burned, and Christians who refused
to sacrifice were tortured and killed.
This persecution claimed many of the
greatest names in Christian sanctity among its victims: St. George, St.
Barbara, St. Catherine… Typical among the responses of the Christians was the
following by St. Euphemia and those with her on being commanded to worship the
god Ares: “If your decree and the Emperor’s is not contrary to the commandments
of the God of heaven, we will obey it. If it stands in opposition to God, then
not only will we disobey it, but we will seek to overturn it. If you were to
command us to do that which we are obliged to do, we would render to Caesar the
things which are Caesar’s. However, inasmuch as your ordinance is opposed to
God’s commandments, and you, in a manner hateful to God, require us to honor
that which is created rather than the Creator, worshipping and sacrificing to a
demon rather than to the most high God, we shall never obey your decree; for we
are true worshippers of the one God, Who dwells in the heavens.”[163]
In the West, after the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian on May 1,
305, the persecution was brought to an end by Constantius Chlorus in Gaul and
Britain, and then, after his death on July 25, 306, by his son Constantine in
the whole of the West. But in the East the persecution continued under Galerius
until his death in 311, and in the territories of Maximinus until 313. The
turning point, which marked the beginning of the end both for paganism and for
the image of Rome as the persecuting beast, must be considered the Edict of
religious toleration proclaimed by the Emperors Constantine and Licinius in
Milan in 313. Later, in 324, Constantine defeated Licinius and imposed his rule
on the East, delivering Roman Christians throughout the Empire from the
persecutions of pagan emperors. Rome was now, not the persecutor, but the
protector, of the Christian people.
However, when St. Constantine was
acclaimed emperor by the Roman army in York in 306, it seemed to many that the
world was about to die rather than being on the point of rebirth. The reason
was that Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, the worst in history,
threatened to destroy the Roman empire in its role as “that which restraineth”
the advent of the Antichrist and thereby, as we have seen, usher in the end of
the world. As Constantine’s tutor, Lactantius, wrote: “It is apparent that the
world is destined to end immediately. The only evidence to diminish our fear is
the fact that the city of Rome continues to flourish. But once this city, which
is the veritable capital of the world, falls and there is nothing in its place
but ruins, as the sibyls predict, who can doubt that the end will have arrived
both for humanity and for the entire world?”[164]
Thus Constantine, by bringing the persecution to an end, both saved the
Christians from extinction and gave Rome and the world a new lease of life.
It was to be a true Renovatio Imperii,
renovation of the Empire. As Fr. George Florovsky writes, “the Age of
Constantine is commonly regarded as a turning point of Christian history. After
a protracted struggle with the Church, the Roman Empire at last capitulated.
The Caesar himself was converted, and humbly applied for admission into the
Church. Religious freedom was formally promulgated, and was emphatically
extended to Christians. The confiscated property was returned to Christian
communities. Those Christians who suffered disability and deportation in the
years of persecution were now ordered back, and were received with honors. In
fact, Constantine was offering to the Church not only peace and freedom, but
also protection and close cooperation. Indeed, he was urging the Church and her
leaders to join with him in the ‘Renovation’ of the Empire… Constantine was
firmly convinced that, by Divine Providence, he was entrusted with a high and
holy mission, that he was chosen to re-establish the Empire, and to
re-establish it on a Christian foundation. This conviction, more than any
particular theory, was the decisive factor in his policy, and in his actual
mode of ruling.”[165]
And yet the Triumph of the Cross under St.
Constantine proved, paradoxically, that God does not need Christian kings in
order to save the world. They help – they help greatly. But for almost three
centuries from the Resurrection of Christ to the Edict of Milan the Church
survived and grew in the teeth of everything that Jewish and pagan fury could
hurl against her, and without the help of any earthly forces.
As Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow wrote: “there is benefit in the union of the altar and the throne, but it is not mutual benefit that is the first foundation of their union, but the independent truth, which supports both the one and the other. May the king, the protector of the altar, be blessed; but the altar does not fear the fall of this protection. The priest is right who preaches that the king should be honoured, but not by right of mutuality, but by pure obligation, even if this took place without the hope of mutuality… Constantine the Great came to the altar of Christ when it already stood on the expanses of Asia, Europe and Africa: he came, not in order to support it with his strength, but in order to submit himself with his majesty before its Holiness. He Who dwells in the heavens laughed at those who later thought of lowering His Divine religion to dependence on human assistance. In order to make their sophistry laughable, He waited for three centuries before calling the wise king to the altar of Christ, and meanwhile from day to day king, peoples, wise men, power, art, cupidity, cunning and rage rose up to destroy this altar. And what happened in the end? All this has disappeared, while the Church of Christ stands – but not because it is supported by human power…”[166]
Having said that, the conversion of the
Emperor to the Church was an event of the greatest historical significance that
brought immeasurable benefits to the Church and to humanity in general.
Constantine was converted in 312. Just before the fateful battle of the Milvian
Bridge, outside Rome, against the pagan Emperor Maxentius, both he and his army
saw a cross of light in the sky with the words: “In this sign conquer” above
it.
Eusebius records the story as Constantine
himself related it to him: “He said that at about midday, when the sun was
beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light
in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription Conquer by This (Hoc
Vince). At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole
army also.”[167]
The next night Christ appeared to him and
told him to make standards for the army in this form, “and to use it as a
safeguard in all engagements with his enemies”. So the next day Constantine had
the pagan standards removed and the Christian one, the so-called Labarum,
put in their place, and declared himself publicly to be a Christian. The result
was an easy victory over the much larger army of Maxentius. The next day,
October 29, Constantine entered Rome and was hailed as Emperor of the West.[168]
Although Constantine was not baptised
until he was on his deathbed[169],
and never received a Christian coronation, the Church has always believed that
he received the invisible anointing of the Holy Spirit: “Thou wast the image of
a new David, receiving the horn of royal anointing over thy head; for with the
oil of the Spirit hath the transcendent Word and Lord anointed thee, O glorious
one. Wherefore, thou hast also received a royal sceptre, O all-wise one, asking
great mercy for us.”[170]
The first consequence of the battle of
Milvian bridge was the Edict of Milan (313), whereby the Emperors Constantine
and Licinius restored freedom of religion. Fr. Alexis Nikolin write: “The Edict
of Milan decisively rejected many traditions of antiquity. St. Constantine
clearly proclaimed that Christianity is not the property of any particular
people, but is a universal religion, the religion of the whole of humanity. If
formerly it was thought that a given religion belongs to a given people and for
that reason it is sacred and untouchable, now the lawgiver affirmed a new
principle: that the sacred and untouchable religion was that religion which
belonged to all peoples – Christianity. It was obviously not an attempt to
bring Christianity under the usual (pagan) juridical forms, but a principled
changed in those forms.”[171]
In fact, Constantine did much more than simply tolerate the Church;
he defended and helped it in every way. Long before his defeat of the last tyrant, Licinius, in 324, he had started to legislate in favour of Christianity with the following decrees: “on the
abolition of pagan games (314), on the liberation of the Christian clergy from
civil obligations and church lands from additional taxes (313-315), on the
abolition of crucifixion as a means of capital punishment (315), on the
abolition of the branding of criminals (315), against the Jews who rose up
against the Church (315), on the liberation of slaves at church gatherings
without special formalities (316), on forbidding private persons from offering
sacrifices to idols and divining at home (319), on the annulment of laws
against celibacy (320), on the celebration of Sunday throughout the Empire
(321), on the right of bishops to be appeal judges (321), on banning the
forcible compulsion of Christians to take part in pagan festivals (322), on the
banning of gladiatorial games (325), on allowing Christians to take up senior
government posts (325), on the building of Christian churches and the banning
in them of statues and images of the emperor (325).”[172]
Among these decrees the one on absolving the clergy from holding
civic office is particularly interesting because it shows the underlying
motivation of Constantine’s legislation: “[The clergy] shall not be drawn away
by any deviation and sacrifice from the worship that is due to the Divinity,
but shall devote themselves without interference to their own law… for it seems
that rendering the greatest possible service to the Deity, they most benefit
the state.”[173]
Some would see in this a cynical attempt to exploit the Deity in the interests
of the emperor. But a more reasonable interpretation is that Constantine was
already feeling his way to a doctrine of the symphony of powers, in which the
emperor helps the Church as the defender of the faith and “the bishop of those
outside the Church”, while the Church helps the emperor through her prayers –
all to the ultimate glory of God and the salvation of men.
Barnes writes: “Constantine allowed pagans
to retain their beliefs, even to build new sacred edifices. But he allowed them
to worship their traditional gods only in the Christian sense of that word, not
according to the traditional forms hallowed by antiquity. The emperor made the
distinction underlying his policy explicit when he answered a petition from the
Umbrian town of Hispellum requesting permission to build a temple of the Gens Flavia.
Constantine granted the request but specified that the shrine dedicated to the
imperial family must never be ‘polluted by the deceits of any contagious
superstition’. From 324 onwards Constantine constantly evinced official
disapproval of the sacrifices and other cultic acts which constituted the
essence of Greco-Roman paganism: Christianity was now the established religion
of the Roman Empire and its ruler, and paganism should now conform to Christian
patterns of religious observance.”[174]
How central Christianity was to
Constantine’s conception of empire is illustrated by his words on hearing of
the Donatist heresy: “Until now I cannot be completely calm until all my
subjects are united in brotherly unity and offer to the All-holy God the true worship
that is prescribed by the Catholic Church». Again, when the Donatists appealed
to him against the judgement of the bishops, he said: “What mad presumption!
They turn heavenly things into earthly, appealing to me as if the matter was of
a civic nature.” Thus Constantine separated Church matters from civic matters
and did not subject the former to State law, but on the contrary tried to
conform his legislation to Christian principles. He gave to the Church the full
honour due to her as an institution founded by the One True God, no less than
the Body of the God-Man Himself, and therefore higher by nature than any human
institution, not excluding the Roman Empire itself. Christianity did not simply
take the place of the old Roman religion in the State apparatus; for
Constantine understood that the Christian faith was not to be honoured for the
sake of the empire, or in submission to the empire, but that the empire existed
for the sake of the faith and was to be submitted to it.
This was most clearly illustrated at
the First Ecumenical Council in 325, when the emperor took part in the
proceedings only at the request of the bishops, and did not sit on a royal
throne, but on a little stool.[175]
Then, when he addressed the Council Fathers he demonstrated that for him the
internal peace and prosperity of the Church was even more important that the
external peace and prosperity of the Empire: “Now that we, with the help of God
the Saviour, have destroyed the tyranny of the atheists who entered into open
war with us, may the evil spirit not dare to attack our holy Faith with his
cunning devices. I say to you from the depths of my heart: the internal
differences in the Church of God that I see before my eyes have plunged me into
profound sorrow... Servants of the God of peace, regenerate amidst us that
spirit of love which it is your duty to instil in others, destroy the seeds of
all quarrels.”[176]
Again, to the Fathers who were not present at the Council of Nicaea he wrote
concerning its decrees: “That which has been established in accordance with the
God-inspired decision of so many and such holy Bishops we shall accept with joy
as the command of God; for everything that is established at the Holy Councils
of Bishops must be ascribed to the Divine will.”
Constantine saw himself as the instrument
of God’s will for the uprooting of impiety and the planting of piety: “With
such impiety pervading the human race, and the State threatened with
destruction, what relief did God devise?… I myself was the instrument He chose…
Thus, beginning at the remote Ocean of Britain, where the sun sinks beneath the
horizon in obedience to the law of nature, with God’s help I banished and
eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the human race,
enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of God’s holy
laws.”[177]
Whatever Constantine did for the Church –
for example, the convening of Church Councils and the punishment of heretics –
he did, not as arbitrary expressions of his imperial will, but in obedience to the commission of the
Church.
Thus the Fathers of the First Council
welcomed the Emperor as follows: "Blessed is God, Who has chosen you as
king of the earth, having by your hand destroyed the worship of idols and
through you bestowed peace upon the hearts of the faithful... On this teaching
of the Trinity, your Majesty, is established the greatness of your piety.
Preserve it for us whole and unshaken, so that none of the heretics, having
penetrated into the Church, might subject our faith to mockery... Your Majesty, command that Arius should depart from his error and rise
no longer against the apostolic teaching. Or if he remains obstinate in his
impiety, drive him out of the Orthodox Church." As A. Tuskarev observes, "this is a clear
recognition of the divine election of Constantine as the external defender of
the Church, who is obliged to work with her in preserving the right faith, and
in correspondence with the conciliar sentence is empowered to drive heretics
out of the Church."[178]
The most famous definition of the
relationship between Constantine and the Church is to be found in two passages
from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine which speak of him as “like a common
bishop” and “like a bishop of those outside”.
The
first passage is as follows: “[Constantine] was common for all, but he paid a
completely special attention to the Church of God. While certain divergences
manifested themselves in different regions, he, like a common bishop
established by God, reunited the ministers of God in synods. He did not disdain
to be present at their activities and to sit with them, participating in their
episcopal deliberations, and arbitrating for everyone the peace of God… Then,
he did not fail to give his support to those whom he saw were bending to the
better opinion and leaning towards equilibrium and consensus, showing how much
joy the common accord of all gave him, while he turned away from the indocile…”
In the second passage the emperor receives
the bishops and says that he, too, is a bishop: “But you, you are the bishops
of those who are inside the Church, while I would be established by God as the
bishop of those outside.” Eusebius immediately explains that Constantine’s
“bishopric” here consisted, not in liturgical priestly acts, but in “watching
over [epeskopei] all the subjects of the empire” and leading them towards piety.[179] So
the emperor is not really a bishop,
but only like a bishop, being similar
to the pastors in both his missionary and in his supervisory roles.
Constantine excelled in both roles. Thus,
on the one hand, he responded vigorously to St. Nina’s request that he send
bishops and priest to help her missionary work in Georgia, and on hearing that
the Christians were being persecuted in Persia he threatened to go to war with
that state. And on the other hand, he convened numerous councils of bishops to
settle doctrinal disputes throughout the empire, acting as the focus of unity for the Church on
earth.
The emperor’s role as a focus of unity within the Church should by no means be understood to mean that he
was thought as having power over the
Church. Thus when St. Athanasius the Great was condemned by a council at Tyre
that considered itself "ecumenical", and appealed to the Emperor
Constantine against the decision, he was not asking the secular power to
overthrow the decision of the ecclesiastical power, as had been the thought of
the Donatists earlier in the reign, but was rather calling on a son of the
Church to defend the decision of the Holy Fathers of the Church at Nicaea
against overthrow by heretics from outside the Church. Of course, being mortal,
Constantine was not always consistent in the execution of his principles (as
when he refused Athanasius’ appeal). But the principles themselves were sound,
and he was always sincere in trying to uphold them.
The emperor’s role as focus of unity was especially necessary when the
Church was afflicted by problems that affected the whole Church, and needed a
Council representing the whole Church to solve them. Such, for example, were
the problems of Arianism and the Church calendar, both of which were resolved
at the First Ecumenical Council, convened by the Emperor Constantine.
Since the Church herself, contrary to the assertions of later papist
propagandists, lacked a “bishop of bishops” having ecumenical jurisdiction,
only the emperor could carry out this co-ordinating function. He alone had the
ecumenical authority necessary to compel the bishops from all parts of the
empire to meet together in Synods, and remain there until decisions were agreed
upon. And he alone could then see that these decisions, such as the exile of
Arius, did not remain a dead letter, but were put into practice.
St. Constantine died at midday on Pentecost,
337, and was buried in the church of the Holy Apostles in the midst of the
sepulchres of the twelve apostles. For in his person the Church had indeed
found an “equal to the apostles”. And the process of converting the world that
began at Pentecost reached its first climax in his reign…
The transformation of the pagan despotism
of Old Rome into the Christian Autocracy of New Rome on the model of the
Israelite Autocracy was a gradual, piecemeal process, with many reverses along
the way. Just as Constantine himself did not immediately become a baptised
Christian after his vision of the Cross at the Milvian Bridge, but was baptised
only on his deathbed, so the pagan governmental structure did not become
Christian overnight. Official paganism still retained some of its rights until
Theodosius’ decrees late in the fourth century; it was not until the reign of
Gratian near the end of the century that the Emperors abandoned the pagan
religious title of pontifex maximus, and the Senate was forbidden to
offer incense on the altar of the goddess Victory.
Some of the successors of Constantine,
especially in the East, tried to revive the pagan Roman idea of the Emperor as
supreme ruler in both religious and secular affairs, and to treat the Church as
no more than a department of State. This pagan reaction began already in the
reign of Constantine’s son Constantius. He had been Orthodox, but converted to
the Arian heresy, believing that Christ was not the pre-eternal God but a
created being.
In accordance with this change, St.
Athanasius, who had previously addressed him as “very pious”, a “worshipper of
God”, “beloved of God” and a successor of David and Solomon, now denounced him
as “patron of impiety and Emperor of heresy,… godless, unholy,.. this modern
Ahab, this second Belshazzar”, like Pharaoh, worse than Pilate and a forerunner
of the Antichrist.[180]
For, as he wrote to Constantius: “Judgement is made by bishops. What business
is it of the Emperor’s?”[181]
Another great bishop who spoke out in
similar terms against Constantius was the normally tolerant and urbane St.
Hilary of Poitiers. “It is time to speak,” he begins; “the time for holding my
peace has passed. Let Christ be expected, for Antichrist has prevailed. Let the
shepherds cry, for the hirelings have fled… You are fighting against God, you
are raging against the Church, you are persecuting the saints, you hate the
preachers of Christ, you are annulling religion; you are a tyrant no longer
only in the human, but in the divine sphere… You lyingly declare yourself a
Christian, but are a new enemy of Christ. You art a precursor of Antichrist,
and you work the mysteries of his secrets.”[182]
Constantius’ heretical cast of mind made
it easier for him to assume the place of Christ as head of the Church. Thus at
the Council of Milan in 355, which condemned St. Athanasius, the emperor said:
“My will is law”. To which St. Osius of Cordoba, replied: “Stop, I beseech you.
Remember that you are a mortal man, fear the Day of Judgement, preserve
yourself pure for that. Do not interfere in matters that are essentially
ecclesiastical and do not give us orders about them, but rather accept teaching
from us. God has entrusted you with the Empire, and to us He has entrusted the
affairs of the Church. And just as one who seizes for himself your power
contradicts the institution of God, so fear lest you, in taking into your own
hands the affairs of the Church, do not become guilty of a serious offence. As
it is written, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. We are
not permitted to exercise an earthly role; and you, Sire, are not authorised to
burn incense.”
At about this time, the Persian King Sapor
started to kill the clergy, confiscate church property and raze the churches to
the ground. He told St. Simeon, Bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, that if he
worshipped the sun, he would receive every possible honour and gift. But if he
refused, Christianity in Persia would be utterly destroyed. In reply, St. Simeon
not only refused to worship the sun but also refused to recognise the king by
bowing to him. This omission of his previous respect for the king’s authority
was noticed and questioned by the King. St. Simeon replied: "Before I
bowed down to you, giving you honour as a king, but now I come being brought to
deny my God and Faith. It is not good for me to bow before an enemy of my
God!" The King then threatened to destroy the Church in his kingdom… He
brought in about one hundred priests and about one thousand other Christians
and killed them before the saint’s eyes. The saint encouraged them not to be
frightened and to be in hope of eternal life. After everyone had been killed,
St. Simeon himself was martyred.[183]
This story is important because it shows
that the Fathers and Martyrs of the Church recognised the authority of kings
and emperors only so long as they did not persecute the Church of God. At the
same time, non-recognition did not necessarily mean rebellion. Thus although
the Fathers could not look upon a heretical emperor such as Constantius as an
image of the Heavenly King, they did not counsel rebellion against him, but
only resistance against those of his laws that encroached on Christian piety.
However, when Julian the Apostate (361-363)
came to the throne, passive resistance turned into active, if not actually
physical, attempts to have him removed. Thus St. Basil the Great prayed for the
defeat of Julian in his wars against the Persians; and it was through his
prayers that the apostate was in fact killed, as was revealed by God to the
holy hermit Julian of Mesopotamia.[184] At
this, St. Basil’s friend, St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “I call to
spiritual rejoicing all those who constantly remained in fasting, in mourning
and prayer, and by day and by night besought deliverance from the sorrows that
surrounded us and found a reliable healing from the evils in unshakeable hope…
What hoards of weapons, what myriads of men could have produced what our
prayers and the will of God produced?”[185] Gregory
called Julian not only an “apostate”, but also “universal enemy” and “general
murderer”, a traitor to Romanity as well as to Christianity.[186]
This raises the question: what was
different about Julian the Apostate that made him so much worse than previous
persecutors and unworthy even of that honour and obedience that had been given
to them? Two possible answers suggest themselves. The first is that Julian was
the first – and last – of the Byzantine emperors who openly trampled on the
memory and legitimacy of St. Constantine, declaring that he “insolently usurped
the throne”.[187]
In this way he questioned the legitimacy of the Christian Empire as such – a
revolutionary position that we do not come across again in Byzantine history
(if we except the short interlude of the political zealots in Thessalonica in
the 1340s). If, as Magdalino suggests, “each emperor’s accession was a
conscious act of renewal of the imperial order instituted by Constantine the
Great,” and “the idea of each new ruler as a new Constantine was implicit in
the dynastic succession established by the founder of Constantinople”[188],
then Julian’s rejection of Constantine was clearly a rejection of the imperial
order as such. In this sense he was an anti-emperor as well as an anti-christ.
That this is how the Byzantines looked at
it is suggested by what happened at the death of Julian and the accession of
the Christian Emperor Jovian in 363: “Themistus assured the people of the city
that what they were getting, after Constantine’s son Constantius and
Constantine’s nephew Julian, was nothing less than a reincarnation of
Constantine himself.”[189]
Jovian’s being a “new Constantine” was a guarantee that he represented a return
to the old order and true, Christian Romanity. From this time new Byzantine
emperors were often hailed as new Constantines, as were the Christian kings of
the junior members of the Christian commonwealth of nations.
A second reason for ascribing to Julian an
exceptional place amongst the forerunners of the Antichrist was his reversal of
the Emperor Hadrian’s decree of the year 135 forbidding the Jews from returning
to Jerusalem and, still worse, his helping the Jews to rebuild the Temple, in
defiance of the Lord’s prophecy that “there shall be left not one stone upon
another that shall not be thrown down” (Mark 13.2). By a miracle from
God the rebuilding of the Temple was forcibly stopped. St. Gregory the
Theologian relates how the Jews enthusiastically set about the rebuilding.
“Suddenly,” however, ”they were driven from their work by a violent earthquake
and whirlwind, and they rushed together for refuge to a neighbouring church…
There are some who say that the church doors were closed against them by an
invisible hand although these doors had been wide open a moment before… It is,
moreover, affirmed and believed by all that as they strove to force their way
in by violence, the fire, which burst from the foundation of the Temple, met
and stopped them; some it burnt and destroyed, others it injured seriously… But
the most wonderful thing was that a light, as of a cross within a circle,
appeared in the heavens… and the mark of the cross was impressed on their
garments… a mark which in art and elegance surpassed all painting and
embroidery.” [190]
But if Julian had succeeded, then,
wondered the Christians, what would have prevented him from sitting in the
Temple as God – in other words, taking the place of the Antichrist himself? It
is from this time, as Dagron points out, “that the face of each emperor or
empress is scrutinised to try and recognise in it the characteristic traits of
the Antichrist or of the sovereigns, good or bad, who precede his coming…”[191]
Strengthened by their victories over
apostate emperors, the Holy Fathers were emboldened to claim a dominant role
even in relation to Orthodox emperors. Thus St. Basil the Great wrote: «The
Emperors must defend the decrees of God».[192]
And St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “The law of Christ submits you to our
power and our judgement. For we also rule, and our power is higher than yours.
In fact, must the spirit bow before matter, the heavenly before the earthly?”[193]
And St. John Chrysostom wrote: “The priesthood is as far above the kingdom as
the spirit is above the body. The king rules the body, but the priest – the
king, which is why the king bows his head before the finger of the priest.”[194]
And again: “The Church is not the sphere of Caesar, but of God. The decrees of
the State authorities in matters of religion cannot have ecclesiastical
significance. Only the will of God can be the source of Church law. He who
bears the diadem is no better than the last citizen when he must be reproached
and punished. Ecclesiastical authority must stand firmly for its rights if the
State authorities interfere in its sphere. It must know that the boundaries of
royal power do not coincide with those of the priesthood, and the latter is
greater than the former.”[195]
This viewpoint was summarised in the Apostolic
Constitutions as follows: “The king occupies
himself only with military matters, worrying about war and peace, so as to
preserve the body, while the bishop covers the priesthood of God, protecting
both body and soul from danger. Thus the priesthood surpasses the kingdom as
much as the soul surpasses the body, for it binds and looses those worthy of
punishment and forgiveness.”[196]
This new assertiveness of the Church
towards the Empire was most clearly illustrated in the relationship between the
Emperor Theodosius the Great and St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Theodosius was
probably more disposed to accede to the desires of the Church than any Emperor
since Constantine. While only a general, he had a
vision of St. Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, investing him with the imperial robe
and covering his head with an imperial crown. So, on seeing him at the Second
Ecumenical Council in 381, the emperor ran up to him, “and, like a boy who
loves his father, stood for a long time gazing on him with filial joy, then
flung his arms around him, and covered eyes and lips and breast and head and
the hand that had given him the crown, with kisses”[197] –
a striking image of the new, filial relationship between Church and Empire.
Never before, and probably never again until the Muscovite tsars of the seventeenth
century was this relationship to be so clearly promulgated.
But if Theodosius thought that the
Church would now in all circumstances support him, as he supported the Church,
he was to receive a salutary shock at the hands of the great bishop, St.
Ambrose of Milan. “Ambrose,” writes John Julius Norwich, “was the most
influential churchman in Christendom – more so by far than the Pope in Rome, by
reason not only of the greater importance of Milan as a political capital but
also of his own background. Member of one of the most ancient Christian
families of the Roman aristocracy, son of a Praetorian Prefect of Gaul and
himself formerly a consularis, or governor, of Liguria and Aemilia, he
had never intended to enter the priesthood; but on the death in 374 of the
previous bishop, the Arian Auxentius, an acrimonious dispute had arisen between
the Orthodox and Arian factions in the city over which he, as governor, was
obliged to arbitrate. Only when it finally emerged that he alone possessed
sufficient prestige to make him equally acceptable to both parties did he
reluctantly allow his name to go forward. In a single week he was successively
a layman, catechumen, priest and bishop.”[198]
Now in 388 some Christians burned down the local synagogue in Callinicum
(Raqqa), on the Euphrates. Theodosius ordered it to be rebuilt at the
Christians’ expense. However, St. Ambrose wrote to him: «When a
report was made by the military Count of the East that a synagogue had been
burnt down, and that this was done at the instigation of the bishop, You gave
command that the others should be punished, and the synagogue be rebuilt by the
bishop himself… The bishop’s account ought to have been waited for, for priests
are the calmers of disturbances, and anxious for peace, except when even they
are moved by some offence against God, or insult to the Church. Let us suppose
that the bishop burned down the synagogue… It will evidently be necessary for
him to take back his act or become a martyr. Both the one and the other are
foreign to Your rule: if he turns out to be a hero, then fear lest
he end his life in martyrdom; but if he turns out to be unworthy, then fear
lest you become the cause of his fall, for the seducer bears the greater
responsibility.
And what if others are cowardly and agree to construct the synagogue? Then… you can write on the front of the building: ‘This temple of impiety
was built on contributions taken from Christians’. You are motivated by
considerations of public order. But what is the order from on high? Religion
was always bound to have the main significance in the State, which is why the
severity of the laws must be modified here. Remember Julian, who wanted to
rebuild the temple of Jerusalem: the builders were then burned by the fire of
God. Do you not take fright at what happened then?… And
how many temples did the Jews not burn down under Julian at Gaza, Askalon,
Beirut and other places? You did not take revenge for the
churches, but now You take revenge for the synagogue!”[199] “What is more important,” he asked, “the parade of discipline or
the cause of religion? The maintenance of civil law is secondary to religious
interest.” [200] And he refused to
celebrate the Divine Liturgy until the imperial decree had been revoked. Theodosius backed down…
St. Ambrose’s views on
Church-State relations were squarely in the tradition of the Eastern Fathers
quoted above: “The Emperor is not above the Church, but in the Church,” he wrote. “If one reads the Scriptures, one sees
that it is bishops who judge Emperors.”[201]
Like other men catapulted from exalted positions in the State to still more
exalted positions in the Church (we think of several popes and St. Photius the
Great), St. Ambrose showed a courage in the face of State authority that was
awe-inspiring. Perhaps this was based, in part, on his knowledge, based on his
experience as a governor, of how weak emperors really are. As he wrote: “How
miserable even in this world is the condition of kings, how mutable the
imperial state, how short the span of this life, what slavery sovereigns
themselves endure, seeing that they live not according to their own will but by
the will of others”.[202]
These patricians-turned-hierarchs strikingly combined the traditional
ideals of the political and ecclesiastical rulers as described by St. John
Chrysostom: «Fear induced by the leaders does not allow us to relax from lack
of care, while the consolations of the Church do not allow us to fall into
despondency: through both the one and the other God constructs our salvation.
He both established the leaders (Romans 13.4) so as to frighten the
bold, and has ordained the priests so as to comfort the sorrowing».[203]
Ambrose displayed these qualities again in 390, when a riot took place
in Thessalonica that led to the murder of several magistrates. In his anger on
hearing the news, the Emperor Theodosius ordered the execution of the
perpetrators. But there was no trial, and many innocent as well as guilty were
killed, perhaps as many as seven thousand.
“News of this lamentable calamity,” writes Theodoret, “reached Ambrose.
The emperor on his arrival at Milan wished according to custom to enter the
church. Ambrose met him outside the outer porch and forbade him to step over
the sacred threshold. ‘You seem, sir, not to know,’ said he, ‘the magnitude of
the bloody deed that has been done. Your rage has subsided, but your reason has
not yet recognised the character of the deed. Peradventure your Imperial power
prevents your recognising the sin, and power stands in the light of reason. We
must however know how our nature passes away and is subject to death; we must
know the ancestral dust from which we sprang, and to which we are swiftly
returning. We must not because we are
dazzled by the sheen of the purple fail to see the weakness of the body that it
robes. You are a sovereign, sir; of men of like nature with your own, and who
are in truth your fellow slaves; for there is one Lord and Sovereign of
mankind, Creator of the universe. With what eyes then will you look on the temple
of our common Lord – with what feet will you tread that holy threshold, how
will you stretch forth your hands still dripping with the blood of unjust
slaughter? How in such hands will you receive the all-holy Body of the Lord?
How will you who in rage unrighteously poured forth so much blood lift to your
lips the precious Blood? Begone. Attempt not to add another crime to that which
you have committed. Submit to the restriction to which God the Lord of all
agrees that you be sentenced. He will be your physician, He will give you
health.’
“Educated as he had been in the sacred
oracles, Theodosius knew clearly what belonged to priests and what to emperors.
He therefore bowed to the rebuke of Ambrose, and retired sighing and weeping to
the palace. After a considerable time, when eight months had passed away, the
festival of our Saviour’s birth came round and the emperor sat in his palace
shedding a storm of tears.” [204]
At this point Rufinus, controller of the
household, proposed that he ask Ambrose to revoke his decision. The emperor did
not think Rufinus would succeed; “for I know the justice of the sentence passed
by Ambrose, nor will he ever be moved by respect for my imperial power to
transgress the law of God.” Nevertheless, he eventually agreed that Rufinus
should make the attempt.
Ambrose was scathing to Rufinus: “Your
impudence matches a dog’s,” he said, “for you were the adviser of this terrible
slaughter.” And he said he would rather die than allow the emperor to enter the
church: “If he is for changing his sovereign power into that of a tyrant, I too
will gladly submit to a violent death.”
Here we find a very important difference
between the concepts of true sovereignty, basileia, and the unlawful
power of the usurper, tyrannis. Such a distinction was not new.
Aristotle had written: “There is a third kind of tyranny; which is the most
typical form and is the counterpart to the perfect monarchy. This tyranny is
just that arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no-one and
governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage,
not to that of its subjects and therefore against their will.”[205]
The Holy Fathers developed this idea in a Christian context. Thus St. Basil the Great said: “If the heart of the king is in the hands of God (Proverbs 21.1), then he is saved, not by force of arms, but by the guidance of God. But not every one is in the hands of God, but only he who is worthy of the name of king. Some have defined kingly power as lawful dominion or sovereignty over all, without being subject to sin.” A strict definition indeed! And again: “The difference between a tyrant and a King is that the tyrant strives in every way to carry out his own will. But the King does good to those whom he rules.”[206]
St. Ambrose followed in this tradition and
gave the idea a further twist: a tyrant is a ruler who attempts disobey or
dominate the Church. Other Fathers agreed that the possession of power by no
means guaranteed its legitimacy. Thus St. Isidore of Pelusium wrote, early in
the fifth century: “If some evildoer unlawfully seizes power, we do not say
that he is established by God [the definition of a true king], but we say that
he is allowed, either to spit out all his craftiness, or in order to chasten
those for whom cruelty is necessary, as the king of Babylon chastened the
Jews."[207]
As we shall see, the iconophile Fathers of
the eighth and ninth centuries also resorted to the use of the phrase “tyrant,
not king” to describe the iconoclast emperors. The distinction between true
kings and tyrants was to have a long development, especially in the West.
Unfortunately, in the mouths of less holy hierarchs than Ambrose it would
provide an excuse for the heretical, papocaesarist theory of political power…
Models
of Kingship
The Christian Roman Empire was a new and
astounding phenomenon, which immediately raised the question: what kind of
kingdom was it? Before attempting to answer this question, let us remind
ourselves of some of the different concepts of kingship in ancient times.
“In every people,” writes the French
linguist Émile Benveniste, we can observe that special functions are
attributed to the ‘king’. Between royal power in the Vedas [of India] and Greek
royal power there is a difference which comes out when we compare the following
two definitions: In the Laws of Manu the king is characterised in one phrase:
‘the king is a great god in human form’. Such a definition is confirmed by
other utterances: ‘there are eight holy objects, objects of veneration, worship
and good treatment: Brahman, the holy cow, fire, gold, melted butter, the sun,
the waters and the king (as the eighth)’. This is opposed by the definition of
Aristotle: ‘the king is in the same relationship with his subjects as the head
of a family with his children’. That is, in essence, this despotis in
the etymological sense of the word was a master of the house – a complete
master, without a doubt, but by no means a divinity….
“For the Indo-Iranians the king is a
divinity, and he has no need to attach legality to his power by using a symbol
such as a sceptre. But the Homeric king was just a man who received royal
dignity from Zeus together with the attributes that emphasised this dignity.
For the Germans the king’s power was purely human.”[208]
So Rome, according to Benveniste, tended
towards the oriental, despotic, god-man model of kingship. However, as we have
seen, there was always a tension, in the early pagan Roman empire, between the
earlier, more democratic traditions of Republican Rome and the later, more
despotic traditions adopted by Augustus from the East (especially Cleopatra’s
Egypt). Only by the time of Diocletian, in the early fourth century, had the
oriental, despotic tradition achieved clear dominance.
But the Christian Roman emperors
beginning with St. Constantine had more than Greco-Roman traditions to draw on:
there were also the traditions of Old Testament Israel. That is, they had as
models for imitation not only the pagan Greek and Roman emperors, such as
Alexander and Augustus, but also the Old Testament kings, such as David and
Solomon. In the end, a creative synthesis was achieved, which enabled the
Christian Roman emperors to look back to both David and Augustus as models and
forerunners. And into this sythesis went a third element: St. Paul’s teaching
that the Roman emperor was “the servant of God” (Romans 13.4), the King
of kings, the Lord Jesus Christ – Who chose to become a man as the Son of David
and a taxpayer as the subject of Augustus.
However, the tension between the pagan
(Roman) and Christian (neo-Roman or Byzantine) elements of this synthesis
continued to trouble the empire for centuries. G.A. Ostrogorsky writes: «The
Byzantine State structure was not created by Christian Byzantium itself. It was
created, first and above all, by the Roman Emperor and pagan Diocletian, and
secondly, by Constantine the Great, who stood on the boundary between the old
and the new Rome, between paganism and Christianity. This circumstance
determined the destiny of Byzantium. According to their State consciousness,
the Byzantines always remained Romans; they proudly called themselves Romans
right up to the 15th century, on the eve of the fall of the Empire.
Moreover, they knew no other name for themselves. But in spirit – and the more
so as time passed – they were Greeks. But at the same time and first of all
they were Christians. Transferred into the sphere of another culture, the form
of Roman Statehood served as a vessel for the Greek-Christian spirit. No less
than the Byzantine people, and still more, did the Byzantine Emperors feel
themselves to be Romans – the heirs and successors of ancient Rome, right up to
Augustus. With the form of Roman Statehood they absorbed also all the
prerogatives and attributes of Imperial power in ancient Rome. But to these
prerogatives there also belonged the prerogative of the first-priesthood. The
Emperor was not only the supreme judge and army commander, but also the Pontifex
Maximus; the religious life of his subjects was subject to him as a part of
public law. In ancient Rome, where the State religion was the cult of the
genius of the divine Emperor, this was completely natural. In Christian
Byzantium such a position, it would seem, was unthinkable. Further development
also demonstrated its impossibility, but not a little time passed before the
new spirit broke through the ways of the old traditions. The very title Pontifex
Maximus was removed only half a century after the Christianisation of the
Empire (by an Edict of the Emperor Gratian in 375), while the remnants of the
first-hierarchical character of Imperial power were visible for longer.... This
viewpoint was not eastern, but simply typical of the given period, and was
based not on Byzantine, but on ancient Roman ideas. At that time it was
inherent both in the East and in the West; in the Middle Ages it lost its power
both in the East and in Byzantium. And it is important that it lost its power
in East in proportion as the Byzantine principles began to triumph over the
Roman...»[209]
One idea that was to prove critical in
defining the status of the emperor was that of the earthly king as being the
image of the Heavenly King. Though pagan (hellenistic) in origin[210],
immediately after the christianisation of the empire this idea was borrowed and
modified by Christian writers, who purified it of the tendency, so natural to
pagan thought, of identifying the
earthly and the Heavenly, the image and its archetype. Thus St. Cyril of
Alexandria wrote to the Emperor Theodosius II: «In truth, you are a certain
image and likeness of the Heavenly Kingdom».[211]
The first to use this comparison in a
Christian context was the Arian Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote of St.
Constantine:
"The kingdom with which he is invested is an image of the heavenly one. He
looks up to see the archetypal pattern and guides those whom he rules below in
accordance with that pattern.”[212] “The ruler
of the whole world is the second Person of the All-Holy Trinity – the Word of
God, Who is in
everything visible and invisible. From this all-embracing Reason the Emperor is
rational, from this Wisdom he is wise, from participation in this Divinity he
is good, from communion with this Righteousness he is righteous, in accordance
with the idea of this Moderation he is moderate, from the reception of this
highest Power he is courageous. In all justice one must call a true Emperor him
who has formed his soul with royal virtues, according
to the image of the Highest Kingdom”.[213]
As we have seen, already in the first three
Christian centuries the Roman Empire had been seen as the providential creation
of God for the furtherance and strengthening of His rule on earth. Now that the
emperor himself was a Christian and was acting in such a successful way to
spread the faith throughout the ecumene, the idea that his earthly
kingdom was a reflection of the Heavenly Kingdom was readily accepted. But this
is no way implied the spiritual subjection of the Church to the Empire. And
when the emperor began to support heresy and persecute the Orthodox, his “image
status” was immediately lost. At no time more than in the fourth century do we
find Christians bolder in their confession against false emperors, or more
prepared, as we have seen, to emphasise the superiority of the Church to the
Empire…
Understood in a Christian way, the idea of the emperor as being in the
image of the Heavenly King excluded not only the pagan idea of the despotic
king-god-man, but also the equally pagan idea of democratism. Thus Eusebius
wrote: «The example of monarchical rule there is a source of strength to him.
This is something granted to man alone of the creatures of the earth by the
universal King. The basic principle of kingly authority is the establishment of
a single source of authority to which everything is subject. Monarchy is
superior to every other constitution and form of government. For polyarchy,
where everyone competes on equal terms, is really anarchy and discord. This is
why there is one God, not two or three or even more. Polytheism is strictly
atheism. There is one King, and His Word and royal law are one."[214]
Even
those Fathers who insisted most on the inferiority of the State to the Church
accepted that the State could only be ruled by one man. Thus Ê.V. Glazkov writes: «St. Ephraim
the Syrian noted that God’s unity of rule in the Heavenly Kingdom and Caesar’s
unity of rule in the earthly kingdom destroy polytheism and polyarchy... The holy
hierarch Gregory the Theologian remarked that there exist three basic forms of
rule: monarchy – rule by one man, which contains in itself faith in one God or,
at least, in a highest God; polyarchy or aristocracy – the rule of the minority
or of the best, which is bound up with polytheism; and, finally, the power of the
majority, which St. Gregory calls anarchy (democracy), which goes hand in glove
with atheism. The saint affirmed that the Orthodox venerate monarchy insofar as
it imitates the unity of God, while polyarchy presupposes a scattering of His
might, a division of His essence amidst several gods.
And, finally, anarchy, the rule of the people, theologically includes within
itself the atomisation of God’s essence, in other words, power is so fragmented
that it becomes almost impossible to attain to the very existence of God».[215]
This teaching of the fourth-century Fathers în the significance of autocratic power was confirmed, over four centuries later, by St. Theodore the Studite: "There is one Lord and Giver of the Law, as it is written: one
authority and one Divine principle over all. This single principle is the
source of all wisdom, goodness and good order; it extends over every creature
that has received its beginning from the goodness of God…, it is given to one
man only.. to construct rules of life in accordance with the likeness of God.
For the divine Moses in his description of the origin of the world that comes
from the mouth of God, cites the word: 'Let us create man in accordance with
Our image and likeness' (Genesis 1.26). Hence the establishment among
men of every dominion and every authority, especially in the Churches of God:
one patriarch in a patriarchate, one metropolitan in a metropolia, one bishop
in a bishopric, one abbot in a monastery, and in secular life, if you want to
listen, one king, one regimental commander, one captain on a ship. And if one
will did not rule in all this, there would be no law and order in anything, and
it would not be for the best, for a multiplicity of wills destroys
everything."[216]
The idea that monarchy is the natural form
of government because it reflects, and draws attention to, the monarchy of God,
was a new concept of great importance in the history of ideas. The pagan states
of the Ancient World were, for the most part, monarchical. But none of them
believed, as did the Christians, in a single God and Creator. Moreover, as
often as not, they invested the king with divine status, so that no higher
principle or source of authority above the king or emperor was recognised. In
the Christian empire, on the other hand, sacred and secular power were embodied
in different persons and institutions, and both emperor and patriarch were
considered bound by, and subject to, the will of God in heaven.
Of course, there were real dangers in
attributing too exalted an authority to the emperor, and some of the iconoclast
emperors earned the epithet “forerunner of the Antichrist” in Byzantine
liturgical texts when they tried to revive the pagan idea of the king-priest.
However, in spite of their experience with the iconoclast emperors, and the
constant struggle the patriarchs had to prevent the emperors invading their
sphere, the Byzantines continued to assert the independent and sacred authority
of the anointed emperors, pointing to the examples of the Old Testament kings.
And since the Old Testament kings, such as David and Solomon, while deferring
to the priesthood, were nevertheless quite clearly the leaders of the people of
God in a more than purely political sense, the same predominance was enjoyed by
the emperors in Byzantium.
In Byzantium, therefore, writes Dagron,
“the Old Testament has a constitutional value; it has the same normative
character in the political domain as the New Testament has in the moral domain.
The history of the Jews, carefully dehistoricised and dejudaised by this
Christian reading, has the function of prefiguring what will be or should be
the conduct of the Empire, of understanding in what conditions and by
conformity with what biblical “figure” a sovereign will win or lose his
legitimacy, a son inherit power from his father, or a king be able to call
himself a priest…”[217]
The
Symphony of Powers
Although different interpretations of the
Old Testament models of kingship (and priesthood) eventually led, together with
other doctrinal disputes, to the schism between East and West in the eleventh
century, until then a common understanding of the Church-State relationship had
flourished throughout Christian Europe and the Middle East. This understanding
was given its classical expression in the Emperor Justinian’s famous Sixth
Novella on the “symphony of powers”. Let us briefly examine the historical
process that led to this statement.
We have seen that the great fourth-century
bishops of the Church, in both East and West, vigorously upheld the sovereignty
of the Church in “the things that are God’s”. This led in some cases to serious
conflict with the emperors. Thus Saints Athanasius and Basil and Gregory had to
defy the will of Arianising emperors in the East, as did Saints Osius and
Hilary and Ambrose in the West; while St. John Chrysostom reproached the
Empress Eudoxia and suffered banishment for his boldness.
However, there were several emperors who
were conscientious in protecting the rights of the Church – the western
emperors Arcadius, Honorius and Valentinian III, for example, and the eastern
emperors Theodosius I and II. The latter sent emissaries to the Council of
Ephesus, at which Nestorius was condemned, instructing not to interfere in the
arguments about the faith. For it was not permitted, he said, for any of them
who was not numbered among the most holy bishops to interfere in Church
questions.[218]
But as the fifth century wore on, and the
chaos in the Church caused by the heretics increased, there were calls for the
emperors to take a more active role in Church affairs. Some “interference” by
the emperors was even sanctioned by Canon 93 (Greek 96) of the Council of
Carthage in the year 419: “It behoves the gracious clemency of their Majesties
to take measures that the Catholic Church, which has begotten them as
worshippers of Christ in her womb, and has nourished them with the strong meat
of the faith, should by their forethought be defended, lest violent men, taking
advantage of the times of religious excitement, should be fear overcome a weak
people, whom by arguments they were not able to pervert”. An ancient epitome of
this canon puts it succinctly: “The Emperors who were born in the true religion
and were educated in the faith, ought to stretch forth a helping hand to the
Churches. For the military band overthrew the dire conspiracy which was
threatening Paul.”[219]
That the Emperor, as well as the
hierarchs, should pronounce his word in defence of the faith was accepted by
the Church in both heaven and on earth. Thus we read in the life of St.
Hypatius of Rufinianus (June 17): “When Nestorius had left for Ephesus, and the
[Third Ecumenical] Council had assembled, on the day when he should be deposed,
Saint Hypatius saw in a vision that an angel of the Lord took hold of Saint
John the Apostle, and led him to the most pious Emperor [Theodosius II] and
said to him, ‘Say to the Emperor: “Pronounce your sentence against Nestorius”.’
And he, having heard this, pronounced it. Saint Hypatius made note of this day,
and it was verified that Nestorius was deposed on that very day…”[220]
A little later, St. Isidore of Pelusium
declared that some “interference” by the emperors was necessary in view of the
sorry state of the priesthood: “The present hierarchs, by not acting in the
same way as their predecessors, do not receive the same as they; but
undertaking the opposite to them, they themselves experience the opposite. It
would be surprising if, while doing nothing similar to their ancestors, they
enjoyed the same honour as they. In those days, when the kings fell into sin
they became chaste again, but now this does not happen even with laymen. In
ancient times the priesthood corrected the royal power when it sinned, but now
it awaits instructions from it; not because it has lost its own dignity, but
because that dignity has been entrusted to those who are not similar to those
who lived in the time of our ancestors. Formerly, when those who had lived an
evangelical and apostolic life were crowned with the priesthood, the priesthood
was fearful by right for the royal power; but now the royal power is fearful to
the priesthood. However, it is better to say, not ‘priesthood’, but those who
have the appearance of doing the priestly work, while by their actions they
insult the priesthood. That is why it seems to me that the royal power is acting
justly when, while recognising the priesthood itself.”[221]
The justification of such “interference”, in St. Isidore’s view, lay in the
fact that “although there is a very great difference between the priesthood and
the kingdom (the former is the soul, the latter – the body), nevertheless they
strive for one and the same goal, that is, the salvation of citizens”.[222]
Following this rule, the emperors did at
times intervene successfully in Church affairs. This was especially necessary
because of the violent behaviour of heretics such as Dioscuros. Thus it was the
decisive intervention of the new Emperors Marcian and Pulcheria that made
possible the convening of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451 and the Triumph
of Orthodoxy over the Monophysite heresy. [223]
At such times, when the bishops were
betraying the truth, the pious emperors stood out as the representatives of the
laity, which, as the Eastern Patriarchs were to declare in their encyclical of
the year 1848, is the guardian of the truth of the Church. At such times they
were indeed higher than the clergy, if not by their intrinsic grace, at any
rate in view of the fact that the clergy had forsaken their vocation. At such
times, the emperors were indeed images of the Heavenly King, their vocation being,
like His, to witness to the truth. For as the King of kings
said to Pilate: “You say that I am a king. For that I was born, and for that I came
into the world, to witness to the truth” (John 18.37). It was in this sense that
St. Leo the Great wrote to the Emperor Theodosius II that he had “not only the
soul of an Emperor, but also the soul of a priest”. And to the Emperor Marcian
he wished “the palm of the priesthood as well as the emperor’s crown”.[224]
As Dagron points out, “the emperor could not remain neutral. He was
the guarantor and often the principal architect of the unity of the Church.
Thus the Orthodox or heretical council unanimously celebrated the sovereign
‘guarded by God’ by giving him without niggardliness the title of ‘teacher of the
faith’, ‘new Paul’, ‘equal to the apostles, illumined like the bishops by the
Holy Spirit’. At the end of the fourth session of the council held in
Constantinople in 536, the bishops expressed the conviction of all in declaring
that, ‘under an Orthodox emperor’, the Empire had nothing and nobody to fear;
and Patriarch Menas concluded: ‘It is fitting that nothing of that which is
debated in the holy Church should be decided against the advice and order [of
the emperor]’.”
It is in this context that one has to
understand the at times highly rhetorical expressions used by Eastern – and
also Western - bishops with regard to the emperors and kings. Dagron again:
“The distinction between the two powers was never as clearly formulated as
while there was a disagreement between them. When there was concord or the hope
of harmony, the celebration or hope of unity carried the day. Nobody found
anything wrong when the synod that condemned the heretic Eutyches in
Constantinople in 448 acclaimed Theodosius with the words: ‘Great is the faith
of the emperors! Many years to the guardians of the faith! Many years to the
pious emperor, the emperor-bishop (tw arcierei basilei).’ The whole world is equally agreed, a little later at the Council
of Chalcedon, in acclaiming Marcian as ‘priest and emperor’, at the same time
as ‘restorer of the Church, teacher of the faith, New Constantine, New Paul and
New David’. At the same time Pope Leo congratulated Theodosius II, and then
Marcian, on the sacerdotalis industria, on the sacerdotalis anima,
and on the sacerdotalis palma with which God had rewarded
them, and he declared to Leo I that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit in
matters of the faith.[225]
Except during periods of tension, the adjective sacerdotalis was part of
the formula of the pontifical chancellery for letters addressed to the emperors
of Constantinople. The composers of elegies were not behindhand, in the West as
in the East. Procopius of Gaza underlined that Anastasius had been elected to
be a bishop before being named emperor, and that he reunited in himself ‘that
which is most precious among men, the apparatus of an emperor and the thought
of a priest’; Ennodius of Pavia (473-521) proclaimed Theodoric to be ‘prince
and priest’; Venantius Fortunatus, in the second half of the 6th
century, called Childebert I ‘Melchisedech noster, merito rex atque sacerdos’;
towards 645 and anonymous panegyric characterised Clotaire I as quasi
sacerdos; Paulinus, bishop of Aquilea, in 794 encouraged Charlemagne to be
‘Dominus et pater, rex et sacerdos’. To justify the canonisation of a king,
they said that he had been led during his reign acsi bonus sacerdos. We
are in the domain of rhetoric, but that does not mean that they could say
anything and break the taboos. Even if the words have a metaphorical and
incantatory meaning, even if their association distilled a small dose of
provocation, there was nothing abnormal in affirming that the ideal emperor was
also a priest.”[226]
It was therefore on the basis of a common
understanding both of the theological and of the political foundations of
Christian Rome that spiritual peace between the Old and New Romes was restored
after the death of Anastasius. First came the recognition, by Patriarch John
Kappadokes, of the primacy of the see of Old Rome – which, however, he declared
to be one church with the see of New Rome.[227] Then, in 533, Pope John II responded
by exalting the emperor as high as any western bishop had ever done: "'The
King's heart is in the hand of God and He directs it as He pleases' (Proverbs
21.1). There lies the foundation of your Empire and the endurance of your rule.
For the peace of the Church and the unity of religion raise their originator to
the highest place and sustain him there in happiness and peace. God's power
will never fail him who protects the Church against the evil and stain of
division, for it is written: 'When a righteous King sits on the throne, no evil
will befall him'." (Proverbs 20:8)[228]
Thus by the time Justinian ascended the
throne, the Gelasian doctrine of a strict demarcation of powers between the
Emperor and the Church was giving way, in both East and West, to a less clearly
defined Leonine model in which the Emperor was allowed a greater initiative in
the spiritual domain, for the sake of “the peace of the Church and the unity of
religion”. Justinian pursued this aim in two ways: by war in the West, and by
theological negotiation in the East. He was more successful in the former than
the latter. Nevertheless, the union, however fleeting, of the five ancient
patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in one
Orthodox Church under one right-believing Emperor, was a great achievement. And
there could be little doubt that the single person most instrumental in
achieving this union was the emperor himself: if the five patriarchates
represented the five senses of the Body of Christ on earth, then the head in
which they all adhered was the emperor.
This unity was not achieved without some
pressure. However, writes Meyendorff, “without denying the dangers and the
abuses of imperial power, which occurred in particular instances, the system as
such, which been created by Theodosius I and Justinian, did not deprive the
Church of its ability to define dogma through conciliarity. But conciliarity
presupposed the existence of a mechanism, making consensus possible and
effective. Local churches needed to be grouped into provinces and
patriarchates, and patriarchates were to act together to reach an agreement
valid for all. The empire provided the universal Church with such a mechanism…”[229]
Thus, no less strikingly than in
Constantine’s time, the emperor acted as the focus of unity of quarrelling
Christians. The importance of this function was recognised by all – even by the
heretics. In consequence, as L.A. Tikhomirov points out, even when a Byzantine
emperor tried to impose heresy on the Church, “this was a struggle that did not
besmirch the Church and State power as institutions. In this struggle he acted
as a member of the Church, in the name of Church truth, albeit mistakenly
understood. This battle was not about the relationship between the Church and
the State and did not lead to its interruption, nor to the seeking of any other
kind of principles of mutual relationship. As regards the direct conflicts
between Church and State power, they arose only for particular reasons, only
between given persons, and also did not relate to the principle of the mutual
relationship itself.”[230]
As if to symbolise the unity he had achieved, Justinian built Hagia
Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom and without a peer to this day. “I
have surpassed Solomon,” he cried on entering the church. The other, no less
enduring expression of this unity was Justinian’s codification of Roman law,
which united the old and new in one coherent body.
Among the new laws was the famous Sixth
Novella
(535): "The greatest gifts given by God to men by
His supreme kindness are the priesthood and the empire, of which the first
serves the things of God and the second rules the things of men and assumes the
burden of care for them. Both proceed from one source and adorn the life of
man. Nothing therefore will be so greatly desired by the emperors than the
honour of the priests, since they always pray to God about both these very
things. For if the first is without reproach and adorned with faithfulness to
God, and the other adorns the state entrusted to it rightly and competently, a
good symphony will exist, which will offer everything that is useful for the
human race. We therefore have the greatest care concerning the true dogmas of
God and concerning the honour of the priests…, because through this the
greatest good things will be given by God – both those things that we already
have will be made firm and those things which we do not have yet we shall
acquire. Everything will go well if the principle of the matter is right and
pleasing to God. We believe that this will come to pass if the holy canons are
observed, which have been handed down to us by the apostles, those inspectors
and ministers of God worthy of praise and veneration, and which have been
preserved and explained."
Several points in Justinian’s Sixth Novella, which was
addressed to Patriarch Epiphanius of Constantinople, need to be emphasised.
First, both the priesthood and the empire are said to “proceed from the same
source”, that is, God. This has the very important consequence that the normal
and natural relationship between the two powers is one of harmony and symphony,
not rivalry and division. If some of the early Fathers, in both East and West,
tended to emphasise the separation and distinctness of the powers rather than
their unity from and under God, this was a natural result of the friction
between the Church and the pagan and heretical emperors in the early centuries.
However, now
that unity in Orthodoxy had been achieved the emphasis had to return to the
common source and common end of the two institutions. This commonality was
emphasised in the Seventh Novella (2, 1), in which it was admitted in
principle that “the goods of the Church, which are in principle inalienable,
could be the object of transactions with the emperor, ‘for the difference
between the priesthood (ierwsunh) and the Empire (basileia) is small, as it is between the
sacred goods and the goods that are common to the community.’”[231]
Secondly, it is not any kind of harmony or symphony that is in question
here, but only a true symphony that comes from God and leads to the good. As
Andrushkevich points out, the word"symphony” [consonantia
in the original Latin] here denotes much more than simple agreement or concord.
Church and State can agree in an evil way, for evil ends. As A.V. Kartashev
points out, ‘this is no longer symphony, but cacophony’.
[232] True symphony is possible only where both the Church "is
without reproach and adorned with faithfulness to God" and the State is
ruled "rightly and competently" - that is, in accordance with the
commandments of God.[233]
If
the emperor were seriously to care for the observation of the Church canons,
then he would have to qualify the absolutist principle of Roman power, namely,
that whatever is pleasing to the emperor
has the force of law with the words: unless
it contradicts the holy canons. Several Church canons forbid resort to the
secular powers in Church matters[234], and Justinian now defended the
canons in his Novella 131: “The
Church canons have the same force in the State as the State laws: what is
permitted or forbidden by the former is permitted or forbidden by the latter.
Therefore crimes against the former cannot be tolerated in the State according
to State legislation.”
«As regards the judicial branch,” writes Nikolin, “coordinated action
presupposed not simply mutual complementation of the spheres of administration
of the ecclesiastical and secular courts, but, which is especially important,
the introduction into the activity of the latter of the moral-educational
content inherent in Christianity.
“In
a single service to the work of God both the Church and the State constitute as
it were one whole, one organism – ‘unconfused’, but also ‘undivided’. In this
lay the fundamental difference between Orthodox ‘symphony’ and Latin
‘papocaesarism’ and Protestant ‘caesaropapism’.”[235]
Of
course, the principle that the Church canons should
automatically be considered as State laws was not always carried out in
practice, even in Justinian’s reign; and in some
spheres, as Nikolin points out, «in becoming [State] law, the [Church] canon
lost its isolation, and the all-powerful Emperor, in commenting on the canon
that had become law, was able thereby to raise himself above the canon. The
Christian Emperor received the ability to reveal the content of the canon in
his own way (in the interests of the State). Justinian’s rule provides several confirmations of this. The rules for the election, conduct and inter-relations of bishops, clergy and monks, for the
punishment of clergy, and for Church property were subjected to his reglamentation. Bishops received broad powers in
State affairs (more exactly, numerous State duties were imputed to them)».[236]
This
recruitment of bishops to undertake essentially secular bureaucratic duties was
contrary to the apostolic canons and could have led to a secularisation of the
Episcopal calling. In general, however,
this did not take place; and the enormous benefits of the principle of the symphony of powers continued to be felt throughout the long history of Byzantium. As Nikolin writes,
“Justinian’s rule was a rule in which the mutual relations of Church and State
were inbuilt, and which later lasted in Byzantium right up to the days of her
fall, and which were borrowed in the 10th century by Rus’. In the first place this related to the principle: 'Ecclesiastical canons
are State laws’. Moreover, the Christian direction of Justinian’s reforms told
on the content of the majority of juridical norms. This was most vividly
revealed in the resolutions of questions concerning the regulation of
individual spheres of Church life. Church communities were now provided with
the rights of a juridical person. In property questions they were given various
privileges...
“A particular feature of Justinian’s
reforms was that as a result of them State power was transformed into a defender
of the faith. This was most clearly revealed in the establishment of
restrictions on the juridical rights of citizens of the empire linked with
their confession of faith:
-
Pagans and Jews were
deprived of the right to occupy posts in state or societal service, and were
not able to possess Christians slaves.
-
Apostates, that is, people
going over from Christianity to paganism or Judaism were deprived of the right
to composed wills and inherit, and likewise were not able to be witnesses at
trials;
-
Heretics were not able to occupy posts in state or societal service; they were deprived of the right of inheritance; they could make bequests… only to Orthodox. There were even stricter measures
adopted in relation to certain sects.»[237]
As a
natural development of this church-oriented tendency, from 602 the crowning of
Byzantine emperors took place, not in the Hippodrome, but in the church, and at
the hands of the Patriarch.
If
the model for Justinian’s symphony of powers
was the Chalcedonian doctrine of the relationship between the two natures of
Christ, the model for his symphony of nations
was the hierarchical relationship between father and son. Here the metaphor
was of a family of nations with the Eastern Roman Emperor as its head and
father. This idea had already taken root by the sixth century. This family was
not united by a single political or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but by a
common sentiment of belonging to the civilisation of Christian Rome.
“This doctrine,” writes I.P. Medvedev, “found practical expression
in… a hierarchical system of States…The place of each sovereign in this
official, hierarchical gradation of all
the princes of the world in relation to the Byzantine Emperor was defined by
kinship terms borrowed from the terminology of family law: father-son-brother,
but also friend… The use of kinship terms by the Byzantine Emperor in
addressing a foreign Sovereign was not a simple metaphor or rhetoric, but a
definite title which was given on the basis of a mutual agreement, that is,
bestowed by the Emperor… And so at the head of the oikoumene was the Basileus
Romanon, the Byzantine Emperor, the father of ‘the family of sovereigns and
peoples’. Closest of all ‘by kinship’ among the politically independent sovereigns
were certain Christian rulers of countries bordering on the Empire, for example
Armenia, Alania and Bulgaria; they were spiritual sons of the Byzantine
Emperor. Less close were the Christian masters of the Germans and French, who
were included in this ‘family of sovereigns and peoples’ with the rights of
spiritual brothers of the Emperor. After them came the friends, that is,
independent sovereigns and peoples who received this title by dint of a special
agreement – the emir of Egypt and the ruler of India, and later the Venetians,
the king of England, etc. Finally, we must name a large group of princes who
were ranked, not according to degree of ‘kinship’, but by dint of
particularities of address and protocol – the small appanage principalities of
Armenia, Iberia, Abkhazia, the Italian cities, Moravia and Serbia (group 1),
and the appanage princes of Hungary and Rus’, the Khazar and Pecheneg khans,
etc. (group
2)…”[238]
If
we restrict ourselves to speaking only of the Orthodox Christian States and
peoples, then within this single religio-cultural commonwealth or civilisation
there was, strictly speaking, only one Christian people, the people of the
Romans; and Greeks and Latins, Celts and Germans, Semites and Slavs were all
equally Romans, all equally members
of the Roman commonwealth of nations.
Thus
the following words of Fr. George Metallenos concerning the Eastern Empire
could be applied, without major qualification, to the whole vast territory from
Ireland and Spain in the West to Georgia and Ethiopia in the East: "A
great number of peoples made up the autocracy but without any 'ethnic'
differentiation between them. The whole racial amalgam lived and moved in a
single civilisation (apart from some particularities) - the Greek[239], and it had a single cohesive
spiritual power – Orthodoxy, which was at the same time the ideology of the oikoumene
- autocracy. The citizens of the autocracy were Romans politically, Greeks
culturally and Orthodox Christians spiritually. Through Orthodoxy the old relationship
of rulers and ruled was replaced by the sovereign bond of brotherhood. Thus the
'holy race' of the New Testament (I Peter 2.9) became a reality as the
'race of the Romans', that is, of the Orthodox citizens of the autocracy of the
New Rome."[240]
So
widely accepted was the ideal of “One Faith, One Church, One Empire” that when
Charlemagne came to create his western rival to the Eastern Empire, he also
spoke of "the Christian people of the Romans" without ethnic
differentiation, and tried (without much success) to introduce a single Roman
law for all the constituent nations of his empire. As Agobard, Archbishop of
Lyons, put it: "There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor
Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All
are one in Christ... Can it be accepted that, opposed to this unity which is
the work of God, there should be an obstacle in the diversity of laws [used] in
one and the same country, in one and the same city, and in one and the same
house? It constantly happens that of five men walking or sitting side by side,
no two have the same territorial law, although at root - on the eternal plan -
they belong to Christ."[241]
There were gaps, it must be admitted, in the record of Orthodox unity.
Thus towards the end of the fifth century the Eastern Emperor Zeno confessed
Monophysitism, as did the Armenians, while a vast swathe of Italy, France and
Spain was ruled by the Arian Theodoric. Again, in the seventh century all of
the patriarchates fell, temporarily, into the heresy of Monothelitism, and in
the eighth century the East fell into iconoclasm.
But
while Orthodoxy faltered – although never in all places at the same time – the
underlying unity of Orthodox Christian civilisation enabled unity of faith to
be recovered before long. It was only in the first half of seventh century, in
the East, and towards the end of the eighth century, in the West, that the
first more or less deep and permanent cracks in the unity both of faith and
civilisation began to appear.
The unity achieved by Justinian between
the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Empire was striking, but it was not, of
course, monolithic. Not only were there Roman citizens who were not Orthodox –
the Monophysite Copts and Syrians, for example: there were also large bodies of
Orthodox, and Orthodox States, that remained outside the bounds of the Empire –
for example, the Celts in the West and the Georgians in the East. The question
was: what was the relationship of these non-Roman Orthodox to Rome and
Romanity?
Of course, friction between the nations of
the Byzantine commonwealth did occur. And although nationalism as such is
usually considered to be a modern phenomenon stemming from the French
Revolution, something similar to nationalism is certainly evident in antiquity.
Perhaps the clearest example is that of the Armenians.
Now Armenia can lay claim to having been
the first Christian kingdom, having been converted by St. Gregory the
Illuminator in the early fourth century. However, in the middle of the fifth
century, in the wake of the Byzantine Emperor Marcian’s refusal to support an
Armenian revolt against Persia, the Armenian Church ignored and then rejected
the Council of Chalcedon. From this time the Armenian Church was alienated from
Orthodoxy, but not completely from Romanity.
Thus in the council of Dvin in 506, they
sided with the Monophysites who were being persecuted by the Persian government
at the instigation of the Nestorians. As Jones writes, they “affirmed their
unity with the Romans, condemning Nestorius and the council of Chalcedon, and
approving ‘the letter of [the Monophysite] Zeno, blessed emperor of the
Romans’.
“However, when Justin and Justinian
reversed [the Monophysite Emperor] Anastasius’ ecclesiastical policy, they were
apparently not consulted, and did not follow suit. This implied no hostility to
Rome, however, for when in 572 they revolted against Persia they appealed to
Justin II. He insisted on their subscribing to Chalcedon as a condition of aid,
but they soon went back to their old beliefs. Maurice [an Armenian himself]
again attempted to imposed the Chalcedonian position upon them, but the bishops
of Persian Armenia refused to attend his council, and excommunicated the
bishops of Roman Armenia, who had conformed.[242] It
was thus not hostility to Rome which led the Armenians into heresy… But having
got used to this position they were unwilling to move from it.”[243]
After the Muslim conquest, the Armenian
Church became more and more entrenched, not only in anti-Chalcedonian
Monophysitism, but also in a kind of nationalism that made it the first
national church in the negative sense of that phrase – that is, a church that
was so identified with the nation as to lose its universalist claims. In this
way the Armenian Church contrasts with other national Churches in the region,
such as the Orthodox Georgian and the Monophysite Ethiopian.
Other cases in which national hatred has
been suspected to lie beneath religious separatism are the Arian Goths, the
Donatist Berbers and the Monophysite Copts and Syrians. However, Jones urges
caution in such inferences: “Today religion, or at any rate doctrine, is not
with the majority of people a dominant issue and does not arouse major
passions. Nationalism and socialism are, on the other hand, powerful forces,
which can and do provoke the most intense feelings. Modern historians are, I
think, retrojecting into the past the sentiments of the present age when they
argue that mere religious or doctrinal dissension cannot have generated such
violent and enduring animosity as that evinced by the Donatists, Arians, or
Monophysites, and that the real moving force behind these movements must have
been national or class feeling.”[244]
The first and most powerful anti-Roman
nationalism was, of course, that of the Jews. In the Old Testament, the faith
of the Jews, though necessarily turned in on itself to protect itself from
paganism, contained the seeds of a truly universalist faith. Thus God commanded
Abraham to circumcise not only every member of his family, but also “him that
is born in the house, or bought with the money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed” (Genesis 17.12).
The Canaanite Rahab and the Moabite Ruth were admitted into the faith and
nation of the Jews. And by the time of Christ there was a large Greek-speaking
diaspora which was spreading the faith of the Jews throughout the Greco-Roman
world and winning converts such as the Roman centurion Cornelius (Acts
11).[245]
However, the Pharisees, who came to
dominate Jewry, were interested only in converts to the cause of Jewish
nationalism (cf. Matthew 23.15). It was the Pharisees who incited
Christ’s death because He preached a different kind of spiritual and universalist
Kingdom that was opposed to their nationalist dreams. And after His death the
Jews became possessed by an egoistical, chauvinist spirit that was expressed in
such a way that, as Rabbi Solomon Goldman put it, "God is absorbed in the
nationalism of Israel."[246]
Cyril Mango writes: “By virtue of a long
tradition in Roman law, Jews enjoyed a peculiar status: they were a licit sect,
their synagogues were protected from seizure, they appointed their own clergy
and had recourse in civil cases to their own courts of law. At the same time
they were forbidden to proselytise, to own Christian slaves or to build new
synagogues.”[247]
However, the Jews continually strove to
undermine the Empire. Alone among all the nations of the Mediterranean basin,
they refused to benefit from, or join in, the pax Romana. Having
asserted, at the Crucifixion of Christ, that they had no king but Caesar, they
nevertheless constantly rebelled against the Caesars and slaughtered thousands
of Christians. Thus in 66-70, and again in 135, they rebelled against Rome. In
115, in Alexandria, whose population was about one-third Jewish, civil war
broke out between the Jews and the Christians. And in 150 the Jews killed
240,000 Greeks in Cyrenaica and 100,000 in Cyprus. [248]
At the root of the Jews’ fierce hatred of
Gentiles and Christians was the teaching of what came to be, from the second
century onwards, their major holy book – the Talmud. The Talmud (like the later
Jewish holy book, the Cabbala) purports to record a secret oral tradition going
back to Moses and representing the true interpretation of the Torah, the first
five books of the Bible. In fact, it bears only the most strained and perverse relation to the
Torah, often completely perverting the true meaning of the Scriptures and
asserting its own superiority over them: “The Law is water, but the Mishna [the
first form of the Talmud] is wine.” Again: “The words of the elders are more
important than the words of the Prophets.”
This opposition between the true, God-inspired Tradition of the Holy
Scriptures and the false, man-made tradition of the Talmud was pointed out by
Christ when He said to the Pharisees, the inventors and guardians of the
Talmud: “Thus have ye made the commandment of no effect by your tradition” (Matthew
15.6).
The
eleven volumes of the Talmud are extremely difficult to obtain (especially in
an uncensored edition), and are fully accessible only to a Talmudic Hebrew
scholar. Nevertheless, some of the flavour of the book may be gauged from the following
description by the London Times correspondent in Central Europe in the
1930s, Douglas Reed:
“The Talmudic Law governed every
imaginable action of a Jew’s life anywhere in the world: marriage, divorce,
property settlements, commercial transactions, down to the pettiest details of
dress and toilet. As unforeseen things frequently crop up in daily life, the
question of what is legal or illegal (not what is right or wrong) in all manner
of novel circumstances had incessantly to be debated, and this produced the
immense records of rabbinical dispute and decisions in which the Talmud
abounds.
“Was it much a crime to crush a flea as to
kill a camel on a sacred day? One learned rabbi allowed that the flea might be
gently squeezed, and another thought its feet might even be cut off. How many
white hairs might a sacrificial red cow have and yet remain a red cow? What
sort of scabs required this or that ritual of purification? At which end of an
animal should the operation of slaughter be performed? Ought the high priest to
put on his shirt or his hose first? Methods of putting apostates to death were
debated; they must be strangled, said the elders, until they opened their
mouths, into which boiling lead must be poured. Thereon a pious rabbi urged that
the victim’s mouth be held open with pincers so that he not suffocate before
the molten lead enter and consume his soul with his body. The word ‘pious’ is
here not sardonically used; this scholar sought to discover the precise
intention of ‘the Law’.”[249]
The Lord said of the forerunners of the
Talmudists: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew
23.24). And of their disputes that “Hebrew of the Hebrews” and former Pharisee,
St. Paul, said: “Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and striving
about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless” (Titus 3.9).
Now a dominant feature of these Jewish
“holy books” was their hatred of Christ and Christianity. Douglas Reed writes:
“The Jewish Encyclopaedia says: ‘It
is the tendency of Jewish legends in the Talmud, the Midrash.. and in the Life
of Jesus (Toledoth Jeshua) that originated in the Middle Ages to
belittle the person of Jesus by ascribing to him illegitimate birth, magic and
a shameful death’. He is generally alluded to as ‘that anonymous one’, ‘liar’,
‘imposter’ or ‘bastard’ (the attribution of bastardy is intended to bring him
under the Law as stated in Deuteronomy 23.3: ‘A bastard shall not enter
into the congregation of the Lord’). Mention of the name, Jesus, is prohibited
in Jewish households.
“The work cited by the Jewish Encyclopaedia as having
‘originated in the Middle Ages’ is not merely a discreditable memory of an
ancient past, as that allusion might suggest; it is used in Hebrew schools
today. It was a rabbinical production of the Talmudic era and repeated all the
ritual of mockery of Calvary itself in a different form. Jesus is depicted as
the illegitimate son of Mary, a hairdresser’s wife, and of a Roman soldier
called Panthera. Jesus himself is referred to by a name which might be
translated ‘Joey Virgo’. He is shown as being taken by his stepfather to Egypt
and there learning sorcery.
“The significant thing about this bogus
life-story (the only information about Jesus which Jews were supposed to read)
is that in it Jesus is not crucified by Romans. After his appearance in
Jerusalem and his arrest there as an agitator and a sorcerer he is turned over
to the Sanhedrin and spends forty days in the pillory before being stoned and hanged
at the Feast of Passover; this form of death exactly fulfils the Law laid down
in Deuteronomy 21.22 and 17.5, whereas crucifixion would not have been
in compliance with that Judaic law.
The book then states that in hell he suffers the torture of boiling mud.
“The Talmud also refers to Jesus as
‘Fool’, ‘sorcerer’, ‘profane person’, ‘idolator’, ‘dog’, ‘child of lust’ and
the like more; the effect of this teaching over a period of centuries, is shown
by the book of the Spanish Jew Mose de Leon, republished in 1880, which speaks
of Jesus as a ‘dead dog’ that lies ‘buried in a dunghill’. The original Hebrew
texts of these Talmudic allusions appear in Laible’s Jesus Christus im Talmud. This scholar says that during the period
of the Talmudists hatred of Jesus became ‘the most national trait of Judaism’,
that ‘at the approach of Christianity the Jews were seized over and again with
a fury and hatred that were akin to madness’, that ‘the hatred and scorn of the
Jews was always directed in the first place against the person of Jesus’ and
that ‘the Jesus-hatred of the Jews is a firmly-established fact, but they want
to show it as little as possible’.
“This wish to conceal from the outer
world that which was taught behind the Talmudic hedge led to the censoring of
the above-quoted passages during the seventeenth century. Knowledge of the
Talmud became fairly widespread then (it was frequently denounced by
remonstrant Jews) and the embarrassment thus caused to the Talmudic elders led
to the following edict (quoted in the original Hebrew and in translation by
P.L.B. Drach, who was brought up in a Talmudic school and later became
converted to Christianity):
“’This is why we enjoin you, under pain of
excommunication major, to print nothing in future editions, whether of the
Mishna or of the Gemara, which relates whether for good or for evil to the acts
of Jesus the Nazarene, and to substitute instead a circle like this: O, which will warn the
rabbis and schoolmasters to teach the young these passages only viva voce.
By means of this precaution the savants among the Nazarenes will have no
further pretext to attack us on this subject’ (decree of the Judaist Synod
which sat in Poland in 1631). At the present time, when public enquiry into
such matters, or objection to them, has been virtually forbidden by Gentile
governments, these passages, according to report, have been restored in the
Hebrew editions of the Talmud…
“The Talmud sets out to widen and heighten
the barrier between the Jews and others. An example of the different language
which the Torah spoke, for Jews and for Gentiles, has previously been given:
the obscure and apparently harmless allusion to ‘a foolish nation’ (Deuteronomy
32.21). According to the article on Discrimination
against Gentiles in the Jewish
Encyclopaedia the allusion in the original Hebrew is to ‘vile and vicious
Gentiles’, so that Jew and Gentile received very different meanings from the
same passage in the original and in the translation. The Talmud, however, which
was to reach only Jewish eyes, removed any doubt that might have been caused in
Jewish minds by perusal of the milder translation; it specifically related the
passage in Deuteronomy to one in Ezekiel 23.20, and by so doing
defined Gentiles as those ‘whose flesh is as the flesh of asses and whose issue
is like the issue of horses’! In this spirit was the ‘interpretation’ of the
Law continued by the Talmudites.
“The Talmudic edicts were all to similar
effect. The Law (the Talmud laid down) allowed the restoration of a lost
article to its owner if ‘a brother or neighbour’, but not if a Gentile.
Book-burning (of Gentile books) was recommended… The benediction, ‘Blessed by
Thou… who hast not made me a goi
[Gentile]’ was to be recited daily. Eclipses were of bad augury for Gentiles
only. Rabbi Lei laid down that the injunction not to take revenge (Leviticus
19.18) did not apply to Gentiles, and apparently invoked Ecclesiastes
8.4 in support of his ruling (a discriminatory interpretation then being given
to a passage in which the Gentile could not suspect any such intention).
“The Jews who sells to a Gentile landed
property bordering on the land of another Jews is to be excommunicated. A
Gentile cannot be trusted as witness in a criminal or civil suit because he
could not be depended on to keep his word like a Jew. A Jew testifying in a
petty Gentile civil court as a single witness against a Jew must be
excommunicated. Adultery committed with a non-Jewish woman is not adultery ‘for
the heathen have no lawfully wedded wife, they are not really their wives’. The
Gentiles are as such precluded from admission to a future world…”[250]
Sergius and Tamara Fomin write: «To the
prayer ‘birkam za-minim’ which was read everyday against heretics and apostates
there was added the ‘curse’ against ‘the proud state’ (of Rome) and against all
the enemies of Israel, in particular the Christians… [The Christians were also
identified with] the scapegoat, on which the sins of the Jews were laid and
which was then driven into the wilderness as a gift to the devil. According to
rabbinic teaching, the goat signified Esau and his descendants, who at the
present time were the Christians».[251]
Another name that the Jews had for the
Christians was Edom, and the Roman-Byzantine Empire was called “the kingdom of
the Edomites”. Rabbi David Kimchi writes as follows in Obadiam: “What
the Prophets foretold about the destruction of Edom in the last days was
intended for Rome, as Isaiah explains (34.1).. For when Rome is destroyed,
Israel shall be redeemed.” And Rabbi Abraham in his book Tseror Hammor
writes: “Immediately after Rome is destroyed, we shall be redeemed.”[252]
The teaching of the Talmud incited the
Jews to terrible crimes against Gentiles, especially Christians. Thus in about
520, 4000 Christians were martyred by the Jewish ruler of the South Arabian
land of Omir (or Himyar), Dû-Nuwâs, for their refusal to renounce
Christ.[253]
Again, in 555,
the Jews took part in the Samaritan rebellion against Byzantium on the
Samaritan side in spite of their traditional disdain for the Samaritans.
During the Time of Troubles that began for Byzantium with the murder of
the Emperor Maurice in 602, the Jewish anti-Roman consciousness reached a new
peak of frenzy. David Keys writes: “The so-called Book of Zerubabel, written by a rabbi of that name in Persian-ruled
Babylon in the first quarter of the seventh century AD, prophesied the coming
of the Jewish Messiah (and his mother!) and their defeat of the Christian Roman
monster – an emperor/pope called Armilus – the son of Satan. Furthermore, a
Palestinian Jew called Jacob who had been forcibly baptised by the Romans in
Carthage described the Empire in typically apocalyptic terms as ‘the fourth
beast’ which was being ‘torn in pieces by the nations, [so] that the ten horns
may prevail and Hermolaus Satan… the Little Horn may come.’
“The
Jews viewed the apparently imminent collapse of the Roman Empire in the first
quarter of the seventh century as evidence that the ‘beast’ (the formerly pagan
but now Christian empire) was doomed, that the Devil in the guise of the last
Roman emperor or Christian pope would be killed by the (imminently expected)
Messiah. They saw the Persians (and a few years later, the Arabs) as the agents
who would help destroy the ‘Roman beast’. Violent and often Messianic Jewish
revolutionary attitudes had been increasing throughout the second half of the
sixth century and went into overdrive as the Empire began to totter in the
first quarter of the seventh. In Antioch in AD 608, Christian attempts at
forced conversion, as the Persians threatened the city, triggered a major
revolt in the Jewish quarter. At first the Jewish rebels were successful, and
their community’s arch-enemy, the city’s powerful Christian patriarch, [St.] Anastasius,
was captured, killed and mutilated. But the revolt was soon put down – and the
800-year-old Antiochan Jewish community was almost totally extinguished.”[254]
The
situation was no better in the Holy Land. The Jewish sent an appeal to all the
Jews of Palestine, inviting them to come and join the Persians. Enraged crowds
destroyed the churches of Tiberias, killed the local bishop and 90,000
Christians in one day. Even the Jewish historian Graetz admits that the Jews
took a greater part in the destruction of Christian churches and monasteries
than the Persians themselves.[255] The Persians were defeated by the
Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who banished the Jews of Jerusalem to a distance
of three miles from the city, and decreed that all the Jews of the empire
should be baptised. But the pendulum swung again when the Byzantines were
defeated by the new power of the Arab Muslims. The Jews were delighted. Many of
them thought that Muhammed was a prophet who had come to prepare the way for
the Messiah. And “even when the Messiah failed to arrive,” writes Karen
Armstrong, “Jews continued to look favourably on Islamic rule in Jerusalem. In
a letter written in the eleventh century, the Jerusalem rabbis recalled the
‘mercy’ God had shown his people when he allowed the ‘Kingdom of Ishmael’ to
conquer Palestine. They were glad to remember that when the Muslims arrived in
Jerusalem, ‘there were people from the children of Israel with them; they
showed the spot of the Temple and they settled with them until this very day.’”[256]
Meanwhile, in what remained of the Byzantine empire there were
intermittent attempts to return to the policy of Heraclius. Thus Cyril Mango
writes that “Leo III ordered once again the baptism of Jews and those who
complied were given the title of ‘new citizens’, but they did so in bad faith,
while others, it seems, fled to the Arabs. The failure of this measure was
acknowledged by the Council of 787 which decreed that insincere converts should
not be accepted; it was preferable to let them live according to their customs
while remaining subject to the old disabilities. A fresh attempt was made by
Basil I: Jews were summoned to disputations and if they were unable to
demonstrate the truth of their religion, they were to be baptized.[257] Remission of taxes and the grant of
dignities were offered as rewards; even so, after the emperor’s death, most of
the converts ‘returned like dogs to their own vomit’. The last recorded case of
forced conversion was under Romanus I, but it only resulted in driving many
Jews to the land of Khazaria north of the Black Sea [where they converted the
Khazars to Judaism]. From then on such Jews as remained were left to live in
relative peace; there was even a reverse migration of them from Egypt into the
Empire in the late tenth and eleventh centuries…”[258]
The
attempts by successive (usually heretical) Byzantine emperors to convert the
Jews to Orthodoxy by force were contrary to the spirit of Christianity.
Christ’s parable of the tares and the wheat, in which it is said that the tares
should not be destroyed, is interpreted by St. John Chrysostom to mean that
heretics should not be killed (which is not to say, however, that they should
not be resisted in other ways). As early as the fourth century – for example,
in Sulpicius’ Life of St. Martin – we find the Holy Fathers
protesting against the forcible conversion of heretics.
As
S.V. Troitsky writes: “Christians are called to freedom (Galatians
5.13), and every religious act of conscious Christians must bear on itself the
mark of freedom. The ancient Christian writer Lactantius demonstrated that
religioun exists only where there is freedom, and disappears where freedom has
disappeared, and that it is necessary to defend the truth with words and not
with blows (verbis, not verberibus).[259]
‘The mystery of salvation,’ writes St. Gregory the Theologian, ‘is for those
who desire it, not for those who are compelled’. The 108th canon of
the Council of Carthage cites the law of Honorius that ‘everyone accepts the
exploit of Christianity by his free choice’, and Zonaras in his interpretation
of this canon writes: ‘Virtue must be chosen, and not forced, not involuntary,
but voluntary… for that which exists by necessity and violence is not firm and
constant’. ‘It does not belong to religion,’ says Tertullian, ‘to force people
to religion, since it must be accepted voluntarily.’[260]”[261]
The
threat from the Jews was real; but the illegitimate methods used to destroy it
only prolonged and deepened it…
Justinian’s formulation of the Symphony of Powers had been consciously
based on Chalcedonian Orthodoxy: the unity of kingship and priesthood in one
Christian Roman State was likened to the union of the two natures, human and Divine,
in the one Person of Christ. It is therefore not surprising to find that under
succeeding emperors who renounced Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and embraced heresy
(Monothelitism and Iconoclasm), the Symphony of Powers was also renounced – or
rather, reinterpreted in such a way as to promote the prevailing heresy. The
emperor, from being a focus of unity
in the religious sphere, became an imposer
of unity – and a false unity at that. The empire suffered accordingly: vast
areas of the East were lost, first to the Persians, and then to the Muslim
Arabs. As religious unity collapsed, so did the unity of nations. St.
Anastasius of Sinai considered these defeats to be Divine punishment for the
heresy of the Monothelite emperor.[262]
Of
course, this was not the first time that an emperor had been tempted to apply
violence against the Orthodox. Even the great Justinian had come close to
overstepping the mark in his relations with the Roman Popes. If that mark, in
the final analysis, was not overstepped by him, because a real unity of faith
between the Old and New Romes was achieved in his reign, this could no longer
be said to be the case a century later, in 655, when the Orthodox Pope St.
Martin was martyred for the faith by a heretical emperor acting in concert with
a heretical patriarch.
The
heretics then proceeded to torture the famous monk and defender of the Church
against Monothelitism, St. Maximus the Confessor. They wished him to
acknowledge the power of the emperor over the Church, as if he were both king
and priest like Melchizedek. But Maximus refused. “Then
you said: ‘What? Is not every Christian emperor a priest?’ I replied: ‘No, for
he has no access to the altar, and after the consecration of the bread does not
elevate it with the words: “The holy things to the holy”. He does not baptise,
he does not go on to the initiation with chrism, he does not ordain or place
bishops, priests and deacons, he does not consecrate churches with oil, he does
not wear the marks of the priestly dignity – the omophorion and the Gospel, as
he wears those of the kingdom, the crown and the purple.’ You objected: ‘And
why does Scripture itself say that Melchisedech is “king and priest” [Genesis
14.18; Hebrews 7.1]?’ I replied: ‘There is only One Who is by nature
King, the God of the universe, Who became for our salvation a hierarch by
nature, of which Melchisedech is the unique type. If you say that there is
another king and priest after the order of Melchisedech, then dare to say what
comes next: “without father, without mother, without genealogy, of whose days
there is no beginning and of whose life there is no end” [Hebrews 7.3],
and see the disastrous consequences that are entailed: such a person would be
another God become man, working our salvation as a priest not in the order of
Aaron, but in the order of Melchisedech. But what is the point of multiplying
words? During the holy anaphora at the holy table, it is after the hierarchs
and deacons and the whole order of the clergy that commemoration is made of the
emperors at the same time as the laity, with the deacon saying: “and the
deacons who have reposed in the faith, Constantine, Constans, etc.” Equally,
mention is made of the living emperors after all the clergy’”[263]
Again he said: “To investigate and define dogmas of the Faith is the
task not of the emperors, but of the ministers of the altar, because it is
reserved to them both to anoint the emperor and to lay hands upon him, and to
stand before the altar, to perform the Mystery of the Eucharist, and to perform
all the other divine and most great Mysteries.”[264]
And
when Bishop Theodosius of Caesarea claimed that the anti-Monothelite Roman
Council was invalid since it was not convened by the Emperor, St. Maximus
replied: “If only those councils are confirmed which were summoned by royal
decree, then there cannot be an Orthodox Faith. Recall the councils that were
summoned by royal decree against the homoousion, proclaiming the blasphemous
teaching that the Son of God is not of one essence with God the Father… The
Orthodox Church recognizes as true and holy only those councils at which true
and infallible dogmas were established.”[265]
Ostrogorsky sees this moment as a critical turning-point in the history
of Byzantium: “The figure of Maximus the Confessor, which
opens up a new era in Orthodox theology, also signifies a certain
ecclesiastico-political turning-point in the history of the Byzantine Church.
It is precisely in the 7th century, when, thanks to the great Emperor Heraclius
and his successors, the Empire had been radically reorganised, that there also
arrive for Byzantium a new era in a State and cultural sense, a new era in the
relations of the Byzantine Church and State...
“However, in the following, 8th century, a
strong reaction can be observed on the part of the imperial power, a desire to
reestablish in principle the former position. Once more the iconoclast emperors
tried to lay State fetters on the Church, striving forcibly uproot the
veneration of icons accepted by the Church. And again Leo III wanted to be
called emperor and high-priest. But the opposition which he and his successors
encountered showed that these had not learned and underestimated the strength
of their opponents – the representatives of a new, medieval, ecclesiastical ideology.
All the works of the defenders of icon-veneration persecuted by the secular
power that have come down to us deliberately insist on the fact that the
teaching of the faith is the affair of the Church and the Church hierarchy. The
emperor did not have the right to change anything in the resolutions of the
Church and had without question to submit to them, as did every other
Christian... That is what all the icon-venerators of the period thought. The
spirit that ruled them was not to be broken by any measures of external
violence. And the struggle that was kindled because of icon-veneration was
crowned by the great victory of the Byzantine Church...»[266]
Leo
III’s heretical, quasi-Muslim understanding of the nature of icons went hand in
hand with a resurrection of the pagan model of the imperator-pontifex
maximus. In fact, insofar as the Muslim Caliph considered himself to be
both a king and a prophet, Leo could be said to have borrowed his theory of
kingship (“I am both king and priest”), as well as his iconoclasm, from the
Muslims. It was therefore eminently fitting that his main critic in both
spheres should have been St. John of Damascus, a functionary at the Caliph’s
court.
“What right have emperors to style
themselves lawgivers in the Church?” asks St. John. “What does the holy apostle
say? ‘And God has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets,
third teachers and shepherds, for building up the body of Christ.’ (I Corinthians 12.28). He
does not mention emperors… Political prosperity is the business of emperors;
the condition of the Church is the concern of shepherds and teachers.”[267]
Again, an epistle read and accepted by the Seventh Ecumenical Council
addressed both the Patriarch and the Emperors, who were described as occupying
the second place in the Church order:
«God gave the greatest gift to men: the Priesthood and
the Imperial power; the first preserves and watches over the heavenly, while
the second rules earthly things by means of just laws».[268]
The
epistle also produced a concise and inspired definition of
the Church-State relationship: «The priest is the
sanctification and strengthening of the Imperial power, while the Imperial
power is the strength and firmness of the priesthood».[269]
Some years later,
in a document probably written early in the ninth century in Constantinople,
but ascribed to the earlier Orthodox Pope Gregory II, Leo III’s claim to be
both king and priest is fittingly refuted, while it is admitted that true kings are in some ways like priests: “You write: ‘I am Emperor and priest’. Yes, the Emperors
who were before you proved this in word and deed: they build churches and cared
for them; being zealous for the Orthodox faith, they together with the
hierarchs investigated and defended the truth. Emperors such as: Constantine
the Great, Theodosius the Great, Constantine [IV], the
father of Justinian [II], who was at the Sixth
Council. These
Emperors reigned piously: they together with the hierarchs with one mind and soul convened councils, investigated the truth of
the dogmas, built and adorned the holy churches. These were priests and
Emperors! They
proved it in word and deed. But you, since the time that you received power,
have not completely begun to observe the decrees of the Fathers...»[270]
Leo’s claim to be
the first pastor of the Church in the image of the Apostle Peter was fittingly
refuted by the Pope, who was still at that time the first pastor of Orthodoxy:
“You know, Emperor, that the dogmas of the Holy Church do not belong to the Emperor,
but to the Hierarchs, who can safely dogmatise. That is why the Churches have been entrusted
to the Hierarchs, and they do not enter into the affairs of the people’s
administration. Understand and take note of this... The coming together of the
Christ-loving Emperors and pious Hierarchs constitutes a single power, when affairs are governed with peace and love”.
And
again: «God has given power over all men to the Piety
of the Emperors in order that those who strive for virtue may find strengthening
in them, - so that the path to the heavens should be wider, - so that the
earthly kingdom should serve the Heavenly Kingdom.»[271]
One person in two distinct natures: one power in two distinct
functions: the Chalcedonian basis of the symphonic doctrine of Church-State
relations is clear. And just as the
symphonic doctrine of Church-State relations reflects Chalcedonian Orthodoxy,
so the absolutist theory of Church-State relations reflects both Monothelitism
and Iconoclasm. Just as Monothelitism denies that there is more than one will
in Christ, so the absolutist theory denies that there is more than one will in
the government of the Christian commonwealth, declaring that the will of the
emperor can take the place of the will of the hierarchs. And just as Iconoclasm
destroys the proper relationship between the icon and its archetype, saying
that icons are in fact idols, so absolutism destroys the proper relationship
and distance between the earthly type and his Heavenly Archetype, so that the
emperor becomes, in St. Maximus’ words, “another God incarnate” - that is, an
idol. For this, no less than for his
iconoclasm, Leo III is justly called «forerunner of the Antichrist» in the
Byzantine service books[272],
and was anathematised by the Church as «the tormentor and not Emperor Leo
the Isaurian».[273]
Perso-Islamic Despotism
The great power that remained unconquered
by Roman armies, and hostile to Romanity throughout the early Christian period,
was Sassanid Persia, the successor of the Parthian empire. “Sassanid Persia,”
writes Roberts, “was a religious as well as a political unity. Zoroastrianism
had been formally restored by Ardashir [or Artaxerxes, the first Sassanid
ruler], who gave important privileges to its priests, the magi. They led
in due course to political power as well. Priests confirmed the divine nature
of the kingship, had important judicial duties, and came, too, to supervise the
collection of the land-tax which was the basis of Persian finances. The
doctrines they taught seem to have varied considerably from the strict
monotheism attributed to Zoroaster but focused on a creator, Ahura Mazda, whose
viceroy on earth was the king. The Sassanids’ promotion of the state religion
was closely connected with the assertion of their own authority.”[274]
At the beginning of the seventh century,
Persia was ruled by the great Sassanid king Chosroes II. His message to the
Byantine Emperor Heraclius was uncompromising: “Chosroes, greatest of gods, and
master of the earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave. Why do you
still call yourself a king?”[275]
Chosroes conquered both Antioch and
Jerusalem. But then, in 628, Heraclius, by the power of the holy and
life-giving cross which he recaptured from Persia, was able to defeat Chosroes
and bring old-style Middle Eastern despotism to an end. However, the effort
exhausted the Byzantine state; and the emperor’s sometimes despotic attempts to
impose his Monothelite faith alienated some of his subject peoples.
Thus a political vacuum was created; and
into that vacuum stepped a third force that was as far as possible opposed to
the style of governing of its predecessors. For Mohammed, the founder of Islam,
was not a king, still less a Persian-style “king of kings”, but a supposed
“prophet”. He was not a man who ascribed divine honours to himself, but a man
who claimed to abhor every kind of man-worship and idolatry (hence Islam’s
influence, as some have supposed, on the iconoclast movement, which claimed to
be fighting the idolatry of icon-worship).
As Bernard Lewis points out, “the power
wielded by the early caliphs was very far from the despotism of their
predecessors and successors. It was limited by the political ethics of Islam
and by the anti-authoritarian habits and traditions of ancient Arabia. A verse
attributed to the pre-Islamic Arabic poet ‘Abid ibn al-Abras speaks o his tribe
as ‘laqah’, a word which, according to the ancient commentators and
lexicographers, denotes a tribe that has never submitted to a king. ‘Abid’s
proud description of his people makes his meaning clear:
They
refused to be servants of kings, and were never ruled by any.
But when
they were called on for help in war, they responded gladly.
“The ancient Arabs, like the ancient
Israelites depicted in the books of Judges and Samuel, mistrusted kings and the
institution of kingship. They were, indeed, familiar with the institution of
monarchy in the surrounding countries, and some were even led to adopt it.
There were kings in the states of southern Arabia; there were kings in the
border principalities of the north; but all these were in different degrees
marginal to Arabia. The sedentary kingdoms of the south used a different
language, and were part of a different culture. The border principalities of
the north, though authentically Arab, were deeply influenced by Persian and
Byzantine imperial practice, and represent a somewhat alien element in the Arab
world…
“The early Muslims were well aware of the
nature of imperial monarchy as practised in their own day in Byzantium and in
Persia, and believed that the state founded by the Prophet and governed after
him by his successors the caliphs represented something new and different…”[276]
In what way was it different?
Miloslavskaya and Miloslavsky point to two major differences which Muslims see
as distinguishing their society from those around them: the idea that society
must be ruled by the commands of Allah, and not by the laws of men, and the
idea that the caliphate's secular and spiritual powers (the sultanate and the
imamate) are indivisible.[277]
Lewis confirms the first point: “For the
Prophet and his companions…., the choice between God and Caesar… did not arise.
In Muslim teaching and experience, there was no Caesar. God was the head of the
state, and Muhammed his Prophet taught and ruled on his behalf. As Prophet, he
had – and could have – no successor. As supreme sovereign of the
religio-political community of Islam, he was succeeded by a long line of
caliphs.”
However, he qualifies the second point as
follows: “It is sometimes said that the caliph was head of State and Church,
pope and emperor in one.[278]
This description in Western and Christian terms is misleading. Certainly there
was no distinction between imperium and sacerdotium, as in the
Christian empire, and no separate ecclesiastical institution, no Church, with
its own head and hierarchy.[279]
The caliphate was always defined as a religious office, and the caliph’s
supreme purpose was to safeguard the heritage of the Prophet and to enforce the
Holy Law. But the caliph had no pontifical or even priestly function… His task
was neither to expound nor to interpret the faith, but to uphold and protect it
– to create conditions in which his subjects could follow the good Muslim life
in this world and prepare themselves for the world to come. And to do this, he
had to maintain the God-given Holy Law within the frontiers of the Islamic
state, and to defend and, where possible, extend those frontiers, until in the
fullness of time the whole world was opened to the light of Islam…”[280]
Of course, there was a contradiction
between the quasi-democratic, almost anarchical ideal of early Islam and the
reality of the caliphs’ almost unlimited power. On the one hand, the caliphs
wanted to create an order in which, “as ideally conceived, there were to be no
priests, no church, no kings and no nobles, no privileged orders or castes or
estates of any kind, save only for the self-evident superiority of those who
accept the true faith to those who wilfully reject it – and of course such
obvious natural and social realities as the superiority of man to woman and of
master to slave.”[281]
But on the other hand, they were military leaders and success in war,
especially against peoples trained in obedience to autocratic or despotic
leaders, required that they should be able to command no less obedience.
And so Muslim “democratism” soon passed
into a monarchism hardly less despotic than the monarchies that Islam had
destroyed. This was particularly the case after 747, when Abu Muslim, a
manumitted Persian slave, raised the standard of revolt, defeated the Umayyad
caliph and created the Abbasid dynasty. A few years later, Al-Mansur (754-775)
moved the capital of the Islamic empire to Baghdad, where it came under the
influence of Persia with its strong despotic tradition. The caliphs of the
ninth century, particularly Mamun (813-833), believed their authority to be
unlimited. And at the beginning of the eleventh century, the Fatimid ruler
Al-Hakim even accepted his identification with the godhead.[282]
“The increasingly authoritarian character
of government”, writes Lewis, “and the disappointment of successful
revolutionaries is vividly expressed in a passage quoted by several classical
authors. A certain Sudayf, a supporter of the Abbasids, is cited as complaining
of the changes resulting from the fall of the Umayyads and the accession of the
Abbasids to the caliphate: ‘By God, our booty, which was shared, has become a
perquisite of the rich. Our leadership, which was consultative, has become
arbitrary. Our succession, which was by the choice of the community, is now by
inheritance.”[283]
Despotism in politics leads to the
persecution of all non-State-sponsored religion. Thus when Caliph Mutasim,
Mamum’s brother and successor, conquered the Byzantine fortress town of
Amorion, he executed forty-two prisoners who refused to renounce Christianity
and embrace Islam. In Moorish Spain, too, we find an increase in Christian
martyrdoms (and apostasies to Islam) at this time.[284]
That Muslim statehood should become
despotic was a natural consequence of the lack of a separation of Church and
State in Islam, which gave an absolute, unchecked power to the Caliphs,
embodying as they did both religious and political authority.[285] As
Guizot points out, the separation of spiritual and temporal power is a legacy
of Christianity which the Islamic world abandoned: “This separation is the
source of liberty of conscience; it is founded upon no other principle but that
which is the foundation of the most perfect and extended freedom of conscience.
The separation of temporal and spiritual power is based upon the idea that
physical force has neither right nor influence over souls, over conviction,
over truth. It flows from the distinction established between the world of
thought and the world of action, between the world of internal and that of
external facts. Thus this principle of liberty of conscience for which Europe
has struggled so much, and suffered so much, this principle which prevailed so
late, and often, in its progress, against the inclination of the clergy, was
enunciated, under the name of the separation of temporal and spiritual power,
in the very cradle of European civilisation; and it was the Christian Church
which, from the necessity imposed by its situation of defending itself against
barbarism, introduced and maintained it… It is in the combination of the
spiritual and temporal powers, in the confusion of moral and material
authority, that the tyranny which seems inherent in this [Muslim] civilisation
originated.”[286]
There is another reason why despotism and
tyranny are inherent in Islam: the Muslims’ belief that all people are bound to
obey Allah, and that those who do not obey – with the partial exceptions of the
Jews and Christians - have no right either to life or freedom or property. This
belief, combined with their further beliefs in fatalism and in the automatic
entrance of all Muslim warriors that die in the struggle with the unbelievers
into the joys of Paradise, made the Muslim armies of the early Arab caliphate,
as of the later Turkish sultanate, a formidable expansionary force in world
politics.
Thus the Koran says: “O believers, make
war on the infidels who dwell around you. Let them find firmness in you” (Sura:
9; Ayat: 123). “Fight those who believe not… even if they be People of the Book
[Jews and Christians] until they willingly agree to pay the tribute in
recognition of their submissive state” (Sura: 9; Ayat: 29). “You will be called
to fight a mighty nation; fight them until they embrace Islam” (Sura: 48; Ayat:
16).” As Kenneth Craig writes, holy war, or jihad, “was believed to be
the recovery by Islam of what by right belonged to it as the true and final
religion but which had been alienated from it by the unbelief or perversity
embodied in the minorities whose survival – but no more – it allowed....”[287]
L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “In submitting
without question to God, the Muslim becomes a spreader of the power of God on
earth. Everyone is obliged to submit to Allah, whether they want to or not. If
they do not submit, then they have no right to live. Therefore the pagans are
subject either to conversion to Islam, or to extermination. Violent conversion
to Islam, is nothing prejudicial, from the Muslim point of view, for people are
obliged to obey God without question, not because they desire it, but because
Allah demands this of them. Mohammed violently converted to his faith not only
pagans, but also Jews. However, it was soon established that all those ‘having
the Scriptures’, that is, Christians and Jews, should not be subjected to
violent conversion or extermination. It was presupposed that they, too, submit
to God, although incorrectly, because of some insufficiencies in their
Scriptures, but not out of a lack of desire to submit to him. However, since
they do not submit in the established way, they cannot have an independent
existence, they do not have rights and must serve to the benefit of the right
believers. Thus already under Mohammed the Muslims were indicated the aim of
subduing the whole world. Moreover, only the Muslims can rule everywhere, while
the unbelievers are subject either to extermination, or to violent conversion,
or, finally (the Jews and Christians), to a subject existence, being obliged to
pay the Muslims money for being allowed to exist, albeit in a rightless
situation. This vision of universal conquest and pillage was also completely in
the spirit of the Arabs, who were eternally occupied in pillaging all
'strangers’ and those who in a spirit of self-sacrifice defended ‘their own’.…
«Islam came from the hands of Mohammed as
a religion adapted primarily for political and social life. In relation to
everything that satisfies the spiritual demands of the personality, Islam is
poor and in this respect weak...
“Islam is universalist and cosmopolitan,
it receives to itself everyone and makes them all masters of the world or at
least pretenders to such mastery. In their submission to Allah, the Muslims are
equal to each other inside their own society. But in relation to the whole of
the rest of the world they have the rights of mastery over the unbelievers,
over their work and property. The Muslims reign in the world with Allah –
clearly, evidently, with all the advantages that this entails. This entices the average person, of course. Fanaticism,
when it has become a duty before Allah, and fatalism, which proceeds from faith
in predestination, make the followers of Islam fearless warriors, the more so
in that each success in subduing the unbelievers constantly provides the right
believers with new wealth. By extremely simplifying the faith, and binding man
to God not through any subtleties of the spiritual life, but through a blind,
unthinking submission with the obligation to spread the faith, Mohammed created
a powerful weapon in the hands of the prophet and his successors. Hence the the threatening external power of Islam and its fabulously rapid spread in the world. But the poverty of its religious
content has created its inner weakness and receptivity to the external
influences of other religions, which in the end has been reflected in a
weakening even of the external power of Islam. This was revealed very quickly,
one could say with the first conquests of the Muslims, whose power was
resurrected by every outburst of Mohammed’s simplified fatalism and was
weakened with every manifestation of a striving for a deeper and subtler
religious life».”[288]
With the fall of iconoclasm in Byzantium
in 843, there also fell the absolutist theory of Church-State relations
preached by the iconoclast emperors. Although, under the new dynasty of
Macedonian emperors, the empire entered a glorious period of increased power
and prosperity, the patriarchs of the period were in no mood to concede more
power than was necessary to the new dynasty, Orthodox though it might be. One
reason for this was that some of the patriarchs had been brought up during the
iconoclast persecution and had suffered personally during it (St. Methodius had
been in prison, while St. Photius’ parents had been martyred). Another reason
was the particularly prominent – and damaging - role that the emperors had
taken in the recent persecutions. The early Roman emperors had persecuted the
Church at times – but they had been pagans in a pagan society, and were
therefore simply expressing the prejudices of the society in which they lived.
Later emperors in the post-Constantinian era, such as Constantius and Valens,
had also persecuted the Church – which was worse, since they were supposed to
be Christians, but again, they had not been the initiators of the persecution,
but had responded to the pleas of heretical churchmen. However, the iconoclast
emperors enjoyed the dubious distinction of having been at the head of their
heretical movement; they were heresiarchs themselves, not simply the political
agents of heresiarchs. As one document of the period put it: “The ancient
heresies came from a quarrel over the dogmas and developed progressively,
whereas this one [iconoclasm] comes from the imperial power itself.”[290]
The patriarchs therefore laboured to raise the profile, and increase the power,
of the patriarchate in society, as a defence against any return to
antichristianity on the part of the emperors.[291]
This new intransigeance of the patriarchs
in relation to the emperors had been foreshadowed even before the last period
of iconoclast persecution, when, on 24 December, 804, “Leo V brought Patriarch
Nicephorus and several bishops and monks together to involve them in coming to
an agreement with those who were ‘scandalised’ by the icons and in making an
‘economy’. The confrontation gave way to a series of grating ‘little phrases’
that were hawked about everywhere and which sketched a new theory of imperial
power. The clergy refused to engage in any discussion with this perfectly
legitimate emperor who had not yet taken any measures against the icons and who
wanted a council of bishops to tackle the problem. Emilian of Cyzicus said to
him: ‘If there is an ecclesiastical problem, as you say, Emperor, let it be
resolved in the Church, as is the custom… and not in the Palace,’ to which Leo
remarked that he also was a child of the Church and that he could serve as an
arbiter between the two camps. Michael of Synada then said to him that ‘his
arbitration’ was in fact a ‘tyranny’; others reproached him for taking sides.
Without batting an eyelid, Euthymius of Sardis invoked eight centuries of
Christian icons and angered the emperor by reusing a quotation from St. Paul
that had already been used by John of Damascus: ‘Even if an angel from heaven
should preach to us a gospel different from the one that you have received, let
him be anathema!’ (Galatians 1.8). The ‘ardent teacher of the Church and
abbot of Studion’ Theodore was the last to speak: ‘Emperor, do not destroy the
stability of the Church. The apostle spoke of those whom God has established in
the Church, first as apostles, secondly as prophets, and thirdly as pastors and
teachers (I Corinthians 12.28)…, but he did not speak of emperors. You,
O Emperor, have been entrusted with the stability of the State and the army.
Occupy yourself with that and leave the Church, as the apostle says, to pastors
and teachers. If you did not accept this and departed from our faith…, if an
angel came from heaven to preach to us another gospel, we would not listen to
him; so even less to you!’ Then Leo, furious, broke off the dialogue to set the
persecution in motion.”[292]
What is remarkable in this scene is the
refusal of the hierarchs to allow the emperor any kind of arbitrating role –
even though he had not yet declared himself to be an iconoclast. Of course, the
bishops probably knew the secret motives and beliefs of the emperor, so they
knew that any council convened by him would have been a “robber council”, like
that of 754. Moreover, the Seventh Ecumenical Council had already defined the
position of the Church, so a further council was superfluous. However, the
bishops’ fears were probably particularly focussed on the word “arbitration”
and the false theory of Church-State relations that that implied. The Church
had allowed, even urged, emperors to convene councils in the past; but had
never asked them to arbitrate in them. Rather it was they, the bishops sitting
in council, who were the arbiters, and the emperor who was obliged, as an
obedient son of the Church, to submit to their judgement. The bishops were
determined to have no truck with this last relic of the absolutist theory of
Church-State relations.
It was St. Theodore the Studite who
particularly pressed this point. As he wrote to the Emperor Leo V: «If you want
to be her (the Church’s) son, then nobody is hindering you; only follow in
everything your spiritual father (the Patriarch)».[293]
And it was the triumph of Studite rigorism – on this issue, at any rate – that
determined the attitude of the patriarchs after the final Triumph of Orthodoxy
over iconoclasm in 843.
However, there were other issues on which the leaders of the Church were
less united in their approval of the Studite position – in particular, the
so-called “moichian” controversy, in which St. Theodore had broken communion
with Patriarch Nicephorus over the Priest Joseph’s illegal “crowning” of the
Emperor Constantine VI and his mistress. St. Nicephorus himself had been
reconciled with St. Theodore on this issue; but the first patriarch after the
Triumph of Orthodoxy, St. Methodius, would not be reconciled with his
followers, to the extent of excommunicating all those who did not anathematise
all of Theodore’s writings that were critical of Nicephorus. The reason for
this attitude, according to Hieromonk Gregory Lurye, was that St. Methodius had an
ecclesiology which exalted the status of the patriarchate to an unheard-of,
almost papist degree. [294]
Be that as it may, there is no question
that the Patriarchs Methodius, Photius and Ignatius, all of whom have been
canonised by the Church, quite consciously tried to exalt the authority of the
patriarchate in relation to the empire. But in order to justify this programme,
they needed a biblical model. And just as the Emperor Leo had used the figure
of Melchizedek, both king and priest, to justify his exaltation of the role of the
emperor, so Patriarch Photius used the figure of Moses, both king (as it were)
and priest, to exalt the role of the patriarch.[295]
Only whereas Melchizedek had been seen by Leo as primarily a king who was also
a priest, Moses was seen by St. Photius as primarily a priest who also had the
effective power of a king: “Among the citizens, [Moses] chose the most refined
and those who would be the most capable to lead the whole people, and he
appointed them as priests… He entrusted them with guarding the laws and
traditions; that was why the Jews never had a king and why the leadership of
the people was always entrusted to the one among the priests who was reputed to
be the most intelligent and the most virtuous. It is he whom they call the
Great Priest, and they believe that he is for them the messenger of the Divine
commandments.”[296]
However, St. Photius soon came into
conflict with one who called himself “Great Priest” in no uncertain terms, and
who exalted his priesthood in such a way as to encroach on the prerogatives of
kings and introduce heresy into the Church – Nicholas I, Pope of Rome. The
dogmatic aspect of the quarrel related to Nicholas’ introduction into the Creed
of the Filioque, which Photius succeeded in having anathematised
together with its author. But it also had a political aspect insofar as
Nicholas, reasserting the Gelasian model of Church-State relations, but also
going further than that in an aggressively papist direction, claimed
jurisdiction over the traditionally eastern provinces of Sicily and Bulgaria.
It was becoming clear that if “caesaropapism” had been the greatest danger in
the iconoclast period, it was its opposite, “papocaesarism”, that was the
greatest danger in the post-iconoclast period.
Of all the patriarchates, Rome, at least
in part through her healthy scepticism about the corruption and ambition of
secular power, had been the most faithful to Orthodoxy for more than four
centuries. But her consciousness of this fine record had bred pride and an
incipient feeling of infallibility, which led her to encroach on the
prerogatives both of the other patriarchates in the Church and of the emperor
in the State. And so St. Photius now stood up in defence of the Eastern Church
and State – and in so doing was forced to limit his own exalted conception of
the patriarchate, as we see in the later part of the 15th canon of
the First-and-Second Council, which permits clergy and laity to break communion
with their patriarch on the grounds of publicly proclaimed heresy even before a
conciliar decision.[297]
In two letters dating to the year 870, one
to the bishops from exile and the other to the Emperor Basil who exiled him,
St. Photius presents a balanced and traditional model of the role of the
emperor. Thus on the one hand, in his letter to the emperor, he reminds him of his
fallibility and mortality.[298]
But on the other hand, in his letter to the bishops, he gives due honour to the
emperor: “While before us the divine Paul exhorts us to pray for sovereigns, so
does Peter too, the chief of the apostles, saying, ‘Be submissive to every
human institution for the Lord’s sake whether it be to the emperor as supreme,’
and again, ‘Honor the emperor,’ But still, even before them, our common Master
and Teacher and Creator Himself from His incalculably great treasure, by paying
tribute to Caesar, taught us by deed and custom to observe the privileges which
had been assigned to emperors. For this reason, indeed, in our mystical and
awesome services we offer up prayers on behalf of our sovereigns. It is,
accordingly, both right and pleasing to God, as well as most appropriate for
us, to maintain these privileges and to join also our Christ-loving emperors in
preserving them.” [299]
Moreover, in his advice to the newly
bapised Bulgarian Tsar Boris-Michael he gave the tsar authority even in matters
of the faith: «The king must correct his people in the faith and direct it in
the knowledge of the true God».[300]
However, in the law manual entitled the Epanagoge, which was compiled between
879 and 886, and in whose composition St. Photius probably played a leading
part, the authority of the Patriarch is exalted over the Emperor. The pro-patriarchal “bias” of this
document is already evident in the foreword, where, as Fr. Alexis Nikolin
writes, “it says that ‘the law is from God’, Who is the true Basileus.…[And]
in the Digests we do not find the following thesis of Roman law: ‘That which is pleasing to the emperor has the force of law’. Thus
the emperor is not seen in the capacity of ‘the living law’ [nomoV emyucoV].”[301] He is the living law, says the Epanagoge,
only when there is not already a written law: “The Emperor must act as the law
when there is none written, except that his actions must not violate the canon
law. The Patriarch alone must interpret the canons of the ancient (Patriarchs) and
the decrees of the Holy Fathers and the resolutions of the Holy Synods” (Titulus III, 5).
In
fact, as Dagron writes, “The emperor is defined as a ‘legitimate authority’ (ennomoV epistasia), contrary to the Hellenistic and
Roman tradition which declares him to be ‘above the laws’, being himself ‘the
living law’ and only submitting to the laws of his own free will… In the first
article [of Titulus III] the
patriarch is defined as the living and animate image of Christ by deeds and
words typifying the truth (eikwn zwsa Cristou kai emyucoV di’ergwn kai logwn carakterizousa thn alhqeian)…
Everything that the patriarch gains, he steals from the emperor. In
place of the emperor traditionally called – as in the letter of Theodore the
Studite – ‘imitator of Christ’ there is substituted a patriarch called the
image of Christ, and in place of the emperor as the living law – a patriarch as
the living truth… The idea of the emperor-priest, which was condemned in the
person of Leo III, is succeeded by the prudent but clear evocation of a
patriarch-emperor, or at least of a supreme priest to whom revert all the
attributes of sovereignty. If he is the living image of Christ, the patriarch
participates like him in the two powers. He is a New Moses and a New Melchizedek.”[302]
The document then proceeds to contrast the rights and duties of the
Emperor and the Patriarch. «The task of the Emperor is to protect and preserve
the existing popular forces by good administration, and to reestablish the
damaged forces by careful supervision and just ways and actions» (Titulus II, 2). «The task of the Patriarch
is, first, to keep those people whom he has received from God in piety and
purity of life, and then he must as far as possible convert all heretics to
Orthodoxy and the unity of the Church (heretics, in the laws and canons of the
Church, are those who are not in communion with the Catholic Church). Also, he
must lead the unbelievers to adopt the faith, striking them with the lustre and
glory and wonder of his service» (Titulus III, 2)… «The aim of the Patriarch is the salvation of the souls entrusted to
him; the Patriarch must live in Christ and be crucified for the world» (Titulus III, 3). «The Emperor must be most
distinguished in Orthodoxy and piety and glorified in divine zeal, knowledgeable
in the dogmas of the Holy Trinity and in the definitions of salvation through
the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ» (Titulus
II, 5). «It particularly belongs to the Patriarch
to teach and to relate equally and without limitations o both high and low, and
be gentle in administering justice, skilled in exposing the unbelievers, and
not to be ashamed to speak before the face of the Emperor about justice and the
defence of the dogmas» (Titulus III, 4). “The Emperor is bound to defend and strengthen, first of all, all
that which is written in the Divine Scriptures, and then also all the dogmas
established by the Holy Councils, and also selected Roman laws» (Titulus II, 4).
Although it is evident that a more exalted place is accorded to the
patriarch in the Epanagoge, it is
nevertheless striking that the emperor is still given an important role in
defending the faith. However, the word “emperor” is
carefully defined to exclude what St. Basil or St. Ambrose would have called a
“tyrant”: «The aim of the Emperor is to do good, which is why he is called a
benefactor. And when he ceases to do good, then, it seems, he corrupts the
meaning of the concept of Emperor by comparison with the ancient teachings» (Titulus II, 3).
In the last analysis, if Photius’ conception of the kingship seems
“to the right of centre” of the patristic consensus, if Justinian’s Novella 6 is seen as the centre, this is
probably to be explained by the need felt by the Patriarch to counter the
absolutism of Leo III’s Eclogue, the need to check the still
sometimes intemperate acts of the contemporary emperors (Photius himself was
exiled more than once), and by the great power that St. Photius wielded in
post-iconoclast Byzantium. Thus in the struggle with Rome he was the main mover
and the main victor. The Great Council of 879-880, which was attended by 400
bishops, including the legates of Pope John VIII, anathematised the Filioque,
firmly restricted the Pope’s jurisdiction to the West, and gave Photius a completely
analogous jurisdiction in the East, calling him “supreme pastor”, whose
competence extended to “the whole world”.[303]
If that phrase was just a rhetorical flourish, it was nevertheless true
that the authority of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate now extended
throughout the Orthodox East; and it is from this time that the structure of
the Orthodox Church, which from Justinian to Theodore the Studite had been
characterised as a pentarchy of patriarchates, now became a diarchy (Rome and
Constantinople), with the three Eastern patriarchates under Muslim rule being
virtually reduced to the status of metropolitan districts of the
Constantinopolitan patriarchate.[304]
In the East, moreover, the diarchy was seen rather as a
Constantinopolitan monarchy, insofar as the decline and corruption of Rome in
the early tenth century during the “pornocracy of Marozia”[305]
greatly reduced the prestige and influence of the other diarch. Again, in
missionary work beyond the bounds of the empire, where the emperors had
previously taken the initiative, the patriarch was now the prime mover: in
relation to the Armenians and Syrians in the East, to the Moravians in the
West, to the Khazars, Bulgars and Russians in the North.[306]
The patriarchate was becoming more truly “ecumenical” with every passing year.
At the same time, it must not be thought that St. Photius denied the
traditional doctrine of Church-State symphony. Thus the Epanagoge concludes: «The State
consists of parts and members like an individual person. The most important and
necessary parts are the Emperor and the Patriarch. Therefore unanimity in
everything and agreement (sumfwnia) between
the Empire and the Priesthood (constitutes) the spiritual and bodily peace and
prosperity of the citizens» (Titulus III, 8). Thus the
iconoclast thesis and the post-iconoclast antithesis in political theology came
to rest, in the Epanagoge, in a synthesis which emphasised the
traditional value of symphony between the two powers, even if the superiority
was clearly given to the patriarch (the soul) over the emperor (the body).
It must also be remembered that the
“consensus of the Fathers” with regard to the emperor-patriarch relationship
did not occupy an exact middle point, as it were, on the spectrum between
“caesaropapism” and “papocaesarism”, but rather a broad band in the middle. In
times when the emperor was apostate, heretical or simply power-hungry and
passionate, the Fathers tended slightly right of centre, emphasising the
independence of the Church in her own sphere, the lay, unpriestly character of
the emperor, and the superiority of spiritual to temporal ends as the soul is
superior to the body (SS. Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John
Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, Maximus the Confessor, Photius the Great). But in
times when the emperor was a faithful son of the Church, the Fathers were glad
to accord him a quasi-priestly role and leadership even in spiritual matters –
provided, of course, that he did not undertake strictly sacramental functions
(the Fathers of the First, Fourth and Fifth Ecumenical Councils, St. Isidore of
Pelusium). It was only the extremes that
were definitely excluded: the royal absolutism of the iconoclast emperors and
the priestly absolutism of the heretical popes, both of which tended to deny
any independent sphere of action to the Church, in the former case, and to the
emperor, in the latter. As society became more completely penetrated with the
Spirit of the Gospel, and conflicts with the emperor over matters of faith
became rarer, it became normative to see the emperor in a quasi-priestly role.
This was especially the case after the introduction of the sacrament of royal
anointing. However, the history of Byzantium in the ninth century shows that
the exalted place that the emperor came to occupy as a matter of course in
Eastern Orthodoxy was made possible only at a cost – the cost of a ferocious struggle on the part of the
first hierarchs of the Church to eliminate royal absolutism, a struggle,
moreover, which did not end with the death of St. Photius…
As we have seen, it was a fundamental principle
both of Justinian’s and of Photius’ legislation that Church canons should
always take precedence over imperial laws. As this principle became more
generally accepted, more areas of what had been considered purely secular life,
having little or nothing directly to do with the Church, came under the
influence of the process of “enchurchment”. This process was expressed in
several new requirements: that the emperors themselves should be
anointed in a special Church rite; that marriages take place in church, and in
accordance with the canons; and that lands and monies donated by individuals to
the Church should never be secularised, but should ever remain under the
control of the Church. Thus one of the novellas
of Emperor Alexis Comnenus said that it was wrong to forbid a slave a Church
marriage in a Christian State, for in the Church a slave is equal to a lord.
Again, there were cases of trials of murderers, not according to the civil
codex, but in accordance with the Church canons: the criminal besought
forgiveness on his knees and was given a fifteen-year penance of standing among
the penitents at the Divine Liturgy.[307]
However, as was to be expected, there was
resistance to this process, if not as an ideal, at any rate in practice; and
this was particularly so in the case of marriage law – more specifically, of
marriage law as applied to emperors… The first major conflict came towards the
end of the eighth century, when St. Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople,
refused to give his blessing to the marriage of the son of the Empress Irene,
Constantine VI, who had cast off his lawful wife and entered into an adulterous
relationship with his mistress. The Emperors then turned to the priest Joseph,
who performed the marriage, upon which. St. Tarasius at first did nothing,
“through adaptation to circumstances”, but then excommunicated Joseph. Fearful,
however, that too great strictness in this affair would lead the Emperors to
incline towards iconoclasm, the patriarch accepted Joseph into communion before
the end of his penance. Joseph was also received into communion by the next
Patriarch, St. Nicephorus, who was under pressure from the next Emperor,
Nicephorus.
In protest against these
applications of “economy”, which he characterized as the “heresy” of “moichism”
(“adulterism”), St. Theodore the Studite broke communion with both patriarchs,
and returned into communion with St. Nicephorus only when he, after the death
of the Emperor Nicephorus, had again excommunicated Joseph.[308] St. Theodore allowed no
compromise in relation to the Canons of the Church, which he did not
distinguish from the Gospel itself. He who was not guided by the canons was not fully
Orthodox. St. Paul anathematised anyone who transgressed the law of Christ,
even if he were an angel from heaven. A fortiori the emperors were not
exempt from the canons; there was no special “Gospel of the kings”. Only God is
not subject to the law.[309]
St. Photius faithfully followed St.
Theodore’s teaching. When Basil I came to power after murdering his
predecessor, Photius accepted him as emperor, but refused to give him
communion, for which he was deposed. He was deposed again by Basil’s son, Leo
the Wise, who shifted the balance of Church-State relations back towards
caesaropapism, saying that “from now on the emperor’s care extends to
everything, and his foresight (pronoia, a word which can equally well mean the ‘providence’ of God) controls
and governs everything.”[310]
And so when St. Photius’ successor (and nephew), Patriarch Nicholas the Mystic,
opposed his fourth marriage to Zoe, the Emperor simply removed him from office,
forced a priest to perform the marriage and then, in the absence of a
patriarch, himself placed the imperial crown on his “wife’s” head. However, the
patriarch did not give in. Commenting that the Emperor was to Zoe “both
bridegroom and bishop”[311],
he defrocked the priest that had “married” the emperor and refused the emperor
entrance into the church. Then, when the legates of the Pope recognised the
marriage, St. Nicholas resigned from his see, declaring that he had received
the patriarchate not from the king but through the mercy of God alone, and that
he was leaving his see because the emperor by his uncanonical actions had made
the government of the Church impossible. The emperor retaliated by putting his
friend Euthymius on the patriarchal throne, who permitted the fourth marriage,
saying: “It is right, your Majesty, to obey your orders and receive
your decisions as emanating from the will and providence of God”![312]
However, after the death of Leo in 912, Euthymius was imprisoned and St.
Nicholas was restored to the patriarchate. The struggle between the
Nicholaitans and the Euthymites was brought to an end only by the Tome of Union in 920, which condemned
fourth marriages as “unquestionably illicit and void.”[313]
As
St. Nicholas later explained to the Pope: “What was I to do in such
circumstances? Shut up and go to sleep? Or think and act as befits a friend who
cares at one and the same time both for the honour of the emperor and for the
ecclesiastical decrees? And so we began the struggle with God’s help; we tried
to convince the rulers not to be attracted by that which is proper only for
those who do not know how to control themselves, but to endure what had
happened with magnanimity, with good hope on Christ our God; while we touched,
not only his knee, but also his leg, begging and beseeching him as king in the
most reverential way not to permit his authority to do everything, but to
remember that there sits One Whose authority is mightier than his - He Who shed
His Most Pure Blood for the Church.” And to the Emperor he wrote: “My child and
emperor, it befitted you as a worshipper of God and one who has been glorified
by God more than others with wisdom and other virtue, to be satisfied with
three marriages: perhaps even a third marriage was unworthy of your royal
majesty… but the sacred canons do not completely reject a third marriage, but
are condescending, although they dislike it. However, what justification can
there be for a fourth marriage? The king, they say, is the unwritten law, but
not in order that he may act in a lawless manner and everything that comes into
his head, but in order that by his unwritten deeds he may be that which is the
written law; for if the king is the enemy and foe of the laws, who will fear
them?”[314]
Another area in which imperial might came
up against ecclesiastical right, and in which “natural” processes were subject
to a process of “enchurchment”, was the very important one of imperial
legitimacy and succession.
Dagron has shown that the Byzantine
concept of legitimacy was a complex one composed of many strands; one could
become emperor by dynastic succession from father to son, by being “purple-born
(porjurogennhtoV)”[315],
by marrying a former empress, by being made co-emperor by a living emperor, and
even by what we would call usurpation, the overthrow of a living emperor by
force.[316]
Although a usurper would naturally be considered to be the very opposite of a
legitimate ruler, he could nevertheless be seen as expressing a change in “the
mandate of heaven”, God’s transfer of power from an unworthy man to one more
worthy, as when He “repented” of His choice of Saul and chose David instead.[317]
Thus, according to Lemerle, “usurpation…
has a meaning and almost a political function. It is not so much an illegal act
as the first act in a process of legitimation… There is a parallelism, rather
than an opposition, between the basileus and the usurper. Hence the existence
of two different notions of legitimacy, the one ‘dynastic’ and the other which
we might call (in the Roman sense) ‘republican’, which are not really in
conflict but reinforce each other: the second, when the usurper fails,
reinforces thereby the first, and when he succeeds, recreates it, whether the
usurper attaches himself to the dynasty or founds a dynasty himself.”[318]
And yet… what if a usurper came to power
by the murder of his predecessor? Even here the Church usually crowned the
usurper. Thus in 865 St. Irene Chrysovalantou revealed that the Emperor Michael
III was to be murdered. However, she said, “do not by any means oppose the new
Emperor [Basil I], who shall come to the throne, though murder be at the root
of it. The holy God has preferred and chosen him, so the enemy himself will not
benefit.”[319] St.
Photius also accepted the new emperor – but refused him communion in church.[320]
Sometimes the usurper was crowned,
provided certain conditions were fulfilled. Thus when Emperor Nicephorus Phocas
was murdered on December 11, 969 by his successor, John Tzimiskes, Patriarch
Polyeuctus “declared that he would not allow the Emperor to enter the church as
long as he had not expelled the Augusta from the palace and had not named the
murderer of the Emperor, whoever he might be. Moreover, he demanded the return
to the Synod of a document published by Nicephorus in violation of justice. The
point was that Nicephorus, either intending to remove certain violations of the
sacred rites that had been allowed, in his opinion, by certain hierarchs, or
wishing to submit to himself even that in the religious sphere which it was not
fitting for him to rule over, had forced the hierarchs to compose a decree
according to which nothing in Church affairs was to be undertaken without his
will. Polyeuctus suggested that the Emperor carry out all (this); in the
contrary case he would not allow him to enter the holy church. (John) accepted
the conditions; he removed the Augusta from the palace and exiled her to an
island called Protos, returned Nicephorus’ decree to the Synod and pointed to
Leo Valans, saying that he and nobody else had killed the Emperor with his own
hand. Only then did Polyeuctus allow him into the holy church and crown him,
after which he returned to the Royal palace and was hailed by the army and
people”.[321]
This extraordinary episode tells us much
about the real relationship between Church and State in Byzantium. On the one
hand, there is no question that Tzimiskes won the throne through brute force
and murder, and that there was no real attempt to remove him or refusal to
recognise him. This indicates that the pagan principle of Old Rome: “might is
right”, still prevailed in tenth-century Byzantium. On the other hand,
Tzimiskes’ de facto victory was not felt to be enough in a Christian
society: he needed the de jure confirmation of the Church, her
sacramental blessing. And this the Church felt powerful enough to withhold
until several conditions had been met: (1) the removal of Empress Theophano,
the widow both of Nicephoros and the previous emperor Romanos and the mother of
Romanos’ purple-born sons Basil and Constantine, whom Tzimiskes had wanted to
marry in order to strengthen his position; (2) the annulment of a caesaropapist
decree of the previous emperor; and (3) the new emperor had made at least a
formal attempt to find the murderer (everyone must have known that the emperor
himself was the murderer, but if he did not accuse himself there was no higher
judicial power that could convict him). By obtaining the fulfilment of these
three conditions the Church, it could be said, made the best out of a bad job,
extracting some good from an essentially evil deed.
While the Byzantines accepted Tzimiskes as
basileus, they condemned the deed by which he attained the throne. Thus,
according to Morris, “Leo the Deacon writes of the action… as kathairesis
(‘pulling down’) and anairesis (‘destruction’, ‘abrogation’). He
comments that if the emperor’s brother, Leo Phokas, had been quicker off the
mark, he might have been able to rally support against this neoterismos
(‘innovation’, revolution’).”[322]
The manoeuvre, writes Morris, was “nicely put by Leo the Deacon, who clearly
understood these matters. Tzimiskes, he wrote, ‘took up the reins of the
Empire’ at the fourth hour of the day of 11 December 963. In other words he
assumed the governance of the empire. But it was not until after his coronation
that his position as autokrator was finally legitimised by receiving the
blessing of the church.”[323]
But if this resolved the question of
Tzimiskes’ legitimacy (for the Church, if not for Nikephoros’ relatives, who
continued to rebel against the empire for the next fifty years), it did not
wipe out his sin. [324]
Morris writes: “In the Apocalypse of
Anastasia, dateable to the beginning of the twelfth century at the latest,
we have an angel indicating to the narrator an empty throne in Hell and explaining
that it belonged to John Tzimiskes ‘who was not worthy of it, because he
murdered Nikephoros Phokas’. Then the wounded Nikephoros is seen reproaching
John, saying, ‘”John, Tzimiskes, Lord John, why did you inflict an unjust death
on me… “ and John replied nothing but “Woe! What have I done?”’. The invention
of the tradition that Tzimiskes’ anointing had washed away the sin of the
murder is, of course, another clear indication that he was believed to have
been directly implicated.”[325]
“The aim,” according to Dagron, “is to
convert brute force (to qhriwdeV, qhrion alogon, as Agapetus and Basil write) into a legitimate power, and the
historical sources often allude to this conversion. If Theophanes characterises
Leo V, in 814, as ‘very legitimate emperor of the Romans’, this is to signify
that this general, who had been called to the Empire by war and popular favour,
was able to carry out the mutation which from now on made him a legitimate
sovereign by not being too precipitate in the stages of transition, by letting
the patriarch act, by ceasing to be an army commander, by conforming himself,
not to constitutional rules which did not exist, nor even to more or less
uncertain procedures, but to a process that allowed him to leave one role, that
of a popularly elected general, for another, that of an emperor elected by God.
If, on the contrary, Michael Attaliates and his contemporaries were doubtful
that Isaac I Comnenus had succeeded, in 1057, in his passage from ‘tyranny’ to
‘legitimate power’, in spite of his probity and his courage, this was because
he had not been able to divest himself of his martial fury, which had given him
power but not sacredness….
“So it is not power that is legitimate, it is he who appropriates it who
can become legitimate by choosing to respect the law. Ancient tradition gave
this simple idea the form of a paradox, whose first term was borrowed from
Hellenistic literature: the emperor is not subject to the laws, since he is
himself ‘the living law’, and whose second term brings in a correction: but a
legitimate sovereign must choose to conform to the laws. In short, legitimacy
passes by conversion to legality…”[326]
The question of the legitimacy or
otherwise of one who seized the Roman throne by force was linked with the
question of the legitimacy of rulers of other kingdoms that claimed for
themselves prerogatives similar to those of the Roman emperor. We have already
studied this in the case of Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire, and have
seen that, from the Byzantine point of view, Charlemagne might be an “emperor”
(basileus), but in no way could he be called the “emperor of the
Romans”, whose seat could only be the New Rome of Constantinople. A challenge
similar to that of Charlemagne – and much more threatening to the real power of
the Roman emperors – was provided by the Bulgarian tsars.
Early in the 860s Khan Boris of Bulgaria
was converted to the Orthodox faith by the famous Greek monk St. Methodius.[327]
In 865 Boris was baptised, probably by the patriarch of Constantinople, St.
Photius, and took the name Michael after his godfather, the Emperor Michael. In
this way the foundation was laid, not only of the Christianization of Bulgaria,
but also of the unification of its two constituent peoples, the Bulgar ruling
class and the Slavic peasants, who had been at loggerheads up to that time.
However, Tsar Boris-Michael wanted the
Bulgarian Church to be autonomous, a request that the Mother Church of
Constantinople denied. So, taking advantage of the rift that was opening up
between the Eastern and Western Churches and empires, he turned to Pope
Nicholas I with a series of questions on the faith and a request that Bulgaria
be given a patriarch. The Pope did not immediately grant his request, but Boris
was sufficiently encouraged by his reply to allow Roman missionaries – with the
new Frankish heresy of the Filioque - into his land.
Since the Bulgarian Church was clearly
within the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the Pope’s sending his clerics to
Bulgaria was already a canonical transgression and a first manifestation of his
claim to universal dominion in the Church. It would never have happened if the
West had recognised the authority of the East Roman emperor, as the Popes had
done in earlier centuries. The same could be said of the later expulsion of
Saints Cyril and Methodius from Moravia by jealous German bishops – these were
all fruits, in the ecclesiastical sphere, of that division that had first begun
in the political sphere, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the
Romans.
After some turmoil, the Bulgarian Church
was firmly re-established within the Eastern Church and Empire. A pagan
reaction was crushed, the Scriptures and services were translated into Slavonic
by the disciples of St. Methodius and a vast programme of training native
clergy was initiated. However, the virus of national self-assertion had been
sown almost simultaneously with the Christian faith, and during the reign of
St. Boris’ youngest son, Symeon, Bulgaria was almost continuously at war with
the Empire. Symeon, writes Papadakis, “extended his power over the entire
Balkan peninsula, assumed the title of ‘emperor (tsar) of the Bulgarians
and the Romans’ and tried to capture Constantinople itself.”[328]
St. Nicholas the Mystic vigorously
defended the authority of the East Roman Emperor. “The power of the Emperor,”
he said, “which extends over the whole earth, is the only power established by
the Lord of the world upon the earth.” Again, he wrote to Tsar Symeon in 913:
«God has submitted the other sceptres of the world to the heritage of the Lord
and Master, that is, the Universal Emperor in Constantinople, and does not
allow his will to be despised. He who tries by force to acquire for himself the
Imperial dignity is no longer a Christian».[329]
However, Symeon continued to act like a
new Constantine, transferring the capital of the new Christian kingdom from
Pliska, with its pagan associations, to Preslav on the model of St.
Constantine’s moving his capital from Rome to Constantinople. And during the
reign of his more peaceful son Peter (927-969) the Byzantines conceded both the
title of “basileus” to the Bulgarian tsar (so there were now three officially recognised Christian
emperors of the one Christian empire!) and (in 932) the title “patriarch” to
the first-hierarch of the Bulgarian Church, Damian. Peter’s legitimacy was also
recognised by the greatest of the Bulgarian saints, John of Rila.
After the death of Peter the Bulgarian kingdom
was conquered by the Greeks (in about 971), as a consequence of which the local
Bulgarian dioceses were again subjected to the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate.
However, there was a resurgence of Bulgarian power in Macedonia under Tsar
Samuel, who established his capital and patriarchate in Ohrid. But this did not
last long either. In 1014 the Bulgarian armies were decisively defeated by
Emperor Basil “the Bulgar-slayer”, leading to the end of the Bulgarian empire
and its re-absorption into the Roman Empire.
The
Ohrid diocese’s autocephaly was still recognised, but it was demoted from a
patriarchate to an archbishopric. “The archbishop’s jurisdiction,” writes
Papakakis, “was to extend – according to the charters – over all the
territories which were part of Bulgaria under tsars Peter and Samuel, including
even clearly Greek-speaking areas, and areas populated by Vlachs (Romanians)
and Magyars (called ‘Turks’). The archbishopric included also most Serbian
areas. Basil II was even liberal enough to appoint a native Bulgarian, John, as
the first archbishop of Ohrid under Byzantine rule… All of John’s successors on
the see of Ohrid would be Greek ecclesiastics, often clearly connected with the
court of Constantinople. The archbishopric would survive as an autocephalous
church until 1767, when it would be suppressed by the patriarchate of
Constantinople. Since this suppression would be a unilateral act, supported by
the Turks, the ancient status of Ohrid would be used by the Bulgarians in 1870
to justify the establishment of an independent Bulgarian exarchate (in defiance
of the ecumenical patriarchate) as a restoration, not an innovation.
“Understandably the period between 1018
and 1204, when Ohrid was under direct Greek administration, is seen by many
Bulgarian historians as the darkest period of the ‘Byzantine yoke’. Some
historians have noted also that the Greek rule imposed on Bulgaria during that
period seems to stand in direct contradiction with the Cyrillo-Methodian
ideology, which encouraged the development of national Christian cultures. The
Russian historian E.E. Golubinsky makes a strong point in affirming that the
archbishopric of Ohrid, after 1018, became a Greek see, identical with any
other, and that its history is the history of repression of Bulgarian
nationalism. This view can be strengthened by referring to the snobbish
utterings found in the correspondence of the most eminent among the Greek
archbishops of Bulgaria, Theophylact (c.1090-c.1126), who writes to his
Constantinopolitan friends about his flock as ‘unclean barbarians, slaves who
smell of sheepskin,’ and as ‘monsters’.
“Notwithstanding the snobbishness of some
(perhaps many) Byzantine administrators, there is no evidence that the Slavic
culture, brilliantly developed in Ohrid by Sts Clement and Naum, simply
disappeared after the Byzantine conquest. Many important Slavic manuscripts
were copied in Bulgaria at that time, and Theophylact himself is the author of
a Life of St. Clement in Greek, where
the missionary merits of St. Cyril and Methodius and of their disciples are
fully recognized. One should therefore agree with D. Obolensky and other
scholars, who believe that ‘the Byzantine authorities, however much they
affected to despise the Bulgarians as “barbarians” and strove constantly to
assimilate their country into the Empire’s administrative structure, did not
pursue therein a policy of systematic hellenization.’ Actually, the Bulgarian
cultural revival could not have been as strong as it was in the late twelfth century,
if Slavic civilization had been totally suppressed during the Byzantine rule.
”It should be remembered also that, even
under tsars Symeon, Peter and Samuel, the patriarchates of Preslav, Silistria
and Ohrid – although designated as ‘Bulgarian’ (as was also the empire of these
tsars), were multiethnic in their constituency, including not only Bulgarians,
but also Greek, Serbian, Wallachian and Hungarian flocks. The charters of Basil
II specifically refer to this multiethnic reality, and reestablish territorial
organization of the church with local dioceses, uniting all the faithful of a
region. Except for a Byzantine leadership at the top, the cultural pluralism,
so characteristic of the medieval Balkans – and very distinct from the
secularistic national antagonisms of modern times – was the basic rule within
the church both before and after the Byzantine conquest of 1018.[330]
It has been claimed that the task assigned
to Bulgaria and King Boris by God “could be realized only by an independent, autonomous
church, since, if the nation were to be dependent on another people in church
matters, it could easily lose its political independence along with its
religious independence and disappear from the face of the earth.”[331]
Perhaps; and yet the idea that each nation has to have its own independent
church was a new one in the history of Christianity. De facto, as a
result of the conquest of certain parts of the Roman Empire by barbarian
leaders, independent national Churches had sprung up in various regions, from
Georgia in the East to England in the West. But the idea of a single Christian
commonwealth of nations looking up to its father in God, the Christian Roman
Emperor, was never completely lost; and there was still the feeling that de
jure all Christian nations owed him some kind of allegiance. Charlemagne
had not disputed this; he (or the Pope) simply believed that he was now that Emperor, and that the
Empire was now centred, not in Constantinople but in Aachen.
It must be admitted that it was the
Bulgarian emperors who made the first serious breach in this internationalist
ideal; for they called their kingdom, not by the internationalist name of Rome,
but “the kingdom of the Bulgarians and the Greeks” – in other words, a national
kingdom composed of two nations, with the Bulgarians as the dominant ethnic
element. Coups by individuals were commonplace in Byzantine history: the
attempt to place one nation above all
others was new. It is perhaps not coincidental that when the Orthodox Church
came to anathematise the heresy of nationalism, or phyletism, in 1872, the
anathema was directed in the first place against Bulgarian nationalism…
Georgia, the lot of the Most Holy Mother
of God, had played only a minor role in Orthodox history since her baptism by
St. Nina in the fourth century. However, in 1008 a political and ecclesiastical
unification of the eastern and western Georgian lands took place under King
Bagrat III. “It is from this moment proper,” writes Papadakis, “that we may
speak of Georgia…
“The new unity… brought Church and State
closer together. The ecclesiastical hierarchy were doubtless advocates of
national unity and in this sense were of the greatest benefit to Georgia’s
Bagratid rulers. The catholicus on the other hand retained control of
ecclesiastical affairs and administration, and was even formally recognised as
the spiritual king of the nation. However, the Georgian primate along with all
major bishops and abbots were temporal princes of the realm as well, and
actually sat on the council of state or Darbazi together with the feudal
princes of Georgia…
“Arguably, the two most important members
of the new Caucasian monarchy were David II (1089-1125) and queen Tamar
(1184-1212). Both of these Bagratid sovereigns were in the end canonized as
saints by the Georgian Orthodox Church. By extending Georgia’s power far beyond
its historic frontiers, these rulers were in the final analysis responsible for
creating a genuine Georgian hegemony not only over Georgians but over Muslims
and Armenians as well. David II was surnamed by contemporaries the Restorer or
Rebuilder (aghmashenebeli) for good reason…His reign constitutes a
genuine ‘epic period’ in the history of medieval Georgia. David’s victories
against the Muslims were especially important since they paved the way for the
Transcaucasian multinational empire of his successors. In 1122 he was able to
gain control of Tiflis (it had been for centuries an Islamic town) and to
reestablish it as Georgia’s capital. But his great triumph was without doubt
his decisively humilating defeat of the Seljuks a year earlier at the battle of
Didgori (12 August).[332]
Georgians to this day celebrate the victory annually as a holiday in August.
“In addition to a strengthened monarchy
and a magnified Georgia, David II also bequeathed to his descendants a reformed
Church. The attention he was willing to devote to the welfare of the Church as
a whole, was doubtlessly genuine. He was also evidently concerned with Christian
unity and repeatedly labored to convince the separated Armenian community to
return to the unity of the Orthodox Church by accepting Chalcedonian
Christology and by renouncing schism. His vigorous efforts to establish
ecclesiastical discipline, eliminate abused, and reorganize the Church,
culminated in 1103 at the synod of Ruisi-Urbnisi. This meeting – one of the
most famous in Georgian history – was presided over by the king who had also
convened it…
“It was during [Queen Tamar’s] rule that the
great golden age of Georgian history and culture reached its summit. There is
no denying the multinational nature of her kingdom by the dawn of the
thirteenth century. By then Georgia was one of the most powerful states in the
Near East. As a result of Queen Tamar’s numerous campaigns, which took her
armies to the shores of the Black Sea, Paphlagonia and further east into
Iranian territory, the Georgian state extended far beyond its original borders.
By 1212 the entire Caucasus, the southern coast of the Black Sea, most of
Armenia and Iranian Azerbaijan, had in fact been annexed to the Georgian
state….
«[The queen was in general friendly
towards] Saladin, who was actually responsible in the end for the return to the
Georgians in the Holy City of properties that had once belonged to them. In
contrast, Tamar’s relations with the Latins in the crusader states… were rarely
courteous or fraternal. The Orthodox Georgians never actually directly involved
themselves with the crusades. This may have been at the root of the friendship
Muslims felt for them.”[333]
“Twice,” however, “did. Tamar put to
flight the Turks, come out for the conquest of Iberia. During two terrible
battles she herself saw the finger of God directing her to the fight, and, with
her soldiers, witnessed the miraculous conversion of one of the Mohammedan
generals who was made prisoner.”[334]
As we ponder why little Georgia should
have fared so prosperously and heroically at a time when the Byzantine empire
was being defeated by her enemies, we should remember three factors. One was
the internal unity of the State under its strong and pious rulers. A second
other was its strict faithfulness to Orthodoxy. Thus when we compare the
Georgians’ relations with the heretical Armenians with the Byzantines’
relations with the heretical Latins during the same period, we find much
greater firmness on the part of the Georgians, whose refusal to make
concessions on the faith for the sake of political gains reaped both spiritual
and material fruits.[335] It
was an example, unfortunately, that New Rome, Georgia’s first teacher in the
faith, was to imitate less than perfectly in the following centuries…
A third factor is the conscious
assimilation and affiliation of the Georgian kingdom in this period to its
Byzantine parent, from which relationship it clearly drew spiritual strength.
Thus Antony Eastmond writes: “The two hundred years before Tamar’s reign saw a
very marked change in the depiction of power in Georgia in an attempt to
establish an effective form of royal presentation. The Georgian monarchy came
increasingly to model itself on imperial rule in Byzantium. The Bagrat’ioni
kings began to see themselves as inheritors of Byzantine royal traditions, and
displayed themselves as the descendants of Constantine the Great, rather than
their own Georgian ancestors, such as Vakhtang Gorgasalan (the great Georgian
king who ruled c. 446-510). Between the ninth and twelfth centuries it is
possible to trace the way the Bagrat’ionis began to adopt more and more of the
trappings of Byzantine political ideas. In the ninth century, Ashot’ I the
Great (786-826), the first Bagrat’ioni ruler, showed his dependence on
Byzantine ideas by accepting the title of Kouropalates; although the only
surviving image of the king shows him in a very abstract, indistinguishable
form of dress. By the tenth century the Georgians had adopted a more positive
Byzantine identity. At the church of Oshk’I (built 963-73), the two founder
brothers, Davit and Bagrat’ are shown in a donor relief on the exterior wearing
very ornate, ‘orientalized’, Byzantine costume. All earlier royal images in
Georgia, as well as the contemporary image of the rival King Leo III of
Abkhazia (a neighbouring Georgian Christian kingdom) in the church of K’umurdo (built
964), had shown the rulers in less distinct, or clearly local forms of dress.
The choice of dress at Oshk’I showed the outward adherence of the Bagrat’ionis
to the Byzantine political system….
“This gradual process of Byzantinization
continued throughout the eleventh century, becoming increasingly dominant. It
was encouraged by closer links between the Georgian and Byzantine royal
families. Bagrat’ IV (1027-72) married Helena, the niece of Romanos III Agyros
in 1032; and his daughter, Maria ‘of Alania’ married two successive Byzantine
emperors (Michael VII Doukas and Nikephoros III Botaneiates).
“By the beginning of the twelfth century,
there had been a transformation in the whole presentation of the Georgian royal
family. In addition to Byzantine court dress, all aspects of the royal
environment became ‘Byzantinized’. In the royal churches standard Byzantine
forms were adopted…
“At Gelati, built between 1106 and 1130 by
Davit IV and his son Demet’re (1125-54), this Byzantinization reaches its peak…
The point of strongest Byzantine influence at Gelati comes in the fresco scenes
in the narthex. These show the earliest surviving monumental images of the
seven ecumenical councils… Davit IV himself convened and presided at two sets
of church councils in his reign, and clearly saw himself as a successor to the
early Byzantine emperors and their domination of the church: Davit IV’s
biographer even calls him a second Constantine…”[336]
Queen Tamara continues in the same tradition;
in spite of her sex she is called a second Constantine, a David and a Solomon
in the chronicles.[337] The contrast between Georgia and
Bulgaria is instructive: the Georgian kings saw themselves as sons of the
Byzantines, and prospered, whereas the Bulgarian tsars saw themselves as
rivals, and were brought low…
In 860 a new nation which St. Photius
called “Ros” (RwV)[338] appeared off
Constantinople and ravaged the suburbs. These came from Russia, but were
probably Scandinavian Vikings by race (the Finns call the Swedes “Rossi” to
this day). Through the grace of the Mother of God the invaders were defeated,
and in the treaty which followed the ceasefire the Russians agreed to accept
Christianity. Thus St. Photius wrote that “the formerly terrible people, the
so-called Rus… are even now abandoning their heathen faith and are
converting to Christianity, receiving bishops and pastors from us, as well as
all Christian customs.”
In this way was laid the foundations of
the conversion of the last of the major Christian nations. St. Photius sent Bishop Michael to Russia. He began
to preach the word of God among the pagans, and at their demand worked a
miracle: he ordered a fire to be kindles and placed in it a book of the
Gospels, which remained unharmed.[339] Many were then converted to the
faith, including the Prince Askold, the first prince of
Kiev, Askold, who was baptised with the name Nicholas and opened diplomatic
relations with Constantinople in 867. According to tradition, Princes Askold
and Dir suffered martyrdom for the faith.
Two years after the defeat of 860, and
perhaps partly as a result of it, the Slavs of the northern city of Novgorod
made an unprecedented change in the form of their political organisation,
inviting the Scandinavian Vikings under Rurik to rule over them: “Our land is
great and abundant, but there is no order in it – come and rule over us”. As N.M. Karamzin writes: “The citizens perhaps
remembered how useful and peaceful the rule of the Normans had been: their need
for good order and quiet made them forget their national pride, and the Slavs,
‘convinced,’ as tradition relates, ‘by the advice of the Novgorod elder
Gostomysl,’ demanded rulers from the Varyangians.”[340]
As I. Solonevich notes[341],
this was very similar to the appeal of the British Christians to the Saxons
brothers Hengist and Horsa in the fifth century. However, the results were very
different: whereas in Britain the invitation led to a long series of wars
between the Britons and Saxons and the eventual conquest of most of England by
the pagans, in Russia it led, without bloodshed, to the foundation of a strong
and stable State – “the empire of the Ruriks”, as Marx described it, – in which
the Germanic element was quickly swallowed up by the Slavs. Thus by inviting
the Vikings to rule over them, the Russian Slavs triumphed at one stroke over
egoism and self-will in both the individual and the national spheres.[342]
As Hieromartyr Archbishop Andronicus of
Perm wrote: “At a time when, in the other peoples of Europe, the power of the
princes and kings was subduing the peoples to themselves, appearing as external
conquerors of the disobedient, but weak, - we, on the other hand, ourselves
created our own power and ourselves placed the princes, the prototypes of our
tsars, over ourselves. That is how it was when Rurik and his brothers were
recognised by Ilmen lake. We placed them to rule over ourselves at a time when
we had only just begun to be conscious of ourselves as a people, and when our
statehood was just beginning to come into being”.[343]
Of course, the consolidation of the
victory, and the transformation of Russia into Holy and Autocratic Russia,
required many more centuries of spiritual and political struggle. “The real
state life of Rus’,” writes St. John Maximovich, “begins with Vladimir the
Saint. The princes who were before him were not so much ruler-lords as
conquerors, for whom the establishment of good order in their country was less
important than subduing the rich country to themselves and forcing it to pay
some tribute. Åven Svyatoslav preferred to live in Bulgaria, which he had
conquered, ànd not in his own capital. It was Christianity, which was brought
into Russian first by Olga, who had great influence on her eldest grandsons
Yaropolk and Oleg, and then finally by St. Vladimir the Beautiful Sun, who
baptised Rus’, that laid the firm foundations of Statehood.
“Christianity bound together by a common
culture the princely race, which was, as is affirmed, of Norman extraction, and
the numerous Slavic and other races which constituted the population of ancient
Rus’. It taught
the princes to look on themselves as on defenders of the weak and oppressed and servers of
the righteousness of God. It taught the people to see in them not simply leaders
and war-commanders, but as people to whom power had been given by God Himself.”[344]
Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna develops
this theme: “The ideal of Holy Rus’, like the formula itself, was not born
immediately. Two stages are important in its genesis: the baptism of Rus’ and
her regeneration after the Tatar conquest. Like any other historical people,
the Russian nation is a child of her Church. Greece and Rome, on accepting
Christianity, brought to the Church their rich pagan inheritance. The German
peoples were already formed tribal units at the moment of their reception of
Christianity, and they preserved quite a lot of their pagan past, especially in
the sphere of national and juridical ideas, in Christianity. But we – the
Russian Slavs – had absolutely nothing before our acceptance of Christianity:
neither state ideas, nor national consciousness, nor an original culture. The
Eastern Slav pagans did not even have their own gods – the whole ancient
Russian pantheon consisted of foreign divinities: Perun was a Lithuanian
divinity, Khors – a Scythian-Sarmatian one, Moksha and Veles were Finnish gods.
None of them even had a Slavic name. The Russian people gave their untouched
soul to Christianity. And the Church gave everything to the Slavs, so that already
one generation after the reception of Christianity, under Prince Yaroslav, we
were no poorer in a cultural sense, but rather richer than the majority of our
neighbours…”[345]
It was St. Vladimir’s
grandmother, St. Olga, who in 957 initiated the process of the Christianisation
of her country by submitting to baptism in Constantinople. Her godfather was
the Byzantine Emperor himself. [346]
However, she did not succeed in converting her son Svyatoslav, and towards the
end of her reign a pagan reaction set in, which intensified under Svatoslav and
even more in the early years of Vladimir’s rule.
Like Moses, St. Vladimir, the baptiser of
Russia, was expelled from his homeland in his youth. But in 980 he returned and
conquered Kiev. After a period of fierce idolatry, he repented and led his
people in triumph out of the Egypt of idolatry and through the Red Sea of
baptism in the Dniepr on August 1, 988, and thence into the
inheritance of the promised land, the new Israel of “Holy Russia”, which had
been all but evangelised by his death in 1015.
In view of this, the usual epithet of “new
Constantine” granted to the kings of new Orthodox nations was more than usually
appropriately applied to St. Vladimir, as Metropolitan Hilarion applied it in
his famous Sermon on the Law and Grace in about 1050.
Indeed, Russia was not only an offshoot
of Christian Rome, like Francia or England, Bulgaria or Georgia. Through her
racial and dynastic links with Western Europe (especially the
Anglo-Scandinavian north-west), Russia became the heir of what was left of the Old, Orthodox Rome of the West,
regenerating the ideal of the Symphony of Powers just as it was being destroyed
in the West by the heretical Papacy. And by her filial faithfulness to
Byzantium, as well as through the marriage of Great-Prince Ivan III to Sophia
Palaeologus in the fifteenth century, she became the heir of the Second or New Rome of Constantinople.
Thus
Vladimir was not a “new Constantine” in the conventional way that all newly
converted Christian kings, or founders of new Christian dynasties, were called
such in the Middle Ages. His kingdom actually became, in the course of time
(about 500 years), the reincarnation
or successor or heir of Christian Rome. In fact, it became the Third Rome.
But such an idea was never accepted by the
Byzantines before the fall of Byzantium itself. As St.
Photius the Great declared: «Just as the dominion of Israel lasted until the
coming of Christ, so we believe that the Empire will not be taken from us
Greeks until the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ».[347] Only after the Second Rome was no
more did the Greeks begin to contemplate a Third Rome…
4. NEW ROME: THE WEST
So then Northumbria was prosperous,
When king and pontiff ruled in harmony,
One in the church and one in government;
One wore the pall the Pope conferred on him,
And one the crown his fathers wore of old.
Alcuin, On the Saints of the Church of
York.
The heads of the world shall live in union of perfect
charity, and shall prevent all discord among their lower members. These
institutions, which are two for men, but one for God, shall be enflamed by the
divine mysteries; the two persons who represent them shall be so closely united
by the grace of mutual charity, that it will be possible to find the king in
the Roman pontiff, and the Roman pontiff in the king.
Peter
Damian.[348]
St. Constantine’s transfer of his capital
from Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople marked the beginning of the end
of the Western Empire. Already in 410 and 455 Old Rome had been conquered by
barbarians. In 476 she fell permanently under barbarian rule until Justinian’s
conquests in the sixth century. The shock was great[349],
and called for a theological and historiosophical explanation. For if
Tertullian had said: “In the Emperor we reverence the judgement of God, Who has
set him over the nations”[350],
the fall of the empire itself – albeit only its western half - had to express
the judgement of God in some especially important way.
The most famous meditation on the fall of
Rome came from St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, after Alaric’s sacking of the
city in 410. Augustine distanced himself from the perhaps too close
identification of Romanitas and Christianitas that had been common
in the first century after Constantine’s conversion. As F. van der Meer
interprets his thought: “Compared with Christianity, what significance was
there in things, admittedly good in themselves, like the order, unity and
authority of the Roman Empire?… Were even the old ethical insights worthy to
serve as a basis for the scientific investigation of revelation? ‘All mortal
things are only symbols’… In the year 400 all earthly things were recognized as
relative, even the immortal Empire and the supposedly final wisdom of the
ancients.”[351]
The pagans were quick to claim that Rome
had fallen because she had deserted her gods. They pointed out that it was
precisely since the ban on pagan practices imposed by Theodosius the Great in
380 that the barbarians had begun to overwhelm the empire. Augustine wrote the
first five books of his City of God to refute this notion. Then, in the
second part of the work, he describes the origin, history and final destiny of
the two Cities - the City of God, which is holy and destined for eternal bliss,
and the City of Man, which is sinful and destined for the eternal fire. The
Roman Empire, he wrote, like the Church herself of which it is the ally,
contains citizens of both Cities, both wheat and tares. When the state is ruled
by a truly Christian ruler, like Theodosius, one can see “a faint shadowy
resemblance between the Roman Empire and the Heavenly City”; which is why one
must obey the law and render one’s patriotic and civic duty to the State.
However, this now traditional view is juxtaposed, in Augustine’s
thought, with a more radical, apolitical and even anti-political view. Thus at
one point he calls Rome a “second Babylon”.[352] He
points out that there was always a demonic element at the heart of the Roman
state, which has not been eliminated even now. Sin, fratricide – Romulus’
murder of Remus – lie at the very root of the Roman state, just as sin and
fratricide – Cain’s murder of Abel – lie at the beginning of the history of
fallen humanity. Moreover, the growth of the Roman empire was achieved through
a multitude of wars, many of which were quite unjust. But “without justice what
are governments but bands of brigands?”[353]
Therefore it should not surprise us that
the Roman empire should decline and fall. “If heaven and earth are to pass
away, why is it surprising if at some time the state is going to come to an
end? If what God has made will one day vanish, then surely what Romulus made
will disappear much sooner.” “As for this mortal life, which ends after a few
days’ course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon
to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?”[354]
For it is the Jerusalem above that is our real
Fatherland, not Rome here below.
Augustine’s purpose was to wean men away
from trust in men and in political institutions, whether pagan or Christian,
and to trust in God alone. Christian rulers were, of course, in general better
than pagan ones. But politics in general was suspect.
Augustine believed Rome had not been
destroyed, but chastised. By this tribulation God was purifying the Roman
nation, as He had purified Israel in Old Testament times. Rome would emerge
from this period of affliction cleansed and better able to carry out her
civilising mission in the world. For “God’s providence,” he wrote, “constantly
uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind, as it also uses
such afflictions to train men in a righteous and laudable way of life. It
removes to a better state those whose life is approved, or keeps them in this
world for further service.”
The catastrophe of 410 did not produce the
regeneration of Rome that Augustine had hoped for. Things went from bad to
worse until, in 476, the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus,
surrendered without a fight to the barbarian, Odoacer. And that this
really was the end was proved by the fact that Odoacer did not take the title
of emperor, nor put a puppet-emperor in his place, but was content with the
formerly despised title of rex. The ideal of the Roman empire remained
potent and was even resurrected in the centuries to come. But the reality – in
the West, at any rate - was gone…
If it was still true at the
beginning of the century that Rome was being chastised, not destroyed, it had
to be admitted that the disease was more serious and chronic, and the treatment
more radical, tending rather to kill than cure the patient, than Augustine (in
his more optimistic moods, at any rate) had recognised. It was not so much that
some rotting flesh had been cut away, allowing the body to recover its full
strength in time; it was rather that a whole limb – or rather, the head, the
ruling city itself - had been amputated. The sad fact was that Old Rome had not
profited from the opportunity presented by the conversion of St. Constantine to
regenerate herself. It remained in a situation of spiritual and political
crisis not dissimilar to that in the time of Diocletian over a hundred years
earlier.
That Old Rome was in a sense irredeemable
had been implicitly recognised by St. Constantine when he transferred his
capital to the New Rome of Constantinople, hoping thereby to make a fresh start
for the Christian empire.[355]
And even several of the western emperors chose rather to live in Milan or
Ravenna. The symbolism of his act was clear: if the state, like the individual
man, was to be redeemed and enjoy a long and spiritually fruitful life, it,
too, had to make a complete break with the past, renounce the demonic sacrifices
and pagan gods and philosophies that it had loved, and receive a new birth by
water and the Spirit. For Old Rome, in contrast to many of her individual
citizens, had never been baptised. There was a pagan rottenness at the heart of
the western empire which even its Christian head, the Emperor, was not able to
cut out.[356] And
so its doom was sealed.
The real rulers of the later western
empire when the emperor was campaigning against the barbarians, were the
senators. Snobbish and immensely rich, they had much to lose from the empire’s
fall. However, as an eastern visitor to Rome remarked, they did not want to
serve the State, “preferring to enjoy their property at leisure”.[357]
“In spite of frequent lip-service to the
romantic concept of Eternal Rome,” writes Grant, “many noblemen were not
prepared to lift a finger to save it… They also undermined the state in a very
active fashion. For of all the obstacles to efficient and honest
administration, they were the worst. They forcibly ejected collectors of taxes,
harboured deserters and brigands, and repeatedly took the law into their own
hands… They often remained hostile to the Emperor, and estranged from his
advisers. For a long time many were pagans while their ruler was Christian.”[358]
The free poor of Rome did not come far
behind the senators in corruption. Although the Christian Emperor Honorius had
supposedly abolished the circuses in 404, Grant writes that “a hundred and
seventy-five days of the year were given up to public shows, as opposed to a
mere hundred and thirty-five two centuries earlier; moreover the fabric of the
Colosseum was restored as late as 438. It is also true that in the mid-fourth
century 300,000 Romans held bread tickets which entitled them to draw free
rations from the government; and even a century later, when the population of
the city had greatly diminished, there were still 120,000 recipients of these
free supplies. Certainly the population of Rome was largely parasitic. However,
the city proletariat played little active part in guiding the course of events
which brought the later Roman empire to a halt.
“It was, on the other hand, the ‘free’
poor of the rural countryside upon whom the government, struggling to raise
money for the army, imposed the full rigours and terrors of taxation. Although
technically still distinguishable from slaves, they were no better off and
perhaps worse off, since they often found themselves driven into total
destitution. Between these rustic poor and the government, the relationship was
that of oppressed and oppressor, of foe and foe.
“This is perhaps the greatest of all the
disunities that afflicted the Western Empire. The state and the unprivileged
bulk of its rural subjects were set against each other in a destructive and
suicidal disharmony, which played a very large and direct part in the downfall
that followed. It was because of this rift that the taxes which were needed to
pay the army could not be raised. And because they could not be raised, the
Empire failed to find defenders, and collapsed.”[359]
It might have been different if the
barbarians had been converted to the universalism of both Rome and the Church.
Certainly, the Germans, having settled within the empire through necessity, to
escape the hordes that pressed on them from the east, were not always resolved
to destroy it, and often came to admire and emulate it. Thus Ataulf, the son
and successor of the famous Alaric, expressed his attitude towards Rome as
follows: “To begin with, I ardently desired to efface the very name of the
Romans and to transform the Roman Empire into a Gothic Empire. Romania, as it
is commonly called, would have become Gothia; Ataulf would have replaced Caesar
Augustus. But long experience taught me that the unruly barbarism of the Goths
was incompatible with the laws. Now, without laws there is no state. I
therefore decided rather to aspire to the glory of restoring the fame of Rome
in all its integrity, and of increasing it by means of the Gothic strength. I
hope to go down to posterity as the restorer of Rome, since it is not possible
that I should be its supplanter.”[360]
Orosius, who recounted this anecdote,
together with other churchmen such as St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola and the
Priest Salvian of Marseilles, were hopeful that a new Romano-Germanic order
could be constructed. Moreover, they had the example of the Gothic Christian
Martyrs Sabbas (+372) and Nicetas (+378), and the very early translation of the
Bible into the Gothic language, to show that a real conversion of the barbarians
was possible. Unfortunately, however, most of the Goths were converted to
Arianism rather than Orthodox Christianity.[361]
Moreover, many Christians did not rise to
the universalist spirit that alone could have saved Rome at this hour, making a
Romano-Germanic Christian order a real possibility. Thus the Christian poet
Prudentius, who once declared that the peoples of the empire were “equals and
bound by a single name”, nevertheless despised the barbarians:
As beasts from men, as dumb from those who speak,
As from the good who God’s commandments seek,
Differ the foolish heathen, so Rome stands
Alone in pride above barbarian lands.[362]
In the last analysis it was this pride, more than any purely political
or economic factors, that destroyed Old Rome. Rome ceased to be the universal
ruler when she abandoned her own tradition of universalism. The same happened,
as we shall see, to the New Rome of Constantinople when she, too, turned in on
herself.
In the past Rome had not been too proud to
learn from the Classical Greeks whom she had conquered. Nor, centuries later,
had she despised the humble fishermen who preached a Jewish God Whom they
themselves had crucified. The success of the apostles even among the emperor’s
own family was witnessed by St. Paul, who declared: “My bonds in Christ are
manifest in all the palace [of the emperor]” (Philippians 1.13), and
came to fruition with the conversion of St. Constantine.
Even when the last pagan Roman emperor,
Julian the apostate, tried to reverse the Constantinian revolution, the
momentum proved unstoppable. Like all the previous persecutors of the
Christians, he perished in agony, crying, “You have triumphed, Galilean!” And
when the last Emperor to unite East and West, Theodosius the Great, bowed in
penitence before a Christian bishop, Ambrose of Milan, it seemed as if
Ambrose’s dream of a Rome purged of its pagan vices and uniting its traditional
virtues to the Cross of Christ – a Rome truly invicta and aeterna
because united to the invincible and eternal God - had been realised.
For, as St. Leo the Great, Pope of Rome, said
in the next century, addressing Rome: “[The Apostles] promoted thee to such
glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal
state, and the head of the world through the blessed Peter's holy See thou
didst attain a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government. For
although thou wast increased by many victories, and didst extend thy rule on
land and sea, yet what thy toils in war subdued is less than what the peace of
Christ has conquered… That state, in ignorance of the Author of its
aggrandisement, though it ruled almost all nations, was enthralled by the
errors of them all, and seemed to itself to have fostered religion greatly, because
it rejected no falsehood. And hence its emancipation through Christ was the
more wondrous in that it had been so fast bound by Satan.”[363]
But
the fifth century proved to be the great watershed, the “stone of separation” (Zach.
4.10) which both revealed the rottenness still nestling in the heart of the
Western Empire, and cut it away in an operation so painful that in 476, with
the fall of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, the Empire, too, collapsed.
It was not the Emperors that were to blame: although there were no really
distinguished Emperors after Theodosius I, they remained faithful to Orthodox
Christianity.[364] The burdens they imposed on the
people were not imposed willingly, but because the desperate situation of the
empire called for drastic remedies. These remedies failed because Roman society
was divided both against itself and against its allies. And a divided house
cannot stand…
And
yet Christian Rome did not die in the West. Although the Antichrist took her
place in the sense that pagan and heretical rulers took the place of Orthodox
ones, under the rubble of the old empire new kingdoms were arising that were to
restore Orthodoxy and reincarnate the spirit of Christian Rome. Moreover, for
many centuries to come the memory of Old Rome and her achievement was to remain
influential; even the twentieth-century atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell
concluded: “The problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be
solved by combining the solidity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St.
Augustine’s City of God.”[365]
The question facing the Old Rome of the
West after the collapse of the Western empire was: to what extent was it able,
and willing, to integrate itself into the New Rome of the East? Was the
destruction of the ancient institutions too thorough, and the dominance of the
Germanic kings too great, to permit Old Rome to continue in a real, and not
merely nominal union with New Rome? Or, even if the answer to that question
was: no, would the jealousy of the old capital towards its younger supplanter
hinder it, as the jealousy of the Jews towards the Christians had prevented
their integration into the New Testament Church?
In the end, as is well-known, Old Rome did
fall away from New Rome both politically and ecclesiastically, a fact which has
been more critical than any other in determining the course of European
civilisation in the second millenium of Christian history. However, it did not
happen immediately; and the six centuries or so from the fall of the Western
Empire to the emergence of the new Papist Empire of Hildebrand and the medieval
Popes constitutes a fascinating period in which the Orthodox Christian forms of
political and ecclesiastical life – upheld primarily, now, in the East –
gradually succumbed to the new, heretical forms – but only after a fierce
struggle during which the Orthodox staged several “comebacks”. In this struggle
two forces were especially prominent both for good and for evil: the Popes of
Rome, and the kings of the newly emergent national kingdoms of Western Europe.
As we have seen in the last chapter, the
Popes of the fifth century were completely “eastern” in their political
theology and in their respect for the Eastern Emperor. They played an important
(but by no means “papist”) part in the theological struggles of the Eastern
Church. St. Leo’s Tome, for example, was one of the great documents that
established the triumph of Orthodoxy over Monophysitism at the Fourth
Ecumenical Council. For centuries to come, the Popes constituted the main
upholders of Orthodox Romanitas, the politico-ecclesiastical unity of
Christendom, in the West, and the vital rampart against which the waves of
barbarism and heresy beat in vain.[366]
Although such famous Popes as Leo I and Gregory I were scions of West Roman
aristocratic families, and were therefore sensitive to the pride and traditions
of the old capital,[367]
they maintained close links with the Empire of New Rome. And they understood
Church-State relations in essentially the same, “symphonic” way as in the East,
with the Emperor being expected to play an important part in Church affairs.[368]
However, already by the end of the fifth
century, we can begin to see a different emphasis in the Popes’ understanding
of Church-State relations from that prevalent in the East. This emphasis was in
fact no less Orthodox than that in the East, being essentially the same
“anti-caesaropapist” emphasis as we find, not only in such Western Fathers as
Ambrose of Milan, but also in such Eastern Fathers as Basil the Great, Gregory
the Theologian and John Chrysostom. Moreover, it was elicited by essentially
the same fact – the falling of the Eastern Emperor into heresy. However, there
was another important factor which was to be found only in the West and which
sharpened the emphasis: the vacuum in political authority left by the fall of
Old Rome, which vacuum the Eastern Emperors before Justinian were unable to
fill and which the Germanic Arian kings only partially filled. Into this vacuum
stepped the Popes, as a result of which, when the Popes argued for the
independence of the Church from the State, they were speaking from a position
of unparalleled authority, as being almost the first authority in both Church
and State in the West.
This emphasis on the independence
of the Church from the State was reflected in a rejection of the comparison,
common in the East, between the Emperor and Melchizedek. This comparison might be valid in some respects, but not if it meant
that a mortal man could combine the roles of king and priest in the manner of
Melchizedek. For ordinary mortals, as Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow wrote
many centuries later, “God has not blessed the union of the callings of king
and priest”.[369] That is why he punished King Uzziah when he took upon himself to serve
as a priest in the Temple. The sinful combination of the roles of king and
priest was characteristic of the pagan god-kings of antiquity, and will be
characteristic of the Antichrist at the end of time.
Thus “before the coming of
Christ,” wrote Pope Gelasius (492-496), “there existed people… who were,
according to what sacred history tells us, at the same time both kings and
priests, such as Melchizedek. This example was followed in his domain by the
devil, who always, in a tyrannical spirit, claims for his own that which is
fitting for divine worship, to the extent that the pagan emperors were also
called pontiffs. But when there came He Who was in truth both King and Priest,
from that time the emperor ceased to give himself the name of pontiff and the
pontiff to lay claim to the royal pomp. For, although we say that the members
of Christ, the true King and Priest, have, by reason of their participation in
the glorious nature, received both the one and the other dignity through the
sacred generosity [of Christ], so that they are at the same time ‘a royal and a
priestly race’, nevertheless Christ, remembering the weakness of men..., has
divided the spheres of the two powers by means of a distinction of duties and
callings..., desiring that His own [children] should be guarded by grace-filled
humility and should not once again become victims of human pride. So that the
Christian emperors need the pontiffs for eternal life and the pontiffs conform
to the imperial laws as regards the course of temporal things. Thus spiritual
activities have been separated from carnal activities…. He who is entrusted
with secular matters should not appear to preside over divine things, so that
the modesty of the two orders should be respected…. ”[370]
And so, the same Pope wrote to the
Monophysite Emperor Anastasius, “there are two powers which for the most part
control this world, the sacred authority of priests and the might of kings. Of
these two the office of the priests is the greater inasmuch as they must give
account even for kings to the Lord at the Divine Judgement. You know that
although by your rank you stand at the head of the human race, you nevertheless
bend your will before the leaders of Divine affairs, you turn to them in
matters relating to your salvation, and you receive the heavenly sacraments
from them. You know, consequently, that in matters of the faith you must submit
to their lawful decisions and must not lord it over them – not submit them to
your will, but be yourself guided by their judgements.” However, “in matters
touching public order, the Church hierarchs know that the emperor’s power has
been sent down on you from above, and are themselves obedient to your laws, for
they fear to be shown to be opponents of your will in worldly affairs.”[371]
However, as Dagron points out, this was
very much a western perspective: the easterners continued to attach a
quasi-priestly character to the figure of the emperor – but without, of course,
the specifically sacramental functions of the priesthood. The difference in
perspective is explained partly by the fact that in the fifth century Rome had
little support from Byzantium in her struggle with the barbarians, and the
popes were often forced to fill the political vacuum themselves, as when Pope
Leo the Great who travelled to the camp of Attila and succeeded in turning him
away from Rome.
The rejection of the comparison with
Melchizedek was also influenced, as Dagron points out, by St. Augustine’s The City
of God, “in which, during his exegesis of Melchisedek, Augustine affirms that
from now on Christ is the only Mediator between God and men, the only One to
have put on the eternal priesthood. In the time of Israel, the earthly kingdom
‘was a type of’ the spiritual kingdom, but since the Incarnation the City of
God has found its King once and for all. The break is a sharp one: before the
coming of Christ a royal priesthood is possible whether by Divine economy
(Melchisedek) or by diabolical counterfeit (the Roman emperor-pontifex
maximus); after the coming of Christ this very notion is lanced with
illegitimacy; the regale sacerdotium has devolved to the Son of God and
by extension to the Christians as a whole… A true Christian emperor is not a
Roman emperor converted or faithful to Christianity, or an emperor who could
draw a new legitimacy from Old Testament models, but an emperor whose power has
been in part confiscated by Christ and whose competence has been modified by
the installation of Christianity, who will have to adopt the pose of humility
before the new wielders of spiritual power, who will be constantly suspected of
belonging to ‘the earthly City’, of remaining pagan or of identifying himself
through pride with the Antichrist.”[372]
And so Augustinian scepticism with regard
to secular authority, together with the unparalleled prestige and power of the
Popes in Western Christendom, combined to introduce a new, and specifically
western exaltation of ecclesiastical power. So far, there was nothing heretical
in this new accent; it remained just that – a new accent, a different emphasis.
In hindsight, however, we can see how, in the conditions of continued political
weakness and disunity in the West, it paved the way for the definitely
heretical political theology of such later, “papist Popes” as Nicholas I and
Gregory VII, which did seek to combine the roles of king and priest in the
single person of the Pope...
But that was still many centuries ahead. Let us now see how the
remnants of Roman Christian civilisation, and loyalty to the idea of Romanitas,
survived the fall of Old Rome. For, as Patric Ranson and Laurent Motte write,
“in reality the barbarian invasions – Visigoths, Lombards, Vandals, Franks, -
in spite of their violence did not shatter this national Roman unity; they
could only, at the beginning, displace its visible centre: bypassing the Roman
political structures, it was around the Church that the conquered people found
itself again, and it was the Church that then exercised a real ethnocracy. It
was with the Church that the barbarians had to come to terms; the bishop, still
freely elected by the faithful and the clergy, was their interlocutor. In Gaul,
this ethnarchy was for a long time assumed by the bishop of Arles – a true
Roman capital, which bore the name of Constantine, in Spain by that of Cordoba,
in Italy by that of Rome.”[373]
But
it was not only in the Mediterranean provinces of France, Spain and Italy that
the consciousness of Romanity survived and reestablished itself around the
Church. The distant province of Britain was in a sense more committed to the
new order of Christian Rome than any other for the simple reason that the first
Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, had been proclaimed emperor for the
first time precisely in Britain, and
had taken the title Britannicus Maximus, “the greatest of the Britons”,
in 315. However, with this consciousness that Christian Roman power had been
established first in Britain there appears also to have come the more dangerous
idea that Christian Roman power could be re-established
– more precisely, usurped - from
Britain. Thus in 383 Magnus Maximus, leader of the army in Britain, seized
power over the whole of the West and killed the Western Emperor Gratian.
Now
Maximus was baptised, was a champion of the Church and defended the Western
frontier against the Germans well. Moreover, his usurpation of the empire
should not have debarred him from the throne: many emperors before and after
came to the throne by the same means. Nevertheless, he is consistently
portrayed in the sources as a tyrant; and Sulpicius Severus wrote of him that
he was a man “whose whole life would have been praiseworthy if he could have
refused the crown illegally thrust upon him by a mutinous army”.[374]
St. Ambrose of Milan refused to give him communion, warning him that “he
must do penance for shedding the blood of one who was his master [the Western
Emperor Gratian] and… an innocent man.” Maximus refused, “and he laid down in
fear, like a woman, the realm that he had wickedly usurped, thereby
acknowledging that he had been merely the administrator, not the sovereign [imperator]
of the state.”[375] In 388 he was defeated and executed
by the Eastern Emperor Theodosius.
It may
be instructive to examine how the words “king” and “tyrant”were used in the
land that had been known as “the Roman island”, but which became, from the
beginning of the fifth century, “a province fertile in tyrants” (St. Jerome) –
Britain.[376] The very fact that, in the 380s,
western bishops such as Ambrose could recognise the Eastern Emperor Theodosius
as a true king while rejecting the British usurper Maximus, was a tribute to
the way in which Christian Rome had transformed political thought in the ancient
world. In early Rome a “tyrant” was a man who seized power by force; and in
Republican Rome tyrants were those who, like Julius Caesar, imposed one-man
rule on the true and only lawful sovereigns – Senatus PopulusQue Romanorum,
the senate and people of Rome. But during the first three centuries of the
empire, many generals seized power by force and the senate and the people were
forced to accept their legitimacy. However, this changed with the coming of St.
Constantine, who became the source and model of all legitimate emperors.
Constantine, of course, had seized the empire by force; but he had done so
against anti-Christian tyrants and was therefore seen to have been acting with
the blessing of God. Now legitimate rulers would have to prove that they were
in the image of Constantine, both in their Orthodoxy and in their legitimate
succession from the previous emperor. As for who the real sovereign was – the emperor or the senate and people – this
still remained unclear.
In
the years 406-410, British troops attempted to place the “tyrants” Marcus,
Gratian and Constantine III on the throne of the Western Empire. Gratian, for
example, was given “a purple robe, a crown and a body-guard, just like an
emperor,” according to Zosimus.[377] What happened next is confusing,
but the Roman legions left Britain and, whether voluntarily or involuntarily,
the British found themselves outside the Roman Empire from the year 410. As
Procopius wrote: “The Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it
remained from that time on under tyrants.”[378]
The
British sixth-century historian, St. Gildas the Wise, blamed his countrymen,
saying that they had “ungratefully rebelled” against “Roman kings”, and had
failed in their “loyalty to the Roman Empire”.[379] And yet many, perhaps most Britons
continued to consider themselves to be Romans and to preserve the Roman
traditions in Church and State.[380] And the distinction between true
kings and tyrants continued to be made.
Thus
St. Patrick, the British apostle of Ireland, called the Scottish chieftain
Coroticus a “tyrant” because he did not fear God or His priests; “for the sake
of a miserable temporal kingdom [regnum]” he would face God’s judgement
on “wicked kings” [regibus].[381] Patrick’s use of the terms “king”
and “tyrant” is not clear; his definition of the word “tyrant” seems to be a
mixture between the old, secular meaning of “usurper” and the newer, more
religious, Ambrosian meaning of “unjust or immoral person in authority”.
St.
Gildas the Wise, writing in the mid-sixth century, makes a clearer distinction
between “king” and “tyrant”. Among past rulers in Britain, Diocletian, Maximus,
Marcus, Gratian, Constantine, Constans and Vortigern were all “tyrants”. On the
other hand, there had been legitimate rulers, such as Ambrosius Aurelianus, “a
modest man, who alone of the Roman nation had been left alive in the confusion
of this troubled period… He provoked the cruel conquerors [the Anglo-Saxons] to
battle, and by the goodness of our Lord got the victory”. His parents,
according to Gildas, even “wore the purple”.[382] And then, at the turn of the
century, came the famous King Arthur. He won twelve victories over the Saxons,
fighting with an icon of the Virgin Mary on his back, and halted the pagan
advance westwards for at least a generation. Arthur of Britain, with Clovis of
France, was the first great king of the post-Roman West, and became the stuff
of innumerable medieval legends.
But
as for Gildas’ contemporaries: “Britain has kings [reges], but they are
tyrants [tyrannos]; she has judges, but they are wicked. They often
plunder and terrorize the innocent; they defend and protect the guilty and
thieving; they have many wives, whores and adulteresses; they constantly swear
false oaths, they make vows, but almost at once tell lies; they wage wars,
civil and unjust; they chase thieves energetically all over the country, but
love and reward the thieves who sit with them at table; they distribute alms
profusely, but pile up an immense mountain of crime for all to see; they take
their seats as judges, but rarely seek out the rules of right judgement; they
despise the harmless and humble, but exalt to the stars, as far as they can,
their military companions, bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and
enemies of God… They hang around the altars swearing oaths, then shortly
afterwards scorn them as though they were filthy stones…”[383]
Thus
by the sixth century it looks as if the problem of formal legitimacy had been
solved, at least in the eyes of the Britons themselves. The kings Gildas were
talking about were both Christian and “anointed” – they had that link, at any
rate, with the anointed kings of Israel and Christian Rome. But they did not
fulfil their vows; they were a terror to good works, but not to the evil – and
by that criterion they were not true authorities (Romans 13.3), being
linked rather with the tyrants of old, the Ahabs and Magnus Maximuses. So the
break with Rome was still keenly felt. Celtic Britain had many great monks and
hierarchs, but very few great, or even powerful, kings…
Moreover, even when the link with Rome was re-established, through St.
Augustine’s mission to the pagan Anglo-Saxons in 597, the old British tendency
to self-assertion and rebellion manifested itself again – and led, this time,
to perhaps the first formal schism on nationalist grounds in Church history (if
we exclude the Jews and the Armenians at the other end of the empire, which had
dogmatic underpinnings). Unlike the neighbouring Irish Church, which had always
expressed willing obedience to the Pope of Rome (from whom it had received its
first missionary bishop)[384], the older Church of Wales strongly
asserted its independence. Thus when the Roman St. Augustine, first archbishop
of Canterbury, sought union with the Welsh, asking only that they adopt the
Roman-Byzantine method of calculating the date of Pascha, correct some
inadequacy in their administration of the rite of Baptism, and co-operate with
him in the conversion of the pagan Saxons, the Welsh refused. And two generations
later, the Welsh rejected the decrees of the Synod of Whitby (664), which
brought about a union of the Celtic and Roman traditions in the British Isles
through the acceptance of the Byzantine-Roman Paschalion. As an Irish
canon put it, “the Britons [of Wales] are… contrary to all men, separating
themselves both from the Roman way of life and the unity of the Church”.[385]
St.
Aldhelm of Sherborne, described the behaviour of the schismatic Welsh thus:
“Glorifying in the private purity of their own way of life, they detest our
communion to such a great extent that they disdain equally to celebrate the
Divine offices in church with us and to take course of food at table for the
sake of charity. Rather,.. they order the vessels and flagons [i.e. those used
in common with clergy of the Roman Church] to be purified and purged with
grains of sandy gravel, or with the dusky cinders of ash.. Should any of us, I
mean Catholics, go to them for the purpose of habitation, they do not deign to
admit us to the company of their brotherhood until we have been compelled to
spend the space of forty days in penance… As Christ truly said: ‘Woe to you,
scribes and Pharisees; because you make clean the outside of the cup and of the
dish’.”[386]
Some
have argued that the Welsh were in fact making the first major protest against
the Papist heresy. Thus according to one, somewhat suspect source[387], the Welsh said to Augustine: “Be
it known and declared that we all, individually and collectively, are in all
humility prepared to defer to the Church of God, and to the Bishop of Rome, and
to every sincere and godly Christian, so far as to love everyone according to
his degree, in perfect charity, and to assist them all by word and deed in
becoming children of God. But as for any other obedience, we know of none that
he, whom you term the Pope, or Bishop of bishops, can demand. The deference we
have mentioned we are ready to pay to him as to every other Christian, but in
all other respects our obedience is due to the jurisdiction of the Bishop of
Caerleon, who is alone under God our ruler to keep us right in the way of
salvation.”
However, this is an anachronistic argument. For the Pope of St.
Augustine’s time, Gregory the Great, was vehemently opposed to any idea of a
universal “Bishop of bishops”, and the Roman Church in the seventh century was
as Orthodox as any in the oikoumene. In fact, the Welsh rebellion,
motivated by pride and nationalist hatred of the Saxons who had conquered their
lands, had nothing to do with Papism as such, although it did demonstrate the
fruits of that anti-conciliar and anti-Roman
spirit of which Papism, paradoxically, was to be the most disastrous example…
As we have seen, the relationship between
the Church and the State in New Rome was understood by analogy with the
relationship between the soul and the body, with the soul corresponding to the
Church and the body to the State. Now while this analogy was certainly
illuminating, it had, like all analogies of spiritual things, certain
limitations. One important limitation was that while the Orthodox Church
throughout the world was one, there never was just one Orthodox Christian
State. Or rather, there had been one Orthodox Christian State for a short time,
in the fourth century. But with the fall of the Empire in the West in 476, the
West (and parts of the East) had split up into a number of barbarian kingdoms,
some of them Orthodox, most not, and none of them deriving their power from the
emperor in Constantinople. Thus while there was only one soul, there appeared
to be many bodies. How, then, was the idea of a single Christendom, a single
Christian oikoumene animated by a single Christian Faith and Church, to
be reconciled with the fact of a multiplicity of Christian States and nations?
And, still more importantly, what were to be the relations between the
Christian Empire and the newly formed Christian kingdoms?
The first solution was to bestow upon the
independent barbarian states a kind of filial status in relation to the Eastern
Empire. Thus when the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by
Odoacer and the imperial insignia returned to the East, Odoacer was made
“lieutenant” (foederatus) of the sole Emperor in New Rome. Later, in
489, the Emperor Zeno commissioned the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric, to
drive out Odoacer[388],
and in 497 Theodoric gained the Emperor Anastasius’ recognition of his
kingship. Theodoric, writes Roberts, “was utterly convinced of Rome’s authority;
he had an emperor as a godfather and had been brought up at Constantinople
until he was eighteen. ‘Our royalty is an imitation of yours, a copy of the
only Empire on earth’, he once wrote to the emperor in Constantinople from his
capital in Ravenna. On his coins appeared the legend ‘Unvanquished Rome’ (Roma
invicta), and when he went to Rome, Theodoric held games in the old style
in the circus. Yet technically he was the only Ostrogoth who was a Roman
citizen, his authority accepted by the Senate; his countrymen were merely the
mercenary soldiers of the empire. To civil offices he appointed Romans…”[389]
Theodoric was an Arian, but Clovis, king
of the Franks, was an Orthodox Christian. St. Gregory of Tours writes of him,
that he received letters “from the Emperor Anastasius to confer the consulate
on him. In Saint Martin’s church he stood clad in a purple tunic and the
military mantle, and he crowned himself with a diadem. He then rode out on his
horse and with his own hand showered gold and silver coins among the people
present all the way from the doorway of Saint Martin’s church to Tours
cathedral. From that day on he was called Consul or Augustus.”[390]
Actually, Clovis was the only major Orthodox Christian ruler at this
time, if we exclude the British King Arthur (Anastasius was a Monophysite).
Soon he began a series of religious wars against the Arians. In 506 he defeated
the Arian Visigothic King Alaric II at Vouillé in 507. By 510 the
Visigoths had been forced to give up most of their lands in France, and then in
511 the Franks’ allies against the Visigoths, the Burgundians, were converted
from Arianism to Orthodoxy. The revival of Orthodoxy received its strongest
boost in 518 when the Monophysite Emperor Anastasius, died, and was succeeded
by the Orthodox Justin I.
Although Arian German rule had not
generally been oppressive for the majority Roman population, the revival of
Orthodoxy in both Gaul and the East, where the heterodox, Jews and pagans were
coming under increasing pressure, together with the new and friendly
relationship between the Emperor and the Pope, began to make the previously
tolerant Arian King Theodoric nervous. In 524 he executed the Roman senator and
philosopher Boethius on suspicion of plotting with the Byzantines against the
Goths. Then, in 526, he sent Pope John I on a humiliating mission to
Constantinople to intercede for the Arians in the Empire. Although the Pope was
received with great honour and crowned Justin emperor, he did not succeed in
his mission, and on his return he was cast into prison, where he died. Then
Theodoric issued an edict allowing the Arians to occupy the churches of the
Orthodox in retaliation for the Emperor’s actions against the Arians in the
East.
Soon, the legal fiction that the Arian
German kings of Italy and Spain were in any sense foederati of the
Orthodox Emperor was abandoned[391],
and the new Emperor Justinian prepared to wage war on them, in order to restore
the territory of the Roman Empire, on the one hand, and to restore the Orthodox
faith to the West, on the other. The Gothic wars that ensued posed an acute
dilemma for the Orthodox Roman populations under Arian rule, a dilemma that was
to be felt many times in the future by Orthodox Christians living under
non-Orthodox rule: to rebel or not to rebel.
The question was: was the Roman Empire the
only legitimate political authority for those of Roman descent living on its
former territories? Or were the barbarian kings also legitimate powers, the
legal successors of Rome in some sense? The question was easily answered – in a
positive sense - in the case of the Frankish kings, who immediately entered
into a close, harmonious relationship with the Gallo-Roman nobility and
episcopate, and even received Baptism under Clovis. It was also easily answered
– in a negative sense - in the case of the Vandals of North Africa, whose first
king, Gaiseric, a rigorous Arian, had banished Orthodox priests who refused to
perform the Arian services and even sacked Rome in 455.[392]
Later, in 530, the pro-Roman and pro-Orthodox King Hilderic was overthrown by
the anti-Roman and anti-Orthodox Gelimer. This gave Justinian the excuse he
needed, and in a short six-month campaign (533-34) his general Belisarius,
supported by the local population, destroyed the Vandal kingdom and placed all
the dissident and heretical assemblies under ban.
But the Gothic rulers of Italy and Spain
constituted a less clear-cut case. On the one hand, they remained socially and
legally separate from their Roman subjects and did not adopt Orthodoxy; but on
the other hand, they did not, in general, persecute the Faith, and allowed the
Romans to follow their own laws. The dilemma was made more acute by the fact
that in Rome itself many suspected that Justinian had deliberately appointed a
pro-Monophysite patriarch of Constantinople in the person of Anthimus. And when
Pope Agapetus arrived in Constantinople, Justinian said to him: “I shall either
force you to agree with us, or else I shall send you into exile.” Whereupon the
Pope replied: “I wished to come to the most Christian of all emperors,
Justinian, and I have found now a Diocletian; however, I fear not your
threats.”[393]
So the question of who was the legitimate ruler of the western lands was not so
clear to the Roman populations of the West, in spite of their natural sympathy
for the Empire, as it probably appeared to Justinian. If they had lived
peaceably enough for more than one generation under Arian rulers, why should
they rise up against them now?
However, after the murder of the pro-Roman
Ostrogothic Queen Amalasuntha in 534 by the new King Theodahad, the Emperor had
a clear casus belli. And then the victories of Justinian’s generals
Belisarius and Nerses settled the question: Italy was again Roman and Orthodox.
The famous frescoes of Justinian and Theodore in Ravenna’s church of San Vitale
commemorate the restoration of Romanity to the heartland of Old Rome. And
although there had been many desertions, and the cost of the war had been very
great, and the north was soon overrun again by another Arian Germanic race, the
Lombards, the leaders of Roman society, such as Pope Gregory I, were convinced
that it had all been worth it…
In the fourth century Spain had been an
important part of the Christian Roman Empire, producing such great Christians
as St. Osius, bishop of Cordoba, and the Emperor Theodosius the Great. Its
recovery from the hands of the Arian Visigoths was therefore an important part
of Justinian’s strategy of reuniting the Empire. By the 550s the Roman armies
also carved out a province in the south-east of Iberia called Spania. Now it
might have been expected that the Roman inhabitants of the peninsula, who
constituted perhaps 90% of the population, would have risen up in support of
the Byzantines against their foreign rulers. However, many of the
Hispano-Romans fled inland from Cartagena when the Byzantines invaded,
including even the most notable Spaniard of the age, St. Leander of Seville.
As a result of this loyalty of the Roman
Spaniards to the Visigothic regime, the restoration of Orthodoxy in Spain came
about, neither through the might of Byzantine arms from without, nor through
the rebellion of Hispano-Romans from within, but through the conversion of the
Visigoths themselves. It began in 579 when the Visigothic King Leovigild’s
eldest son and the ruler of Seville, Hermenegild, married the Orthodox Frankish
princess Ingundis. Not only did Ingundis stubbornly refused to become an Arian
even under torture from the Queen Mother Goisuntha. On arriving in Seville, she
and St. Leander succeeded in converting Hermenegild to Orthodoxy. And this was
followed by the conversion of several thousand Goths in Seville.
Now Arianism was the national religion of
the Goths: every Goth was required to be Arian, just as every Roman was
encouraged to remain Orthodox. Intermarriage between the two sub-nations was
illegal. This was not so much a matter of faith, as of national identity. The
Goths did not try to convert the Romans because that would have meant a
confusion of the races, and they discouraged conversion by insisting on the
rebaptism of converts from Orthodoxy. Already some confusion was taking place
through the Goths’ adoption of Roman manners and dress. If they adopted the
faith of the Romans as well, what would distinguish them from their subjects?
And so, writes Scott, “in the political situation of the kingdom the
transference of the allegiance of the heir apparent from the Arian to the
Catholic confession involved and proclaimed a withdrawal of his allegiance to
the king. This ecclesiastical defection was necessarily accompanied by a
political rebellion.”[394] As
Keys writes, “Hermegild’s conversion was a massive challenge to the political
system as a whole.”[395]
The rebellion of Hermenegild, though aided
by the Orthodox Sueves in the north-west[396]
and Byzantines in the south-east[397],
was crushed by King Leogivild (the Byzantine general was bribed to stay in
camp). Hermenegild himself was killed at Pascha, 585 for refusing to accept
communion from an Arian bishop in prison. He was immediately hailed as a martyr
by Pope St. Gregory, the writer of his life; and St. Gregory of Tours
also treated the civil war as religious in essence. However, the Spanish
sources, both Gothic and Roman, speak of him as a rebel rather than a martyr
(they say that he prostrated before his father), and “it seems evident,” writes
Ziegler, “that the Spanish Church did not espouse the cause of the Catholic
prince against his Arian father”[398] So
it is clear that those within and outside the country attached different
priorities to the purity of the faith, on the one hand, and the integrity of
the kingdom, on the other. For the Franks and the Italians (and the Orthodox of
other nations who inscribed St. Hermenegild’s name among the saints), the
triumph of Orthodoxy justified even the horrors of civil war. But the
Spaniards, who, as St. Gregory of Tours wrote, “had adopted this detestable
custom of killing with the sword any of their kings who did not please them,
and of appointing as king whomsoever their fancy lighted upon”[399],
preferred the peaceful status quo.
And yet putting the faith first bore rich
fruit; for within a very few years, at the great Council of Toledo in 589, the
new king, Reccared and the whole of the Gothic nobility accepted Orthodoxy, and
Arianism never again lifted its head in Spain. Thus “the fruit of the death of
this one man was life and Orthodoxy for all the people of Spain”.[400]
Led by the Church, Spain now entered perhaps the greatest period in her
history, marred only by ever-increasing persecution of the Jews.[401]
It is true that the king had great power in the Spanish Church; he effectively
appointed the bishops. At the same time, he insisted on bringing the Church right
into the process of civil legislation, allowing bishops to take part in the
election of kings.
Thus “the decisions of the council,”
writes Ziegler, “had the strange character of being partly civil and partly
ecclesiastical, with the important distinction, however, that the
ecclesiastical as well as the civil had the force of statute law for all living
within the kingdom… It cannot be denied that the presence of the bishops at
these councils had the result of placing the legal code of Visigothic Spain on
a philosophical basis and of resting it on principles which expressed to a very
large degree the social doctrines of the Christian religion. The enactment of
laws by the synod did not have the necessary result of making the Church an
integral or essential part of the civic administration, but it did introduce
into the laws principles of morality and justice which must ultimately have
resulted in the greatest benefit to all the people of Spain…”[402]
The abortive, but ultimately successful,
rebellion of St. Hermenegild established the principle that legitimate political power was either Roman
power, or that power which, shared in the faith of the Romans, Orthodoxy. A
power that was not Orthodox could legitimately be overthrown from without or
rebelled against from within as long as the motive was truly religious – the
establishment or re-establishment of Orthodoxy.
This did not mean, however, that
Christians were obliged to rebel
against pagan or heterodox régimes; for, as Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky) points out, civil war is one of the worst of all evils and is to
be undertaken only if the alternative is likely to be even worse in terms of
the salvation of souls.[403]
By the end of the sixth century, Old Rome,
restored to ecclesiastical and political unity with New Rome, was recovering
much of its power and influence among the western peoples. The crucial figure
in this revival was undoubtedly Pope Gregory I – “the Great”, as he is known in
the West, “the Dialogist”, as he is known in the East. As well as restoring the
power and influence of the papacy throughout continental Western Europe, he
determined on recovering Britain, “the Roman island”, where the heirs of
Christian Rome in Britain had been driven to the West or absorbed into the
pagan Anglo-Saxon settlements that dominated most of the island.[404] To
this end, in 597 he sent a band of Roman monks, led by St. Augustine of
Canterbury, to convert the Anglo-Saxons. And so, as Roberts remarks, “it was
another Rome which was to convert the English nation, not the empire,”[405]
which had first brought the island within the scope of Roman civilization, and
hence of Christianity, but the Church, which now took the place of Rome in the
lives of the Germanic peoples.
Of course, the Roman missionaries tried
hard to reconstruct the few bridges that connected the land with its Roman
past, as when St. Paulinus constructed the first wooden church in York right in
the middle of the vast Roman praetorium where St. Constantine had been
hailed as emperor.[406]
However, the missionaries found a virtual cultural tabula rasa amid
pagans who knew next to nothing about Rome. This makes the English enthusiastic
embrace of Romanity, both in its religious and political aspects, the more
remarkable.
For the Anglo-Saxons were not like the
other Germanic tribes who, for generations before accepting the faith, had been
settled within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, and had even been employed
as foederati in the Roman armies. They were newcomers whose conversion
to Romanity was the stronger in that it was fresher, less hindered by
historical betrayals. They had been called by God from darkness into light by
Pope Gregory and his disciples; and their gratitude to St. Gregory, St.
Augustine’s spiritual father and “the Apostle of the English”, was boundless.[407]
From that time English men and women of
all classes and conditions poured across the Channel in a well-beaten path to
the tombs of the Apostles in Rome (to whom almost all the English cathedrals
were dedicated), and a whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono”
because of the large number of English pilgrims it accomodated.[408]
English missionaries such as St. Boniface of Germany and St. Willibrord of Holland
carried out their work as the legates of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax
known as “Peter’s Pence” which the English offered to the Roman see was paid
even during the Viking invasions, when it was the English themselves who were
in need of alms.
However, the “Romanity” to which the
English were so devoted was not the Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages,
or even the Frankish Romanity of Charlemagne. Rather, it was the Greco-Roman Romanitas
or Rwmeiosunh of Orthodox Catholicism. And the spiritual and political capital of
Romanitas until 1453 was not Old Rome in Italy, but the New Rome of
Constantinople. Thus St. Gregory compared the newly enlightened King Ethelbert
of Kent to St. Constantine and Queen Bertha to St. Helena, and according to Fr.
Andrew Phillips they “had, it would seem, actually emulated Constantine. Having
made Canterbury over to the Church, they had moved to Reculver, there to build
a new palace. Reculver was their New Rome just as pagan Byzantium had become
the Christian city of New Rome, Constantinople. Nevertheless, King Ethelbert
had retained, symbolically, a royal mint in his ‘Old Rome’ – symbolically,
because it was his treasury, both spiritually and physically. The coins he
minted carried a design of Romulus and Remus and the wolf on the Capitol.
Ethelbert had entered ‘Romanitas’, Romanity, the universe of Roman Christendom,
becoming one of those numerous kings who owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the
Emperor in New Rome…”[409]
The Romanisation of England was greatly
aided by the appointment, in 668, of a Greek, St. Theodore of Tarsus, as
archbishop of Canterbury, who created a single Church organisation to which all
the Christian kings of England submitted and which formally recognised the
first Six Ecumenical Councils. Again, bishops like Saints Wilfrid, Egwin and
Aldhelm strengthened the links with Rome by frequent trips there. And abbots
like Saints Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid imported books, icons, church
furnishings and even the chief chanter of the Roman Church to make sure that
even in the furthest recesses of the north things were done as the Romans did
them.
In Church-State relations, too, the
English followed the Roman-Byzantine model. Thus Ethelbert and Augustine (in
Kent), Oswald and Aidan (in Northumbria), and Cynegils and Birinus (in Wessex)
enjoyed close, “symphonic” relations. The acceptance of the symphonic pattern
of Church-State relations in England may well have been aided by the fact that
sacral kingship was a traditional institution among the Germanic tribes even
before their conversion to Christianity. With the coming of Christianity,
writes Chaney, there was “a separation of royal functions, the
sacrificial-priestly role of the Germanic tribal monarch going to the Church
hierarchy and that of sacral protector remaining with the king. This separation
of power manifested itself not in the obliteration of the religious nature of
kingship but in the establishment of a sphere of action by and for the ecclesia
apart… from that of the regnum.”[410]
In fact, the Byzantine ideal of a true
symphony between Church and State was perhaps more passionately believed in –
and, at times, more closely attained – among these former barbarians of the
Orthodox West than among the more worldly-wise Byzantines themselves. Thus in
Northumbria in the eighth century we see the almost ideal harmony between the
brothers King Edbert and Archbishop Egbert, of whom Alcuin writes:
So then Northumbria was prosperous,
When king and pontiff ruled in harmony,
One in the church and one in government;
One wore the pall the Pope conferred on him,
And one the crown his fathers wore of old.
One brave and forceful, one devout and kind,
They kept their power in brotherly accord,
Each happy in the other’s sure support.[411]
The rite of royal anointing appears to have originated in the West, although it is not certain where. According to one tradition, Clovis, first Christian king of the Franks received the sacrament in a miraculous fashion after his baptism by St. Remigius, Archbishop of Rheims, on Christmas Day, 496.[412] But this may in fact have been the sacrament of chrismation that is normally administered immediately after baptism, and not specifically royal anointing.[413]
Another possibility is that it originated
in Britain; for St. Gildas the Wise, writing in about 545 but referring to
events taking place in the fifth century, declared: “Kings were anointed [Ungebantur
reges] not in God’s name, but as being crueller than the rest; before long,
they would be killed, with no enquiry into the truth, by those who had anointed
them, and other still crueller chosen to replace them.”[414]
In the sixth century the Italian
archbishop Gregory anointed the first Christian King of the South Arabian
kingdom of Omir, Abraham, in the presence of St. Elesbaan, king of Ethiopia:
“Raising his eyes and mind and hands to heaven, he prayed fervently and for a
long time that God, Who knows the life and thoughts of every man, should
indicate to him the man who was worthy of the kingdom. During the prayer of the
archbishop, the invisible power of the Lord suddenly raised a certain man by
the name of Abraham into the air and placed him in front of King Elesbaan.
Everyone cried out in awe for a long time: ‘Lord, have mercy!’ The archbishop
said: ‘Here is the man whom you demanded should be anointed to the kingdom.
Leave him here as king, we shall be of one mind with him, and God will help us
in everything.’ Great joy filled everyone on beholding the providence of God.
Then King Elesbaan took the man Abraham, who had been revealed by God, led him
to the temple of the All-Holy Trinity which was in the royal city of Afar, put
the royal purple on him and laid the diadem on his head. Then St. Gregory
anointed him and the bloodless Sacrifice was offered for the kings and all the
people, and both kings communicated in the Divine Mysteries from the hands of
the archbishop…”[415]
Not long after this, in 574, Irish apostle
of Scotland, St. Columba, consecrated (by laying on of hands rather than
anointing) the first Orthodox King of Scotland, Aidan Mor. The seventh-century
Abbots of Iona Cummineus Albus and Adomnan both relate the story, according to
which, when the saint was staying “in the island of Hymba [Eileann-na-Naoimh,
in the Scottish Hebrides], he was in an ecstasy of mind one night and saw an
Angel of the Lord who had been sent to him, and who held in his hand a glass
book of the Ordination of Kings. The venerable man received it from the Angel’s
hand, and at his command began to read it. And when he refused to ordain Aidan
as king according to the direction given to him in the book, because he loved
his brother Iogenan more, the Angel, suddenly stretching out his hand, struck
the saint with a scourge, of which the livid mark remained on his side all the
days of his life, and he added these words, saying: ‘Know thou for certain that
I am sent to thee by God with this glass book, that according to the words
which thou hast read in it, thou mayest ordain Aidan to the kingship – and if
thou art not willing to obey this command, I shall strike thee again.’ When,
then, this Angel of the Lord had appeared on three successive nights, having in
his hand that same glass book, and had pressed the same commands of the Lord
concerning the ordination of that king, the saint obeyed the Word of the Lord,
and sailed across to the isle of Iona where, as he had been commanded, he
ordained Aidan as king, Aidan having arrived there at the same time.”[416]
The next year, St. Columba went with King Aidan to the Synod of Drumceatt in
Ireland, where the independence of Dalriada (that part of Western Scotland
colonised by the Irish, of which Iona was the spiritual capital) was agreed
upon in exchange for a pledge of assistance to the mother country in the event
of invasion from abroad.
It is perhaps significant that these
earliest examples of sacramental Christian kingmaking come from parts of the
world that were remote from the centres of Imperial power. Neither Ethiopia nor
Ireland had ever been part of the Roman Empire[417];
while Britain had fallen away from the Empire. We may speculate that it was
precisely here, where Romanity was weakest or non-existent, that the Church had
to step in to supply political legitimacy through the sacrament, especially
since in these cases a new dynasty in a
new Christian land was being created, which required both the blessing of
the former rulers and a special act of the Church – something not dissimilar to
the creation of a new autocephalous Church.
In the formerly Roman West, if we exclude
the doubtful case of Clovis, the sacrament of royal anointing first appeared in
Spain. A possible reason for this is that Spain had a serious weakness which
the sacrament may have gone some way to removing: the lack of a stable
monarchy. Thus Collins writes that in the first half of the seventh century,
“principles by which legitimacy of any king could be judged, other than sheer
success in holding onto his throne against all comers, seem to be conspicuously
lacking. Thus Witteric had deposed and killed Liuva II in 603, Witteric had
been murdered in 610, Sisebut’s son Reccared II was probably deposed by
Swinthila in 621, Swinthila was certainly deposed by Sisenand in 631, Tulga by
Chindaswinth in 642. Ephemeral kings, such Iudila, who managed to strike a few
coins in Baetica and Lusitania in the early 630s, also made their bids for
power.”[418]
The only generally recognised authority that could introduce order into this
chaos was the Church, and so, probably toward the middle of the seventh
century, the Orthodox Church in Spain introduced the rite of royal anointing.
From now on, kings would not only be called
“kings by the grace of God”, they would be seen
to be such by the visible bestowal of sacramental grace at the hands of the
archbishop.
Thus in 672 King Wamba was anointed by the
archbishop of Toledo in a ceremony that was described by his contemporary, St.
Julian of Toledo, as follows: “When he had arrived there, where he was to
receive the vexilla of the holy unction, in the praetorian church, that
is to say the church of Saints Peter and Paul, he stood resplendent in his
regalia in front of the holy altar and, as the custom is, recited the creed to
the people. Next, on his bended knees the oil of blessing was poured onto his
head by the hand of the blessed bishop Quiricus, and the strength of the
benediction was made clear, for at once this sign of salvation appeared. For
suddenly from his head, where the oil had first been poured on, a kind of
vapour, similar to smoke, rose upon the form of a column, and from the very top
of this a bee was seen to spring forth, which sign was undoubtedly a portent of
his future good fortune.”[419]
But it was the anointing of the Frankish
King Pepin by Pope Stephen in 754 that led gradually to the rite becoming
standard practice in kingmaking throughout the West. Thus in 781 Pepin’s
successor, Charlemagne, had two of his sons anointed by Pope Hadrian as kings
of Aquitaine and Italy, It was some time, however, before anointing came to be
seen as constitutive of true
kingship. As in Rome and Byzantium, western kings who were raised to the throne
by election or acclamation only were not considered illegitimate; it was simply
that anointing added an extra authority and sacred character to the monarchy.
The extra authority and grace provided by
the sacrament of anointing produced tangible results; for in Spain, Francia and
England the introduction of anointing, accompanied by stern conciliar warnings
“not to touch the Lord’s Anointed”, led to a reduction in regicides and
rebellions and a considerable strengthening of monarchical power. In Spain,
this process came to an abrupt end in 711, when most of the peninsula was
conquered by the Arab Muslims. In Western Francia (modern France), it was also
brought to an end towards the end of the ninth century by the Viking invasions,
in spite of the efforts of such champions of royal power (and opponents of
papal despotism) as Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims; and France did not develop a
powerful monarchy until the twelfth century. But in Eastern Francia (modern
Germany) and, especially, in England, the monarchy survived and put down deep
roots.
Now Janet Nelson writes: “If relatively
many reigning Merovingians and no Carolingians were assassinated, this can
hardly be explained simply in terms of the protective effect of anointing for
the latter dynasty, at least in its earlier period. More relevant here are such
factors as the maintenance of a fairly restrictive form of royal succession (and
the Carolingians’ abandonment of polygamy must soon have narrowed the circle of
royals) and the growth of a clerically-fostered ideology of Christian
kingship.”[420]
However, all these factors were related.
Once it became accepted that the Church had an important part to play in
kingmaking through the sacrament of anointing, then it also became natural for
the Church to have a say in deciding who was the best candidate for the throne,
and then in administering a coronation-oath in which the king swore to protect
the Church and uphold justice, peace and mercy, etc. Theoretically, too, the Church could refuse to sanction a king, and
even lead the people in rebellion if he did not rule rightly[421] –
although in practice this ultimate sanction was rarely, if ever applied.
Joseph Canning writes: “The specific
contribution which the anointing rituals made to the development of the idea of
theocratic kingship appeared clearly in Hincmar’s ordines. Anointing had
become the constitutive element in the king-making process: it was the bishops
who as mediators of divine grace made the king. There was thus a relative
downgrading of other, traditional aspects of inauguration: the consent of the
great men of the kingdom, enthronement and the feast. The episcopal anointing
represented the third stage of the elaboration of the notion of kingship by the
grace of God, the first being the Pauline view that all rulership was divinely
sanctioned, and the second that the monarch derived his power directly from
God. Anointing transformed kingship into another, higher dimension, because
such unction was understood to be a sacrament. There was thereby involved a
crucial change in the meaning attributed to the ‘grace’ by which the medieval
king ruled. Whereas previously, gratia in this context meant ‘favour’,
thus indicating the source of his power (the possibly sacramental nature of
eighth-century unction remains obscure), now gratia also definitely
signified ‘supernatural grace’ infused into the king through the mediation of
the bishops in order to enable him to perform his sacred ministry of rulership
over clergy and laity within his kingdom understood as a church in the wider
sense.”[422]
St. Constantine in a famous phrase had
called himself “the bishop of those outside” – in other words, his ministry was
understood as being analogous to that of the bishop, but extending beyond the
jurisdiction of any bishop into the pagan world and therefore subject to the
Church in a moral, but not in a jurisdictional sense. In the West by the ninth
century, however, when the boundaries of the kingdom and the Church were almost
coterminous, the king’s ministry was seen as almost entirely within the Church, which perception was
reinforced by his anointing by the
Church, and by the fact that the symbolism of the rite, including the staff and
ring and vestments, were almost identical to that of episcopal consecration.
This served to increase the king’s sacred, spiritual character; but it also
gave the Church the opportunity to intervene more decisively both in the
kingmaking process and in the definition of what the king could and could not
do.[423]
Of course, the power of the king had never
been absolute in Germanic society; there was a contractual element between him
and his subjects. Thus “in 843 Charles the Bald swore to uphold the honour of
both his clerical and lay fideles, and the respective laws under which
they lived, whereas they swore to sustain the honour of the king”. And in 858
he promised “’like a faithful king’ to honour and protect the persons and legal
position of his fideles”.[424]
What was new from the ninth century onwards was the increased role played by
the Church in this process, both in that protecting the Church’s rights was
considered the most important part of
the king’s obligations and in that it was the Church that administered the
coronation oath. Also new was the hint, as we have seen, that the bishops might
depose the king if he broke his oath, as Charles the Bald implicitly admitted
at his coronation in 869, when he said that he could be expelled from his
consecration “by no one, at least without hearing and judgement by the bishops,
by whose ministry I was consecrated king”.[425]
Now the fact that the king was anointed by
the bishop did not mean that the king was thereby subject to the bishop, any
more than Christ’s baptism at the hands of St. John the Baptist meant that He
was subject to the Baptist.[426]
Nevertheless, the hint was there, and was spelled out by Archbishop Hincmar of
Rheims, who “subjected more than one king to harsh criticism, to penance and
even to excommunication”[427] As
he put it during the last Synod over which he presided, in 881: “So much
greater is the responsibility of the priesthood in that they must render
account in God’s judgement even for the very kings of men, and by so much
greater are the rank and prestige of bishops than of kings because kings are
consecrated to their kingship by bishops, but bishops cannot be consecrated by
kings.”[428]
This doctrine was to be distorted and exploited by Pope Gregory VII in his war
against the anointed kings. However, Hincmar was no papist, even on the smaller
scale of the Frankish kingdom. Like other powerful western bishops who anointed
kings, he was not trying to weaken the institution of the monarchy, but to
strengthen and purify it. For he saw that Christian society in his troubled age
could not survive without the sacred power of the anointed kings…
In the
seventh and early eighth centuries the West entered probably its most vigorous
and truly Christian period. It was united ecclesiastically under a patriarchate
that was more consistently Orthodox than any of the eastern sees (and which
remained, throughout this period, predominantly Greek in culture), with a vigorous
monasticism on the Benedictine model spreading the faith and learning
everywhere, and with national kingdoms (the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the
Merovingians in France, the Visigoths in Spain, the Lombards in Italy)
consciously basing their administrations on the Byzantine model of Church-State
relations.
However,
the linguistic and cultural differences between East and West were beginning to
widen. St. Gregory the Great (+604) was the first Pope who did not speak Greek,
although he had served in Constantinople, and remained loyal to the Byzantine
Empire. In the sixth century Latin was still regularly spoken in Byzantium[429],
but from the time of the Emperor Heraclius (early seventh century) the East
stopped using Latin even in its official documents, although it always retained
the title of “Empire of the Romans”. The
last emperor who came to Rome did so in 663 and the last pope to go to
Constantinople went there in 710. [430]
Moreover, the patience of the West Romans was tested when the Council in
Trullo (692) rejected certain Roman customs, such as fasting on
Saturdays.
The
estrangement deepened with the coming to power of the Emperor Leo III. His
iconoclastic faith sent streams of iconodule refuges to the West, confirming
the Popes in their opposition to the heresy – both Popes Gregory II and III
anathematised it. Then, in about 733, Leo took the whole diocese of East
Illyricum, including the bishoprics of Sicily, South Italy, Crete, mainland
Greece and the Balkans into the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of
Constantinople. But the popes of that period, while rebuking the iconoclast
emperors for their impiety, still looked to New Rome as the capital of the
Christian ecumene, still commemorated them at the Liturgy, and still
used their coinage. East and West still constituted one Christian world.
However, in
752, the last Greek Pope, Zachariah, died; and in 754, at a council in
Constantinople, the heresy of iconoclasm was officially proclaimed as the
religion of the Eastern empire. A little earlier, in 751, Ravenna, the capital
of Byzantine power in northern Italy, fell to the Lombards, and the Emperor Leo
was too distracted by the Bulgars in the north to send troops to recover it.
Pope Stephen II did not want to break with Byzantium, but since the Byzantines
were no longer able to defend their Italian lands, he was forced to look for
protectors elsewhere. He travelled to France and anointed the former major-domo
of the French Merovingian dynasty, Pepin the Short, as the first of a new dynasty
of Frankish kings, bestowing on him the Roman title of patricius and
appointing him protector of the papal lands. That Pope Stephen did not desire to break with the Eastern Empire is
proved by his first words on meeting Pepin, beseeching him tearfully “to reach
agreements in the cause of peace, of St. Peter, and of the Roman Republic” –
where “Roman Republic” could only refer to the Byzantine Empire. But when the
honour bestowed by Pope Stephen on the Frankish ruler had its desired effect
and Pepin defeated the Lombards who were oppressing Rome, the Pope proceeded to
act in a way that could only be interpreted as a decisive break from Byzantium:
he accepted from Pepin, as “a gift to St. Peter”, the former Byzantine
Exarchate of Ravenna. This both created the territorial base for the Papal
State, making the Pope a secular as well as a spiritual ruler, and revealed
that the Pope had renounced his allegiance to Byzantium.[431]
Moreover, from this time the popes began to change the dating of their
documents, and to issue their own coins.[432]
The significance of the new relationship
was underscored by the fact that Pope Stephen’s anointing of Pepin was his second
anointing to his kingdom. Some years earlier, after the deposition and
sending to a monastery (with Pope Zachariah’s blessing) of the last weak
Merovingian ruler of Francia, Pepin had been specially crowned and anointed by
St. Boniface, archbishop of Mainz. For the change of dynasty or coup
d’état – call it what you will - had to be legitimised, as did the
claims of the new dynasty to power over the vast new territories that had just
been Christianized by St. Boniface and his army of English missionaries to the
east of the Rhine. But the second
anointing had a deeper significance. Whether Stephen already had this in mind
or not, it came to signify the
re-establishment of the Western Roman Empire, with its political capital
north of the Alps, but its spiritual capital, as always, in Rome.
In 768, King Pepin’s son, Charles, later
known as Charlemagne, ascended the throne. He vigorously expanded the
boundaries of his kingdom; at its height it extended from the Elbe to the
Spanish Marches, from Brittany to the borders of Byzantine Italy and Hungary.
Nor were his achievements limited to the military and the secular. He took a
very active interest in Church matters, and his relationship with the Church
was a model of the Byzantine “symphony of powers”. He promoted education and
art, held twice-yearly Synods of his bishops and nobles in the best conciliar style,
suppressed heresy (e.g. Adoptionism, a form of Arianism) and did his best to
weld the very varied peoples and customs of his far-flung realm into a
coherent, multi-national whole.
It is clear that Charlemagne’s empire was
seen as a resurrection of the Western Roman empire. Thus in 794, during the
building of the palace complex at Charlemagne’s new capital of Aachen, a court
poet wrote:
That all
the separate kingdoms are joined in his empire through victory,
That the
age has been changed back into the culture of Antiquity,
Golden
Rome is restored and reborn to the world.[433]
But if Charlemagne’s empire was meant to
be a restoration of the Western Roman Empire, it must be judged to have failed;
for it disintegrated after his death into three separate kingdoms and continued
to decline into the tenth century. One reason for this was that he failed to
create the political bureaucracy and tax and legal systems which were so
important in preserving the Roman Empire. Another reason was the fact that the
dukes and counts upon whom his administration critically depended expected to
be paid in land for the services they rendered, so that the kingdom was stable
just so long as it was expanding – and the expansionist phase of its history
was already over by the 810s.[434]
The idea of selfless service to the king just because he was the king, the
Lord’s anointed, had to compete with the idea of the aristocratic band of
warriors whose leader was elected because of his military prowess and because
he promised greater success in war and therefore more plunder than any other
leader. The state was not yet fully a res publica, a public thing or possession, in the
Frankish consciousness; it was rather the private demesne of the king and those
of his nobles who had earned a part of the spoils through their service to him.
As Tacitus had written centuries before of the pagan Germans, “You cannot keep
up a great retinue except by war and violence, for it is to the free-handed
chief that they look for the war horse, for the murderous and masterful sphere:
banquetings and a certain rude but lavish outfit take the place of salary. The
material for this open-handedness comes from war and foray.”[435]
However, the real weakness of
Charlemagne’s kingdom was more spiritual than institutional: he took his own
achievements, and the weakness of the Eastern Empire (which, since it was ruled
at the time by a woman, Irene, was technically vacant according to Frankish
law), as sufficient reason to usurp the place of the Basileus in the
political sphere and, still more serious, the place of the Church in the
ecclesiastical sphere. Thus in 794, without consulting the Pope, he convened a
council in Frankfurt which condemned the Acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council
on icon-veneration (the translation of the Acts into Latin may have confused
icon veneration with icon worship) and introduced the Filioque – the
statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – into the Creed. The Filioque immediately
produced conflict between Frankish and Greek monks in Jerusalem. But
Charlemagne did not back down. In a council in Aachen in 809 he decreed that
the innovation was a dogma necessary for salvation. As for the Seventh Council,
since Pope Hadrian had already, as Professor John Romanides points out,
“excommunicated all those who had not accepted the Seventh Ecumenical Council,
technically the Franks were in a state of excommunication.”[436]
However, neither Hadrian nor his successor, Pope Leo III, felt powerful enough
openly to oppose Charlemagne’s ecclesiastical innovations - although Leo did
have the Creed without the Filioque
inscribed in Greek and Latin on silver shields placed outside St. Peter’s.
Charlemagne’s English adviser on Church
affairs, Deacon Alcuin of York, also opposed the Filioque – and also
felt he could not oppose the king too openly. He even supported the idea that
was becoming fashionable that Charlemagne was greater than both Pope and
Emperor: "There have hitherto been three persons of greatest eminence in
the world, namely the Pope, who rules the see of St. Peter, the chief of
apostles, as his successor…; the second is the Emperor who holds sway over the
second Rome…; the third is the throne on which our Lord Jesus Christ has placed
you to rule over our Christian people, with greater power, clearer insight and
more exalted royalty than the afore-mentioned dignitaries. On you alone the
whole safety of the churches of Christ depends."[437]
According to Alcuin, Charlemagne, like
King David, combined the functions of royal leadership and priestly teaching in
order to guide his people to salvation.[438]
This exalted view of his kingly role was shared by others, such as Paulinus of
Aquileia, who called Charlemagne “king and priest” in 794. And as early as 775
Cathwulf wrote to Charlemagne: “Always remember, my king, with fear and love
for God your King, that you are in His place to look after and rule over all
His members and to give account on judgement day even for yourself. And a
bishop is in second place: he is only in Christ’s place. Ponder, therefore,
within yourself how diligently to establish God’s law over the people of God.”[439]
Caesaropapism was threatening to
re-establish itself in the West – with the same results for the purity of the
faith as under the caesaropapist emperors of the East. As we shall see, it did
not last long: by the second half of the ninth century, episcopal power had
reasserted itself both at the level of the papacy and below. But while it
lasted it threatened to tear the West away from the unity of the Orthodox
faith.
As long as the Eastern Emperors had been
iconoclast, and he himself remained Orthodox, Charlemagne could have had some
justification for claiming the leadership of the Christian world. But since 787
the Eastern Empire had returned to Orthodoxy while he, through his false
council of Frankfurt in 794, had become a heretic! Again, the iconoclast
Emperor Leo the Isaurian had undermined the “symphonic” principle of Church-State
relations when he had declared that he was “both king and priest”. But now
Charlemagne was showing himself to be no less of a “caesaropapist” than the
iconoclasts by his imposition of heretical innovations on the Church. Indeed,
the former champion of Orthodoxy and Romanity against the heretical and
despotic iconoclast emperors was now well on the way to becoming the chief
enemy of Orthodoxy and Romanity through his heresy and despotism, considering,
as Romanides puts it, "that the East Romans were neither Orthodox nor
Roman"![440]
The critical point came on Christmas Day,
800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Emperor of the Romans” in Rome. Now
Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard claims that he would never have entered the
church if he had known what the Pope was intending to do. And there is evidence
that in later years Charlemagne drew back from too sharp a confrontation with
Constantinople, dropping the phrase “of the Romans” while retaining the title
“Emperor”.
Moreover, he dropped his idea of attacking
the Byzantine province of Sicily. Instead he proposed marriage to the Byzantine
Empress Irene (or perhaps it was her idea[441]),
hoping “thus to unite the Eastern and Western provinces”, as the chronicler
Theophanes put it[442] -
not under his sole rule, for he must have realised that that was impossibile,
but perhaps on the model of the dual monarchy of the fifth-century Roman
empire. In any case, all these plans collapsed with Irene’s overthrow in 802.
As for the Byzantines, at first they treated
Charlemagne as yet another impudent usurper; for, as a chronicler of Salerno
put it, "The men about the court of Charles the Great called him Emperor
because he wore a precious crown upon his head. But in truth, no one should be
called Emperor save the man who presides over the Roman - that is, the
Constantinopolitan kingdom.”[443]
However, in 812 the legates of Emperor Michael I saluted Charles in Aachen with
the title “emperor”. So from 812, as A. Vasiliev says, “there were two Roman
emperors, in spite of the fact that in theory there was still only one Roman
empire.”[444]
Whatever Charlemagne’s real intentions in
800, the fact is that in the ninth century the idea became established in the
West that the only Orthodox Roman Emperor was the Emperor of the Franks. And
this in spite of the fact that by the middle of the century the Eastern Empire
had recovered its former glory while the Frankish Empire was disintegrating
rapidly. So whereas Alcuin in the previous century had followed the convention
of calling Constantinople the second Rome, for a later Latin eulogist the
second Rome was Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen: “Most worthy Charles, my voice
is too small for your works, king, love and jewel of the Franks, head of the
world, the summit of Europe, caring father and hero, Augustus! You yourself can
command cities: see how the Second Rome, new in its flowering and might extent,
rise and grows; with the domes which crown its walls, it touches the stars!”[445]
Thus Romanides writes that the Frankish
position “was clearly spelled out in a letter of Emperor Louis II (855-875) to
Emperor Basil I (867-886) in 871. Louis calls himself ‘Emperor Augustus of the
Romans’ and demotes Basil to ‘Emperor of New Rome’. Basil had poked fun at
Louis, insisting that he was not even emperor in all of Francia, since he ruled
only a small part of it, and certainly was not emperor of the Romans, but of
the Franks. Louis argued that he was emperor in all of Francia because the
other Frankish kings were his kinsmen by blood. He makes the same claim as that
found in the Annals of Lorsch: he who holds the city of Old Rome is
entitled to the name ‘Emperor of the Romans’. Louis claimed that: ‘We received
from heaven this people and city to guide and (we received) the mother of all
the churches of God to defend and exalt… We have received the government of the
Roman Empire for our Orthodoxy. The Greeks have ceased to be emperors of the
Romans for their cacodoxy. Not only have they deserted the city (of Rome) and
the capital of the Empire, but they have also abandoned Roman nationality and
even the Latin language. They have migrated to another capital city and taken
up a completely different nationality and language.’”[446]
But Louis’ arguments were in vain. In
879-80, a Council in Constantinople under the presidency of St. Photius the
Great condemned the heterodoxy of the previous Pope, Nicolas I, and upheld the
Orthodoxy of the Eastern Church. Significantly, the acts of the Council were
signed by the legates of Pope John VIII. Thus both the Roman Pope and the
Eastern Emperor and Church agreed that it was the Frankish empire that was not Orthodox.[447]
And since both Greeks and Romans and Franks agreed that there could be only one
Christian Roman Empire, this meant that the Frankish attempt to usurp the
Empire was defeated – for the time being...
And yet this did not stop West Europeans
from attaching the most exalted significance to what was left of the
Carolingian empire. Thus in the mid-tenth century Adso of Montier-en-Der wrote
to Queen Gerbera of France: “Even though we see the Roman Empire for the most
part in ruins, nonetheless, as long as the Kings of the Franks who now possess
the Roman Empire by right shall last, the dignity of the Roman Empire will not
completely perish because it will endure in its kings. Some of our learned men
say that one of the Kings of the Franks will possess anew the Roman Empire. He
will be in the last time and will be the greatest and the last of all kings.
After he has successfully governed his empire, he will finally come to
Jerusalem and will lay aside his sceptre and crown on the Mount of Olives. This
will be the end and the consummation of the Roman and Christian Empire…”[448]
K.N. Leontiev writes: “It was precisely
after the fall of the artificial empire of Charles that the signs which
constitute, in their integrity, a picture of a special European culture, a new
universal civilization, become clearer and clearer.
“The future bounds of the most recent
western States and particular cultures of Italy, France and Germany also begin
to become clearer. The Crusades come closer, as does the flourishing age of
knighthood and of German feudalism, which laid the foundations of the
exceptional self-respect of the person (a self-respect which, passing by means
of envy and imitation first into the bourgeoisie, produced the democratic
revolution and engendered all these modern phrases about the boundless rights
of the person, and then, penetrating to the lower levels of western society,
made of every simple day-time worker and cobbler an existence corrupted by a
nervous feeling of his own worth). Soon after this we hear the first sounds of
Romantic poetry. Then Gothic architecture develops, and soon Dante’s Catholic
epic poem will be created, etc. Papal power grows from this time. And so the
reign of Charles the Great (9th century) is approximately the
watershed after which the West begins more and more to bring its own
civilisation and its own statehood into prominence. From this century Byzantine
civilisation loses from its sphere of influence all the large and
well-populated countries of the West. On the other hand, it acquires for its
genius the Southern Slavs…., and then [the Eastern Slavs] in Russia.”[449]
As the power of the “Holy Roman Emperors”
of the West declined in the ninth century, so the power of the Popes increased.
Beginning with Nicholas I, they began to claim a quasi-imperial rule over the
whole Church, East and West. And this imperial role began more and more to
resemble the “imperator-plus-pontifex maximus” role of the pagan Roman
emperors: the heresy of Papism was born.
However, for the first eight centuries,
every attempt to combine the roles of king and priest in a single person had
been decisively rejected by the Popes. Thus when, in 796, Eadbert Praen, an
English priest, rejected the lordship of the kingdom of Mercia and assumed the
crown of the sub-kingdom of Kent for himself, he was immediately rejected by
Archbishop Aethelheard of Canterbury and anathematised by Pope Leo III, who
wrote that such a priest-king was like Julian the Apostate.[450]
But gradually, and with increasing self-assertion, the Popes claimed a kingly
power and role.
One of the reasons for this was that after
the Western Empire had collapsed after 476 and split up into a number of
independent kingdoms, the Western Church remained united, making her by far the
most prominent survival of Christian Romanity. Even the most powerful of the
western kings did not command a territory greater than that of a Roman
provincial governor, whereas the Pope was not only the undisputed leader of the
whole of Western Christendom but also the senior hierarch in the whole of the
Church, Eastern and Western. However, as long as the Popes remained both Orthodox in faith and loyal subjects of the Eastern
Emperor in politics, – that is, as we have seen, until Pope Stephen’s political
break with Byzantium in 756, – the lack of a political power in the West
commensurate with the ecclesiastical power of the Popes was not a pressing
necessity; for everyone accepted that in the political sphere the Eastern
Emperor was the sole basileus of the whole of Christendom, and the
western kings were his sons or satraps; but that in the ecclesiastical sphere
there was no single head, the Body of Christ being overseen by its “five
senses”, the five patriarchates, of which Rome was simply the primus inter
pares.
But problems arose when Rome broke its
last political links with the Eastern Empire and sought a new protector in the
Frankish empire of Pepin and Charlemagne. This caused changes in the political
ideology of the Franks, on the one hand, who, as we have seen, came to see
themselves as the real Roman Empire,
more Roman and more Orthodox than the Empire of the East; and on the other
hand, in the ecclesiology of the Popes, who came to see themselves as the only Church of this renewed Roman
Empire, having ultimate jurisdiction over all
the Churches in the world. Frankish caesaropapism soon collapsed; but Roman
papocaesarism continued to grow until it claimed supreme authority in both Church and State…
In fact, there is a strong argument to be
made for the thesis that the ultimate gainer from Charlemagne’s coronation in
800 was not the new emperor, but the Pope. Herrin writes that his “acclamation
as imperator et augustus only partly answered Alcuin’s proposals for a
grander title and did not please the Frankish theologians. They did not
consider that the Bishop of Rome had any right to bestow an imperial title and
thus assume a crucial role in the ceremony. The Franks did not perceive of
Roman ecclesiastical authority as something overarching which covered the whole
of Charles’s territories. Within northern Europe, papal authority was hedged by
the claims of many archbishops to an equal power…
“Of the three powers involved in the
coronation event of 800, the Roman pontiff emerges as the clear winner in the
triangular contest over imperial authority. By seizing the initiative and
crowning Charles in his own way, Pope Leo claimed the superior authority to
anoint an imperial ruler of the West, which established an important precedent…
Later Charles would insist on crowning his own son Louis as emperor, without
papal intervention. He thus designated his successor and, in due course, Louis
inherited his father’s authority. But the notion that a western rule could not
be a real emperor without a papal coronation and acclamation in ancient Rome
grew out of the ceremonial devised by Leo III in 800.”[451]
So
the foundations were laid for the growth of papal power in the political as
well as the ecclesiastical spheres, which growth was especially evident as
Carolingian power declined later in the ninth century.
The significant figure here is Pope Nicholas
I, whose first task was to establish his supremacy over the Church in the West.
However, here an Orthodox ecclesiology still prevailed at the metropolitan and
lower levels. Thus the archbishops of Trèves and Cologne replied to an
unjust sentence by Nicholas as follows: “Without a council, without canonical
inquiry, without accuser, without witnesses, without convicting us by arguments
or authorities, without our consent, in the absence of the metropolitans and of
our suffragan bishops, you have chosen to condemn us, of your own caprice, with
tyrannical fury. But we do not accept your accursed sentence, so repugnant to a
father’s or a brother’s love; we despise it as mere insulting language; we
expel you yourself from our communion, since you commune with the
excommunicate; we are satisfied with the communion of the whole Church and with
the society of our brethren whom you despise and of whom you make yourself
unworthy by your pride and arrogance. You condemn yourself when you condemn
those who do not observe the apostolic precepts which you yourself are the
first to violate, annulling as far as in you lies the Divine laws and the
sacred canons, and not following in the footsteps of the Popes your
predecessors…”[452]
Nicholas did not confine himself to
unjustly deposing western bishops: he also deposed St. Photius, Patriarch of
Constantinople, whose speedy promotion to the rank of patriarch from the lay
state he considered uncanonical (although many holy patriarchs, and the famous
St. Ambrose of Milan, had risen to the episcopate as quickly). All this was in
accordance with his theory, first put forward in 865, that the Pope had
authority “over all the earth, that is, over every other Church”, “the see of
Peter has received the total power of government over all the sheep of Christ”.
The Emperor Michael III was furious, but Nicholas replied: “The day of
king-priests and emperor-pontiffs is past, Christianity has separated the two
functions, and Christian emperors have need of the Pope in view of the life
eternal, whereas popes have no need of emperors except as regards temporal
things.”[453]
This would suggest that Nicholas supported
the Orthodox teaching on the separation of the secular and ecclesiastical
powers. And indeed, his treatment of the traditional theme of Melchizedek is
Orthodox.[454]
However, while it was useful for him to preach the Orthodox doctrine in order
to limit the power of the emperor, he accepted few, if any, limitations on his
own power. He even hinted that the Byzantine emperors might not be legitimate
emperors of the Romans, which would imply that the only legitimate emperor was
the Frankish one, or, if the Donation of Constantine was to be believed, the
Pope himself! Thus he said that it was ridiculous for Michael to call himself
Roman emperor, since he did not speak Latin.[455]
Then he demanded from the Emperor the return of his territories in the
Greek-speaking south of Italy for no other reason than that they had once,
centuries before, come within the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarchate: “Give
us back the patrimony of Calabria and that of Sicily and all the property of
our Church, whereof it held possession, and which it was accustomed to manage
by its own attorneys; for it is unreasonable that an ecclesiastical possession,
destined for the light and service of the Church of God, should be taken from
us by an earthly power.” Finally, he sent missionaries to Bulgaria, which was
deep within the traditionally Byzantine sphere. To add injury to insult, these
missionaries preached the heresy of the Filioque to the newly converted
Bulgarians. For this reason, a Council convened at Constantinople in 867
presided over by St. Photius, and at which the archbishops of Trèves,
Cologne and Ravenna were present, excommunicated and anathematized Nicholas.
Two years later, however, a palace revolution enabled another
“anti-Photian” council to be convened, at which the Council of 867 was
annulled. Papists have often counted this anti-Photian council as the Eighth
Ecumenical – not least, one suspects, because the new Pope, Hadrian II,
demanded that all its participants recognized him as “Sovereign Pontiff and
Universal Pope”. But a much better claim to ecumenicity can be made for the
Great Council convened at Constantinople in 879-80, which four hundred Eastern
bishops and the legates of Pope John VIII attended. This Council annulled,
under the legates’ signature, the acts of the anti-Photian council. It also made two very important decisions. First, it decreed that
there was no papal jurisdiction in the East, although the papal primacy was
recognised. And secondly, it reaffirmed the original text of the Nicene Creed
without the Filioque, and explicitly condemned all additions to it. So a
Roman Pope formally recognised that he had no jurisdiction in the Eastern
Church and that the Filioque was a heresy!
The
Growth of Feudalism
Thus was the Papist heresy crushed – for the time being. However, the
serpent of Papism lay bruised, not completely scotched; and a more permanent
triumph could be hoped for only if a healthy antidote against its poison could
be built up within the West. This depended, above all, on the strength of the
other pillar of Christian society in the West – the sacred power of the
anointed kings. Such an antidote existed, as we shall see, in England, where
precisely a powerful monarchy ruling most of the country arose in the person of
King Alfred the Great. On most of the continent, however, the monarchy was
deeply involved in a phenomenon that had a profoundly negative impact on both
political and ecclesiastical life – feudalism.
The word “feudalism” comes from the Latin feuda, translated as
“fief”, which means a piece land held in exchange for service to a lord.
Feudalism, in the sense of the widespread division of the land into fiefs, is a
common phenomenon in many lands in time of invasion or social decline. But the
term was invented to describe the particular socio-political organisation of
Western Europe in the later Middle Ages. It arose as a defensive reaction to
the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and the breakdown in central
authority which they caused. The breakdown was worst in West Francia, modern
France, where royal authority almost disappeared. One result was serfdom: the
lands which had belonged to the crown, the royal “fisc”, were given to local
landowners, both ecclesiastical and lay, and the peasants who had cultivated
the land, deprived of any protection from the crown, threw themselves on the
mercy of the local landowners, bartering their and their children’s labour in
return for protection. The second was feudalism proper: the freemen became
vassals of lords, swearing to fight the lord’s battles in exchange for
protection. A vassal was a knight – that is, he owned arms and a horse and was
able to fight. Since this required money, he very likely owned land – either
inherited, “allodial” land, or a “benefice” or “fief” granted temporarily, in
the vassal’s lifetime only. A vassal might himself have vassals. Thus many of
the king’s counts, or local officials, were at the same time both feudal lords
and vassals of the king.
Feudalism ate into the king’s power in two ways: first, the kings’
peasants hardly counted as his subjects any more since their real masters were
now their landowners; and secondly, the king’s vassals tended to leave his
service for that of the most powerful local feudal lord. The king did not
always resist this process, but rather reinforced it, since he saw that the
feudal lord was the only guarantee of law and order in the countryside. Thus in
the capitulary of Meersen in 847 King Charles the Bald ordered all free men to
choose a lord, and likewise forbade them to leave their lord without just
reason – which effectively made the bond of vassalage permanent in all normal
cases. Again, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, he gave official
recognition to the vassal’s oath, which thereby replaced the oath of allegiance
as the main glue holding society together. Finally, in the capitulary of Kiersy
in 877, Charles sanctioned hereditary succession to counties and other fiefs,
which meant that county administration became hereditary and passed out of the
king’s control.[456]
As a defensive system to preserve a minimum of order in a time of
foreign invasion, feudalism undoubtedly had merits. But it was evidently much
inferior not only to Byzantine-style autocracy, but also to the Carolingian
system that preceded it. Moreover, as the threat of invasion passed, and
feudalism spread from its homeland in Northern France throughout Western Europe
in the eleventh century, its degrading and coarsening effect on general
morality, and its potential, in certain circumstances, for a more-than-local
despotism, became more obvious.
As Maurice Keen writes: “In effect, as a result of the confusion of the
ninth and tenth centuries, government had ceased to have much to do with even a
rudimentary state machine. It had become part of the patrimony of powerful men.
What bound this society together was not a sense of obligation to a common
weal, but the personal oaths of individual men to individual lords. The peace
of society depended on how far these individuals were prepared to observe their
promises, and here force was a moving factor. The system had grown out of the
exigencies of a military situation, and bore plenty of marks of its origin. The
true centre of a lord’s authority was his castle, behind whose walls or
pallisades he could defy all comers: where too he held his court and judged his
subjects. The most essential obligation of the vassal was his service in war:
his estate was valued by the number of soldiers it could maintain. And if a man
was injured in his right by a rival, or if his lord or his underling broke the
sworn agreement between them, what king and count and vassal alike fell back on
was the ancient right of the free man, the vendetta. He defied his rival in
solemn language, and he made war upon him. The wars of feudal noblemen left
little peace in many parts of Europe over the four centuries following the year
1000.”[457]
According to Solonevich, feudalism could be defined as “the splintering
of state sovereignty among a mass of small, but in principle sovereign owners
of property”. Contrary to Marx, it had nothing to do with ‘productive
relations’ and was far from being an advance on previous forms of social
organisation. “It is sufficient to remember the huge cultural and unusually
high level of Roman ‘production’. Feudal Europe, poor, dirty and illiterate, by
no means represented ‘a more progressive form of productive relations’ – in
spite of Hegel, it was sheer regression. Feudalism does not originate in
productive relations. It originates in the thirst for power beyond all
dependence on production and distribution. Feudalism is, so to speak, the democratisation of power [my italics
– V.M.] – its transfer to all those who at the given moment in the given place
have sufficient physical strength to defend their baronial rights – Faustrecht..
Feudalism sometimes presupposes a juridical basis of power, but never a moral
one.
“The feudal lord does not rule ‘in the name’ of the nation, the people,
the peasants, or whoever else there might be. He rules only and exclusively in
his own interests, which have been strengthened by such-and-such battles or
parchments. For the feudal lord the monarch is not the bearer of definite moral
ideals or even of the practical interests of the people or nation, but only
‘the first among equals’, who has had the luck to be stronger than the rest…
“The thirst for power is, of course, a property common to all humanity,
and therefore the tendency to the
development of feudalism will be to a greater or lesser degree characteristic
of all countries and all peoples of the world…. But if we discard trivialities,
then we must say that Rome, for example, had no knowledge at all of feudal relations. There were landowners and there were
senators, there were proconsuls and there were emperors, but there were no
barons. The sovereign power ‘of the people and senate of Rome’, engraved on the
Roman eagles, remained the single indivisible source of all power – even the
power of the Roman emperors. The civil wars of Rome bore no relation to the
feudal wars of medieval Europe. Nor did Ancient Greece with its purely
capitalist relations know feudalism. Yes, Greece was split up into a series of
sovereign states, but, though tiny, these were nevertheless states – monarchies
and republics, in principle having equal rights in relation to each other and
by no means in relations of feudal submission or co-submission.”[458]
One of the worst aspects of feudalism was
the fact that the Church, too, was bound up in the feudal nexus, with churchmen
having lay lords higher than themselves and vassals lower than themselves,
which resulted, as Papadakis writes, in “the unrestrained secularization of the
western clergy. By the 900s most churchmen – both high and low – had lost
nearly all their independence and sense of corporate identity, as their
functions everywhere became identified with those belonging to lay vassals. Quite
simply, as rulers came to regard all ecclesiastical organization under their
effective control as a facet of the secular system, conventions governing one
sphere were adjusted to fit the other. As a result, bishops and abbots were not
exempt from the secular obligations and responsibilities attached to feudal
tenure. As feudal dependents they, too, had to attend court, give advice and,
when required, supply their lay superiors with military service…
Characteristically, promotion to an episcopal see or a rich abbey was often the
reward of previous dutiful service in the royal household. It is worth adding
that ecclesiastical tenants were also preferred for many posts because their
lands and their jurisdictions were not governed by inheritance [celibate priests
had no (legal) children]. Whereas the heirs of a lay vassal holding of the king
by hereditary right could occasionally create legal difficulties or foment
rebellion, an heirless but enfeoffed celibate cleric was incapable of doing so.
This was probably a decisive reason why so many high ecclesiastics, time and
again, became essential associates in royal government everywhere.”[459]
The control exercised by feudal lords over clerical appointments was
symbolised by the ceremony of “lay investiture”, whereby the lord endowed the
cleric with a ring, signifying the cleric’s entry into feudal tenure of a
church or lands. Such a ceremony was distinct from ecclesiastical ordination.
But in practice the power inherent in lay investiture determined who should be
ordained (and for how much).
“The hastily ordained and ‘invested’ clerk
was often altogether unworthy (if not also incompetent and untrained) of the
priestly calling. Church assemblies and individual churchmen, it is true,
routinely complained. All the same, neither the power of laymen to appoint and
invest clergy, nor the encroachment and spoliation of Church property, was ever
discontinued. As a matter of fact, lay nominations to vacant sees became so
frequent that they were no longer regarded a radical departure from canonical
tradition. The abuse was recognized as a perfectly acceptable practice. In 921
the archbishop of Cologne was thus solemnly admonished by the pope himself for
attempting to block a royal appointment at Liège. Pope John X’s letter
informing the archbishop that no episcopal candidate was to be consecrated in
any diocese without royal authorization still survives. As far as pope John was
concerned, the right of the feudal power to interfere at the highest level in
the internal affairs of the Church was ‘ancient usage’. Ecclesial autonomy, to
say nothing of ecclesial political and economic freedom, was apparently of
little consequence. Canon law evidently had long given way to the feudal
system…”[460]
The development of feudalism was aided by
the pressure of the German land law system, which prevailed throughout the
former Carolingian empire. The result, continues Papadakis, “was the so-called Eigenkirchentum,
or proprietary church system, an arrangement by which the parish with all its
appurtenances became the private property of its founder. In terms of
ecclesiastical power, according to one investigator, the main result of this
‘Germanization’ or ‘privatization’ was complete revolution. Its overall effect
on Latin ecclesiastical organization at any rate was profound as well as
extensive.
“This becomes evident when traditional
canon law is compared or contrasted with German land law. Plainly put, unlike
the Church, early barbarian Europe did not understand the legal concept of
corporate ecclesiastical ownership. The idea of an abiding corporation with
legal rights simply did not exist in German customary law. Thus, the conviction
that the Church could also simultaneously own land or real property, as a
corporate personality or institution, was unknown. Rather, according to
Germanic law, everything built on a plot of land, whether it was the local
parish church or the monastery, was considered the exclusive ‘property’ of the
landlord; the man who had built and endowed it was also its real owner. Control
and rights of ownership of the foundation constructed on an estate, quite
simply, continued to be in the hands of the proprietor. To be sure, the church
could never actually be secularized. On the other hand, it could always be given,
sold, traded, or exchanged if necessary. It was even possible to dispose of it
as a sort of fief by leasing it to one’s relatives or liegemen. In sum, the
treatment of parishes was identical to the holding of ordinary pieces of real
property… It is worth adding that the resident priest of the Eigenkirche
(usually an ill-trained serf from the lord’s own estate) was in practice
appointed and dismissed by the proprietor. His status resembled a small
quasi-feudal dependent. Almost invariably, if the incumbent was married or
living in concubinage he was able to pass the parish on to his son or heir.
“…The practice of buying and selling rural
parishes as a profitable investment was in time also applied to bishoprics and
cathedrals. Although such sales were not a general phenomenon, it remains true
that in some areas such as the Midi region, bishoprics were habitually sold or
bequeathed as Eigenkirche. This was presumably still the practice in
1067 when the bishopric of Carcassone was sold to the count of Barcelona by the
viscount of Albi….
“Everywhere the priest had really become
essentially an estate servant. His private arrangement with the lord of the
parish had in fact replaced the canonical bond uniting him to his bishop. It
was this personalized local relationship that ultimately mattered, rather than
the bishop’s potestas jurisdictionis. Throughout Europe, to put it
another way, episcopal control enjoyed by all prelates was succeeded by a
division of control among an unlimited number of owners. The diocese no longer
actually functioned as a single administrative unit, but as a collection of
private independent churches, in which the bishop’s pastoral and disciplinary
powers were in practice relaxed or ignored altogether. Before long, given the
moral and intellectual shortcomings of the priesthood, this diocesan
centralization was to generate further serious pastoral and canonical problems.
The confusion of authority and rights within the diocese just described was, in
the main, also responsible for the ensuing simony and incontinence among the
western clergy.
“It was undoubtedly lay control of
ecclesiastical structure that made possible the purchase or sale of virtually
every clerical grade the general rule by the tenth century. Simony became in
fact unavoidable once clerical offices began to be treated like secular
appointments. If a secular vassal could be taxed on inheriting his fief, so
could every clerical candidate on his elevation to office. Besides, the offices
in question were profitable, and to grant them out without any remuneration
would have been pointless if not unusual in the agrarian world of the Middle
Ages. In the event, the bishop who had received his position by canonical
election (without paying for it) had before long become a great rarity...”[461]
The
English Monarchy
“In the intricate web of vassalage,” writes Roberts, “a king might have
less control over his own vassals than they over theirs. The great lord,
whether lay magnate or local bishop, must always have loomed larger and more
important in the life of the ordinary man than the remote and probably
never-seen king or prince. In the tenth and eleventh centuries there are
everywhere examples of kings obviously under great pressure from great men. The
country where this seemed to present least trouble was Anglo-Saxon England…”[462]
England before the Viking invasions, which
began in 793, was divided into seven independent kingdoms. Each had its own
bishops, but all, from the time of St. Theodore the Greek, archbishop of
Canterbury (+691), recognised the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury. In
786, however, Prince Egfrith of the kingdom of Wessex was anointed even before
he had ascended the throne of his father, and from the time of this, the first
royal anointing in Anglo-Saxon history, the Wessex dynasty gradually came to
dominate political life in England. In the late ninth century, under Alfred the
Great, it led the recovery against the Viking invaders, and Alfred’s successors
succeeded in uniting most of Britain in a single Orthodox kingdom until the
Norman-papist invasion of 1066-70. In a real sense, therefore, the anointing of
Egfrith may be said to have been the critical event that led to the creation of
one nation and one State.
King Alfred came to the throne of Wessex
when English civilisation was in the process of being wiped out by the pagan
Danes. Almost single-handedly, he defeated the Danes and laid the foundations
for their conversion and integration into his All-English kingdom. But not
content with that, he undertook the organisation and education of the badly
shattered Church, beginning by sending all his bishops a copy of his own
translation of the Pastoral Care by
Pope Gregory the Great – the Roman connection again! Indeed, re-establishing
links with both Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church was a priority with
Alfred. He corresponded with the Patriarch of Jerusalem and sent alms to the
monks of India.
The stability of Alfred’s dynasty and
kingdom by comparison with the sub-Carolingian kingdoms on the continent was
partly owing to the fact that, like the Roman missionaries in the early seventh
century, this Romanising monarch found a tabula rasa and was able to
rebuild on relatively uncluttered, but firm foundations. In particular, the
tensions between the monarchy and the local aristocracies which so weakened the
West Frankish kingdom, hardly existed in England after 878 and surfaced again
in a serious way only in 1052. There are several indications that the English
kingdom modelled itself on Byzantium. Thus early in the tenth century King
Athelstan gave himself the Byzantine titles basileus and curagulus.
Again, in 955, King Edred called himself “King of the Anglo-Saxons and Emperor
of the whole of Britain”. And a little later King Edgar is also called basileus
et imperator.
In the second half of the tenth century,
England reached the peak of her glory as an Orthodox kingdom, on the basis of a
strong monastic revival supported by a powerful king, Edgar, and a sainted archbishop,
Dunstan, working in close harmony. Ryan Lavelle writes: “A document from around
973, the Regularis Concordia,… was intended as a rulebook and liturgical
guide for English monks and nuns, but it was also a bold statement of the
relationship between God, the king and a Christian people. The king and queen
were seen as protectors of monks and nuns in the temporal world, while, in
return, the souls of the West Saxon royal family were protected with prayers by
the same monks and nuns. The positions of the king and queen were therefore
inextricably linked with the survival of Christianity in the kingdom. This was
part of a process of legitimising royal power to an extent that was hitherto
unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England. The king had become part of the
ecclesiastical order in a coronation ceremony that made him God’s
representative on earth. The original meaning of Christ’s name, Christus
meant ‘the anointed [king]’, and the inauguration of Edgar used an ordo (an
order of service) that put Edgar on a similar level – directly anointed by God.
The monastic reform movement gave this a new impetus, to such an extent that
King Edgar could go through such a royal inauguration for a second time.”[463]
Edgar’s first anointing had taken place in
960 or 961, when he became King of England. For many years he was not allowed
to wear his crown in penance for a sin he had committed. But in 973, the
penance came to an end, and at the age of thirty (perhaps significantly, the
canonical age for episcopal ordination in the West) he was anointed again, this
time as “Emperor of Britain” in the ancient Roman city of Bath (again
significantly, for Edgar was emphasising the imperial, Roman theme). In the
same year, again emphasising the imperial theme, he was rowed on the River Dee
by six or eight sub-kings, include five Welsh and Scottish rulers and one ruler
of the Western Isles.[464]
“This was a move,” writes Lavelle, “that recalled the actions of his
great-uncle Athelstan, the successful ruler of Britain, but it was also an English
parallel to the tenth-century coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto of
Germany, in which the stem-dukes had undertaken the task of feeding the
emperor.”[465]
Edgar’s ascription to himself of the
trappings of Romanitas was not without some foundation. The economy was
strong, the tax and legal systems were sophisticated, the coinage was secure
(with an impressive system of monetary renewal whereby all coins issued from
the royal mints had to be returned and reissued every five years). England was
now a firmly Orthodox, multi-national state composed of three Christian
peoples, Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Danes[466],
living in mutual amity. She was at peace at home and respected abroad,
spreading her influence in a beneficial way outwards through missions to the
Norwegians and Swedes.
Edgar married twice, the first marriage
producing a son, Edward, and the second another son, Ethelred. When he died in
975 (his relics were discovered to be incorrupt in 1052), Ethelred’s partisans,
especially his mother, argued that Ethelred should be made king in preference
to his elder half-brother Edward, on the grounds that Edgar had not been
anointed when he begat Edward in 959 or 960, and that his first wife, Edward’s
mother, had never been anointed, so
that the throne should pass to the younger son, Ethelred, who had been born “in
the purple” when both his parents were anointed sovereigns. The conflict was
settled when the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Dunstan, seized the initiative
and anointed St. Edward. In this way, through her stewardship of the sacrament
of royal anointing, the Church came to play the decisive role in deciding the
question of succession.[467]
However, the defeated party of Ethelred
did not give up their opposition to God’s chosen one, and in 979 came the
murder of the Lord’s anointed. “No worse deed for the English was ever done
that this,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And while it was said that
there was “great rejoicing” at the coronation of St. Edward’s half-brother,
Ethelred, St. Dunstan sorrowfully prophesied great woes for the nation in the
coming reign. The prophecy was exact; for not only were the English
successively defeated by Danish pagan invaders and forced to pay ever larger
sums in “Danegeld”, but the king himself, betrayed by his leading men, was
forced to flee abroad in 1013. The next year he was recalled by the English
leaders, both spiritual and lay, who declared that “no lord was dearer to them
than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than
he had done in the past.” [468]
The religious nature of Anglo-Saxon
kingship was manifested in the fact that the king was still seen as the “warden
of the holy temple”.[469]
Crimes against the Church or her servants were seen as crimes against the king,
and were duly punished by him. It was seen as his duty to look after the Church
and enforce her laws with secular penalties. “For a Christian king is Christ’s
deputy among Christian people”, as King Ethelred’s laws put it. Both he and the
archbishop were “the Lord’s Anointed” – the archbishop so that he might
minister the sacraments of salvation, and the king so that, as Bede wrote in
his commentary on Acts, “he might by conquering all our enemies bring us
to the immortal Kingdom”. The king was sometimes compared to God the Father and
the bishop – to Christ (in fact, the bishop is often called “Christ” in
Anglo-Saxon legislation).[470] He
was the shepherd and father of his people and would have to answer for their
well-being at the Last Judgement. Regicide and usurpation were the greatest of
crimes; for, as Abbot Aelfric wrote in a Palm Sunday sermon, “no man may make
himself a king, for the people have the option to choose him for king who is
agreeable to them; but after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power
over the people, and they may not shake his yoke from their necks.” And so, as
Archbishop Wulfstan of York wrote in his Institutes
of Christian Polity, “through what shall peace and support come to God’s
servants and to God’s poor, save through Christ, and through a Christian king.”[471]
Nor was the king’s authority confined to
the purely secular sphere. Thus “in England,” writes Barlow, “just as the king
referred to his earls and thegns, so he addressed his archbishops, bishops and
abbots. The prelates were his men, his servants; their churches and estates
were in his gift and under his protection and control. He could even grant the
rank of bishops without the office or benefice. It was he who decided under
what rule his monasteries should live, what saints should be recognized, what
festivals observed.”[472]
And yet the relationship between Church
and State in England was one of “symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of
caesaropapism; for the kings, as well as being in general exceptionally pious,
did nothing without consulting their bishops and other members of the witan
or assembly – who were not afraid to disagree with the king, or remind him of
his obligations.[473]
Thus, as Frank Barlow goes on, “a true
theocratic government was created, yet one, despite the common charge of
confusion [between spiritual and political functions] against the Anglo-Saxon
Church, remarkably free of confusion in theory. The duality of the two spheres
was emphatically proclaimed. There were God’s rights and the king’s rights,
Christ’s laws and the laws of the world. There was an independent
ecclesiastical jurisdiction under the control of the bishop, but there was also
the helping hand of the secular power which the church had invoked and which it
could use at its discretion.”[474]
Although East
Francia, modern Germany, was as immersed in the feudal system as anywhere else
on the continent, it had preserved the institution of the monarchy more
successfully than elsewhere. For the German kings were more than simply
exceptionally powerful, perhaps the most powerful, feudal lords: they still
retained about them the aura of the autocratic monarchy, the “balm” of anointed
kings. And they used this charismatic authority to turn the feudal system to
their advantage – and to the disadvantage of the papacy.
Just as the English autocracy arose out of
the successful struggle with the Vikings, so the German autocracy arose out of
the successful struggle with the Magyars. King Alfred the Great’s victory at
Ethandune in 878 laid the foundations, not only for the All-English kingdom
that encompassed the Danish invaders, but also for the Norwegian and Swedish
Christian kingdoms that arose as a result of English missionary activity to the
north-east. In the same way, King Otto the Great’s victory at Lech in 955 laid
the foundations for the Salian monarchy, which, while not quite as extensive as
the Carolingian empire at its height, lasted much longer.
However, Germany proved more difficult to
weld into a single whole than England. It was only after a series of civil wars
that Otto won the submission of the duchies of Lotharingia, Swabia, Bavaria and
Franconia in addition to his native Saxony. And this even after he had been
formally elected by “the whole people” of the Saxons and the Franks, and had
been anointed to the kingdom in a double ceremony in Charlemagne’s
palace-chapel at Aachen. “The first part,” writes R.H.C. Davis, “took place in
the narthex of the church, where the dukes, principal counts, and other knights
lifted him on to the throne and swore fealty to him, thus making him king after
their manner. The second occurred in the main body of the church… where the
clergy were awaiting him. The Archbishop of Mainz took him by the hand, and leading
him to the central space, addressed the people as follows: ‘Behold, I bring
before you Otto, chosen by God, designated by Henry, formerly lord of the
kingdom, and now made king by all the princes. If this choice pleases you, you
should signify the fact by raising your right hands.’ When this had been done,
the people acclaimed him, and the archbishop invested him with the regalia…
with the words: ‘Accept this sword with which you are to eject all the enemies
of Christ, barbarians and bad Christians. For all power over the whole empire
of the Franks has been given to you by divine authority, so as to assure the
peace of all Christians.’ Finally, he anointed Otto, and installed him on the
throne which was in the gallery of the church, where Otto displayed himself to
the people.”[475]
After defeating the rebellious princes,
Otto decided to remove the native ducal dynasties and distribute their lands to
his relatives. But rebellions continued, so he resorted to a bold and fateful
experiment: government, not through secular officials, dukes or counts, but
through bishops and abbots. Thus Otto put Lotharingia, as Davis writes, “in
charge of his young brother Bruno, who was a cleric and Archbishop of Cologne.
The combination of an archbishopric and a duchy did not seem in any way
incongruous to him, for he did not consider that there was any essential
division between ‘Church’ and ‘State’; they were merely different aspects of
the same society.”[476] As
he wrote to Bruno, “you have both priestly religion and royal strength”.[477]
This failure to see any essential division between Church and State was a
consequence of the feudal Weltanschauung.
The system of government through bishops
had the advantage, from the king’s point of view, that he could appoint the
bishops, who, since they could not marry, could not found hereditary dynasties
that might challenge his power at a later date. Moreover, he founded imperial
churches or abbeys with vast swathes of land to which he granted “immunity”
from interference from the local dukes and counts. These abbots then became in
effect then the local judges and tax-collectors, as well as spiritual fathers.
Although the Ottonian system of government
through the clergy was clearly caesaropapist in essence, it was not opposed, as
we have seen, by the papacy. However, it had the weakness from the king’s point
of view that while the bishops and abbots could be appointed by him, they could
be dismissed only by the Pope. Moreover, only the Pope could create new
bishoprics or ecclesiastical provinces. In the case of conflict with a bishop,
therefore, - and such a conflict took place between Otto and Archbishop
Frederick of Mainz, the Primate of Germany - the king would need the help of
the Pope in order to impose his will.
Otto hoped that the Pope could be
persuaded to grant more “stavropegial” grants to abbeys – that is, make them
directly subject to the Pope and therefore “immune” from local episcopal
control. “What he wanted,” writes Davis, “and eventually got, was papal exemptions
for abbeys such as Hersfeld, Quedlinburg, and Gernrode, which were to be the
perfect examples of the Ottonian System. Their ‘royal immunities’ would exclude
the power of counts and dukes, and their papal exemptions that of bishops and
archbishops. In them the abbot would preside over all things; and over the
abbot would stand the king.”[478]
Turning to Rome now: the first half of
the tenth century was probably the period of the deepest degradation in the
eternal city’s pre-schism history - the so-called “pornocracy” of Marozia, an
evil woman who with her mother Theodora made, unmade, lived with and begat a
series of popes. However, in 932 Marozia’s second son Alberic, marquis of
Spoleto, imprisoned his mother, took over the government of Rome and gave it a
short period of peace and relative respectability. But in 955 Alberic died and
his son Octavian became Pope John XII at the age of sixteen.
“Even for a pope of that period,” writes
De Rosa, “he was so bad that the citizens were out for his blood. He had
invented sins, they said, not known since the beginning of the world, including
sleeping with his mother. He ran a harem in the Lateran Palace. He gambled with
pilgrims’ offerings. He kept a stud of two thousand horses which he fed on almonds
and figs steeped in wine. He rewarded the companions of his nights of love with
golden chalices from St. Peter’s. He did nothing for the most profitable
tourist trade of the day, namely, pilgrimages. Women in particular were warned
not to enter St. John Lateran if they prized their honour; the pope was always
on the prowl. In front of the high altar of the mother church of Christendom,
he even toasted the Devil…”[479]
Retribution was coming however. Berengar,
king of Lombardy in northern Italy, advanced on Rome, and the pope in
desperation appealed to Berengar’s feudal lord, Otto of Germany. This was
Otto’s opportunity to seize that imperial crown, which would give him complete
dominance over his rivals. He marched into Italy, drove out Berengar and was crowned
Emperor by John on February 2, 962. However, when Otto demanded that the
inhabitants of the Papal states should swear an oath of allegiance to him,
Otto, and not to the pope, thereby treating the Papal states as one of his
dependencies, the Pope took fright, transferred his support to Berengar and
called on both the Hungarians and the Byzantines to help drive Otto out of
Italy. But Otto saw this as treachery on the part of the pope; he summoned a
synod in Rome, deposed John, and placed Leo VIII in his place. Then he inserted
a clause into his agreement with Leo whereby in future no pope was to be
consecrated without taking an oath of loyalty to the Emperor.
Although Otto was crowned in Rome, he did
not call himself “Emperor of the Romans”, but preferred simply “emperor”. This
was probably because he did not wish to enter into a competition with the
Byzantine emperor. It may also have been because he had little admiration for
Old Rome.[480]
Nor they for him. Indeed, it is from this
time that the struggle between the Franco-German and Greco-Roman parties for
control of the papacy began, a struggle which ended in the middle of the
eleventh century with the final victory of the Franco-German party – and the
fall of Orthodoxy. Thus Lampryllos writes: “The people of Rome preferred to
govern themselves, under a republican form of government, with a consul as
their supreme magistrate, under the nominal protectorate of the Greco-Roman
emperors of Constantinople, rather than support the temporal domination of
their bishops, who had often been imposed
on them by the Teutonic emperors and kept there by force. For one should
note that in general, before the pontificate of Gregory VII, the party of the
Popes in Rome was usually the same as the imperialist party (with the emperors
of the West, of barbaric origin), and that, by contrast, the popular party
sympathised with the Greco-Roman empire of the East. Those of the popes who
were supported by the Teutons also laid claim to temporal power, either as
receivers, or as vicars of the emperors of the West, while the others
restricted themselves to spiritual power alone…. Voltaire, in his Essay on
history and customs (chapter 36) made the observation that the imprudence
of Pope John XII in having called the Germans to Rome was the source of all the
calamities to which Rome and Italy were subject down the centuries…”[481]
Be that as it may, Otto seems to have
impressed the Byzantines sufficiently to obtain their recognition of his
imperial title (which, as we have seen, did not contain the word “Roman”), and
to persuade them to send Princess Theophano to be the bride of his son, Otto
II. The marriage was celebrated in Rome in 972. Theophano then introduced
another Byzantine, John Philagathos, as godfather of her son, Otto III. He
later became head of the royal finances and finally - Pope (or antipope) John
XV.
This led to a sharp increase in Byzantine
influence in the western empire,[482] and the temporary
eclipse of the new papist theory of Church-State relations. Thus in an ivory
bas-relief Christ is shown crowning Otto II and Theophano – an authentically
Byzantine tenth-century motif.
“The image,” as Jean-Paul Allard writes,
“was more eloquent than any theological treatise. It illustrated a principle
that the papacy and the Roman Church have never accepted, but which was taken
for granted in Byzantium and is still held in Orthodoxy today: Christ and
Christ alone crowns the sovereigns; power comes only from God, without the
intercession of an institutional representative of the Church, be he patriarch
or pope. The anointing and crowning of the sovereign do not create the
legitimacy of his power; but have as their sole aim the manifestation of [this
legitimacy] in the eyes of the people.”[483]
“Sole aim” is an
exaggeration: anointing and crowning also sanctify the sovereign,
giving him the Divine grace without which he cannot fulfil his duties in a
manner pleasing to God. Moreover, there is a difference in legitimacy between
the God-chosen Orthodox sovereign and any other ruler, a difference that is
expressed by the Latin terms legalis and legitimus.[484]
Nevertheless, the main point stands: legitimate political power comes directly
from God.
In 991 Princess Theophano died and the
young Otto III became Emperor under the regency of his grandmother Adelaide. He
“dreamed of reuniting the two empires [of East and West] into one one day, so
as to restore universal peace – a new imperial peace comparable to that of
Augustus, a Roman Empire which would embrace once more the orbis terrarum
before the end of the world that was announced for the year 1000.”[485] To
signify that the Renovatio Imperii Romani (originally a Carolingian
idea) had truly begun, he moved his court from Aachen to Rome, and began
negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor for the hand of a daughter or niece of
the basileus that would enable him to unite the two empires in a
peaceful, matrimonial way. And, imitating the Byzantine concept of a family of
kings under the Emperor, he handed out crowns to King Stephen of Hungary and
the Polish Duke Boleslav.
The plan for union with Byzantium was
foiled; but Byzantine influence continued to increase.[486]
Moreover, it spread outwards from the court into the episcopate. Thus Gerbert
of Aurillac, who became the first French pope in 999, took the name Sylvester
II, reviving memories, in those brought up on the forged Donation, of the symphonic relationship between St. Constantine and
Pope Sylvester I.[487]
The new Pope, breaking sharply with recent tradition, emphasised that while the
Renovatio embraced both Empire and Church, it had to be led by the
Emperor.[488] Again, it was
Sylvester who, in 1001, inspired Otto to issue an act demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.[489]
Another striking characteristic of this
very unpapist Pope was his declaration that there could be no question of the
Pope being above the judgement of his fellow-bishops. Thus he wrote in 997:
“The judgement of God is higher than that of Rome… When Pope Marcellinus
offered incense to Jupiter [in 303], did all the other bishops have to do
likewise? If the bishop of Rome himself sins against his brother or refuses to
heed the repeated warnings of the Church, he, the bishop of Rome himself, must
according to the commandments of God be treated as a pagan and a publican; for
the greater the dignity, the greater the fall. If he declares us unworthy of
his communion because none of us will join him against the Gospel, he will not
be able to separate us from the communion of Christ."[490]
Thus by the year 1000 there was little
trace of papism in the west: it was the Byzantine ideal of “symphonic”
Church-State relations that had triumphed in the west’s most powerful
monarchies.
A recent survey of the world in the year
1000[491]
gives rise to the thought: just as the year 2000 has witnessed the apex of
democratism in political thought, so the year 1000 witnessed the apex of its
opposite, monarchism. The monarchical regimes that dominated the ancient world
were of two main kinds: autocracy, based on the symphony between Church and State, and despotism, based on the fusion between Church (or ruling
religion) and State. At the beginning of the second millennium autocracy ruled
throughout Europe from the Ireland of Brian Boru to the Georgia of Bagrat III,
with the exception only of some pagan parts of the north Baltic and
Scandinavian region and the Islamic southern half of the Iberian peninsula. The
whole of this vast area was Orthodox Christian in faith – the year 1000
represented the peak of the influence both of autocracy and of Orthodoxy in
world history so far.[492]
Despotism, meanwhile, ruled throughout Asia and Northern Africa, including the
Islamic lands from Morocco to northern India, and the Hindu-Buddhist-Confucian
lands from southern India to China and Japan.[493]
This fairly sharp contrast between
Orthodox and Autocratic Europe, on the one hand, and pagan and despotic Asia
and North Africa, on the other, confirms the thesis that there is a more than
coincidental correlation between Orthodoxy and Autocracy, on the one hand, and
paganism and despotism, on the other. Orthodoxy flourishes under authoritarian
political rule, but does not allow that rule to subsume the authority of the
Church, which sanctifies and supports the king while remaining independent of
him. Pagan rulers, on the other hand, almost always ascribe divine, or at least
priestly, honours to themselves. Thus the Japanese emperors traced their
ancestry back to the sun goddess[494], while
the Khmer rulers of Cambodia in this period were “the embodiment of Shiva,
spirit of the ancestors and the earth and the fount of fertility.”[495]
Even the Fatimid Islamic ruler Al-Hakim accepted the theory of a Persian
felt-maker, Hamza ibn Ali, that he was the godhead.[496]
In all the Orthodox Christian lands of
this period we find strong kings allied to powerful, independent Churches.
These included not only the well-established empires of New Rome in the East
and the German-Italian Holy Roman Empire in the West, but also such
newly-established kingdoms as Norway (Olaf Trygvasson), Sweden (Olaf
Skotkunning), Poland (Boleslav the Brave), Hungary (Stephen the Great) and
Russia (Vladimir the Great). Despotism in the strict sense is nowhere to be
found. Only in Iceland and France do we find different kinds of political
authority. Iceland’s Althing, or parliament, preserved a form of pre-liberal
democratism[497],
while France was already breaking down into feudalism, which became the
dominant form of political authority throughout Western Europe in the late
medieval period.
Characteristic of all these European and
Asian monarchies – Christian, Islamic and pagan – was an intense religiosity.
The modern idea that religion should be separated from the State would have
been incomprehensible to almost any dweller on the earth in the year 1000. Thus
the Korean scholar Ch’oe Sung-no wrote:
Is the basis for the cultivation of the self;
Carrying
out the teachings of Confucius
Is the source for regulating the state.[498]
The religiosity of these monarchies was
not incompatible with striking artistic, technical and economic achievements.
Thus the great cities of Constantinople, Cordoba, Baghdad and Bukhara were at
their peak at this time, as was the Sung empire in China. But the most
important corollary of the monarchism of Europe and Asia in the year 1000 was
the belief it incarnated that, as Man writes of Sung China, “state and society,
administration and education, could be united, and take civilization forward to
a new level”.[499]
The major tendency of modern democratic
civilization has been the opposite: the belief that state and society must be
disjoined. Of course, one cannot deny that the conjoining of state and society can
be to an evil end; and some of the states of this period, such as Al-Mansur’s
in Spain or Al-Hakim’s in Egypt, were aggressively antichristian. But it is no
less unreasonable to suppose that state and society cannot in any
circumstances be conjoined for the good. Certainly, the Christian monarchies of
the period compare very favourably, from a Christian point of view, with the
disjointed, thoroughly secularised democracies of today.
The unity enjoyed by these monarchical
societies, the children of New Rome, gave each citizen a purpose in life higher
than his own narrowly personal interests. This purpose, in such a religious
age, could only be religious. That is why changes of regime which did not
involve changes of religion – as when the Muslim Turks took control of Bukhara
from the Muslim Samanids in 999 – caused less upheaval than might have been
expected. Correspondingly, the most savage wars of the time – as between the
Muslims and Hindus in northern India, or between the Muslims and Christians in
the Iberian peninsula – were invariably religious.
The scourge of so many modern states,
ethnic rivalry, was less of a problem in an age that took multi-ethnic empires
like the Roman and Muslim for granted. Much more problematic was the idea of religious pluralism, because it
threatened society’s unity of purpose. Hence the anti-Jewish pogroms in the
Rhineland in 1002 – it was not the different nationality of the Jews that exacerbated the German Christians so
much as the clear contradictions in faith and life between the Jews and the
Christians. Hence also the tendency of nations, when they did change religion,
to convert en masse. The most important and striking example is the
conversion of the vast territory of Russia from paganism to Orthodoxy under St.
Vladimir. Some western historians, puzzled by the speed of the process in
Russia and noting one or two violent incidents, have come to the conclusion
that it was all the result of coercion. But they fail to take into account, not
only the grace of God, but also the cohesiveness of tribal societies, and
therefore the unanimity or near-unanimity of their decision-making, and the
genuine respect and awe in which the views of the tribal leader or king were
held, which naturally to their decisions being accepted as God-inspired. Thus the Kievans reasoned, as the Chronicler records: “If it had
not been good, then our prince and boyars would not have accepted it”. And even
democratic Iceland converted from paganism to Christianity at this time with
scarcely any opposition once the opinion of one wise man, the Lawgiver
Thorgeir, became known.[500]
And so these societies combined two
characteristics which, from the modern point of view, cannot be combined: the
“collectivist” belief that society can and should freely choose its supreme end
together, as one, and the “individualist” belief that the supreme end can be
revealed to one particular man. For if
wisdom comes from God, "it is much more natural to suppose," as
Trostnikov says, "that divine enlightenment will descend upon the chosen
soul of an Anointed One of God, as opposed to a million souls at once".[501]
Scripture does not say vox populi
- vox Dei, but: "The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; he
turns it wherever He will" (Proverbs 21.1).
PART
III: THE WANING OF THE IDEAL (1000 TO 1453)
5. OLD ROME RESURRECTED: THE HERETICAL PAPACY
It is new and unheard-of throughout
the centuries
That the popes should wish… to
change the Lord’s anointed
By popular vote as often as they choose,
As though kings were
village-bailiffs.
Wenrich of Trier, Epistola
Hilthebrando papae (1081).
The Western Church distorted the
image of Christ,
Changing herself from a Church into
a Roman State,
And again incarnating the State in
the form of the Papacy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer (August, 1880).
From the late eleventh century Western Europe began to recover its
strength politically and economically, making the first steps on that path to
world dominance that it and its American offshoots so spectacularly enjoy
today. However, this political and economic ascent was accompanied and
conditioned by a catastrophic spiritual fall: the loss of the West’s unity with
the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and the religio-political civilisation
of Orthodox Christian Romanity. This fall was accomplished in the historical
capital of the West, Old Rome, in the year 1054, when the Patriarchate of Old
Rome fell under the anathema of the Great Church of Constantinople.
Simultaneously it was announced in the heavens, as Chinese astronomers of the
time noted, by the collapse of the Crab nebula. Thus the great star that had
been Western Christianity now became a black hole, sucking in a wider and wider
number of peoples and civilisations into its murky depths.
The
Germans and the Filioque
Papism encompasses many heresies; but in its political aspect it is the
theory that the Pope is to the Church and Christian society as a whole what the
head is to the body – the unimpeachable Sovereign. This theory was not
expressed in a fully explicit manner until the eleventh century. Before then we
have an accumulation of grandiloquent epithets, which were seen simply as
rhetorical devices by the majority. That they were not taken literally is
evident from the fact that some Popes condemned as heretics – for example, the
Monothelite Pope Honorius I was anathematised by the Sixth Ecumenical Council,
and that their anathematisation was confirmed by later Popes. Moreover, towards
the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory I forcefully rejected the title
“universal bishop”: “Anyone who dares to call himself ‘universal bishop’ is a
forerunner of the Antichrist”.[502]
Until about 600, the development of Papism
was inhibited, as we have seen, by the fact that the Popes were subjects of the
Byzantine Emperors, whose basic view of Church-State relations they shared, and
whose confirmation they still required before they could be consecrated. In the
seventh and eighth centuries, however, both the political and ecclesiastical
bonds between the Popes and the Emperors became weaker as Byzantine power in
Italy weakened and the Byzantine emperors fell into the heresies of
Monothelitism and Iconoclasm.
The weakening of bonds with Byzantium was
accompanied by a strengthening of bonds with the new Carolingian empire in the
north. This relationship was reinforced by the Pope’s double anointing of the
first Carolingian, Pepin, the crowning of Charlemagne in Rome and the double
anointing of his son, Louis the Pious, in 814. At the same time, the Frankish
bishops, using the forged Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, began to stress the theme of papal primacy
and the independence of the clergy from all lay control. In the middle of the
century, another forgery, the famous Donation of Constantine, made its appearance. This alleged that Constantine the Great had
given his imperial throne to Pope Sylvester and his successors because “it is
not right that an earthly emperor should have power in a place where the
government of priests and the head of the Christian religion has been
established by the heavenly Emperor”; and for this reason had moved his capital
to the New Rome of Constantinople. “And we ordain and decree that he [the Roman
pontiff] shall have rule as well over the four principal sees, Antioch,
Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, as also over the Churches of God in
all the world. And the pontiff who for the time being shall preside over the
most holy Roman Church shall be the highest and chief of all priests in the whole
world, and according to his decision shall all matters be settled.”[503]
Now Romanides has argued that the purpose
of this forgery was to prevent the Franks from establishing their capital in
Rome. This may well be so; but in the longer term its significance was much
wider than the conflict between Rome and Francia in that it represented a quite
new theory of the relationship between the secular and the ecclesiastical
powers. For contrary to the doctrine of the “symphony” of the two powers which
prevailed in the East and the Byzantine West, the theory encapsulated in the
“Donation” essentially asserted that the head of the Church had a higher
authority, even in purely jurisdictional matters, than the head of the Empire
(whether Eastern or Western); so that the Emperor could only exert his
authority as a kind of vassal of the Pope – or move his dominion to another
place. [504]
However, after the anathematisation of the Filioque by the
Council of Constantinople in 879-80, which was signed by the legates of Pope
John VIII, the the papacy went into a steep moral decline just as Byzantium
reached its apogee. This severely damaged its prestige in the West as well as
in the East. Thus in 991 a Council of French and English bishops at Rouen even
wondered whether the pope of the time was not the Antichrist, or at any rate
his forerunner!
For a short period, as we have seen, it looked as if Byzantinism might
triumph in the West under the leadership of the German Emperor Otto III and
Pope Sylvester II. However, Otto died in 1002 and Sylvester in the next year.
After this the “symphonic” harmony between Church and State at the highest
level of western society began to break down. Like a spinning top that, as it
slows down, begins to lurch more and more sharply from one side to the other,
so the balance of power shifted first to the Emperor and then to the Pope. Or
rather, it shifted first to the Emperor, who wished to place his Franco-German
candidate on the papal throne, and then to the Orthodox populace of Rome, who
stood for a canonically correct election of a Graeco-Roman Pope, who would
preserve the Orthodox confession of faith (without the Frankish Filioque
in the Creed) and the communion of the papacy with the Eastern Church and
Empire.
“Suddenly,” as Papadakis puts it, “the papacy was turned into a sort of
imperial Eigenkirche or vicarage of the German crown. The pope was to be
the instrument and even the pawn of the Germans, as opposed to the Romans.”[505]
This took place in 1009, when, as Patric Ranson and Laurent Motte write, “the
situation was reversed in a definitive fashion. The last Roman Orthodox Pope,
John XVIII, was chased away and a Germanic Pope usurped the Orthodox
patriarchate of Rome: Sergius IV, an adulterer-bishop of Rome who, on ascending
the episcopal throne, wrote to the four other patriarchs a letter of communion
which confirmed the doctrine of the double procession [of the Holy Spirit from
both the Father and the Son – the Filioque heresy] and immediately
provoked a break. The four Orthodox patriarchs then broke communion with the
pope. Some years later [in 1014], Benedict VIII, who was close to the emperor
of Germany Henry II, had the Filioque inserted into the Creed.”[506]
Lampryllos writes: “After the death of this pope, who was… the nephew of
the Emperor Henry, another of his nephews, and brother of the last pope, was
elevated by the imperialist party to the pontificate under the name of John XIX
in 1024. Simple layman though he was, he ascended through all the degrees of the
hierarchy in six days. He held the pontificate for nine years, but finally the
national party, impatient with the excesses of his behaviour, expelled him from
Rome. However, the Emperor Conrad II came down with an army into Italy and
restored him; he died in the same year, and another Teuton, the nephew also of
the Emperor Conrad, succeeded him under the name of Benedict IX. Henry III,
then his son Henry IV, contined to get involved in successive elections of the
popes, tipping the scales in favour of their candidates; almost until 1061 the
popes were their creatures: they were those who go down in history under the
name of the German Popes.”[507]
According to Sir Steven Runciman, the Roman addition of the Filioque
was hateful to the Greeks for purely political reasons, since it represented the triumph of
German influence in Rome.[508] However, the purely theological
zeal of the Byzantines must not be underestimated, and some date the beginning of the Great Schism between the Eastern and
Western Churches precisely to this period. In any case, it was certainly the
German emperors who imposed the heretical Filioque, and their own German
candidates to the papacy, on a basically unwilling Roman populace. So German
caesaropapism can be said to have been the cause of the first stage in the
schism between East and West. The next stage, which would lead, not only to a
break in communion, but to the mutual anathematisation of the two sides, would
be the result, not of German caesaropapism, but of German papocaesarism…
The
Reform Movement
The transformation of German caesaropapism
into German papocaesarism and the transformation of the papacy into a despotic
secular state, was the work of one of the greatest “spiritual” despots in
history, Pope Gregory VII, better known as Hildebrand…
Before becoming pope himself, Hildebrand had been an adviser to Pope Leo
IX, who as bishop of Toul in Lorraine had come under the influence of a network
of monasteries under the leadership of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded
by Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine in 910. The Cluniac monasteries were not
Eigenkirchen, but “stavropegial” foundations independent of the control
of any feudal lord. As such, they had assumed the leadership of a powerful
reform movement directed against the corruptions introduced into the Church by
the feudal system, and had had considerable success in this respect.[509]
They stressed papal authority, clerical celibacy and ecclesiastical
centralisation. Leo IX now introduced the principles of the Cluniac movement
into the government of the Church at the highest level – but with results, in
the reign of his successor, Gregory VII (Hildebrand), that went far beyond the
original purposes of the movement, and which were finally to tear the whole of
the West away from New Rome and the Byzantine commonwealth of nations…
“From the outset,” writes Papadakis, “the new pope was determined to
make the papacy an instrument of spiritual and moral rejuvenation both in Rome
itself and throughout Europe. To this end Pope Leo journeyed to central and
south Italy, but also to France and Germany, crossing the Alps three times.
Nearly four and a half years of his five year pontificate were in fact spent on
trips outside Rome. The numerous regional reforming synods held during these
lengthy sojourns often had as their target the traffic in ecclesiastical
offices and unchaste clergy. Their object above all was to rid the Church of
these abused by restoring canonical discipline. The need to reassert both the
validity and binding power of canon law for all clergy was repeatedly
emphasized. In addition to the decrees against simony and sexual laxity
promulgated by these local synods, however, simoniacal and concubinary clergy
were examined and, when required, suspended, deposed and, even excommunicated.
The object, in short, was to punish the offenders as well. Even if the synods
were not always successful, no one was in doubt that Leo IX and his team of
like-minded assistants were serious. The immediate impact of this flurry of
activity was often extraordinary…
“Overall, the progress of the new papal program was not all smooth
sailing. Widespread protest, often accompanied by violent protest, was to
continue for decades. Yet, all in all, by the end of the century the popular
defenders of simony, of clerical marriage, and of the evils of the proprietary
church had by and large vanished. The champions of reform at any rate proved
more unyielding than their often more numerous adversaries. This was
particularly evident in the skilful drive of the reformers to make celibacy an
absolute prerequisite to ordination. This part of the Gregorian platform was
reinforced by the monastic ideal, since many of the reformers were actually
monks and had already embraced a continent life. Some, like the ascetic Peter
Damian, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, were even eager to treat the problem as
heresy and not as a matter of discipline. But the reformers were perhaps also
uncompromising on this issue because they were convinced that compulsory
clerical continence could advance the process of de-laicization – another more
general item of their platform. A monasticized priesthood, quite simply, was
viewed by reformers everywhere as a crucial corrective to clerical involvement
in the world. If successful, the strategy, it was hoped, would provide the
clergy with that sense of solidarity and corporate identity needed to
distinguish them from the laity. In all essential respects, as one scholar has
put it, the reforming initiatives of the popes were ‘an attempt by men trained
in the monastic discipline to remodel Church and society according to monastic
ideals… to train churchmen to rethink themselves as a distinct ‘order’ with a
life-style totally different from that of laymen.’ Behind the campaign for
celibacy, in sum, aside from the moral and canonical issues involved, was the
desire to set all churchmen apart from and above the laity; the need to create
a spiritual elite by the separation of the priest from the ordinary layman was
an urgent priority. Doubtless, in the end, the Gregorian priesthood did achieve
a certain libertas and even a sense of community, but only at the
expense of a sharp opposition between itself and the rest of society.
“By contrast, in the Christian East, as in primitive Christianity, a
wholly celibate priesthood never became the norm…”[510]
It sometimes happens that one important historical process going in one
direction masks the presence of another going in precisely the opposite
direction. The process of ecclesiastical reformation initiated by Pope Leo IX
in 1049, which aimed at the liberation of the Church from secular control, was
- with the exception of the element of clerical celibacy – a laudable and
necessary programme. But the increasing distance it placed between the clergy
and the laity was fraught with danger. In particular, it threatened to
undermine the traditional place in Christian society of the anointed kings, who occupied an intermediate position between
the clergy and the laity. And in the hands of two ambitious clerics who entered
the service of the papacy at about this time, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida
and Archdeacon Hildebrand, it threatened simply to replace the caesaropapist
variety of feudalism with a papocaesarist variety – that is, the subjection of
the clergy to lay lords with the subjection of the laity, and even the kings,
to clerical lords – or rather, to just one clerical lord, the Pope. For,
as Ranson and Mott write, “in many respects, in its structure the papacy is
nothing other than the religious form of feudalism…”[511]
The problem was that by the middle of the eleventh century Church and
State were so deeply entangled with each other that nobody, on either side of
the quarrel, could conceive of a return to the traditional system of the
symphony of powers, which allowed for the relative independence of both powers
within a single Christian society. Thus the Church wished to be liberated from
“lay investiture”; but she did not want to be deprived of the lands, vassals
and, therefore, political power, which came with investiture. Indeed, the last
act in the life of Pope Leo IX himself was his marching into battle at the head
of a papal army in 1053 (in alliance, ironically, with the Byzantines) in order
to secure his feudal domains in Benevento, which had been granted to him by his
kinsman, Emperor Henry III.
Contemporary western society was shocked by that; for, worldly and
entangled in secular affairs as bishops had become, it was still felt that war
was not an activity suited to a churchman. But that shock was as nothing to the
trauma caused in the 1070s and 1080s by Hildebrand’s creative interpretation of
the basic feudal relationship: all Christians, he said, were “the soldiers of
Christ” and “the vassals of St. Peter”, i.e. of the Pope, and the Pope had the
right to call on all the laity to break their feudal oaths and take up arms
against their lords, in obedience to himself, their ultimate feudal suzerain,
who would repay them, not with lands or physical security, but with the
absolution of sins and everlasting life! Thus freedom from lay control, on the
one hand, but control over the laity, and greater secular power, on the other:
that was the programme – both contradictory and hypocritical - of the
“reformed” papacy.
But before undertaking this assault on the
West, the papacy needed to secure its rear in the East. This was achieved by
picking a quarrel with the Eastern Church and sending Cardinal Humbert to
Constantinople to anathematize it – which elicited an anathema against the
papacy from the Synod of Constantinople on July 16, 1054. This date has
conventionally been taken as the severing of the branch, the moment when the
Western Church finally fell away from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church; and although many have doubted that it was the real cut-off point (it
has, for example, been pointed out that a Byzantine council of 1089 acted as if
the schism of 1054 had not taken place [512]),
the balance of evidence remains in favour of it.[513]
The Pope who sent Humbert to
Constantinople, Leo IX, was the most papist Pope since Nicholas I, and he went
even further than Nicholas both in his exaltation of his see and in his
heretical explanation for such an exaltation. Thus in the reply he wrote to
Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople in September, 1053 (with the
help of Cardinal Humbert), he not only tried, as Dagron writes, “to impose
obedience [on the Eastern Church] by multiplying the expected scriptural
quotations… He also added that the
rebels of the East should content themselves with these witnesses ‘to the
simultaneously earthly and heavenly power, or rather, to the royal priesthood
of the Roman and apostolic see (de terreno et coelesti imperio, imo de
regali sacerdotio romanae et apostolicae sedis).”[514]
Thus the title of “royal priesthood” that
St. Peter (1.1-2, 2.9-10) ascribes to the whole people of God, - a phrase which
by no means denotes the sacramental priesthood, but rather the relationship of
the people of the God to the people of the world – is ascribed by the Pope to
himself alone. Moreover, this “royal priesthood” is now, for the first time,
given the attribute of infallibility: “If anywhere in the universe any people
proudly disagrees with the Roman Church, it can no longer be called or
considered to be a Church – it is already an assemblage of heretics, a
conventicle of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan”.[515]
The now definitely graceless and secular character of the papacy was
demonstrated at the inauguration of Pope Nicholas II, when a quasi-royal coronation was introduced as part of the
rite. Then, in 1059, he decreed that the Popes should be elected by the
cardinal-bishops alone, without the participation of the people. “The role of
the Roman clergy and people,” writes Canning, “was reduced to one of mere
assent to the choice. The historical participation of the emperor was by-passed
with the formula ‘saving the honour and reverence due to our beloved son Henry
[IV] who is for the present regarded as king and who, it is hoped, is going to
be emperor with God’s grace, inasmuch as we have now conceded this to him and
to his successors who shall personally obtain this right from the apostolic
see’.”[516] Sixty years before,
Otto III had bombastically claimed that he had “ordained and created” the Pope.[517]
Now the wheel had come round full circle: the emperors were emperors only by
virtue of receiving this right from the Pope.
Four months later, the new Pope made a hardly less momentous decision:
he entered into alliance at Melfi with the Normans of South Italy, the same
nation whom the Leo IX had been fighting at his death, and whom he had cursed
on his deathbed. The alliance was momentous because up to this moment the Popes
had always turned for protection to the Christian Roman Emperor, whether of
East Rome or of the “Holy Roman Empire” of the West. Indeed, the Pope had
insisted on crowning the “Holy Roman Emperor” precisely because he was the
papacy’s official guardian. For it was unheard of that the Church of Rome
should recognise as her official guardian any other power than the Roman
Emperor, from whom, according to the forged Donation
of Constantine, she had herself received her quasi-imperial dignity and
power. But just as, in the middle of the eighth century, the Papacy had
rejected the Byzantines in favour of the Franks, so now it rejected the Germans
in favour of the Normans, a recently formed nation of Viking origin but French
speech and culture.
Now the Normans had recently seized a large swathe of land belonging to
the Lombards and Byzantines in Southern Italy. The Pope legitimised this
robbery in exchange for the Norman leaders Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard
becoming his feudal vassals and swearing to support the Papacy. In addition,
Robert Guiscard specifically promised: “If you or your successors die before
me, I will help to enforce the dominant wishes of the Cardinals and of the
Roman clergy and laity in order that a pope may be chosen and established to
the honour of St. Peter.”[518]
Guiscard was as good as his word. “Thus after 1059 the Norman conquests
were made progressively to subserve the restoration of the Latin rite and the
extension of papal jurisdiction in southern Italy"[519]
- at the expense both of the Byzantines and of the German Emperor, Henry IV,
who was at that time still a child and therefore unable to react to the assault
on his position.
Even before this, the Papacy had begun to forge close bonds with the
Normans in their homeland in Northern France, whence the papal assault on that
other fortress of old-style Orthodox Autocracy, England, would soon be
launched. Thus in 1055, the year after Duke William of Normandy seized
effective control of his duchy by defeating a coalition led by his lord, King
Henry I of France, the old-fashioned (that is, Orthodox) Archbishop Mauger was
deposed to make way for the more forward-looking Maurilius. He introduced “a
new and extraneous element”[520]
– that is, an element more in keeping with the ideals of the heretical,
“reformed papacy” – into the Norman Church. Then, in 1059, papal sanction for
the marriage between Duke William and Matilda of Flanders, which had been
withheld by Leo IX at the Council of Rheims in 1049, was finally obtained. This
opened the way for full cooperation between the Normans and the Pope. Finally,
William supported the candidacy of Alexander II to the throne as against that
of Honorius II, who was supported by the German Empress Agnes.[521]
The Pope now owed a debt of gratitude to the Normans which they were soon to
call in…
By the 1060s, then, there were
only two powers in the West that stood in the way of the complete triumph of
the crude, militaristic ethos of feudalism: the Orthodox autocracies of England
and Germany. By the end of the century both powers had been brought low –
England by military conquest and its transformation into a single feudal fief
under William of Normandy, and Germany by cunning dialectic and the fear of
excommunication by the Pope.
The
Fall of Orthodox England
The English, as we have seen, held the autocracy in the greatest honour
as a sacred institution on a par with the priesthood. This is evident even in
as late a document as the eleventh-century Anonymous of York: “Kings and
priests have a common unction of holy oil, a common spirit of sanctification, a
common quality of benediction, the name and power of God and Christ in common…
If therefore the king and the priest are both, by grace, gods and christs of
the Lord, whatever they do by virtue of this grace is not done by a man but by
a god and a christ of our Lord.”[522]
But this was precisely the teaching and veneration that the heretical
papacy was determined to destroy – by force, if necessary…
In 1043, after a period of rule by Danish Christian kings (1017-1042),
the Old English dynasty of Alfred the Great was restored in the person of King
Ethelred’s son Edward, known to later generations as “the Confessor”. In
January, 1066, King Edward died, and his brother-in-law Harold Godwineson was
consecrated king in his place. Now two years earlier, Harold had been a
prisoner at the court of William in Normandy, and in order to gain his freedom
had sworn over a box of holy relics to uphold William’s claim to the English
throne. And so when he broke his oath and became king himself, William decided
to invade – with the Pope’s blessing.
How could the Pope bless the armed invasion of a Christian country led
by an anointed king which posed no threat to its neighbours? In order to answer
this question, we have to examine the new theory of Church-State relations
being developed in Rome. The critical question then was: in a society whose
aims are defined by the Christian faith, are the jurisdictions of the clergy
and secular ruler strictly parallel, or do the clergy have the power to depose
a king who, in their judgement, is not ruling in accordance with these
spiritual aims – whose nature, of course, can only be defined by the clergy?
Now as early as 633 the Fourth Council of Toledo had condemned the
Visigothic King Svithila as unjust and faithless, and declared that he had
already deprived himself of the kingship. However, the king had already been
removed by a Frankish army, and the nobles had already elected a new king,
Sisenand, before the convening of this Council, so it was not the clergy who
deposed the king in this case. Moreover, the bishops then proceeded to condemn
rebellions against kings with an extraordinarily powerful anathema! [523]
Again, in 750, when the last Merovingian king, Childeric, had been
deposed, and the first Carolingian, Pippin, enthroned in his place, it was not
Pope Zachariah who deposed Childeric: he only confirmed and blessed the change
of dynasty, declaring that “it would be better for him to be called king who
had the power of one, than him who remained without royal power”, and then
“commanded by apostolic authority that Pippin be made king lest order be
disturbed”.
Again, it was the chief men of the Carolingian empire who, in 833,
removed their support from Louis the Pious. The bishops only confirmed the
decision later by “declaring formally the divine judgement that he had been
shown to be unfit to govern, and by then degrading him from his rank as ruler
and imposing a penance on him.”[524]
So up to the middle of the ninth century, no decisive test-case had yet
appeared which would define whether the Church could, not simply confirm a royal deposition or change of
dynasty, but actually initiate it.
Pope Nicholas I was the first pope to take it upon himself to initiate the deposition of emperors and
patriarchs as if all power in both Church and State were in his hands. However,
as we have seen, in 865 his efforts were thwarted by the firm opposition both
of the Eastern Church under St. Photius the Great and of Western hierarchs such
as Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims.[525]
It was not before another two hundred years had passed that the papacy once
again felt strong enough to challenge the power of the anointed kings…
Their chance came on the death of King
Edward the Confessor, when Harold Godwinesson took the throne
of England with the consent of the leading men of England but without the
consent of the man to whom he had once sworn allegiance, Duke William of
Normandy.
Professor Douglas writes: “At some
undetermined date within the first eight months of 1066 [Duke William] appealed
to the papacy, and a mission was sent under the leadership of Gilbert,
archdeacon of Lisieux, to ask for judgement in the duke’s favour from Alexander
II. No records of the case as it was heard in Rome have survived, nor is there
any evidence that Harold Godwinesson was ever summoned to appear in his own
defence. On the other hand, the arguments used by the duke’s representatives
may be confidently surmised. Foremost among them must have been an insistence
on Harold’s oath, and its violation when the earl seized the throne… Archdeacon
Hildebrand.. came vigorously to the support of Duke William, and Alexander II
was led publicly to proclaim his approval of Duke William’s enterprise.”[526]
The Pope had his own reasons for
supporting William. In 1052 Archbishop Robert of Canterbury, a Norman, had fled
from England after the struggle between the English and Norman parties at the
court had inclined in favour of the English. During his flight he forgot to take
his pallium (omophorion), which with the agreement of the king was then handed
over to Bishop Stigand of Winchester, who became archbishop of Canterbury in
place of Robert. This elicited the wrath of the Pope, who labelled Stigand an
anticanonical usurper. But the English refused to obey the Pope. And so,
beginning from 1052 and continuing right up to the Stigand’s deposition by the
legates of the Pope at the false council of Winchester in 1070, England
remained in schism from, and under the ban of, the Roman Pope – who himself,
from 1054, was in schism from, and under the ban of, the Great Church of
Constantinople.
To make matters worse, in 1058 Archbishop
Stigand had had his position regularised by the “antipope” (i.e. enemy of the
Hildebrandine reformers) Benedict IX. Here was the perfect excuse for blessing
William’s invasion: the “schismatic” English had to be brought to heel and
their Church purged of all secular influence. And if this “holy” aim was to be
achieved by the most secular of means – armed invasion and the murder of
hundreds of thousands of innocent Christians – so be it!
According to Frank McLynn, it was
Stigand’s supposed uncanonicity “that most interested [Pope] Alexander. William
pitched his appeal to the papacy largely on his putative role as the leader of
the religious and ecclesiastical reform movement in Normandy and as a man who
could clean the Augean stables of church corruption in England; this weighed
heavily with Alexander, who, as his joust with Harald Hardrada in 1061
demonstrated, thought the churches of northern Europe far too remote from papal
control. It was the abiding dream of the new ‘reformist’ papacy to be
universally accepted as the arbiter of thrones and their succession; William’s
homage therefore constituted a valuable precedent. Not surprisingly, Alexander
gave the proposed invasion of England his blessing. It has sometimes been
queried why Harold did not send his own embassy to counter William’s arguments.
Almost certainly, the answer is that he thought it a waste of time on two
grounds: the method of electing a king in England had nothing to do with the
pope and was not a proper area for his intervention; and, in any case, the pope
was now the creature of the Normans in southern Italy and would ultimately do
what they ordered him to do. Harold was right: Alexander II blessed all the
Norman marauding expeditions of the 1060s.
“But although papal sanction for William’s
‘enterprise of England’ was morally worthless, it was both a great propaganda
and diplomatic triumph for the Normans. It was a propaganda victory because it
allowed William to pose as the leader of crusaders in a holy war, obfuscating
and mystifying the base, materialistic motives of his followers and
mercenaries. It also gave the Normans a great psychological boost, for they
could perceive themselves as God’s elect, and it is significant that none of
William’s inner circle entertained doubts about the ultimate success of the
English venture. Normandy now seemed the spearhead of a confident Christianity,
on the offensive for the first time in centuries, whereas earlier [Western]
Christendom had been beleagured by Vikings to the north, Hungarians to the east
and Islam to the south. It was no accident that, with Hungary and Scandinavia recently
Christianised, the Normans were the vanguard in the first Crusade, properly so
called, against the Islamic heathens in the Holy Land.
“Alexander’s fiat was a diplomatic
triumph, too, as papal endorsement for the Normans made it difficult for other
powers to intervene on Harold’s side. William also pre-empted one of the
potential sources of support for the Anglo-Saxons by sending an embassy to the
emperor Henry IV; this, too, was notably successful, removing a possible
barrier to a Europe-wide call for volunteers in the ‘crusade’.”[527]
As long as King Edward had been alive,
Hildebrand’s party had been restrained from attacking England both by the
king’s Europe-wide renown as a holy wonderworker and by the lack of a military
force suitable for the task in hand. But now Edward was dead, having prophesied
on his death-bed that England would soon be invaded by demons and lose the
grace of God.[528]
And William’s suit presented Hildebrand with the opportunity for the “holy war”
he had wanted for so long. William and his army invaded the south of England in
September, 1066. Meanwhile, King Harald Hardrada of Norway had invaded the
north. On September 20 the English King Harold defeated the Norwegian army, and
then, with the minimum of rest and without waiting for reinforcements, he
marched south to meet the Normans.
David Howarth has argued convincingly that
the reason was that Harold now, for the first time, heard (from an envoy of
William's) that he and his followers had been excommunicated by the Pope and
that William was fighting with the pope's blessing and under a papal banner,
with a tooth of St. Peter encrusted in gold around his neck. "This meant
that he was not merely defying William, he was defying the Pope. It was
doubtful whether the Church, the army and the people would support him in that
defiance: at best, they would be bewildered and half-hearted. Therefore, since
a battle had to be fought, it must be fought at once, without a day's delay,
before the news leaked out. After that, if the battle was won, would be time to
debate the Pope's decision, explain that the trial had been a travesty, query
it, appeal against it, or simply continue to defy it.”[529]
The defeat of King Harold at Hastings was the prelude for the
greatest genocide in European history to that date. Every fifth Englishman was
killed[530],
and some parts of the country were a wasteland for generations to come. So
terrible was the slaughter – and the destruction of holy churches and relics –
that the Norman bishops who took part in the campaign were required to do
penance when they returned home.
But the Pope who had blessed this unholy
slaughter did no penance. Rather, he sent his legates to England, who, at the
false council of Winchester in 1070, deposed Archbishop Stigand (and after him,
most of the English bishops), and formally integrated conquered England into
the new Roman Catholic empire.[531]
The Norman Conquest constituted, in
effect, the first crusade of the “reformed” Papacy against Orthodox
Christendom. For, as Professor Douglas writes: “It is beyond doubt that the
latter half of the eleventh century witnessed a turning-point in the history of
Western Christendom, and beyond doubt Normandy and the Normans played a
dominant part in the transformation which then occurred… They assisted the
papacy to rise to a new political domination, and they became closely
associated with the reforming movement in the Church which the papacy came to
direct. They contributed also to a radical modification of the relations between
Eastern and Western Europe with results that still survive. The Norman Conquest
of England may thus in one sense be regarded as but part of a far-flung
endeavour.”[532]
It follows that if William had lost, then,
as John Hudson writes, “the reformers in the papacy, who had backed William in
his quest for the English throne, might have lost their momentum. Normandy
would have been greatly weakened…”[533]
In other words, the whole course of European history might have been changed…
Professor (and Metropolitan) John
Romanides sees William’s victory as the victory of the “Franco-Latin” heretics
of the French, German and North Italian lands over the “West Roman” Orthodox of
Rome itself and the British Isles. “The Franco-Latins had just completed the
expulsion of the Roman Orthodox from the Papacy in 1009/12-1046. This was
followed by William the Conqueror’s capture of England in 1066 and by his
appointment of the Lombard Lanfranc as the first Franco-Latin Archbishop of
Canterbury with the blessing of the Lombard Pope Alexander II in 1070. Lanfranc
and his Franco-Latin bishops got their apostolic succession by dismissing all
their Celtic and Saxon predecessors en masse. They condemned them as heretics
and schismatics and sentenced them to prison for life where they were tortured
and starved to death. Lanfranc’s successor in 1093 was the Lombard Anselm of
Canterbury who was the chief exponent of the Franco-Latin positions at the
[dialogue between the Franco-Latins and the Roman Orthodox over the Filioque]
at Bari [in 1098].”[534]
All William’s barons and bishops owned
their land as his vassals; and when, on August 1, 1086, William summoned all
the free tenants of England to an assembly at Salisbury and imposed upon them
an oath of loyalty directly to himself, he became in effect the sole landowner
of England – that is, the owner of all its land. Thus was born the feudal monarchy, a new kind of
despotism.
R.H.C. Davis explains that this feudal monarchy was in fact “a New
Leviathan, the medieval equivalent of a socialist state. In a socialist state,
the community owns, or should own, the means of production. In a feudal
monarchy, the king did own all the land – which in the terms of medieval
economy might fairly be equated with the means of production.
“The
best and simplest example of a feudal monarchy is to be found in England after
the Norman Conquest. When William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwineson at
the battle of Hastings (1066), he claimed to have established his legitimate
right to succeed Edward the Confessor as King of England, but, owing to
Harold’s resistance, he was also able to claim that he had won the whole
country by right of conquest. Henceforward, every inch of land was to be his,
and he would dispose of it as he thought fit.”[535]
As we have seen, William had conquered
England with the blessing of Archdeacon Hildebrand. And shortly after his
bloody pacification of the country he imposed the new canon law of the reformed
papacy upon the English Church. This pleased Hildebrand, now Pope Gregory VII,
who was therefore prepared to overlook the fact that William considered that he
owed his kingdom to his sword and God alone:
"The king of the English, although in
certain matters he does not comport himself as devoutly as we might hope,
nevertheless in that he has neither destroyed nor sold the Churches of God [!];
that he has taken pains to govern his subjects in peace and justice [!!]; that
he has refused his assent to anything detrimental to the apostolic see, even
when solicited by certain enemies of the cross of Christ; and that he has
compelled priests on oath to put away their wives and laity to forward the
tithes they were withholding from us - in all these respects he has shown
himself more worthy of approbation and honour than other kings..."
The "other kings" Gregory was
referring to included, first of all, the Emperor Henry IV of Germany, who,
unlike William, did not support the Pope's “reforms”. If William had acted like
Henry, then there is no doubt that Pope Gregory would have excommunicated him,
too. And if William had refused to co-operate with the papacy, then there is
equally no doubt that the Pope would have incited his subjects to wage a
"holy war" against him, as he did against Henry. For, as an anonymous
monk of Hersfeld wrote: "[The Gregorians] say that it is a matter of the
faith and it is the duty of the faithful in the Church to kill and to persecute
those who communicate with, or support the excommunicated King Henry and refuse
to promote the efforts of [the Gregorian] party."[536]
But
William, by dint of brute force within and subtle diplomacy without, managed to
achieve the most complete control over both Church and State that any English
ruler ever achieved, while at the same time paradoxically managing to remain on
relatively good terms with the most autocratic Pope in history. For
totalitarian rulers only respect rivals of the same spirit. Thus did the
papocaesarist totalitarianism of Hildebrand beget the caesaropapist
totalitarianism of William the Bastard…
The absolute nature of William's
control of the Church was vividly expressed by Edmer of Canterbury: "Now,
it was the policy of King William to maintain in England the usages and laws
which he and his fathers before him were accustomed to have in Normandy.
Accordingly he made bishops, abbots and other nobles throughout the whole
country of persons of whom (since everyone knew who they were, from what estate
they had been raised and to what they had been promoted) it would be considered
shameful ingratitude if they did not implicitly obey his laws, subordinating to
this every other consideration; or if any one of them presuming upon the power
conferred by any temporal dignity dared raise his head against him.
Consequently, all things, spiritual and temporal alike, waited upon the nod of
the King... He would not, for instance, allow anyone in all his dominion,
except on his instructions, to recognize the established Pontiff of the City of
Rome or under any circumstance to accept any letter from him, if it had not
first been submitted to the King himself. Also he would not let the primate of
his kingdom, by which I mean the Archbishop of Canterbury, otherwise Dobernia,
if he were presiding over a general council of bishops, lay down any ordinance
or prohibition unless these were agreeable to the King's wishes and had been
first settled by him. Then again he would not allow any one of his bishops,
except on his express instructions, to proceed against or excommunicate one of
his barons or officers for incest or adultery or any other cardinal offence,
even when notoriously guilty, or to lay upon him any punishment of
ecclesiastical discipline."[537]
Again, in a letter to the Pope in reply to the latter's demand for
fealty, William wrote: "I have not consented to pay fealty, nor will I
now, because I never promised it, nor do I find that any of my predecessors
ever paid it to your predecessors."[538]
In the same letter he pointedly called Archbishop Lanfranc "my
vassal" (i.e. not the Pope’!). Here we see the way
in which the language of feudalism, of the mutual rights and obligations of
lords and vassals, had crept into the language of Church-State relations at the
highest level.
On the other hand, he agreed to the Pope's
demand for the payment of "Peter's Pence", the voluntary contribution
of the English people to Rome which had now become compulsory - for to squeeze
the already impoverished English meant no diminution in his personal power. The
Popes therefore had to wait until William's death before gradually asserting
their personal control over the English Church.
They did not have to wait long. In the 12th
century John of Salisbury proclaimed the revolutionary doctrine that since “the
prince receives the temporal sword from the hands of the Church”, if he used it
badly could lawfully be killed. Again, Archbishop Thomas à Beckett
reproached Pope Alexander III for being too restrained in his struggle with the
German Emperor Frederick, writing: “Take courage, Father, and be strengthened;
we are more numerous than they; the Lord has destroyed the sword of the
impious, Frederick, and He has also destroyed those who do not repent and
become reconciled with the Church of God. Finally, we await your judgement – or
rather the judgement of the Judge Who takes away the life of sovereigns and
frees the poor man from the mighty.”[539] If we remove the
religious language, it is only a short step from here to Marx…
Nor did Thomas shrink from opposing his
own king, the powerful Henry II, for which he paid with his own life… But this
opposition was not, as later romancers have fantasized, an expression of the
suppressed nationalism of the Saxons against the Normans, still less of the old
English Orthodox Church against its secular conquerors; for neither Saxon
nationalism nor English Orthodoxy had survived the totalitarian rule of
William. It was rather the expression of the resurgent power of the papacy in
the face even of the most powerful of secular rulers.
In 1071, Byzantine Bari in South Italy fell to the Normans, who soon
created another absolutist kingdom “of Sicily and Italy” (as in England,
formally under the Pope’s overlordship, but in fact independent of it) that
served as the launch-pad for several invasions of the Byzantine Empire. In the
same year the Byzantines suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the
Seljuk Turks at Manzikert, as a result of which most of Anatolia, the heartland
of Byzantine strength, was conceded to the Turks. As Orthodox autocracy reeled
under these hammer blows from East and West, Papism entered upon a new and
decisive phase of its development with the election, in 1073, of Archdeacon
Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII…
Hildebrand was a midget in physical size.[540]
But having been elected to the papacy “by the will of St. Peter”, he set about
ensuring that no ruler on earth would rival him in grandeur. Having witnessed
the Emperor Henry III’s deposition of Pope Gregory VI, with whom he went into
exile, he took the name Gregory VII in order to emphasise a unique mission.
As Peter de Rosa writes, “he had seen an
emperor dethrone a pope; he would dethrone an emperor regardless.
“Had he put an emperor in his place, he would have been beyond
reproach. He did far more. By introducing a mischievous and heretical doctrine
[of Church-State relations], he put himself in place of the emperor… He claimed
to be not only Bishop of bishops but King of kings. In a parody of the gospels,
the devil took him up to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms
of the world, and Gregory VII exclaimed: These are all mine.
“As that most objective of historians,
Henry Charles Lea, wrote in The
Inquisition in the Middle Ages: ‘To the realization of this ideal [of papal
supremacy], he devoted his life with a fiery zeal and unshaken purpose that
shrank from no obstacle, and to it he was ready to sacrifice not only the men
who stood in his path but also the immutable principles of truth and justice.’
“… The Bishop of Trier saw the danger. He
charged Gregory with destroying the unity of the Church. The Bishop of Verdun
said that the pope was mistaken in his unheard-of arrogance. Belief belongs to
one’s church, the heart belongs to one’s country. The pope, he said, must not filch
the heart’s allegiance. This was precisely what Gregory did. He wanted all; he
left emperors and princes nothing. The papacy, as he fashioned it, by
undermining patriotism, undermined the authority of secular rulers; they felt
threatened by the Altar. At the Reformation, in England and elsewhere, rulers
felt obliged to exclude Catholicism from their lands in order to feel secure…
“The changes Gregory brought about were
reflected in language. Before him, the pope’s traditional title was Vicar of St.
Peter. After him, it was Vicar of Christ. Only ‘Vicar of Christ’ could justify
his absolutist pretensions, which his successors inherited in reality not from
Peter or from Jesus but from him.”[541]
Canning writes: “The impact of Gregory
VII’s pontificate was enormous: for the church nothing was to be the same
again. From his active lifetime can be traced the settling of the church in its
long-term direction as a body of power and coercion; the character of the
papacy as a jurisdictional and governmental institution… There arises the
intrusive thought, out of bounds for the historian: this was the moment of the
great wrong direction taken by the papacy, one which was to outlast the Middle
Ages and survive into our own day. From the time of Gregory can be dated the
deliberate clericalisation of the church based on the notion that the clergy,
being morally purer, were superior to the laity and constituted a church which
was catholic, chaste and free. There was a deep connection between power and a
celibacy which helped distinguish the clergy as a separate and superior caste,
distanced in the most profound psychological sense from the family concerns of
the laity beneath them. At the time of the reform papacy the church became
stamped with characteristics which have remained those of the Roman Catholic
church: it became papally centred, legalistic, coercive and clerical. The Roman
church was, in Gregory’s words, the ‘mother and mistress’ (mater et magistra)
of all churches.’”[542]
Gregory’s position was based on a forged
collection of canons and a false interpretation of two Gospel passages: Matthew
16.18-19 and John 21.15-17. According to the first passage, in Gregory’s
interpretation, he was the successor of Peter, upon whom the Church had been
founded, and had plenary power to bind and to loose. And according to the
second, the flock of Peter over which he had jurisdiction included all
Christians, not excluding emperors. As he wrote: “Perhaps [the supporters of
the emperor] imagine that when God commended His Church to Peter three times,
saying, ‘Feed My sheep’, He made an exception of kings? Why do they not
consider, or rather confess with shame that when God gave Peter, as the ruler,
the power of binding and loosing in heaven and on earth, he excepted no-one and
withheld nothing from his power?”
For “who could doubt that the priests of
Christ are considered the fathers and masters of kings, princes and all the
faithful?” This meant that he had power both to excommunicate and depose the
emperor. Nor did the emperor’s anointing give him any authority in Gregory’s
eyes. For “greater power is conceded to an exorcist, when he is made a
spiritual emperor for expelling demons, than could be given to any layman for
secular domination”. “Kings and princes of the earth, seduced by empty glory,
prefer their interests to the things of the spirit, whereas pious pontiffs,
despising vainglory, set the things of God above the things of the flesh.”[543]
Indeed, “who would not know that kings and dukes took their origin from those
who, ignorant of God, through pride, rapine, perfidy, murders and, finally,
almost any kind of crime, at the instigation of the devil, the prince of this
world, sought with blind desire and unbearable presumption to dominate their
equals, namely other men?”[544]
Hildebrand’s attitude to political power
was almost Manichaean in its negative intensity. Manichaeism, a dualistic
heresy that saw physical nature as evil, arose in Persia and had a most varied
history after the execution of its founder, Mani, in 276. It spread west to the
Roman empire, where St. Augustine was a manichee before he became a Christian.
Towards the end of the first millennium it reappeared as the sect of the
Paulicians in Asia Minor, then as the Bogomils in Bulgaria and Bosnia, then as
the Cathars in southern France. It survived in southern China until the 16th
century. Hildebrand’s attitude was Manichaean insofar as it saw the
relationship between the Church and the State as a dualistic struggle between
good and evil, light and darkness. Just as the Manichees (like all heresies of
the Gnostic type) tried to free themselves from the flesh and physical nature as from something defiling in
essence, so the Gregorians tried to free themselves from the state as from
something evil in essence. For them there could be no really good king:
kingship should be in the hands of the only good ones, the priests. Indeed, as
de Rosa writes of a later Pope who faithfully followed Hildebrand’s teaching,
“this was Manicheeism applied to relations between church and state. The
church, spiritual, was good; the state, material, was essentially the work of
the devil. This naked political absolutism undermined the authority of kings.
Taken seriously, his theories would lead to anarchy”.[545]
Of course, the idea that the priesthood
was in essence higher than the kingship was not in itself heretical, and could
find support in the Fathers. However, the Fathers always allowed that kings had
supremacy of jurisdiction in their own sphere, and insisted that the power of
secular rulers comes from God and is worthy of the honour that befits every
God-established institution. Índeed, just before the schism the Latin
Peter Damian had written: “In the king Christ is truly recognised as reigning”.[546]
What was new, shocking and completely unpatristic in Gregory’s words was his
disrespect for the kingship, his refusal to allow it any dignity or holiness –
still more, his proto-communist implication that rulers had no right to rule unless he gave them that right.
The corollary of this, of course, was that
the only rightful ruler was the Pope.
For “if the holy apostolic see, through the princely power divinely conferred
upon it, has jurisdiction over spiritual things, why not also over secular
things?” Thus to the secular rulers of Spain Gregory wrote in 1077 that the
kingdom of Spain belonged to St. Peter and the Roman Church “in rightful
ownership”. And to the secular rulers of Sardinia he wrote in 1073 that the
Roman Church exerted “a special and individual care” over them – which meant,
as a later letter of 1080 demonstrated, that they would face armed invasion if
they did not submit to the pope’s terms.
Again, in 1075 he threatened King Philip of France with
excommunication, having warned the French episcopate that if the king did not
amend his ways he would place France under interdict, adding: “Do not doubt
that we shall, with God’s help, make every possible effort to snatch the
kingdom of France from his possession.”[547] But this kind of talk would have remained just words, and would not
have had the effect it in fact had if Gregory had not had the ability to compel
submission. He demonstrated this ability when wrote to one of King Philip’
vassals, Duke William of Aquitaine, and invited him to threaten the king. The
king backed down…
This power was demonstrated to an even
greater extent in his famous dispute with Emperor Henry IV of Germany. It began
with a quarrel between the pope and the emperor over who should succeed to the
see of Milan. This was the see, significantly, whose most famous bishop, St.
Ambrose, had excommunicated (but not deposed) an emperor, but had also declared
that Rome had only “a primacy of confession, not of honour”.[548]
Gregory expected Henry to back down as King Philip had done. But he did not,
doubtless because the see of Milan was of great importance politically in that
its lands and vassals gave it control of the Alpine passes and therefore of
Henry’s access to his Italian domains. Instead, in January, 1076, he convened a
Synod of Bishops at Worms which addressed Gregory as “brother Hildebrand”,
demonstrated that his despotism had introduced mob rule into the Church, and
refused all obedience to him: “Since, as thou didst publicly proclaim, none of
us has been to thee a bishop, so henceforth thou shalt be Pope to none of us”.[549]
Gregory retaliated in a truly
revolutionary way. In a Synod in Rome in February he declared the emperor
deposed. Addressing St. Peter, he said: “I withdraw the whole kingdom of the
Germans and of Italy from Henry the King, son of Henry the Emperor. For he has
risen up against thy Church with unheard of arrogance. And I absolve all
Christians from the bond of the oath which they have made to him or shall make.
And I forbid anyone to serve him as King…”[550]
By absolving subjects of their allegiance
to their king, Gregory “effectively,” as Robinson writes, “sanctioned rebellion
against the royal power…”[551]
And he followed this up by published the famous Dictatus Papae, which which must be counted as one of the most
revolutionary – and megalomaniac - documents in history: "The Pope can be
judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err till the
end of time; the Roman Church was founded by Christ alone; the Pope alone can
depose bishops and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new
bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can
call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own
judgements; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he
can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet;
his legates, even though in inferior orders, have precedence over all bishops;
an appeal to the papal court inhibits judgement by all inferior courts; a duly
ordained Pope is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of St. Peter."[552]
Robinson continues: “The confusion of the
spiritual and the secular in Gregory VII’s thinking is most marked in the
terminology he used to describe the laymen whom he recruited to further his
political aims. His letters are littered with the terms ‘the warfare of
Christ’, ‘the service of St. Peter’, ‘the vassals of St. Peter’…, Military
terminology is, of course, commonly found in patristic writings.. St. Paul had evoked
the image of the soldier of Christ who waged an entirely spiritual war… In the
letters of Gregory VII, the traditional metaphor shades into literal actuality…
For Gregory, the ‘warfare of Christ’ and the ‘warfare of St. Peter’ came to
mean, not the spiritual struggles of the faithful, nor the duties of the
secular clergy, nor the ceaseless devotions of the monks; but rather the armed
clashes of feudal knights on the battlefields of Christendom…”[553]
This was power politics under the guise of
a anti-political spirituality; but it worked. Although, at a Synod in Worms in
1076, some bishops supported Henry, saying that the Pope had “introduced
worldliness into the Church”; “the bishops have been deprived of their divine
authority”; “the Church of God is in danger of destruction” – still Henry began
to lose support, and in 1077 he with his wife and child was forced to march
across the Alps in deepest winter and do penance before Gregory, standing for
three days almost naked in the snow outside the castle of Canossa. Gregory
restored him to communion, but not to his kingship…
Soon rebellion began to stir in Germany as
Rudolf, Duke of Swabia, was elected anti-king. For a while Gregory hesitated.
But then, in 1080, he definitely deposed Henry, freed his subjects from their
allegiance to him and declared that the kingship was conceded to Rudolf.
However, Henry recovered, convened a Synod of bishops that declared Gregory
deposed and then convened another Synod that elected an anti-pope, Wibert of
Ravenna. In October, 1080, Rudolf died in battle. Then in 1083 Henry and Wibert
marched on Rome. In 1084 Wibert was consecrated Pope Clement III and in turn
crowned Henry as emperor. Gregory fled from Rome with his Norman allies and
died in Salerno in 1085.[554] It looked as if
Gregory had failed, but his ideas endured - as did the conflict between papacy
and empire, which rumbled on for centuries.
In this proud exaltation of the opinion of
one local Church, the Roman – or rather,
of one man in one local Church – above the Universal Church lies the whole
tragedy of the further development of Western civilisation, and of its most
characteristic fruits: Reformation, Rationalism and Revolution...
For, as the great Russian poet F.I.
Tyutchev wrote in 1849: “The revolution, which is nothing other than the
apotheosis of that same human I having
attained its fullest flowering, was not slow to recognise as its own, and to
welcome as two of its glorious ancestors – both Gregory VII and Luther. Kinship
of blood began to speak in it, and it accepted the one, in spite of his
Christian beliefs, and almost deified the other, although he was a pope.
“But if the evident similarity uniting the
three members of this row constitutes the basis of the historical life of the
West, the starting-point of this link must necessarily be recognised to be
precisely that profound distortion to which the Christian principle was
subjected by the order imposed on it by Rome. In the course of the centuries
the Western Church, under the shadow of Rome, almost completely lost the
appearance of the originating principle pointed out by her. She ceased to be,
amidst the great society of men, the society of believers, freely united in
spirit and truth under the law of Christ; she was turned into a political
institution, a political force, a state within the state. It would be true to
say that throughout the whole course of the Middle Ages, the Church in the West
was nothing other than a Roman colony planted in a conquered land…”[555]
When Pope Gregory was lying on his
death-bed, an exile in Salerno, he said: "I have loved righteousness and
hated iniquity," he said; "therefore I die in exile." But a monk
who waited on him replied: "In exile thou canst not be, for God hath given
thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth
for thy possession (Psalm 2.8).
The papist claim to lordship over the
whole world, including the heathen, was demonstrated especially during the
Crusades.
The Crusades were the manifestation to the outside, Orthodox Christian
and Muslim worlds, of the mystery of iniquity that was taking place within the
Western world. The West – especially England, Germany and Italy – had already
felt the mailed fist of the Pope. Now it was the turn of the North, the South
and the East.
First, the Pope’s vassals, the Normans, having conquered Sicily and
Bari, invaded mainland Greece; the Emperor Alexis I only just succeeded in
containing them with the help of English warrior-exiles.[556]
Then, in 1085, King Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city
of Toledo for the Pope; within a few years, his champion, the famous El Cid,
had entered Valencia. Most importantly, in 1095, at a synod in Clermont, Pope
Urban II appealed to all Christians to free Jerusalem from the Saracens, and
placed his own legate, a bishop, at the head of the Christian forces. Thus, as
Roberts writes, “Urban II used the first crusade to become the diplomatic
leader of Europe’s lay monarchs; they looked to Rome, not the empire.”[557]
Urban’s reasoning at Clermont is important as showing how the crusades
were seen as a “Christian” solution to problems thrown up by the new feudal,
militaristic pattern of life in the West. He made it clear, writes Barbara Ehrenreich,
“that a major purpose of the crusade was to deflect the knights’ predatory
impulses away from Europe itself:
“’Oh race of the Franks, we learn that in some of your provinces no one
can venture on the road by day or by night without injury or attack by
highwaymen, and no one is secure even at home.’
“We know he is not talking about common, or lowborn, criminals because
it emerges in the next sentence that the solution to this problem is a
re-enactment of the ‘Truce of God’, meaning voluntary restraint on the part of
the knights, whose energies are now to be directed outward towards the
infidels:
“’Let all hatred depart from among you, all quarrels end, all wars
cease. Start upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre to wrest that land from the
wicked race and subject it to yourselves.’
“Militarily, the Crusades were largely a disaster for the Christians,
but they did serve to cement the fusion of the cross and the sword. The
church’s concept of the ‘just war’ had always been something of a grudging
concession to reality. Here, though, was a war that was not only ‘just’ but
necessary and holy in the eyes of God, Christendom’s first jihad. Those
who participated in Europe’s internal wars were often required to do penance
for the sin of killing; but participation in a crusade had the opposite effect,
cleansing a man from prior sin and guaranteeing his admission to heaven. It was
the Crusades, too, that led to the emergence of a new kind of warrior: the
warrior-monk, pledged to lifelong chastity as well as to war. In the military
monastic orders of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitalers, any
lingering Christian hesitations about violence were dissolved. The way of the
knight – or at least of the chaste and chivalrous knight – became every bit as
holy as that of the cloistered monk.”[558]
The first Crusade of 1098-99 was a watershed in relations between East
and West. Although the proclaimed enemies of the Cross, the Muslims and Jews,
were duly slaughtered en masse at the capture of Jerusalem, those who
suffered most long-term were those who were supposed to be being liberated –
the Orthodox Christians of the Orient. Latin kingdoms with Latin patriarchs
were established over Orthodox populations in Jerusalem, Antioch, Cyprus and, most
bloodily and shockingly, in Constantinople itself during the Fourth Crusade of
1204. In general, the thirteenth century represented a nadir for Orthodoxy and
the zenith of Papism.
The Pope also encouraged crusades against the pagan Slavs and Balts of
the Baltic Sea coast. As in the Mediterranean, these campaigns were marked by
extreme militarism, an eye for commercial exploitation and anti-Orthodoxy. Thus
Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg is described as having colonised the lands of
the Slavic Wends in the mid-twelfth century as follows: “Because God gave
plentiful aid and victory to our leader and the other princes, the Slavs have
been everywhere crushed and driven out. A people strong and without number have
come from the bounds of the ocean and taken possession of the territories of
the Slavs. They have built cities and churches and have grown in riches beyond
all estimation.”[559]
Again, Bernard of Clairvaux said about the Wendish crusade of 1147: “We
expressly forbid that for any reason whatsoever they should make a truce with
those peoples, whether for money or for tribute, until such time as, with God’s
help, either their religion or their nation be destroyed.”[560]
Both the religion and the nation were destroyed… For, as Bernard stressed in his
In Praise of the New Knighthood, “the
knight of Christ need fear no sin in killing the foe, he is a minister of God
for the punishment of the wicked. In the death of a pagan a Christian is
glorified, because Christ is glorified.”[561]
Even the Orthodox Russians were considered to be in need of this
militaristic kind of conversion. Thus Bishop Matthew of Crakow wrote to Bernard
in 1150, asking him to “exterminate the godless rites and customs of the
Ruthenians [Russians]”.[562]
A vivid witness to the destructiveness and anti-Orthodoxy of these
Crusaders in the Baltic is provided by the city of Vineta on the Oder, whose
under-sea remains are now being excavated by German archaeologists Klaus
Goldmann and Günter Wermusch. Tony Paterson writes: “Medieval chroniclers
such as Adam of Bremen, a German monk, referred to Vineta as ‘the biggest city
in all of Europe’. He wrote: ‘It is filled with the wares of all the peoples of
the north. Nothing desirable or rare is missing.’ He remarked that the city’s
inhabitants, including Saxons, Slavs and ‘Greeks and Barbarians’ were so
wealthy that its church bells were made of silver and mothers wiped their
babies’ bottoms with bread rolls.… A century later, another German chronicler,
Helmold von Bosau, referred to Vineta, but this time in the past tense. He said
it had been destroyed: ‘A Danish king with a very big fleet of ships is said to
have attacked and completely destroyed this most wealthy place. The remains are
still there,’ he wrote in 1170.….Vineta was most likely inhabited by resident
Slavs and Saxons as well as ‘Greeks and Barbarian’ merchants from Byzantium who
plied a trade between the Baltic and the Black Sea via the rivers of western
Russia. Dr. Goldmann said that the majority of Vineta’s estimated 20,000 to
30,000 population were probably Greek Orthodox Christians…’After the great
schism of 1054, the Orthodox believers were regarded as threat by the Catholics
in the Holy Roman Empire. Vineta was almost certainly a victim of a campaign to
crush the Orthodox faith,’ he said. Its demise is therefore likely to have
occurred when the chronicler von Bosau said it did: towards the end of the 12th
century when the Crusaders launched a never fully explained campaign in
northern Europe…”[563]
The crusades were rightly called “the Roman war” because they were waged
by the Pope of Rome. Although the actual fighting was undertaken by emperors
and kings, who sometimes displayed megalomaniac tendencies on a par with the
Pope’s[564], it was the Popes
who propelled the crusaders eastward; and they frequently excommunicated rulers
who were tardy in fulfilling their vows to take up the cross. Thus the crusades
completed the transformation of the papacy from a spiritual power into a
worldly, political and military one.
The Apotheosis of Papism: Innocent III
The climax of the Crusades was undoubtedly the Fourth Crusade of
1204, as a result of which Constantinople was sacked in a frenzy of barbarism
and a Latin emperor and patriarch placed on the throne of Hagia Sophia. The pope
at the time was Innocent III, probably the most powerful and imperialist pope
in history. His imperialist claims had been obvious as early as his
enthronement: “Take this tiara,”
intoned the Archdeacon, “and know that thou art Father of princes and kings,
ruler of the world, the vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ, whose
honour and glory shall endure through all eternity.”[565]
Nor did Innocent in private soften the force of these publicly proclaimed
claims. For “we are the successor of the Prince of the Apostles,” he said, “but
we are not his vicar, nor the vicar of any man or Apostle, but the vicar of
Jesus Christ Himself before whom every knee shall bow.”[566]
Was it before Christ or the Pope that the Scripture said every knee
shall bow? It didn’t really matter to the papists. For by Innocent’s time there
was little difference: the Pope had taken the place of Christ in the Roman
Church.
Innocent invented an original doctrine, the “by reason of sin” (ratione
peccati) theory, which enabled him to interfere in secular affairs, and
make judgements in disputes between secular rulers where he judged sin to be
involved. Thus it was no use a secular ruler saying that no sin was involved in
the given case. It was up to the Pope to decide that; he was the expert on sin,
though he was not yet acknowledged to be sinless himself. And since, as is
generally acknowledged, sin is everywhere, Innocent intervened vigorously in
every part of Christendom.
Thus he intervened in Germany, supporting first the one and then the
other candidate to the imperial throne. As he wrote to the Duke of Zahringen in
1202: “We acknowledge, as we are bound, that the right and authority to elect a
king (later to be elevated to the Imperial throne) belongs to those princes to whom
it is known to belong by right and ancient custom; especially as this right and
authority came to them from the Apostolic See, which transferred the Empire
from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of Charles the Great. But the
princes should recognize, and assuredly do recognize, that the right and
authority to examine the person so elected king (to be elevated to the Empire)
belongs to us who anoint, consecrate and crown him. For it is a generally
observed rule that the examination of a person belongs to him who has the duty
of the laying-on of hands. For suppose that the princes elected a sacrilegious
man or an excommunicate, a tyrant or an imbecile, a heretic or a pagan; and
that not just by a majority, but unanimously; are we bound to anoint, consecrate
and crown such a person? Of course not….
“And it is evident from law and custom that when in an election the
votes of the princes are divided we may, after due warning and a fitting
interval, favour one of the parties… For if after such due notice the princes
cannot or will not agree, will not the Apostolic See be without an advocate and
defender, and thus be punished for their fault?”[567]
In accordance with this teaching, Innocent chose Otto IV because he
promised to do whatever he ordered him. So Otto was crowned “king of the
Romans, elect by the grace of God and of the Pope”. But within a year he had
excommunicated him…
Innocent was
no less high-handed in his relations with the other monarchs of the West. Thus
when King John of England disagreed with him over over who should be archbishop
of Canterbury, the pope, determined to break the king’s resistance, placed the
whole kingdom under interdict for six years, excommunicated John, deposed him
from the throne and suggested to King Philip Augustus of France that he invade
and conquer England!!! John appealed to papal mediation to save him from
Philip. He received it, but at a price – full restitution of church funds and
lands, perpetual infeudation of England and Ireland[568] to
the papacy, and the payment of an annual rent of a thousand marks. Only when
all the money had been paid was the interdict lifted “and,” as De Rosa puts it
acidly: “by kind permission of Pope Innocent III, Christ was able to enter
England again”.[569]
This enraged King Philip, however; for he
was now ordered to abandon his preparations for war, in that he was not allowed
to invade what was now, not English, but papal
soil. Moreover, the abject surrender of John to the Pope, and the oath of
fealty he made to him, aroused the fears of the English barons, whose demands
led to the famous Magna Carta
of 1215, which is commonly regarded as the beginning of modern western
democracy. Thus the despotism of the Pope elicited the beginnings of
parliamentary democracy….
Now Magna Carta was a limitation of
royal, not papal power. Nevertheless, it affected the papacy, too, first
because the kingdom of England was supposed to be a papal fief, but more
importantly because it set a dangerous, revolutionary precedent which might be
used against the Pope himself. And so Pope Innocent III “from the plenitude of
his unlimited power” condemned the charter as “contrary to moral law”, “null
and void of all validity for ever”, absolved the king from having to observe it
and excommunicated “anyone who should continue to maintain such treasonable and
iniquitous pretensions”.
But Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury, reversing the fanatically
papist position of his predecessor, Thomas Beckett, only 50 years earlier,
refused to publish this sentence. And the reason he gave was very significant:
“Natural law is binding on popes and princes and bishops alike: there is no escape from it. It is
beyond the reach of the pope himself.”[570]
We shall return to this critical concept of natural law, which,
appearing at the zenith of papal power, presented a theoretical challenge to
its claims of the greatest significance.
Innocent also intervened in France, when in 1209 he gave an expedition
against the Cathar heretics the legal status of a crusade. At Muret in 1213 the
Catholic crusaders from northern France overcame the heretic Cathars of
southern France and a terrible inquisition and bloodletting followed. Indeed,
according to Ehrenreich, “the crusades against the European heretics
represented the ultimate fusion of church and military… In return for an offer
of indulgences, northern French knights ‘flayed Provence [home of the Cathars],
hanging, beheading, and burning “with unspeakable joy.”’ When the city of
Béziers was taken and the papal legate was asked how to distinguish
between the Cathars and the regular Catholics, he gave the famous reply: 'Kill
them all; God will know which are His…’”[571]
This slaughter was legalised at the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215, in which it was officially declared right and a
bounden duty to kill heretics: “If a temporal Lord neglects to fulfil the
demand of the Church that he shall purge his land of this contamination of
heresy, he shall be excommunicated by the metropolitan and other bishops of the
province. If he fails to make amends within a year, it shall be reported to the
Supreme Pontiff, who shall pronounce his vassals absolved from fealty to him
and offer his land to Catholics. The latter shall exterminate the heretics,
possess the land without dispute and preserve it in the true faith… Catholics
who assume the cross and devote themselves to the extermination of heretics
shall enjoy the same indulgence and privilege as those who go to the Holy
Land…”[572]
The theological justification for the
extermination of heretics was given some years later by Thomas Aquinas: “There
is the sin, whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by
excommunication, but also to be shut off from the world by death. For it is a
much more serious matter to corrupt faith through which comes the soul’s life,
than to forge money, through which temporal life is supported. Hence if forgers
of money or other malefactors are straightway justly put to death by secular
princes, with much more justice can heretics, immediately upon conviction, be
not only excommunicated but also put to death.”[573]
In 1231, consequently, the Inquisition was
founded, where only one verdict was possible: guilty. For according to the Libro Negro of the inquisitors, “if,
notwithstanding all the means [of torture] employed, the unfortunate wretch
still denies his guilt, he is to be considered as a victim of the devil: and,
as such, deserves no compassion…: he is a son of perdition. Let him perish
among the damned.”[574]
The Inquisition became especially
notorious in Spain, where, as “Llorente, Secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid
from 1790 to 1792, estimated in his History
of the Inquisition… up to his time thirty thousand had been put to death….
During the reign of Philip II, Bloody Mary’s Spanish husband, it is reckoned
that the victims of the Inquisition exceeded by many thousands all the
Christians who had suffered under the Roman emperors.”[575]
And yet Orthodox Spain before the schism
in the eleventh century had already, according to Guizot, replaced “the oath of
compurgatores, or the judicial combat” by “the proof by witnesses, and a
rational investigation of the matter in question, such as might be expected in
a civilised society.”[576]
Truly, as de Rosa writes, “the Inquisition
was not only evil compared with the twentieth century, it was evil compared
with the tenth and eleventh century when torture was outlawed and men and women
were guaranteed a fair trial. It was evil compared with the age of Diocletian,
for no one was then tortured and killed in
the name of Jesus crucified.”[577]
The Fourth Lateran council, which
assembled bishops and representatives of every power in Europe and the
Mediterranean basin, represents the highwater mark of the papal despotism. For
in it every decree of the Pope was passed without the slightest demurring or
debate in accordance with Innocent’s word: “Every cleric must obey the Pope,
even if he commands what is evil; for no one may judge the Pope…”[578]
Five centuries later, the Roman Church was
still preaching the same doctrine. Thus Cardinal Bellarmine, in his book De Romano Pontifice, wrote: “The Pope is
the supreme judge in deciding questions of faith and morals…. If the Pope were
to err by imposing sins and forbidding virtues, the Church would still have to
consider sins as good and virtues as vices, or else she would sin against
conscience.”[579]
Thus did the Roman Church consciously and completely openly declare that
truth is not truth, or goodness goodness – if the Pope so decrees. Later, the
Pope would be replaced by the People as the ultimate arbiter of truth and
goodness. Thus both Catholics and Protestants denied the only “pillar and
ground of the truth”, which is “the Church of the living God” (I Timothy
3.15).
The
Resurrection of Roman Law
As we have seen, papism represents a distortion of the idea of Christian
Rome, that is, of a symphony of powers between the Roman emperor and the Roman
pope, in favour of the idea a single God-given power, the papacy, to which all
other powers, including that of the emperor, are subordinate and from which
they acquire their legitimacy. In order to buttress this idea, the Popes had
had resort to perverted interpretations of Holy Scripture and to forgeries,
such as The Donation of Constantine
and The Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals.
However, from the twelfth century more genuine works of Christian Rome, such as
Justinian’s Digest, as well as works
from pre-Christian antiquity, such as Aristotle’s Politics, began to appear in Italy. These began to influence
educated western thought in a direction that did not necessarily agree with the
papist ideology.
One of the first to make practical use of Roman law to strengthen his
authority vis-á-vis the pope was King Roger II of Sicily. Of course,
Roger was an absolutist ruler trying to obtain complete control, not only of
political matters, but also of ecclesiastical matters within his kingdom –
hence his rejection of papal claims to feudal overlordship of the island, and
his promotion of his claim to being the apostolic legate to Sicily. So he was
not so much interested in those parts of Roman law that regulated relations
with the Church on a symphonic basis, such as Justinian’s famous Sixth
Novella, as the more absolutist elements (which went back to old, pagan
Rome).
David Abulafia writes: “Roger II was several decades ahead of the German
emperors in making use of Roman law codes, and it can be argued that he grasped
their principles more quickly and firmly than did the emperors: ‘no one should
dispute about the judgement, plans and undertakings of the king. For to dispute
about his decisions, deeds, constitutions, plans and whether he whom the king
has chosen is worthy is comparable to sacrilege.’ The king stood above the law:
this was pure Justinian, cited by Roger, with the substitution of the term rex
for princeps. In other words, it was a law which was intended exactly to
apply to Roger’s kingdom. The idea of the crime of maiestas, or treason,
was developed on Roman lines, and was extended to heretics as well, for by
questioning the parameters of religion they questioned implicitly the divine
election of the ruler.
“Thus the Sicilian monarchy was not entirely a novelty. The ideas that
inspired Roger were late-Roman legal ideas, transmitted through Byzantine
Italy, but applied to a new set of conditions: a territorial monarchy whose
ruler saw himself as detached from the higher jurisdiction of western or
eastern emperor, even of pope. Old legislation was seen to confirm the rights
and powers of a new institution, the Sicilian monarchy; what was revolutionary
was the transformation of the idea of monarchy from the universalism of the
late-Roman codes into the regional autonomy of the Sicilian kingdom…
“Roger II’s attitude to his monarchy has nowhere been so misunderstood
as in his dealings with the Byzantine emperors. Much of his reign was taken up
with open or threatened conflict with Byzantium; but in 1141 and 1143 he sent
embassies to the emperors John and Manuel Comnenus, demanding recognition of
his status as basileus. This is just the moment when his minister George
of Antioch commissioned the mosaic of the king being crowned by Christ, and
when his relations with the pope were once again difficult over the apostolic
legateship. What did Roger mean? The term basileus gave rise to
problems. Westerners knew that it was the core title of a long list of titles
held by the Byzantine emperor… In ancient Greek, basileus was the word
for ‘king’. Western rulers who wished to irritate the Byzantines would send
letters to Consantinople addressed to the ‘king of the Greeks’; but the
Byzantines saw their ruler as ‘emperor of the Romans’, that is, universal
emperor, appointed by God, successor to Constantine. Roger’s idea of a
territorial monarchy, separated out of the universal Christian community, was
not easy for Byzantium to accept; there was a tendency in Byzantium to… treat
the kingdoms of the west as petty provinces ‘allowed’ to function under a
system of self-government (though southern Italy and Sicily were a different
case – they had been ‘stolen’ from Byzantium by the Normans). What Roger wanted
from Constantinople was recognition of the new reality; when he asked to be
treated as a basileus he was not cheekily asking to be reckoned as the
emperor’s equal, or as the western emperor (in lieu of the German ruler), but
as a territorial monarch possessing the plenitude of monarchical authority,
described in Justinian’s law-codes. Nevertheless, the Byzantines regarded even this
as the height of impudence; the Sicilian ambassador was imprisoned, and
relations became even worse than before.
“A sidelight on these events is perhaps cast by a book written at
Roger’s court by a Byzantine scholar just at this time: Neilos Doxopatrios’ History
of the Five Patriarchates. This book rebukes the Normans for seizing the
lands of the Roman emperor – an extraordinary statement in a work dedicated to
a Norman king – but it also argues that Sicily and southern Italy belong to the
patriarchate of Constantinople, and are not under the ecclesiastical authority
of the bishop of Rome. Roger may have seized on this idea, already exploited in
his dealings with the Church, to approach the Byzantine emperor and to offer to
re-enter the Orthodox fold. It would be, at the very least, a deft way to put
pressure on the pope when he was making difficulties over the apostolic
legateship.”[580]
Re-entry into the Orthodox fold was indeed the only way for a Western
Christian ruler of the time, not only to escape from the coils of the papist
absolutism, but also to aspire to the ideal of Christian Statehood. For that
ideal was not “faith-free”: it critically depended on the acceptance of the
Orthodox faith as the pillar and foundation of the Christian State.
Unfortunately, however, Roger was probably the last western ruler who even
contemplated returning to the Orthodox faith…
It was not only rulers who were digging deep into Roman law to find
support for their claims. The Roman commune, created in the 1140s, was looking
for support against absolutism. Thus from Justinian’s Digest Italian lawyers extracted the lex
regia, according to which there “every right and every power of the Roman
people” was transferred to the emperor.” This, as Charles Davis writes, “could
be interpreted in a popular as well as an imperial sense. There was an ongoing
debate among those ‘priests of justice’, the legists, as to whether the Roman
people by means of the lex regia had made a permanent or merely a
temporal grant of their power and authority to the emperor. Did the grant have
to be renewed on the emperor’s death? If so, was the acclamation of the Roman
people necessary to create the emperor, as had apparently been the case at the
coronation of Charles the Great?
“This question was answered in
the affirmative in the middle of the twelfth century by the newly created Roman
commune, which rebelled against the pope in 1143 and again in 1144. The commune
reconstituted the Senate and asserted its right to create the emperor. As
Robert Brenson has said, ‘From 1144 to 1155, far from having concrete limited
goals, the Romans relied on Antiquity as a political model, and claimed to
exercise in the present the undiminished prerogatives of the ancient Roman
Senate and people.’
“Their model seems to have been the
pre-Carolingian empire, primarily that of Constantine and Justinian, without
any room in it for the pope. They were much influenced by the religious leader
Arnold of Brescia (d. 1155), who believed that clerics should be stripped of
their property. A partisan of his named Wezel had the temerity to write to [the
German Emperor] Frederick [Barbarossa] that the Donation [of
Constantine], ‘that lie and heretical fable’, was not believed even by
‘servants and little women’ in Rome, and that the Pope therefore had no right
to summon him there for a coronation…
“… When [Frederick] was approaching Rome
in order to be crowned by the pope, he was met by emissaries of the commune
who, according to Helmold, told him that he ought to ‘honour the City, which is
head of the world and mother of the empire’.”[581]
But Frederick had little time for this early manifestation of
democratism… Nor, of course, did the Popes, who, however much they might wish
to overthrow the power of the emperors and kings, did not want to replace it
with the vague but potentially very powerful force of democratism, which might
be used to overthrow their own power also. And they had reason to fear; for
papism as a real power in the lives of European men was eventually destroyed by
democratism, the rule of the people, as displayed first in the Protestant
Reformation and then in the series of revolutionary movements culminating in
modern liberalism and ecumenism.
However, it is possible to discern the beginnings of democratism in
papism itself. For if papism consists in the assertion that no power, whether
ecclesiastical or political, is sacred unless it is founded and blessed by the
Pope himself, then it is only one step from there to the proposition that the
power of the papacy itself is not sacred unless it is founded and blessed by
the power of the people. Or rather, two steps:
for there was a vital concept linking the power of the papacy with the power of
the people which made the transition from the medieval world view, based on the
sacred power of one man, to the
modern world view, based on the sacred power of every man, possible. That concept was what theologians of the later
Middle Ages called natural law.
Natural
Law
One of the ideas that the medieval jurists
extracted from Justinian’s Digest was the idea that everyone – even the pope and the emperor
– is subject to the law. Thus the Digest declared
that “law is… something which all men
ought to obey for many reasons, and chiefly because every law is devised and
given by God, but resolved on by intelligent men, a means of correcting
offences both intentional and unintentional, a general agreement on the part of
the community by which all those living therein ought to order their lives. We
may add that Chrysippus [said]: ‘Law is the king of all things, both divine and
human; it ought to be the controller, ruler and commander of both the good and
the bad’.”[582]
But what kind of law was meant? There was
scope for confusion and contradiction here. For it was another principle of
Roman-Byzantine law, as we have seen, that the prince was above the law, or
freed from human laws (legibus solutus), insofar as “what pleases the
prince has the power of law”. For if he broke his own laws, who was to judge
him and who was to prevent him passing other laws to make his previous
transgression of the law lawful? Similarly, the pope was similarly considered
to be above the law – that is, freed from the provisions of canon law. This was
a consequence of his “absolute power” (potestas absoluta), for if he
sinned against canon law, or became a heretic, who was to judge him if not the
supreme expert on the subject, the pope himself? And who could judge him if he
refused to judge himself?
Later in the century the revolutionary concept of natural law was
formulated with greater precision by the famous papist theologian, Thomas
Aquinas. The relationship between man-made laws and natural law was defined by
Aquinas himself as follows: “Every law framed by man bears the character of a
law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But
if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to
be a law; it is a mere perversion of the law.”[583] As for the law of nature itself,
this, writes Fr. Copleston, is “the totality of the universal dictates of right
reason concerning that good of nature which is to be pursued and that evil of
man’s nature which is to be shunned.”[584] Another interpreter of Aquinas,
J.S. McClelland, defines it as follows: “For a maxim of morality or a maxim of
good government to be part of natural law, it has to be consistent with
scripture, with the writings of the Fathers of the Church, with papal
pronouncement, with what the philosophers say, and it must also be consistent
with the common practices of mankind, both Christian and non-Christian.”[585]
If this concept could be made precise, it
could provide a basis on which to justify rebellion against the powers that be.
However, Aquinas was not trying to find reasons for rebellion against either
the ecclesiastical or the secular authorities. “Like Aristotle and Augustine,”
writes McClelland, “Thomas always makes a presumption in favour of obedience.
Good government carries its own rationale with it, and this is definitely
strengthened by the Aristotelian ends which Thomas embeds in secular authority.
The effects of good government are certainly pleasing to God. Thomas assumes
that there will be a substantial natural law content in nearly all positive law
(and even in the positive law of Muslim kingdoms ruling over Christian
subjects). Obedience to positive law is therefore to an extent obedience to
God’s law…
“Thomas ends by claiming that most secular law is binding on Christian
conscience, including most of what might appear at first sight to be the
doubtful cases. No Christian had ever doubted that unjust law – that is, law
which flies in the face of the direct commands of the Scriptures – is invalid;
and law that is obviously in keeping with God’s commands is good law by
definition. But what about law that is somehow ‘in between’, law which is
neither very good nor very bad? Aristotelianism enables him to establish a
presumption in favour of obedience in conscience to this ‘in between’ kind of
law. The question of obedience to a particular command of the positive law
cannot be divorced from consideration of the ends for which positive law is in
general established, and one of these ends is the secular peace on which the
realisation of all other strictly human ends depends. A rational conscience is
therefore obliged to consider the question of obedience to an ‘in between’ very
carefully. Disobedience is only justified if two criteria can be met. First,
the law must be bad in itself, though not necessarily very wicked; and second,
disobedience must not threaten the earthly peace to the extent that the ends
for which earthly peace in general established become more difficult to
realise. The second criterion is obviously more difficult to meet than the
first. It is not a blanket cover for obedience in conscience to every nasty
law, but it comes close. The implication is that law bad enough to satisfy both
criteria is only going to appear very infrequently, because no case is easier
to make out than the case which argues that disobedience in this case of bad
law is unjustified because disobedience might either cause social disturbance
or indirectly encourage other kinds of law-breaking.”[586]
Copleston puts the matter as follows: “The
function of the human legislator is primarily to apply the natural law and to
support the law by sanctions. For example, murder is forbidden by the natural
law, but reason shows the desirability of positive enactments whereby murder is
clearly defined and whereby sanctions are added, since the natural law does not
of itself clearly define murder in detail or provide immediate sanctions. The
legislator’s primary function is, therefore, that of defining or making
explicit the natural law, of applying it to particular cases and of making it
effective. It follows that… every human law is a true law only in so far as it
is derived from the natural law. ‘.But if it disagrees with the natural law in
something, it will not be a law, but the perversion of law.’ The ruler is not entitled
to promulgate laws which go counter to or are incompatible with the natural law
(or, of course, the divine law): he has his legislative power ultimately from
God, since all authority comes from God, and he is responsible for his use of
that power: he is himself subject to the natural law and is not entitled to
transgress it himself or to order his subjects to do anything incompatible with
it. Just human laws bind in conscience in virtue of the eternal law from which
they are ultimately derived; but unjust laws do not bind in conscience. Now, a
law may be unjust because it is contrary to the common good or because it is
enacted simply for the selfish and private ends of the legislator, thus
imposing an unjustifiable burden on the subjects, or because it imposes burdens
on the subjects in an unjustifiably unequal manner, and such laws, being more
acts of violence than laws, do not bind in conscience, unless perhaps on
occasion their non-observance would produce a greater evil. As for laws which
are contrary to the divine law, it is never licit to obey them, since we ought
to obey God rather than men.”[587]
”The ruler possesses his sovereignty,” continues Copleston, “only for
the good of the whole people, not for his private good, and if he abuses his power,
he becomes a tyrant. Assassination of a tyrant was condemned by St. Thomas[588]
and he speaks at some length of the evils which may attend rebellions against a
tyrant. For example, the tyrant may become more tyrannical, if the rebellion
fails, while if it is successful, it may simply result in the substitution of
one tyranny for another. But deposition of a tyrant is legitimate, especially
if the people have the right of providing for themselves with a king.
(Presumably St. Thomas is referring to an elective monarchy.) In such a case
the people do no wrong in deposing the tyrant, even if they had subjected
themselves to him without any time limit, for he has deserved deposition by not
keeping faith with his subjects. Nevertheless, in view of the evils which may
attend rebellion, it is far preferable to make provision beforehand to prevent
a monarchy turning into a tyranny than to have to put up with or to rebel
against tyranny once established. If feasible, no one should be made ruler if
he is likely to turn himself into a tyrant; but in any case the power of the
monarch should be so tempered that his rule cannot easily be turned into a
tyranny. The best constitution will in fact be a ‘mixed’ constitution, in which
some place is given to aristocracy and also to democracy, in the sense that the
election of certain magistrates should be in the hands of the people.”[589]
Aquinas also, writes Canning, “accepted government by the people as a
valid form for cities. This provision underlay his general theory of legislation:
‘Making law belongs either to the whole multitude or to the public person who
has care of the whole multitude’, as also did the power of legal coercion.
Indeed, ‘if it is a free multitude, which could make law for itself, the
multitude’s consent, manfested by custom, has more weight in observing
something than the authority of the prince, who only has the power to make law,
in so far as he bears the person of the multitude.’”[590]
The revolutionary potential of this
doctrine is obvious; and, having made every possible allowance for Aquinas’
essential conservatism, it has to be said that he opened a chink in the wall of
social stability which more determined people could make wider. The problem was
that the concept of natural law was so vague that it could be used to justify
almost any act of disobedience provided it had mass support. Since natural law,
in his understanding, was a kind of self-evident truth to which all men had
access, it followed that it was the people as a whole – and “people” here could
mean Muslims and pagans as well as Christians - who were the ultimate arbiters
of justice and truth. True, Aquinas stipulated that natural law should be
consistent, in McClelland’s words, “with scripture, with the writings of the
Fathers of the Church, with papal pronouncement” as well as “with the common
practices of mankind, both Christian and non-Christian”. But it was the latter
part of the definition which was seized upon by political theorists and
reformers, who knew little or nothing about the Scriptures or the Fathers, but
claimed that their own beliefs coincided completely with the common practices
and beliefs of mankind. According to Aquinas, all men know naturally, without
the need for grace, what is politically right and just. Here he shows the
influence of Aristotle, for whom man was a political animal, and political life
- the most natural thing in the world, having no relation to any supernatural
or supra-political, religious goals.
This
was subtly different from the Orthodox view, which is that the truly natural is
that which is grace-filled: without grace, nature degenerates into that which
is unnatural, contrary to nature. According to the Holy Fathers, the will and
law of God is not apprehended in a “natural” way, if by “natural” we mean the
fallen human mind, but by grace. While there is “a light that enlightens every
man that comes into the world” (John 1.9), this natural light of grace,
this “eye of God in the soul of man”, has been so quenched by the fall in most
men that it is folly to entrust the most important decisions of political and
social life to the people as a whole. According to
Orthodoxy, there is no safety in numbers; the multitude can, and very often
are, wrong. Only by personal purification of the mind, and the ascent of the
whole person to God, can the will of God be known. As Deacon Alcuin of York
wrote to Charlemagne: “The people should be led, not followed, as God has
ordained… Those who say, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God,’ are not
to be listened to, for the unruliness of the mob is always close to madness.”[591]
Aquinas represents a point of transition between the eleventh- and
twelfth-century doctrine of the absolute papal monarchy and the conciliarist
teaching of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On the one hand, he upheld
the doctrine that the pope “occupies the summit of both powers, spiritual and
secular”, and that secular rulers, while having a certain autonomy, “should be
subject to him who cares for the ultimate end, and be directed by his command”.[592] On
the other hand, his doctrine of natural law opens the way for the people – or
individuals purporting to know the common beliefs and practices of the people –
to judge and depose both popes and kings.
Aquinas does recognise that the king is the Lord’s anointed.[593]
And yet there is little place in his system for a recognition of the sacred
character of Christian kingship, and of the Providence of God, in Whose hand is
the heart of the king (Proverbs 21.1), “Who ruleth in the kingdom of men and
giveth it to whomsoever He will” (Daniel 4.17). The reason for this lack
is not far to find: the Popes had destroyed such faith in the course of nearly
two centuries of incessant propaganda against kingship (royal anointing was no
longer considered to be a sacrament), violently undermining every authority
except their own. All reasonable men rebelled instinctively against this
tyranny, but their lack of a truly Orthodox faith prevented them from
understanding its cause and therefore fighting against it effectively.
The way forward for the western peoples lay, not in theories of natural
law that allowed the people to judge both popes and kings, theories that led
ultimately to democratism and the revolutions of the modern era, but in the
restoration of the doctrine of the symphony of powers and of sacred kingship.
According to this doctrine, the two powers, ecclesiastical and secular, are
autonomous, so neither can judge the other in its own sphere. At the same time,
they both serve the same end – the fulfilment of the commandments of God and
the salvation of human souls. Any ruler, in Church or State, can err; but
rebellion is permissible only in the case of heresy, as when St. Hermenegild
rebelled against his Arian father. Only in that extreme case can the people of
God, acting in obedience to the Divine (not any “natural”) law, rise up and
overthrow their leader. In any other case, persuasion, even sharp rebuke, may
be permissible, but not rebellion. For rebellion overturns the foundations of
society, and so is justifiable only when the foundations of society are being
overturned and therefore must be defended at any cost…
In the middle of the thirteenth century,
the war between the Popes and the Western Emperors reached its climax. The
Emperor Frederick II, Barbarossa’s grandson, whom Matthew has called “the last
medieval emperor who has to be taken seriously as a ruler of imperial stature”[594],
made a last attempt to carve out an independent position for the emperor
vis-à-vis the Papacy. He controlled a vast and variegated empire that
stretched from the borders of Denmark to Sicily, Cyprus and Jerusalem. Known as
Stupor Mundi, “wonder of the world”, for his wide cultural and
scientific interests, he had good relations with rulers as far apart as Henry
III of England and the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes. Even with Pope Honorius
III he enjoyed reasonable, almost “symphonic” relations. Although his theory of
government, as described in the Constitutions of Melfi, was absolutist in tone, following in the
tradition of his predecessor, Roger II of Sicily, he was nevertheless no tyrant
and was a skilled diplomat. In short, he
represented perhaps the last hope for the West of a powerful and quasi-universal
focus of traditional authority that was not dependent on the papacy.
Sensing that,
Honorius’ successor, Pope Gregory IX, set out to destroy him. He excommunicated
him for not fulfilling his vow of going on crusade, then invaded his lands
while he was on crusade. When Frederick returned from the crusade and restored
his authority, the Pope initiated an unprecedented campaign of slander against
him, calling him, among other things, “the Beast of the Apocalypse”. His
successor Innocent IV then summoned a general council attended by 150 bishops,
which formally deposed him. In 1248 the Pope’s armies defeated Frederick and
after his death the Pope invited the French prince Charles of Anjou to go on a
“crusade” against Frederick’s sons, resulting in the beheading of his grandson
Conradin in 1268.[595]
The “Holy Roman Empire”
would never be the same again. But it was at just this point that the papacy’s
own power began to decline. For while its authority over the western clergy
remained virtually unchallenged, it could tax western Christians at will, and
it had defeated the German empire, its only rival to universal authority in the
West, this had been achieved at a terrible cost to its own moral authority. As
Matthew writes, “the result did not bring the advantages expected for religion,
the church or the papacy itself. Its own moral standing became compromised by
its partisan position. By the fourteenth century its security could not be
guaranteed in Italy. It never really recovered its confidence in dealing with
its problems, preferring cautious diplomacy to preserve the papal system, until
the Reformation.”[596]
Moreover, if the German Empire had been humbled, there was still the
rising power of France, which also had imperial pretensions, to contend with.
In the thirteenth century France was ruled by the pious King Louis IX, who,
though a conventional papist in religion, espoused, and to a large extent able
to realise in fact, a theory of Church-State relations that restored the
balance between kings and popes that the latter had destroyed. Thus according
to his biographer Le Goff, Louis considered his commitments to be based on “the
mutual assistance between the monarchy and the Church. Each in its way
represented God. The king held his function from his birth and directly from
God, of whom he was the lieutenant and ‘image’ in his kingdom. But he entered
into the possession of this grace only through the mediation of the Church,
represented by the prelate who anointed and crowned him. She made him definitively
king, and he undertook to protect her. He would benefit from her hallowing
power, while he would be her secular arm. This alliance between the throne and
the altar – of which Saint Louis had a particularly acute consciousness – was
the corner stone of the French monarchy… This alliance and his respect for the
Church did not hinder the king from combating the claims of the bishops in
temporal and judicial affairs… or from protesting vigorously against the
behaviour of the papacy vis-à-vis the Church of France. He made himself
the right arm of the Church only in cases which he considered just. He rigorously exercised the royal
prerogatives in ecclesiastical matters, and in the collection of ecclesiastical
benefices he applied the moral principles which he accused the papacy of not
always respecting.”[597]
Louis was canonised by the papacy whose
power he reproved, thus marking the beginning both of the waning of the papacy
and of the rise of the monarchical nation-state of modern times. “From St.
Louis,” writes Davies, “the universal arbitrator who reproved the Pope but is
depicted in sculpture or glass on so many of the cathedrals of France, it is
but a little distance to his grandson, Philip IV, who did not scruple to lay
hands on Boniface VIII, and to declare that before there were clergymen, the
King of France had the custody of his kingdom.”[598]
In his struggle against the kings,
Boniface VIII made special use of the two swords metaphor, the last great
metaphor of papal power and one of the clearest examples of how the Popes
manipulated and distorted the Holy Scriptures for the sake of power. This
metaphor had originally been developed in an anti-papal spirit by Gottschalk of Aachen, a chaplain of the
Emperor Henry IV. Hildebrand, he claimed, “without God’s knowledge usurped the regnum
and sacerdotium for himself. In so doing he despised God’s pious
Arrangement which He wished principally to consist not in one, but in two: two,
that is the regnum and sacerdotium, as the Saviour in His passion
had intimated should be understood by the figurative sufficiency of the two
swords. When it was said to Him, ‘Lord, behold here are two swords’, he
replied, ‘It is enough’ (Luke 22.48), signifying by this sufficient
duality that there were to be borne in the Church a spiritual and a carnal
sword, by which every harmful thing would be cut off: the sacerdotal sword
would be used to encourage obedience to the king on God’s behalf, whereas the
royal would be employed for expelling the enemies of Christ without, and for
enforcing obedience to the sacerdotium within.”[599]
However, the papists, notably John of
Mantua, turned the allegory on its head by claiming that both the secular and
the spiritual sword were in the hands of the Pope. They also pointed out,
following Pope Nicholas I, that the Apostle Peter had, almost immediately after
these words of Christ, used the secular sword to cut off Malchus’ ear (Luke
22.50). To which the obvious riposte from the monarchist side was that the Lord
had then ordered Peter to put up his sword, saying: “All they that take the
sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26.5)…
Indeed, Prince Roman Mstislavovich of
Galicia gave a similar answer to a papal legate who came to him after the
conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204, «declaring that the Pope
would soon subdue all peoples with the sword of Peter and make him king. Roman
took his sword and said: ‘Is Peter’s sword that the Pope has like this? If so,
then with it he can take cities and give them to others. But this is against
the Word of God: for the Lord forbade Peter to have such a sword and fight with
it. But I have a sword given to me by God».[600]
But the papists were able to get round
even this objection. “The sword is yours to be drawn,” wrote Bernard of
Clairvaux to the Pope, “perhaps at your command, if not by your hand.
Otherwise, if it in no way belonged to you, when the apostles said, ‘Behold,
there are two swords here’, the Lord would not have replied to them, ‘It is
enough’, but ‘It is too much’. Both belong to the Church, that is the spiritual
sword and the material, but the one is to be drawn for the Church, and the
other also by the Church: the one by the priest’s hand, the other by the
soldier’s, but, to be sure, at the priest’s command and the emperor’s order.”[601]
When Boniface came to write his famous
bull, Unam Sanctam in 1302, declaring
that submission to the Pope was a necessary condition of salvation for every
creature, the image of the sword was still in his mind: “He who denies that the
temporal sword is in the power of Peter wrongly interprets the Lord’s words,
‘Put up thy sword into its scabbard’. Both swords, the spiritual and the
material, are in the power of the Church. The spiritual is wielded by the Church; the material for the Church. The one by the hand of
the priest; the other by the hand of kings and knights at the will and
sufferance of the priest. One sword has to be under the other; the material
under the spiritual, as the temporal authority in general is under the spiritual.”[602]
Unam Sanctam was issued as part of
a power struggle between the Pope and King Philip the Fair of France. It was
followed up in 1303 by the Pope’s appointment of Albert of Hapsburg as Holy
Roman Emperor with authority over all temporal rulers, including the king of
France.[603]
But “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword”. And an aide of the King
of France noted: “The Pope’s sword is merely made of words; my master’s is of
steel.”[604]
So when French soldiers burst into Boniface’s palace at Anagni, and a sword
made of steel pressed onto his neck, the “spiritual” sword had to beg for
mercy. As Papadakis concludes: “This earliest confrontation between the newly
emerging monarchical nation-state and the late medieval papacy was to result in
the collapse of the old Gregorian system of government…”[605]
After the death of Boniface VIII, the
papacy came under the domination of the French[606],
and in 1309 the Pope and his court moved to Avignon. The luxuries and
corruption of the Avignon papacy earned it the title of “the second Babylon”
from its contemporaries. Nor did the monastic orders, which were the
traditional mainstay of the medieval papacy but had now lost their ascetic
character, restore the authority of the Church. Meanwhile, the Hundred Years
war was devastating the two most powerful States of Europe, France and England,
and the Black Death carried away a third of the continent’s population. It was
a time of black pessimism, apocalyptic speculation and – if the papacy had not
undermined the very concept of repentance by its abuses and indulgences – for
reflection on where the West had gone wrong.
With their dominion in France destroyed,
the Popes’ control over the German “Holy Roman” Empire now began to slip away,
too, as the German princes devised an elective system to limit their power to
nominate the Emperor. Already in 1202, while insisting that “the right and
authority to examine the person so elected king (to be elevated to the Empire)
belongs to us who anoint, consecrate and crown him”, the Pope had conceded that
“the right and authority to elect a king (later to be elevated to the Imperial
throne) belongs to those princes to whom it is known to belong by right and
ancient custom”.[607]
Again, “when Pope Clement VI demanded that the Emperor Louis should admit that
the Empire was a fief of the Holy See, the Diet of Frankfurt replied by issuing
a declaration in 1337 to the effect that the Empire was held from God alone,
and that an Emperor, once he had been duly elected by the Princes, needed no
confirmation or approval from the Bishop of Rome”.[608]
This did not lead to a resurrection of the power of the empire, however; for,
while independent of the Pope in this way, the Emperor was tied by his
contracts with the Electors (who included both bishops and princes), who
invariably demanded various concessions in exchange for their support, thus
guaranteeing his political weakness.[609]
It was at about this time that the
important early fourteenth-century political writer, Marsilius of Padua,
appears on the scene. Marsilius worked for the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV and
was an eyewitness of his struggle for power with Pope John XXII. This impressed
upon him the terribly damaging effects of competing jurisdictions, and the need
for a single unambiguous authority or legislator. That legislator,
according to Marsilius, had to be the secular ruler, not the pope. Thus Canning
writes: “Marsilius confronted papal power head-on: in the Defensor
Pacis [1324] he focused on what he considered to be the true cause of the
most real problem of his time – the disruption of the peace of Italy and
Europe. He sought both to demonstrate that the papacy’s claim to plenitude of
power was the source of strife, and to destroy the theoretical basis of that
claim….
“Marsilius’ technique was to argue from
first principles; in the process he drew considerably on Aristotle, but
interpreted him in his own way. In order to demonstrate what powers the clergy
could not possess, Marsilius began by examining the origin, purpose and
structure of the civil community. In so doing he produced a model of general
application on a naturalistic basis. The purpose of the community was the
sufficient life; for this end, tranquillity was necessary, which was found when
the parts of the community worked in harmony like the members of the body of an
animal, a biological image reflecting Marsilius’ medical training. The
structure of government rested on the ultimate authority of the whole
corporation of citizens (universitas civium) which was identified with
the human legislator (legislator humanus), which in turn elected the
executive or ruling part (pars principans) and could depose it. The
ruling part in turn established the other parts and offices of the community.
This theoretical structure was very flexible and capable of being applied to a
wide range of possible political communities. The pars principans could
be one, few or more in number. Marsilius also habitually referred,
unspecifically, to the corporation of citizens or its ‘weightier part’ (valentior
pars), thereby raising the possibility that the legislator could be very
restricted in number. Furthermore, the legislator could always delegate its
law-creating powers to one or more persons. The essence of Marsilius’ approach
was to concentrate on the efficient cause – the will of the citizen body.”[610]
An important part of Marsilius’ argument
was his concept of law, which he identified with the command of the legislator,
not with Divine or natural law. While he was confident that human law was
generally conducive to justice and the common good, he nevertheless disjoined
the two concepts in such a way as to raise the possibility, in McClelland’s
words, “that law can exist without justice… The ruler or legislator is no
longer to be seen as someone well enough qualified to understand the nature of
justice. The legislator (we would say sovereign) is now defined as that man or
group of men who possess the authority to make laws and the power to make them
effective.
“This was anathema to the whole system of
papal politics,” writes McClelland. “The papacy’s case for universal hegemony,
that kings were the pope’s vice-regents, rested on the claim that popes had
privileged access to knowledge of divine law. The pope was always the first to
know the latest news from God and had the unique duty of passing it on to the
faithful. News direct from God was always… news about justice, which the rulers
of the earth were then supposed to put into law under papal tutelage. Now that
law was defined as legislation and punishment, special knowledge of the divine
will no longer constitute a valid claim for papal interference in the
law-making and law-enforcing of secular states. These were, in the most precise
sense possible, none of the pope’s business. Peace, the end of the law, was
still, of course, a good and godly end, but it was now possible to see senses
in which papal pretensions to interfere in the mechanisms of peace-keeping were
actually pernicious. For Marsilius, the efficient cause of peace was law as the
command of the law-giver, with the stress on the word ‘command’. It is the
merest commonplace that for orders to be effective they have to be unambiguous:
order, counter-order, disorder is the oldest military maxim. Anything which
interferes with the clarity of commands is to be avoided at all cost. Nothing
could be worse than two commanders giving different and contradictory orders.
This would reduce an army to a shambles in no time at all. This is how
Marsilius sees papal claims to hegemony. If the papal claims were to be upheld,
there would always be two commanders in every state. People would always be
uncertain which commander to obey and the result might well be chaos, the
opposite of that earthly peace which it is the state’s job to provide.”[611]
It was an important consequence of
Marsilius’ approach that “the human legislator had jurisdiction, including
powers of appointment, over bishops, priests and clergy, and indeed, control
over all the externals of religion relating to the good of the community.”[612]
His system may therefore be called caesaropapist with a democratic bias,
insofar as the will of the people is the ultimate sovereign. He therefore looks
forward both to the powerful princes of the Protestant Reformation and to the
democratic revolutions that followed.
Of course, he was aiming, not to
undermine, but to strengthen the authority of the princely ruler. “In Marsilius
the concept of popular sovereignty is meant only to strengthen secular rulers
at the expense of the temporal jurisdiction of the princes of the Church.”[613]
Nevertheless, the democratic and revolutionary potential of his ideas is
self-evident…
Later in the century, the English
Proto-Protestant Wycliff was similarly concerned to buttress the power of
secular rulers against the power of the Church. Thus in his Tractatus de Officio Regis, as Nicolson
writes, “Wycliff proved that God favoured kingship, since three kings had been
designated to visit the manger at Bethlehem. The king must be honoured as the
vicar of God (rex enim est dei vicarius) and our awe of the king is a
reflection of our fear of God. The king possesses ‘palpable’ (sensibilis)
dignity, whereas the dignity of the Church is impalpable. Thus even a bad king
should be revered owing to the office and titles that he holds. The priest
should own no possessions or titles, since Christ himself was poor. A king
should be intelligent but not necessarily a cultured intellectual. If he be a
stupid man, then the community has lost ‘its finest pearl’. If he be an evil
man, then the whole realm suffers in his person. The king was above the law
while respecting it and only violating it in emergencies. He should study
theology and suppress heresy. He governs for the good of his people and should
seek to reflect divine justice. He possesses full jurisdiction over the clergy
of his realm, and should exact an oath of allegiance from all foreign priests
who enter the kingdom. If the Pope asserted his right to diminish or control
the secular power of the king, he should be denounced as the anti-Christ…
“Wycliff,” writes Nicolson, “advanced the
difficult idea that the king was superior to the Church since he reflected the
godhead of Christ, where the priest reflected his manhood only. He argued that
the king was above the law (solutus legibus) and that it was the moral
duty of the citizen to obey the authority of the crown in every circumstance.”[614]
Thus when Watt Tylor led the peasants in rebellion against King Richard II in
1281, Wycliff supported the king, while refraining from condemning the
peasants. For as the contemporary saying went: “When Adam delved, and Eve span,
who then was the gentleman?”
“Richard II,” continues Nicolson, “was
deeply imbued with Wycliff’s teaching and asserted that ‘the laws were in his
mouth or in his breast and he could alone could change the statutes of the
realm’.[615]
In his opposition to papal interference in English affairs he represented the
feelings of his people; but his attempts to establish a secular authority met
with popular opposition, and in 1399 he was deposed and his cousin, the usurper
Bolingbroke, ascended the throne in his stead. But when Parliament recognised
Bolingbroke as Henry IV they were careful to maintain the fiction of Divine Right
by asserting that he had succeeded ‘through the right God had given him by
conquest’.”[616]
The Lollard movement in England gave birth
in the next generation to the Hussite movement in Bohemia, which, however, was
openly revolutionary (and nationalist). Thus the followers of Huss declared
that for true Christians their ruler could only be God. From this it followed
that all men were free and equal. "All must be brothers to each other and
no one must be subject to another." For this reason taxation and royal
power had to be eliminated, along with every mark of inequality.[617]
In 1378 the Great Schism began, with one
Pope in Rome and another at Avignon. Now, in addition to the division of
authority caused by the conflicts between popes and emperors, there was the
further splintering caused by the conflicts between different popes. Popular
opinion in the West turned to the idea that there was only one way to restore
unity - convene a general council.
Thus began the conciliarist movement,
which superficially had much in common with Orthodox ideas on the importance of
councils in the Church. However, western conciliarism was influenced rather by
the political ideas of Marsilius and William of Ockham than by the history of
the Ecumenical Councils. As such, it represented a new attitude towards
authority in both Church and State.
Thus in respect of the State, write
Thompson and Johnson, the conciliarists “approached the whole question of the
purpose, organization and functioning of civil society without giving to God,
heaven and immortality a predominant place. The purpose of the state was to
obtain peace, prosperity, and security, immediate and earthly ends, and not to
prepare mortals for their heavenly home… The will of the people [exercised in a
representative assembly of the wealthier citizens] should determine what is
law, to which the prince himself should be obedient. The prince is the servant
and not the maker of the laws, and must act always in the interest of all. A
state so organized is quite self-sufficient in itself, with absolutely no need
of or use for the Church.”[618]
Thus as regards the State, the
Conciliarists are thoroughly modern and secular in their outlook. As for the
Church, according to the conciliarists it “is composed of the community of the
faithful (universitas fidelium), of all believing Christians. Final
authority in this Church rests not with pope and clergy but with the
representatives of all believers gathered together in a general council. The
laity as well as the clergy should be represented in this council. [William of]
Ockham recommends that even women should be included. The council has authority
to deal with any questions concerning the spiritual affairs of the Church. As
the prince is the instrument of the legislator, so the pope is the mere
instrument of the will of a general council. Councils should be summoned by the
secular prince and not by the pope. The ultimate authority in the Church should
be the Scriptures, not as interpreted by the pope or clergy, but as interpreted
by a group of reasonable and learned men. The Petrine theory is a falsehood,
and the present papacy an accident of history.”[619]
Pure Protestantism! And the origin of the
conciliarists’ doctrine was “what they regarded as the principles of natural
law which guaranteed the equality of men. If there arose differences in power
and influence within the hierarchy of the Church they must have originally
arisen with the consent of the Church. Papal power therefore rested on the
consent of the Church; it had no inherent rights of its own. As a delegated
power, it must, when abused as it was obviously being abused, be subject to the
control and limitation of the Church, from which it got its power. This Church
was, as had been argued by Marsiglio [Marsilius] and Ockham, the whole body of
the faithful, or, as some argued, the body of the clergy. The institution best
qualified to represent its interests was the council. If the pope were not
subject to the supervision and control of a council it was possible for the
Church to become the slave and the tool of the pope in the pursuit of goals
that had no relation to the needs of the Church at large. The pope must
therefore be the minister of the Church, i.e., of a council, and not an
autocrat. As one historian has put it, he must be the Vicar of the Church, not
of Christ…”[620]
Even some cardinals sympathised with these
ideas. Thus Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly believed that “all terrestrial authority…
derived ultimately from the community. He wished to see the cardinals become
the elected representatives of the metropolitan provinces of the Church, so as
to make the sacred college a kind of parliament about the Pope”.[621]
However, papist doctrine decreed that a
general council could be convened only by the Pope. The problem was: there were
now two Popes, Clement and Urban. As
Conrad of Geinhausen put it: “It is impossible for a general council to be held
or celebrated without the authority of the pope. But to convene such a council
in the present case the pope cannot step in, because no person is universally
recognized as pope.”[622]
Nevertheless, the cardinals convened a council at Pisa in 1409 which deposed
both existing popes and elected another, Alexander V.
But since it had no ecumenical or papal authority,
this council did not solve the problem. France, Scotland and Castile continued
to recognise Urban, while England, Flanders, most of the Italian states and the
Emperor Wenceslaus recognised Clement. Eventually, at the council of Constance,
a single Pope was agreed on; and by the decrees Sacrosancta (1415) and Frequens
(1417) it was declared that in matters of the faith the supreme authority in
the Church was a general council, which should be convened at intervals of not
more than ten years.
The Sacrosancta
or Haec sancta synodus decree
deserves to be quoted at length because of its revolutionary implications: “The
sacred synod of Constance… declares that it is lawfully assembled in the Holy
Spirit, that it has its power immediately from Christ, and that all men, of
every rank and position, including the pope himself, are bound to obey it in
those matters that pertain to the faith, the extirpation of the said schism,
and to the reformation of the Church in head and members. It declares also that
anyone, of any rank, condition or office – even the papal – who was
contumaciously refuse to obey the mandates, statutes, decrees or institutions
made by this holy synod or by any other lawfully assembled council on the
matters aforesaid or on things pertaining to them, shall, unless he recovers
his senses, be subjected to fitting penance and punished as is appropriate.”[623]
This decree made the pope, in effect, a
constitutional monarch: it shifted the balance of power between pope and
council, just as the political revolutions of a later age were to shift the
balance of power between king and parliament. As such, it is still alien to the
Orthodox patristic tradition, as Papadakis points out[624];
for according to the Orthodox the relationship between popes (or patriarchs)
and councils is not one of power, but
of a common search for, or agreement upon, the
truth. Neither popes nor councils guarantee the truth; for grace and truth
are in Christ alone, and to whomever He pleases to bestow it – be he a bishop, a priest or even a simple layman or monk, as, for example, St. Maximus the
Confessor.
Nevertheless, the idea that the problems
of Christian society could be resolved by a general council similar in
principle to the Seven Ecumenical Councils, rather than by papal fiat,
was an important breakthrough. In fact, for a short moment a window of
opportunity presented itself for the strife-torn West. With both ecclesiastical
and political authority weak and divided, it was time for the West to turn back
to its former leader and the creator of its own pre-schism civilisation –
Byzantium. Indeed, this is what John Wyclif had implied in 1383: “The pride of
the Poe is the reason why the Greeks are divided from the so-called faithful…
It is we westerners, too fanatical by far, who have been divided from the
faithful Greek and the Faith of our Lord Jesus Christ”.[625]
Moreover, it was at about this time that the Byzantine Emperor Manuel made an
extended visit to the West, and made a considerable impression. Tragically, however,
at precisely the time that the West was, for the first time in nearly four
centuries, looking to the East for spiritual support, the East was looking to
the West for military support – and so was seeking unity with the Pope rather
than with his conciliarist opponents. And so the invitation to attend the
Council of Basle (1431-1438) that was offered to the Greeks was rejected.
This was a pity, because the bishops at Basle were in earnest. “From
now on,” they said, “all ecclesiastical appointments shall be made according to
the canons of the Church; all simony shall cease. From now on, all priests
whether of the highest or lowest rank, shall put away their concubines, and
whoever within two months of this decree neglects its demands shall be deprived
of his office, though he be the Bishop of Rome. From now on, the ecclesiastical
administration of each country shall cease to depend on papal caprice… The
abuse of ban and anathema by the popes shall cease… From now on, the Roman
Curia, that is, the popes shall neither demand nor receive any fees for
ecclesiastical offices. From now, a pope should think not of this world’s
treasures but only of those of the world to come.”[626]
Although the pope, Eugene IV, was obliged
by the decrees of the council of Constance to attend this council, he refused,
calling the Basle delegates “a beggarly mob, mere vulgar fellows from the
lowest dregs of the clergy, apostates, blaspheming rebels, men guilty of
sacrilege, gaolbirds, men who without exception deserve only to be hunted back
to the devil whence they came.”[627]
Instead, he convened another council at Ferrara, which was joined by the Greeks
and the more pro-papal delegates from Basle. It was at this council (already a
“robber” council by western rules) that the Greeks signed the infamous unia
with the Pope in 1439.
Tragically, the Greeks’ signing of the
unia and endorsement of papism not only betrayed Orthodoxy and condemned the
Byzantine empire to destruction: it also dealt a severe blow to the
conciliarist movement in the West. For “conciliar sovereignty and superiority,
established officially as law at Constance twenty-five years previously, was
given its coup de grâce at Florence by the ‘infallible document’
of Laetentur caeli. ‘By its very
existence it [Florence] counterbalanced and finally outweighed the council of
Basel, and in so doing checked the development of the conciliar movement that
threatened to change the very constitution of the [papal] Church.’ [Gill, The Council of Florence, p. 411].”[628]
With
the conciliarist movement in disarray and the Greeks on his side, Pope Pius II
launched a counter-attack on the very concept of conciliarity in his bull Execrabilis of 1460: “There has sprung
up in our time an execrable abuse, unheard of in earlier ages, namely that some
me, imbued with the spirit of rebellion, presume to appeal to a future council
from the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Jesus Christ… We condemn appeals of this
kind as erroneous and detestable…”[629]
Thus
the position at the end of the Middle Ages was superficially similar to what it
had been four centuries before, with the popes in their quest for absolute
power once again carrying the battle to those who sought to limit it. However,
the constant civil war between the ecclesiastical and the secular principles
had taken its toll; a decisive change of landmarks was about to take place. If
there was no question of a movement back to origins, to the Orthodox symphony
of powers, then the only alternative was to move forwards, to the full unravelling
of the revolutionary principle of the autonomous “I” first proclaimed by that
most revolutionary of popes, Gregory VII…
6. THE
FALL OF NEW ROME
If My
people had heard Me, if Israel had walked in My ways,
Quickly
would I have humbled their enemies,
and upon
their oppressors would I have laid My hand.
Psalm 80.12-13.
I would rather see the Turkish turban in the midst of
the City
Than the Pope’s tiara.
Lucas
Notaras, last Great Chancellor of the Byzantine Empire.
The last period in the history of
Byzantium was dominated by a pattern that was to be repeated several times
until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: the attempt, by doctrinal compromise,
to win military support from the Latins and therefore a prolongation of the
existence of the Byzantine Empire in the face of the Muslim threat.
The pressure to compromise with the Latins
came mainly from the Byzantine emperors. They wanted restoration of communion
with Rome, which had been broken in 1054, so that they could call on the West
to provide military support against the Turks. Thus Alexius I Comnenus and
Manuel I Comnenus both put pressure on the patriarchs of their time. And
Andronicus I Comnenus, according to A.A. Vasiliev, “dealt harshly with the patriarch
of Constantinople and allowed no disputes on faith”.[630]
And so the emperors began to fall into
that tendency which has been called “caesaropapism” by western scholars, but
was more simply called “despotism” in the East.[631]
As we have seen, the distinction between
true kingship and despotism was well recognised in the East. Thus Emperor
Constantine VII wrote in his work, On the Government of the Empire: “If
the Emperor forgets the fear of God, he will inevitably fall into sin and be
changed into a despot, he will not be able to keep to the customs established
by the Fathers, and by the intrigues of the devil he will do that which is
unworthy and contrary to the commandments of God, he will become hateful to the
people, the senate and the Church, he will become unworthy to be called a
Christian, he will be deprived of his post, will be subject to anathema, and,
finally, will be killed as the ‘common enemy’ of all Romans, both ‘those who
command’ and ‘those who obey’”.[632]
These caesaropapist tendencies of the
Comneni emperors did not necessarily imply an indifference to Orthodoxy, and
were at times combined with considerable personal piety, as, for example, in
Manuel I Comnenus. However, the powers that Manuel had in the Church, according
to the canonist Archbishop Demetrius Chomatianos, were striking: “he presided
over synodal decisions and gave them executive force; he formulated the rules
of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; he legislated on the ‘life and the statute’ of
the clergy, including the clergy of the bema, and on the ecclesiastical
jurisdictions, the elections to vacant sees and the transfer of bishops; he
could promote a bishopric to the rank of a metropolia ‘to honour a man or a
city’. The frontier thus traced annexed to the imperial domain several
contested and contestable zones, but in the name of a right – that which gave
the emperor his statute and his title of common epistemonarch of the
Churches.” [633]
The origin of this obscure function is
less important than the use to which it was put: to justify the ever-increasing
interference of the emperors in ecclesiastical affairs. Thus the first of the
Angeli dynasty, Isaac, in a novella issued in 1187, justified his hearing
complaints of bishops together with the patriarch on the grounds that he had
received “the rank of epistemonarch of the Church from him who anointed
him and made him emperor.”[634]
Meanwhile, Byzantine canonists such as
Patriarch Theodore Balsamon of Antioch (12th century) and Archbishop
Demetrius (Chomatianos) of Ochrid (13th century) ascribed to the
emperor all of the privileges of the episcopate except the conducting of church
services and sacraments, but including the traditionally exclusively episcopal
domain of teaching about the faith.
Thus Chomatianos wrote: "The emperor
is provided with all the privileges of the episcopate, with the single
exception of carrying out Divine services".[635]
According to Balsamon, as Dagron
summarises his thought: “If the emperor acts in many circumstances as a bishop,
this is because is power is dual. His dual competence, spiritual and temporal,
can only be understood by the quasi-sacerdotal character of royalty, founded on
anointing…
“The Church is subject to the authority of
the emperor and that of the patriarchs. That is established. But what is the
authority of the emperor based on? On his role as epistemonarch – that is, on
the disciplinary function which he is recognised to have. Balsamon does not
reject this explanation and uses it on occasion, for example, with regard to
the right of appeal to the emperor in ecclesiastical matters, to show that the
decisions of the patriarchal tribunal are without appeal in view of the
loftiness of the see, but that the emperor in his capacity as epistemonarch of the
Church will have to judge the patriarch if he is personally accused of
sacrilegious theft (ierosulh) or heterodoxy…
“’Insofar as the Emperor, through his
anointing to the kingdom, is the Anointed of the Lord, while the Christ [= the
Anointed One] and our God is, besides other things, also a Bishop, there is a
basis for the Emperor being adorned with hierarchical gifts’. The reasoning is
simple, albeit under a complicated form: the Anointed One par excellence,
Christ, is qualified as bishop by us, so the emperors, who also receive
anointing, must be equally considered to be bishops.”[636]
We see here how important the sacrament of
royal anointing had become - and how quite unorthodox conclusions were being
justified by reference to it. Ostrogorsky characterises the ideas of Balsamon
and Chomatianos as «merely echoes of old and antiquated ideas».[637]
But these old ideas, dressed up in new, pseudo-canonical forms, were still
dangerous…
Thus Dagron writes: “Insensibly we have
passed from one logic to another. The rights of intervention recognised by the
Church for the emperor are no longer considered as exceptional privileges, but
as a manifestation of the quasi-episcopal nature of imperial power. Taken
together, they give the temporal power a particular status, and force one to
the conclusion that if the emperor is not strictly speaking a cleric ‘after the
order of Aaron’, he is not in any case a simple layman. By contrast with a
purely juridical conception, Balsamon sketches, not without prudence, a charismatical
conception of imperial power. He suggests that [the emperor’s right of]
‘promoting’ the patriarch is not only the [right of] choosing from a list of
three names which is in principle submitted by the assembly of metropolitans,
or of imposing his choice on the same assembly in the case of disagreement, as
is envisaged in a chapter of the Book of Ceremonies: it is above all
[the right of] ‘creating’ him – before the religious consecration in which the
metropolitans proceed to Hagia Sophia on the following Sunday -, either by
invoking the Holy Spirit, as Balsamon says, or by using the somewhat more
neutral formula preserved by the ceremonial of the 10th century:
‘Grace Divine and the Royalty that we have received from it promote the very
pious person before us to the rank of patriarch of Constantinople.’ The
‘designation’ of the patriarch would be a political prerogative, just as the
carving out of dioceses and the promotion of Episcopal sees, to which the
emperor has the sovereign right to proceed for a better harmony between the
spiritual and the temporal powers; but his ‘promotion by invocation of the
Spirit’ is a religious, if not a liturgical act, which only a charisma can
justify…”[638]
Balsamon went so far as to change the
traditional Patriarch-soul, Emperor-body metaphor in favour of the emperor:
“Emperors and Patriarchs must be respected as teachers of the Church for the
sake of their dignity, which they received through anointing with chrism. Hence
derives the power of the right-believing Emperors to instruct the Christian
peoples and, like priests, offer incense to God. Their glory consists in the fact that, like
the sun, they enlighten the world from one end to the other with the flash of
their Orthodoxy. The strength and activity of the
Emperor touches the soul and body of man while the strength and power of the
Patriarch touches only the soul…”[639]
Again,
Balsamon wrote: “The emperor is subject neither to
the laws nor to the Church canons”.[640] And yet St.
Nicholas the Mystic had written: “If the emperor is the enemy and foe of the
laws, who will fear them?” And so the Balsamonite teaching on the role of the
Emperor could only lead to the undermining of the Empire and its eventual fall.
And this is what in fact happened; for the
dynastic history of the late twelfth century was bloody and chaotic even by
Byzantine standards, as emperors disposed of each other, and the people lost
all respect for an emperor once he had been overthrown.
Thus when Andronicus I Comnenus, who had
himself come to the throne by violence, was overthrown, tortured and killed by
Isaac II Angelus, the people, as Nicetas Choniates relates, “did not think that
this was a man who had not long ago been the Emperor adorned with a royal
diadem, and that they had all glorified him as a saviour, and greeted him with
best wishes and bows, and tbey had given a terrible oath to be faithful and
devoted to him”.[641]
Isaac Angelus deposed several patriarchs,
one after another… And he said: “On earth there is no difference in power
between God and the Emperor: the Emperors are allowed to do anything, and they
can use God’s things on a par with their own, since they received the royal
dignity itself from God, and there is no difference between God and them”.[642]
Moreover, the encomiasts addressed Isaac as “God-like” (qeoeikele, qeoeidei) and “equal to God” (isoqee).[643]
When the Emperors exalted their dignity to
the level of the Divinity in the image of the pagan tyrants, and the people
trampled on them in spite of the Lord’s command: “Touch not Mine anointed”,
everything began to fall apart: both the Bulgarians and Wallachians under Peter
and Asen and the Serbs under Stephan Nemanya rebelled, and then the crusaders
took advantage of the chaos to seize the City in 1204…
Twelve years after the fall of the City,
Nicetas Choniates summed up that absolutist attitude of the last pre-fall
emperors: «For most of the Roman Emperors it was quite intolerably
merely to give order, to walk around in gold clothes, to use the public purse
as their own, to distribute it however and to whomever they wanted, and to
treat free people as if they were slaves. They considered it an extreme insult
to themselves if they were not recognised to be wise men, like gods to look at,
heroes in strength, wise in God like Solomon, God-inspired leaders, the most
faithful rule of rules – in a word, infallible judges of both Divine and human
matters. Therefore instead of rebuking, as was fitting, the irrational and
bold, who were introducing teachings new and unknown to the Church, or even
presenting the matter to those who by their calling should know and preach
about God, they, not wishing to occupy the second place, themselves became at
one and the same time both proclaimers of the dogmas and their judges and
establishers, and they often punished those who did not agree with them»...[644]
The Byzantines never really
recovered from the first fall of the City, in 1204, which became was the
beginning of its final fall, in 1453. Not only was Byzantium itself fatally
weakened: its weakness allowed the other Orthodox states of the Balkans to
assert their own independence. And so the unity of the Orthodox commonwealth of
nations began to fracture, allowing the Ottomans to pick them off one by one…[v2].
Church and State in Kievan Rus’
However, one Orthodox nation which
remained loyal to Byzantium to the end was Kievan Rus’. For nearly five hundred
years the Russian princes continued to look up to the Byzantine Emperor as to
their father in spite of the fact that their own kingdom was completely
independent of, and more powerful than, the Byzantine. Nor did this change with
the enthronement of the first metropolitan of Russian blood, Hilarion, in the
eleventh century.
Thus Podskalsky writes: “Although Hilarion compared Vladimir with Constantine
the Great and recognised his sovereignty over Kievan Rus’, he ascribed the
title of ‘Emperor’ neither to him nor to his successor. The collector (or
editor) of the Izbornik of 1076 everywhere changed the term basileuV ('emperor') for ‘prince’ or ‘kahan’, so as thereby to adapt the
Byzantine texts to Russian conditions, while the term basileuV, ‘tsar’, was kept only when it referred to God. The idea of the
‘transfer of the empire’ (translatio imperii), which captivated the
Bulgarian tsar Simeon or Charles the Great in relation to the Frankish empire,
was foreign to pre-Mongol Rus’. The Byzantine supremacy in the hierarchy of
States was also strengthened by the emperors’ practice of adopting the role of
sponsor at the baptism of newly converted kings or princes.”[645]
Thus
the Emperor had become the sponsor at the baptism of the leader of Tsar
Boris-Michael of Bulgaria and Princess Olga of Kiev. Such
sponsorship, according to Richard Fletcher, “indicated secular lordship as
well. The experience of baptism could thus become a token of submission.
Exported to the west we can see the idea at work in the baptismal sponsorship
of Widukind by Charlemagne in 785, or of Harald Klak by Louis the Pious in 826,
or of the Viking leader Guthrum by Alfred of Wessex in 878.”[646]
The
inferiority of the other Orthodox kings and princes to the Byzantine Emperor
was indicated in a variety of ways: by the difference in title (the Russian
princes were called
arcwn by the Byzantines), and by the fact that only the emperors were anointed at their
enthronement (and that not before the beginning of the 13th
century). As Fr. Timothy Alferov writes, “the Russian Great
Princes and the Serbian, Georgian and Bulgarian rulers were defenders of the
Church only in their territories. They were also raised to the princedom with
the blessing of the Church, but by a different rite (o ezhe blagosloviti
knyaya), which included the crowning of the prince, but contained no
anointing.”[647]
If the Frankish
and Bulgarian rulers had been accorded the title of basileus, this was
only under compulsion and was withdrawn as soon as politically expedient. And
even much later, in 1561, when the pre-eminence of Russia in the Orthodox world
could not be denied, the Ecumenical Patriarch Joasaph II accorded the Ivan the
Terrible the title Basileus only because he was thought to descend from
a Byzantine princess – Anna, the wife of St. Vladimir. So tenacious was the idea among the Greeks that there could be no Third
Rome after the Second…
However, there were exceptions to this viewpoint. According to Podalsky, a Greek Metropolitan of Kiev in the early twelfth century, Nicephorus I, “without hesitation called both the emperor and the prince equally likenesses of the Divine archetype.
This meant that he rejected the Byzantine idea îf the
single and undivided imperial power, which was inherent only in the Basileus of
the Romans and which in this capacity reflected the Divine order of the world.
The conception of the emperor as ‘the image of God’ (imago Dei, eikwn qeou) became well-known in Kiev thanks to the Mirror of Princes
composed in 527 by Deacon Agapetus for Justinian. Extracts from it, in which
the discussion was about the duty of subjects to submit to the visible deputy
(prince) of the invisible ruler of the world (God), were included in the Izbornik
of 1076».[648]
From the beginning Church and State were
exceptionally close in Kievan Rus’, displaying a mutual support without
destroying the autonomy of each in its own sphere, that was exceptional. As an
example, we may cite an incident from Novgorod in 1078, as described by
Hieromonk Dionysius (Alferov): «A certain sorcerer by demonic power wrought
many signs and wonders, collected a huge crowd of people whom he had deceived
and went with them to destroy the church of Hagia Wisdom. The Bishop of
Novgorod with a cross in his hands stood in front of the church and called the
Christians to help him. But only very few hastened to his side. Only the Prince
of Novgorod, Gleb Svyatoslavich, did not fear. He went alone to meet the armed
mob and in the sight of all struck with his sword the servant of satan who had
proudly prophesied to the people that he would be enthroned that day. After
this the crowd dispersed. It is evident that in such a situation no ordinary
good fellow could take the place in the defence of the Church of the Christian
Autocrat, who had received from her a blessing on his service and who was
protected by the power of God through her prayers».[649]
The relationship between Church and State
in Kievan Rus’ is described by G. Podskalsky as follows: «The relations between
the sovereign and his subjects were based on principles drawn from Old- and
New-Testament texts. This, for example, how the chronicler views princely
virtue: ‘If there are righteous princes on the earth, then many sins are
forgiven to the earth, but if they are evil and cunning, then God brings more
evil on the earth, insofar as its head is of the earth’. The Novgorod Bishop
Luke the Jew looks at the matter differently: ‘Fear God, honour the prince, you
are slaves first of God, and also of the lord (that is, the prince – G.P.).
The logical consequence of both utterances is, in principle, the right to
resist the authorities, although its existence and the practical possibilities
of applying it were just not formulated sufficiently clearly in Rus’. On the
contrary, the Church willingly resorted to helping the State in its struggle
with the remnants of paganism and the reappearance of heresies, and also in the
missionary absorption of new territories. In the first place this was a work of
the monks, whose ranks at the beginning were filled up with many from the
land-owning nobility and the social elite of society. But the metropolitans,
who were all practically without exception Greeks, tried, on their part, to
direct the efforts of the Russian princes to ward off the attacks of the nomads
on the East Roman empire, without, however, overstepping the bounds of loyalty
to the princely power….”[650]
“The princes in their turn gradually gave
the Church juridical privileges, steady income and possessions in land… Crimes
in the sphere of family relations, which were subject to punishment from the
point of view of Christian morality, entered into the administration of the
Church already in the 11th century. The jurisdiction of the prince’s
power was limited by the immunity of the clergy and the members of their
families, and also of the monks and the ‘church people’, that is, people under
the special protection of the Church (the poor, the sick, strangers, etc.). However,
sometimes representatives of the clergy were still brought before the prince’s
court...
“Just as the princes took part in the
administration of Church affairs, so the episcopate strove to influence the
princes’ politics. Such cooperation between Church and State reached its zenith
during the rule of Vladimir Monomakh [1113-1125]. But, according to the words
of Hilarion, already Vladimir I had taken part in councils, discussing with the
Church leadership ways and means of strengthening faith amidst the newly
converted. In the future such cooperation gradually broadened in proportion as
the place of the Greek hierarchs was taken by bishops of Russian extraction,
while the princes thereby received the possibility of exerting greater
influence on the choice of candidates and their consecration. The chronicler
tells us of a whole series of bishops who recommended themselves by carrying
out complicated diplomatic missions. The triumphant conclusion of treaties by
the princes was accompanied by oaths and kissing of the cross. The monks of the
Kiev Caves monastery more than once took up a critical position in relation to
the prince. Thus, for example, in 1073 Abbot Theodosius refused to join the
princely civil war on the side of Svyatoslav, who had then seized the princely
throne, and did not even fear sharply to point out to the prince the
lawlessness of his actions, and of his exiling of his brother Izyaslav. Only
the lofty authority of the monastery leader and the pleas of the brethren saved
him from persecution, and after the laying of the foundations of a new
monastery church complete reconciliation was achieved. If the monks thereby
kept an inner distance in relation to politics, the episcopate was forced
sometimes to enter into it, although it did not take an immediate part in the
counsels of the princes.”[651]
“In general, in the course of the civil
wars of the 11th-12th centuries, in the eyes both of the
princes and the people, the Church acquired a new moral authority, while the
State, on its part, for the sake of the common good received from the Church a
confirmation of its divine purpose. From the Slavonic translation of the Nomocanon
in 14 chapters Kievan Rus’ drew the ideal formula for the relations between
the secular and ecclesiastical authorities going back to Justinian’s Sixth
Novella.… The emperor was bound to concern himself with the teaching of the
faith, with respect for the clergy and with the observation of the canons. It
was precisely this postulate that was ladi by Metropolitan Hilarion at the base
of his reasonings on agreement between the Church and the State...
“And so, in all the manifestations of
theological and church-political thought, in art, in Divine services and in
literary works of various genres, already in the 11th century one
and the same national tendency was revealed, a leaning towards a State Church…
The strength of the Church consisted in the fact that it worthily presented
itself in a non-standard situation which it was impossible to master without
the aid of earlier conceptual models and models of behaviour transferred to the
new situation; while the strength of the State consisted in an understanding of
the far-reaching commonality of its interests with the interests of the Church,
by virtue of which it was necessary to give the Church necessary aid in the
fulfilment of her mission. In spite of, or even thanks to the fact that not one of these two powers was able to boast of complete independence from the other, the sphere
of their external activity and internal freedom was as great as it would ever
be later.”[652]
Kievan Rus’ represented a rare balance of freedom and obedience in State
life. Thus Fedotov writes: “Kievan chroniclers are very outspoken about the
vices and flaws of their princes; they obviously felt no restraint imposed by
princely dignity upon the freedom of their judgement. All they can afford to
do, in order to alleviate the guilt of a prince, is to attribute his deficiency
to the influence of bad counselors. Bad counselors, mostly ‘young ones’
(compare Isaiah 3.1-4), are the root of all political evils. The youth
of the prince himself is often considered as a great misfortune and a sign of
God’s wrath against the country.
“Good and bad princes alike are sent by God as a reward or punishment to
the people. ‘If a country is right before God, He ordains in it a just Caesar
or prince, loving law and justice, and he installs governors and judges
administering justice.’ But ‘woe to the city where the prince is young, and
likes to drink wine at the sound of the gusli with young counselors…
Such are given by God for our sins’ (Lavr. 1015).
“If
a bad prince is sent by God and his tyranny has a penitential significance this
seems to exclude revolt against the tyrant as a legitimate political action.
This conclusion would be quite correct in the spirit of the Byzantine and even
early Christian ethics; it was indeed the doctrine of Anastasius Sinaitas in
the seventh century and it was repeated by some Russian moralists as well. And
yet the import of this doctrine of obedience was greatly exaggerated by the
modern historians who often viewed the early Russian ways of life from the
viewpoint of Muscovy. The Kievan chronicler may consider a revolt of the
citizens against their prince as the act of God’s will, punishing the prince in
his turn (Lavr. 1068)…. The chastising providence of God, in the
political sphere, is double-faced; occasionally, it can use to its own ends
even a popular revolution.
“There was, however, one thing before which ancient Russia, unlike
Byzantium, stopped with horror: the murder of a prince. Regicide in Byzantium
was so common that it seems a part of the political system, a necessary
corrective to autocracy. In Russia,… a revolt, although it was sometimes
justified if it ended in the overthrow of a prince, was never pardoned if it
resulted in his murder…”[653]
The unity of the vast area of Kievan Rus’
under St. Vladimir and his immediate successors was an extraordinary
achievement in view of the lack of natural frontiers, the multinational
character of the realm, and the constant invasions of eastern (and occasionally
western) barbarians.
However, as Podskalsky writes, on the
death of Yaroslav the Wise in 1054, according to his will, “the rule of the
Kievan princes was replaced by a federation of independent princedoms linked
between themselves only by the hierarchy of princely thrones and the constant
redistribution of princedoms within the princely clan (according to the principle
of seniority) that flowed from that. These new traits of State construction
were fraught with constant political tension, and forced the Church to step
forward in a new for her role of preserver and defender of State unity”.[654]
From the beginning of the twelfth century
the State began to weaken from both within and without. The basic reason was
the internecine warfare of the princes due to the lack of a law of
primogeniture whereby all power should be handed from the dying leader to only
one of his sons. By contrast, the Russian custom – introduced, according to
Solonevich, from feudal Hungary, Poland and, in part, Germany[655] –
was that the Great Prince of Kiev would divide up his realm into principalities
and give each of his sons one. Although the princes were exhorted to preserve
brotherly love and peace and to recognise the seniority of their elder brother
in Kiev, practice often fell well short of the theory…
However, Solonevich considers the civil
wars of the Kievan princes to be insufficient to explain why neither Kiev, nor
any of the other centres of power in Kievan Rus’, such as Novgorod, Galich or
Vilnius, succeeded in creating a lasting and powerful empire. “For the question
inevitably arises: why did Kiev and those with her not cope with situation, and
why did Moscow and those with her cope? Neither does the idea that the Moscow
princes were talented, or the Kievan ones untalented, contribute to our
understanding: was Yaroslav, who, though called ‘the Wise’, divided the Kieven
land between his sons, stupider than, for example, Daniel Alexandrovich, who
ascended the throne at the age of ten, or Michael Fyodorovich, who ascended the
throne at the age of sixteen? Under these princes the Muscovite land was not
divided. Would it not be more correct to seek for the reasons for success and
failure in some deeper or much broader phenomena than princely childbirths, and
more constant causes than the talent or lack of talent of some tens of princes
who shone on the Kievan or Muscovite thrones?
“The most obvious reason for the failure
of the pre-Muscovite rulers was the ‘civil wars’ in the Novgorodian or Kievan
veches, independently of whether they were decided by the armed combat of
princes on the field of battle or by the battle of parties. If we take the main
lines of development of Novgorod and Kiev, Galich and Vilna, on the one hand,
and Moscow, on the other, then it will become sufficiently obvious: both
Novgorod and Kiev, and Galich and Vilna created a purely aristocratic order for
themselves. And in Novgorod, and partly also in Kiev, the princes, that is, the
representatives of the monarchical principle in the country, were simply
hirelings, whom the veche sometimes invited and sometime expelled as seemed fit
to them. In Galich the princely power was completely eaten up by the boyars. In
the Lithuanian-Russian State the aristocracy was just waiting for the moment to
establish their freedoms before the face of the representative of one-man rule.
They succeeded in this – at the price of the existence of the State. ‘In Kiev
in the 11th century the administration of the city and district was
concentrated in the hands of the military elders’ (Klyuchevsky). ‘The veches in
Kiev and Novgorod, which appeared according to the chronicler already at the beginning
of the 11th century, from the time of the struggle between Yaroslav
and Svyatopolk in 1015, began, from the end of the century, to make louder and
louder noises, making themselves felt everywhere and interfering in the
relations between the princes. The princes had to take account of this force,
enter into deals with it, conclude political agreements with the cities. ‘The
prince, sitting in Kiev, had to strengthen the senior throne under him by
compacts with the Kievan veche. The princes were not fully empowered sovereigns of the land, but only
their military-political rulers.’
“Not
so long ago Russian social thought looked on Kiev Rus’, and in particular
Novgorod, as, very unfortunately, unsuccessful attempts to establish a
democratic order in Rus’. The coarse hand of eastern despotism crushed these
attempts: ‘the veche is not to exist, the bell is not to exist, and Novgorod is
to exist under the complete control of the Muscovite princes’... Now opinions
of this democracy have changed somewhat. Neither in Kiev nor in Novgorod was
there any democracy. There was a feudal-mercantile aristocracy (in Vilna it was
a feudal-landowning aristocracy). And it was this, and by no means
‘the people’, that tried by all means to limit
and bind the princely power. And not, of course, in the name of ‘the people’,
but in its own class interests. One can say: both in Galich, and in Novgorod,
and in Vilna, and in Kiev the aristocracy – whether land-owning or mercantile –
swallowed up the supreme power. But one can also put it another way: neither in Galich, nor in Novgorod, nor in Vilna, nor in Kiev did
the popular masses succeed in creating their own power. And for that reason the lower classes attached
themselves to that power which the Muscovite lower classes had succeeded in
creating: ‘we want to be under the Muscovite Tsar, the Orthodox Tsar’.”[656]
The American professor Richard Pipes agrees that the prince was not
the supreme authority: “If in Novgorod the prince resembled an elected chief
executive, the Great Prince of Lithuanian Rus’ was not unlike a constitutional
king.”[657]
G. P. Fedotov also agrees. But he believes that in Novgorod, at any rate, there
was real ‘people’s power’ : “Was Novgorod a republic? Yes, at least for three
and a half centuries of its history, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The fact that a prince held
authority in Novgorod should not deceive us…
“From the time when Russia actually lost
her political unity, on the death of Vladimir Monomakh (1125), and the decay of
the Kievan monarchy, the authority of the Prince of Novgorod was neither
hereditary nor lifelong. At any time the popular veche could ‘show the
prince his road’ out of the city. The prince, on the other hand, was not an
all-powerful master in Novgorod, not even the chief official in the
administration. His main task was military; he was temporary commander of the
armed forces. And even this military command he shared with the tysyatski.
As a judge he shared authority with the posadnik (deputy or mayor) and others.
He was not even nominal head of the city-state. Decrees were not written nor
treaties concluded in his name. As he was subject to the invitation of the
veche and lacked dynastic rights, like the podestas of the Italian
medieval republics, the prince was easily included in the system of republican
authorities or ‘masters’ who ruled Novgorod. Consequently, Novgorod was really
for centuries a republic in fact, as N.I. Kostomarov expressed it, a government
by the people…
“Supreme authority in the Novgorod
republic belonged, of course, to the veche, or the assembly of all free
citizens. The veche elected the entire administration, not excluding the
archbishop, and had the power to check on it and judge it. This was a direct,
not a representative, democracy like the republics of the ancient world. Only
those who participated in the public meetings could exercise their political
rights. An immense territory was administered by the inhabitants of this single
city. This was the weak spot in the republican systems of both Athens and Rome;
the agora and the forum could not rule empires…
“The archbishop stood above parties and
expressed the unity of the republic. To make him really independent, his name
was drawn by lot from those of the candidates elected by the veche. The three
lots on the altar in the Cathedral of St. Sophia symbolized the divine will for
the fate of the city-state. In the political symbolism of Great Novgorod its
sovereign, the bearer of authority, was St. Sophia herself...”[658]
The first major attempt by a Russian ruler
to halt the decline of Kievan Rus’ by imposing a more disciplined, centralized
and truly autocratic power began in 1155, when Prince Andrew, son of Great
Prince George Dolgoruky of Kiev, left the south to settle in Rostov-Suzdal,
one of the smaller principalities situated in the dense forests of the
Volga-Oka triangle. Here, far from the fratricidal politics of southern Russia,
as N.M. Karamzin writes, “the people had not yet exhibited a mutinous spirit,
they did not judge and change their sovereigns, but fervently obeyed them and
fought bravely for them”.[659] It
was therefore the perfect base for Andrew, who, «having not only a good hear,
but also an excellent mind, clearly saw the reasons for the woes of the State
and wanted to save at least his own land from them: that is, he removed the
unfortunate system of appanages and ruled on his own, giving cities neither to
his brothers nor to his sons”.[660]
Andrew’s plan, according
to Georgievsky, was to change “the principles on which ancient Kievan Rus’ had lived
before him, proclaiming the idea of the autocracy as the basis of the political
life of the Russian people. Orthodoxy and autocracy – these corner-stones of the great building of
the Russian State – were first indicated to the Russian people by Andrew
Bogolyubsky as the foundation for the attainment of State might and popular
prosperity. Bogolyubsky’s later successors, the Great Princes of Moscow who
founded the great Muscovite State which then grew into a mighty empire, only
developed and realised Bogolyubsky’s ideas in their own political activity”.[661]
Andrew’s plan comprised three stages. First,
having been elected Prince of the Rostov-Suzdal land, he chose as his capital
neither Rostov, where the freedom-loving boyars (mainly from Novgorod) were
powerful, nor Suzdal, where his father’s “druzhina” held sway, but Vladimir,
where he built a new shrine for the wonderworking Vladimir icon of the Mother
of God. Although this was a blow to the interests of the boyars and soldiers
who had elected him, they voluntarily surrendered to him.
Secondly, he tried to make the bishop of
Vladimir the metropolitan of the Russian Church instead of the bishop of Kiev -
or at any rate an autocephalous see, as befitted a truly independent state
ruled by a true autocrat. In this attempt he failed. However, later generations fulfilled his plan...
Thirdly, Andrew proceeded to consolidate
his power in the south and north-west. At the head of an alliance of eleven
princes who had elected him as senior prince he sent an army to conquer Kiev
and drive out the Great Prince, placing his younger brother, Gleb, on the
throne instead. After
the victory, Andrew himself did not come to Kiev but
remained in Vladimir, thereby demonstratively showing that Vladimir, rather
than Kiev, was now the capital of the Russian land. Novgorod, too, after an initially
successful rebellion, was forced to accept the authority of Andrew.
And so, just at the moment
when, as Tikhomirov writes, “flashes of the monarchical principle
were beginning to be clearly threatened by the principle of the princely
land-owning aristocracy, Andrew Bogolyubsky used his election, but only in
order to being a radical breakup of the old order on the principles of one-man
rule.”[662]
«This act of Andrew’s,” writes
Georgievsky, “was a most
significant fact in the history of ancient Rus’; from it our history acquired a
new tendency, from it there begins a new order of things. This was not simply the transfer of the Great Prince’s capital from one
place to another, it was a proclamation of the new principles of State life of
Rus’ worked out by Andrews”.[663]
W.J. Birkbeck explains the transfer of the capital from Kiev to
Vladimir as follows: “It was on account of the impossibility of fully realising
this ideal [of the Orthodox autocracy] at Kieff that the seat of the Empire was
removed by Andrew Bogoliusbki to Vladimir in the middle of the twelfth century.
The old traditions of the House of Rurik were too deeply rooted to allow the
free development of these Imperial tendencies in the first capital. Hardly a
single Grand Duke succeeded to the throne without having to fight for it. For
two generations the Sovereigns of Kieff had been looking more and more towards
the basin of the Volga as a source of strength to the monarchical idea against
the yet vigorous remains of the anarchical system inherited from Scandinavian
times….
“If the Russia of the forests in the basin
of the Volga was less fertile, less civilised, than the Russia on the banks of
the Dnieper, it was at least less disturbed by domestic feuds between the
descendants of Rurik. But the old spirit of the druzhina was far from
dead even there. It was in vain that Andrew Bogoliubski had refused to set up
his throne in Rostoff or Suzdal, and had deliberately elected to erect a new
capital as an embodiment of his ideas of centralisation. He was a man
considerably in advance of his time, and Russia was not as yet prepared for
him. As Rambaud points out, already in the twelfth century he indicates exactly
the course of action which the Grand Dukes of Moscow will have to pursue in
order, in the sixteenth century, finally to establish the autocracy upon a firm
and sure basis. Every one of the steps by which they at last successfully
accomplished their task was at least attempted by him. He breaks through the
Varangian tradition of the druzhina; he treats his nobles, not as
companions, but as subjects. All the decentralising tendencies of the Empire he
attempts to crush out; whether they be the power of the appanaged princes, or
the liberties and independence of cities like Great Novgorod…”[664]
Andrew’s achievements were consolidated by his son, Vsevolod III, who was, as John Fennell writes, “one of the
shrewdest and more farsighted of all the descendants of Vladimir I, [and] was
widely acknowledged among his fellow-rulers. ‘All lands trembled at his name
and his fame spread throughout the whole country,’ wrote his chronicler, who…
probably represented the views of most of his contemporaries. All Suzdalia owed
him allegiance of some kind or other; the great city-state of Novgorod with its
vast subject lands to the west, north and north-east had, for the first eight
years of the thirteenth century, only his sons as its rulers; Kiev’s eastern
neighbour, Southern Pereyaslavl’, was firmly under his control; and the princes
of Murom and Ryazan’ to the south were little more than his vassals.”[665]
Then, in 1211, writes G.G. Litavrin,
Vsevolod “obtained from a congress of the boyars, cities, villages, merchants,
nobles, abbots, priests and ‘all the people’ a recognition of his son Yury’s
hereditary rights to the Vladimir-Suzdal throne, which at that time held the seniority
in Rus’. L.V. Cherepnin considers this date critical in the history of Old
Russian Statehood: there began the change from the system of princedoms headed
by a given Prince at a given moment, to a centralised, hereditary Monarchy. The
bearer of the seniority, the Great Prince of Rus’, became the true Autocrat of
the whole of the Russian land”.[666]
Vsevolod’s rule, according to Klyuchevsky,
“was in many respects the continuation of the external and internal activity of
Andrew of Bogolyubovo. Like his elder brother, Vsevolod forced people to
recognise him as Great Prince of the whole of the Russian land, and like him
again, he did not go to Kiev to sit on the throne of his father and
grandfather. He rules the south of Russia from the banks of the distant
Klyazma. Vsevolod’s political pressure was felt in the most distant
south-western borders of the Russian land. The Galician Prince Vladimir, the
son of Yaroslav Osmomys, who won back his father’s throne with Polish help,
hastened to strengthen his position on it, under the protection of his distant
uncle, Vsevolod of Suzdal. He sent him the message: ‘Father and Lord, keep
Galicia under me, and I, who belong to you and God, will always remain in your
will together with the whole of Galicia.”[667]
The Mongol invasions put an end to this
particular attempt to create a centralised Russian kingdom. However, the
Mongols continued the trend towards centralisation, giving the rest of the
Russian land a long and bitter, but necessary training in obedience to a single
political authority.
The Nicaean Empire and Royal Anointing
Although Constantinople fell to the
crusaders in 1204, Romanity survived. In Nicaea the Lascarid Emperors preserved
and nurtured the strength of the Roman power in exile. And then the first of
the Palaeologi, Michael, reconquered the City in 1261, enabling an independent
Orthodox Empire to survive, albeit in a severely truncated form, until 1453.
What had changed to turn the wrath of the
Lord to mercy? Leaving aside the basic and most essential condition for any
real turn for the better – the repentance of the people, - we may point to an
institutional or sacramental development that strengthened the autocracy while
at the same time restoring the Patriarch to a position of something like
equality with the Emperor. This was the introduction of the sacrament of
imperial anointing – visible anointing with holy oil, at the hands of a
patriarch - into the imperial inauguration rite.
Ostrogorsky describes the rite as follows:
«Before the coronation, the Emperor, on entering the church of Hagia Sophia,
first of all handed over to the Patriarch the text of the Symbol of Faith
written in his own hand and signed, and accompanied… by promises to follow
unfailingly the Apostolic traditions, the decrees of all the Ecumenical and
Local Councils, and the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, and always to
remain a faithful son and servant of the Church, etc.... Then before the
accomplishment of the actual rite of coronation, in the Augusteon (a courtyard
leading to Hagia Sophia) there took place the ceremony of raising on the
shield... The shield was held in front by the Patriarch and the first
functionary of the Empire, while on the sides and behind there went the nobles
who were next in rank... The anointing and crowning of the Emperor
were included in the course of the Divine service. At a particular moment in
the Litury, when the Patriarch came out of the altar and onto the ambon,
accompanied by the highest ranks of the Church, and ‘a great silence and quiet’
settled in the church, the Patriarch invited the Emperor to come onto the
ambon. The Patriarch read the prayers composed for the right of anointing – one
quietly, the others aloud, - after which he anointed the Emperor with chrism in
the form of the cross and proclaimed: ‘Holy!’ Those around him on the ambon
repeated this cry three times, and then the people repeated it three times.
After this the altar brought a crown out of the altar, the Patriarch placed it
on the head of him who was to be crowned and proclaimed: ‘Worthy!’ This
proclamation was again repeated three times, first by the hierarchs on the
ambon and then by the people.”[668]
Now, as we have seen, this
sacrament was introduced very late into Byzantium by comparison with the West.
True, elements of the rite were present early on: the first ecclesiastical
coronation of a Byzantine emperor took place in 457, and the patriarch received
the confession of faith of the new emperor already in 491.[669] Nevertheless, the
very late appearance of the fully-fledged rite with anointing requires some
explanation.
One possibility is that anointing was
introduced from the West. Thus Vera Zemskova writes: “It is thought, and with justice, that the
rite of anointing arose in Byzantium under the influence of the West, where the
sacrament already existed and had its source in the understanding of the
sacredness of power that was characteristic for the Barbarians. True, it is
impossible to say precisely what kind of influence this was. Even in the
history of the intensive contacts between the Emperor Manuel Comnenus
(1143-1180) and the western sovereigns there is no mention of this subject. The
rite appeared after the conquest of Constantinople with the emperors of the
Nicaean empire…”[670]
Dagron considers
that the Theodore Laskaris’ anointing by the patriarch in Nicaea in 1208 was
modelled on the westerners’ anointing of Baudouin I in Constantinople in 1204.
It both bolstered imperial power and strengthened the position of the Church in
relation to imperial power: “Far from the historical capital, in the modest
surroundings of Nicaea, it would have appeared necessary to materialise the
‘mystery of royalty’. The Church, being from now on the only force capable of
checking the secessionist tendencies, was able to seize the opportunity to
place her mark more deeply on the imperial coronation. Using the request of
clergy from Constantinople who wanted the convocation of a council to nominate
a patriarch, Theodore Laskaris, who was not yet officially emperor, fixed a
date that would allow the new titular incumbent to proceed to the ‘habitual’
date, that is, during Holy Week [Holy Thursday, to be more precise], for the
making of holy chrism (to qeion tou murou crisma). On his side, [Patriarch]
Michael Autoreianos, who had just been elected on March 20, 1208, multiplied
initiatives aimed at strengthening imperial authority, exhorting the army in a
circular letter in which we are astonished to find echoes of the idea of the
holy war, remitting the sins of the soldiers and of the emperor, and taking an
oath of dynastic fidelity from the bishops assembled in Nicaea.”[671]
Royal anointing exalted the authority of
the emperor by closely associating him with the Church. For the rite had
similarities to the rite of ordination of clergy and was administered by the
Patriarch. As the Byzantine writer Zosimas wrote: «Such was the link between the Imperial dignity and the First-Hierarchical dignity that the former not only
could not even exist without the latter. Subjects were much bolder in deciding
on conspiracies against one whom they did not see as having been consecrated by
native religion».[672]
Perhaps also the Byzantines
introduced anointing at this point in reaction to its downgrading by Pope
Gregory VII and his successors, in order to bolster the prestige of the
anointed kings in the face of the anti-monarchism of the Popes, who constituted
the greatest political power in the world at that time and the greatest threat
to the survival of the Byzantine Church and Empire. Against the claims of the
Popes to possess all the charisms, including the charism of political
government, the Byzantines put forward the anointing of their Emperors. It was
as if they said: a truly anointed and right-believing Emperor outweighs an
uncanonically ordained and false-believing Patriarch…
The lateness of the introduction of
imperial anointing in Byzantium is paralleled by a similar slowness, as we have
seen, in the development of the rite of crowning in marriage. The two
sacraments are linked in that they are both “natural” sacraments that existed
in some form before the coming of Christianity; which needed not so much
replacing as supplementing and purifying. This being so, the Church wisely did
not hasten to create completely new rites for them, but only eliminated the
more grossly pagan elements, added a blessing and then communed the newly-weds
or the newly-anointed one in the Body and Blood of Christ.
Since kingmaking, like marriage, was a
“natural” sacrament that predated the New Testament Church, the ecclesiastical
rite was not felt to be constitutive of legitimate kingship in Byzantium – at
any rate, until the introduction of the last element of the rite, anointing,
probably in the 12th or 13th century. The Roman Empire
was believed to have been created by God alone, independently of the Church. As
the Emperor Justinian’s famous Sixth Novella puts it: "Both proceed
from one source", which is why the Empire did not need to be re-instituted
by the Church – although, of course, its union with, and support of, the Church
was the whole purpose of its existence.
This was clear whether one dated the
beginning of the Empire to Augustus or to Constantine. If the Empire began with
Augustus, then the Church could not be said to have instituted it for the
simple reason that she came into existence simultaneously with it. For, as St.
Gregory the Theologian said: “The state of the Christians and that of the
Romans grew up simultaneously and Roman supremacy arose with Christ’s sojourn
upon earth, previous to which it had not reached monarchical perfection.”[673]
But if it began with Constantine, then
everyone knew that Constantine had been made emperor, from a human point of
view, by the people and the senate of Rome (more specifically, the soldiers in
York in 306 and the senate in Rome in 312), but in actual fact by God’s direct
call through the vision of the sign of the Cross and the words: “By this sign
conquer”. For, as the Church herself chants in the liturgical service to St.
Constantine, “Thou didst not receive thy name from men, but, like the divine
Paul, didst have it from Christ God on high, O all-glorious Constantine”.[674]
Just as the first kings of Israel, Saul and David, were directly chosen by God
– “I have raised up one chosen out of My people; I have found David My servant;
With My holy oil have I anointed him” (Psalm 88.18-19), - so Constantine
was chosen and anointed directly by God – for “thou wast the image of a new
David, receiving the horn of royal anointing over thy head”.[675]
And if there were people, whether in East or West, and whether because of the
personal sins of the Emperors or the of the invisibility of the anointing in
Byzantium, who doubted the special anointing of the Byzantine Emperors, the
completion of the rite with the visible sacrament of anointing served to dispel
those doubts.
Of course, the fact that the Empire, like
the Church, is of Divine origin does not mean that the two institutions are of
equal dignity. Whereas the Church is “the fullness of Him Who filleth all in
all” (Ephesians 1.23), and as such eternal, the Empire, as all believing
Byzantines knew and accepted, was destined to be destroyed by the Antichrist.
Thus the Church is like the soul which survives the death of the body, being by
nature superior to it, even though both soul and body are created by God.
Having said that, the fact that the
Empire, like the body, is created by God was of great importance as against
those who asserted, like Pope Gregory VII, that its origin lies in the fallen
passions of man and the devil. It was against this political Manichaeism that
the institution of imperial anointing in Byzantium stood as a powerful witness.
Or, to use a different theological
metaphor: the quasi-chalcedonian “dogma” of the union without confusion of the
two institutions in Byzantium, the one institution supplying the anointing and
the other institution receiving it, served to mark if off from the political
Monophysitism of the Popes, for whom the Divinity of the Church “swallowed up”,
as it were, the “mere humanity” of the Empire.
Another reason for the introduction of
imperial anointing in Byzantium may have been a perceived need to protect the
monarchy against potential usurpers from within, to bolster the legitimacy of
the lawful Emperors against those innumerable coups which, as we have
seen, so disfigured the image of Byzantine life in the decades before 1204. As
we have seen, the earlier introduction of anointing in Spain, Francia and England
had had just such a beneficial effect. And certainly, the need for some higher
criterion of legitimacy had never been more sorely needed than in the period of
the Nicaean empire.
In previous centuries, the de facto
criterion of legitimacy had been: the true emperor is he who sits on the throne
in Constantinople, whatever the means he used to obtain the throne. This may
have seemed close to the law of the jungle, but it at any rate had the
advantage of clarity. The problem after 1204, however, was that he who sat on
the throne in Constantinople was a Latin heretic who had obtained his throne,
not just by killing a few personal enemies, but by mass slaughter of the
ordinary people and the defiling of all that was most holy to the Byzantines,
including the very sanctuary of Hagia Sophia. The patriarch had not recognised
him and had died in exile. There was no question for the majority of
Byzantines: this was not the true emperor.
So the true emperor had to be found in one
of the Greek kingdoms which survived the fall of the City: Nicaea and Trebizond
in the East, Epirus and Thessalonica in the West. But which?
For a time, from the year 1222, it looked
as if Theodore Angelus in the West, whose dominion extended from the Adriatic
to the Aegean and who was related to the great families of the Angeli, Comneni
and Ducae, had a greater claim to the throne than the Eastern candidate, John
Vatatzes, who was the son-in-law of the first Nicaean emperor, Theodore
Lascaris.
However, Theodore Angelus’s weakness was
that the Patriarch lived in Nicaea, while the metropolitan of Thessalonica
refused to crown him, considering that a violation of the rights of the
Patriarch. So he turned instead to Archbishop Demetrius (Chomatianos) of Ochrid
and Bulgaria, who crowned him in Thessalonica in 1225 or 1227. According to
Vasiliev, “he crowned and anointed Theodore who ‘put on the purple robe and
began to wear the red shoes’, distinctive marks of the Byzantine basileus. One
of the letters of Demetrius shows that his coronation and anointment of
Theodore of Epirus was performed ‘with the general consent of the members of
the senate, who were in the west (that is, on the territory of Thessalonica and
Epirus), of the clergy, and of all the large army.’ Another document testifies
that the coronation and anointment were performed with the consent of all the
bishops who lived ‘in that western part’. Finally, Theodore himself signed his
edicts (chrysobulls) with the full title of the Byzantine Emperor:
‘Theodore in Christ God Basileus and Autocrat of the Romans.”[676]
Moreover, from the letters of Metropolitan
John Apocaucus of Naupactus, as V.G. Vasilievsky writes, “we learn for the
first time what an active part was taken by the Greek clergy and especially by
the Greek bishops. The proclamation of Theodore Angelus as the Emperor of the
Romans was taken very seriously: Thessalonica, which had passed over into his
hands, was contrasted with Nicaea; Constantinople was openly indicated to him
as the nearest goal of his ambition and as an assured gain; in speech, thought,
and writing, it was the common opinion that he was destined to enter St. Sophia
and occupy there the place of the Orthodox Roman emperors where the Latin
newcomers were sitting illegally. The realization of such dreams did not lie
beyond the limits of possibility; it would be even easier to take
Constantinople from Thessalonica than from Nicaea.”[677]
However, Theodore Angelus’ position had
one weakness that proved fatal to his hopes: could a non-Constantinopolitan
archbishop, albeit one with autocephalous jurisdiction, anoint the Emperor of
Constantinople? Previous Byzantine emperors, including Constantine himself, had
received the throne through the acclamation of the army and/or the people,
which was considered sufficient for legitimacy. But now, in the thirteenth
century, acclamation alone was not enough: imperial anointing by the
first-hierarch of the Church was considered necessary.
But here it was the Lascarids of Nicaea
had the advantage over the Angeli of Thessalonica. For the first Lascarid,
Theodore I, had been anointed both earlier (in 1208) and by a hierarch whom
everybody recognised as having a greater authority – Patriarch Michael IV
Autoreianus of Constantinople.
Patriarch Michael’s successor, Germanus
II, wrote to Archbishop Demetrius: “Tell me, most sacred man, which fathers
bestowed on you the lot of crowning to the kingdom? By which of the archbishops
of Bulgaria was any emperor of the Romans ever crowned? When did the archpastor
of Ochrid stretch out his right hand in the capacity of patriarch and
consecrate a royal head? Indicate to us a father of the Church, and it is
enough. Suffer reproach, for you are wise, and love even while being beaten. Do
not get angry. For truly the royal anointing introduced by you is not for us
the oil of joy, but an unsuitable oil from a wild olive. Whence did you buy
this precious chrism (which, as is well known, is boiled in the patriarchate),
since your previous stores have been devoured by time?”[678]
In reply, Archbishop Demetrius pointed to
the necessity of having an emperor in the West in order effectively to drive
out the Latins. Theodore Angelus had carried out his task with great
distinction, and was himself of royal blood. Besides, “the Greek West has
followed the example of the East: after all, in despite of ancient
Constantinopolitan practice, an emperor has been proclaimed and a patriarch
chosen in the Bithynian diocese as need has dictated. And when has it ever been
heard that one and the same hierarch should rule in Nicaea and call himself
patriarch of Constantinople? And this did not take place at the decree of the
whole senate and all the hierarchs, since after the capture of the capital both
the senate and the hierarchs fled both to the East and the West. And I think
that the greater part are in the West…
“For some unknown reason you have ascribed
to yourself alone the consecration of chrism. But it is one of the sacraments
performed by all the hierarchs (according to Dionysius the Areopagite). If you
allow every priest to baptise, then why is anointing to the kingdom, which is
secondary by comparison with baptism, condemned by you? But according to the
needs of the time it is performed directly by the hierarch next in rank after
the patriarch, according to the unfailing customs and teaching of piety.
However, he who is called to the kingdom is usually anointed, not with chrism,
but with oil sanctified by prayer… We had no need of prepared chrism, but we
have the sepulchre of the Great Martyr Demetrius, from which chrism pours out
in streams…”[679]
Nevertheless, it was the feeling that the
true anointing must be performed by a patriarch that proved crucial. In the end
it was the advantage of having received the true anointing from the true
first-hierarch of the Church that gave the victory to the Lascarids. And so
this sacrament, which, as we have seen, was so critical in strengthening the
Western Orthodox kingdoms at a time when invasions threatened from without and
chaos from within, came to serve the same purpose in Eastern Orthodoxy. As
Papadakis writes, “the continuity and prestige conferred on the Lascarid house
by this solemn blessing and by the subsequent presence of a patriarch at Nicaea
were decisive. For, by then, coronation by a reigning patriarch was thought to
be necessary for imperial legitimacy.”[680]
Emperor
John III Vatatzes
In any case, the power of the Angeli was
crushed by the Bulgarian Tsar John Asen. And in 1242 the Nicaean Emperor John
III Vatatzes forced Theodore Angelus’ son John to renounce the imperial title
in favour of that of “despot”, which was followed, four years later, by his
conquest of Thessalonica.[681] And so it was the
earlier and more authoritative anointing of the Nicaean Emperors that enabled
them to win the dynastic struggle.
Under their rule the Nicaean Empire
prospered. And it prospered, at least in part, because the Lascarid emperors of
Nicaea were much more modest in their pretensions than their predecessors.
As Macrides writes: “Their style of rule
was partly a response to limited resources, partly to exclusion from
Constantinople, the natural setting, and also a reaction to the ‘sins’ which
had caused God to withdraw his support from the Byzantines. John III Vatatzes
and his son Theodore II ruled as if New Constantines had never existed. To
rephrase Choniates’ words of criticism for the twelfth-century emperors: John
III and Theodore II did not wear gold, did not treat common property as their
own nor free men as slaves, nor did they hear themselves celebrated as being
wiser than Solomon, heroic in strength, God-like in looks. Contrary to the
behaviour of most emperors, John did not even have his son proclaimed emperor
in his lifetime, not because he did not love his son, nor because he wanted to
leave the throne to anyone else, but because the opinion and choice of his
subjects was not evident. John was an emperor who reproved his son for wearing
the symbols of imperial power, for wearing gold while hunting, because he said
the imperial insignia represent the blood of the emperor’s subjects and should
be worn only for the purpose of impressing foreign ambassadors with the
people’s wealth. John’s care to separate public wealth from his own became
legendary. He set aside land to produce enough for the imperial table and had a
crown made for the empress from the sale of eggs produced by his hens. He
called it the ‘egg crown’ (oaton). John was an emperor who submitted to
the criticism of the church. When his mistress was forbidden entrance to the
church by the… monk Blemmydes, tutor to his son, she went to him in a fury and
charged him to come to her defence. But he only replied remorsefully that he
could not punish a just man. It was precisely the qualities which made him an
exceptional emperor which also contributed to his recognition as a saint by the
local population in Magnesia…”[682]
In
relation to the patriarchate, too, the Lascarid emperors, while rejecting
unwanted candidates, were nevertheless less overweening and “caesaropapist”
than their predecessors.
We
see this in the election of Patriarch Arsenius under Emperor Theodore II:
“After the triumphant burial of Emperor John [Vatatzes] in Sosandri, Theodore
II was raised onto the shield by the nobility and clergy, in accordance with
ancient custom. Setting off for Nicaea, he occupied himself with the election
of a patriarch in the place of the reposed Manuel; then the new patriarch had
to crown the new emperor. Up to 40 hierarchs assembled, and asked for the learned
Blemmydes as patriarch. He, however, was displeasing to the court because of
his independence. Emperor John Vatatzes had already once rejected his
candidacy, declaring openly that Blemmydes would not listen to the emperor, who
might have different views from those of the Church. The new Emperor Theodore
did not decide on speaking openly aganst Blemmydes, and even tried to persuade
him, promising various honours. But Blemmydes refused outright, knowing the
explosiveness and insistence of the young emperor. The efforts at persuasion
ended in a tiff, and Blemmydes left Nicaea for his monastery. That is how
Blemmydes himself recounted the matter, but according to an anonymous author
there was a strong party against Blemmydes among the hierarchs. Then the emperor
suggested electing the patriarch by lot. On proclaiming the name of a
candidate, they opened the Gospel at random and read the first words of the
page. To one there fell the words: “They will not succeed”, to another: “They
drowned”, to the abbot of Sosandri there even came: “ass and chicken”. Finally
Arsenius Avtorianus succeeded: at his name there fell the words “he and his
disciples”, and he was elected. Monk Arsenius, from a family of officials… was
a new man, with a strong character, sincerely devoted to the royal house... At
Christmas, 1254, Patriarch Arsenius triumphantly crowned Theodore II as emperor
of the Romans….”[683]
However, with the last of the Nicaean emperors and the first of the
Palaeologi, Michael Palaeologus, we see a shift back again to caesaropapism.
While he was still regent for Theodore II’s eight-year-old son, John IV
Lascaris, he flattered the hierarchs, said he would accept power only from
their hands, and promised that he would consider the Church to be his mother –
in contrast to Emperor Theodore, who had supposedly despised the Church and
kept it in subjection to imperial power.[684]
But on ascending the throne, he changed course, blinded the young John, and
when Patriarch Arsenius excommunicated him, had him removed.
Finally, as we shall see, he betrayed the Church and Orthodoxy at the
false council of Lyons. And this was the man who reconquered Constantinople for
the Orthodox… Which only goes to show that the politically successful emperor is
not always the good one in God’s eyes…
“Since the Comneni,” writes Vasiliev, “the
attitude of the eastern Emperor towards the union had greatly changed. Under
the Comneni, especially in the epoch of Manuel, the emperor had sought for
union not only under the pressure of the external Turkish danger but also in
the hope, already merely an illusion, that with the aid of the pope he might
gain supreme power over the West, i.e. restore the former Roman Empire. This
aspiration clashed with the similar aspiration of the popes to attain supreme
temporal power over the West, so that no union took place.”[685]
However, this early and rather naïve
stage in negotiations over the unia came to an abrupt end after the notorious
sack of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204. Although the Latins tried to
impose their faith on the Greeks, they were in general repulsed with hatred.
Even the Pope, Innocent III, recognised that relations could never be the same
again: “How is the Church of the Greeks, when afflicted with such trials and
persecutions, to be brought back into the unity of the Church and devotion to
the Apostolic See? It has seen in the Latins nothing but an example of
perdition and the works of darkness, so that it now abhors them as worse than
dogs. For they who are supposed to serve Christ rather than their own
interests, who should have used their swords only against the pagans, are
dripping with the blood of Christians. They have spared neither religion, nor
age, nor sex, and have committed adultery and fornication in public, exposing
matrons and even nuns to the filthy brutality of their troops. For them it was
not enough to exhaust the riches of the Empire and to despoil both great men
and small; they had to lay their hands on the treasures of the Church, and what
was worse its possessions, seizing silver retables from the altars, breaking
them into pieces to divide among themselves, violating the sanctuaries and
carrying off crosses and relics.”[686]
Vronis writes: “A number of the Greek
bishops… fled the Latin lands. Others remained in their sees, sometimes
ignoring Latin ecclesiastical demands and often maintaining contact with the
Greek clergy in non-Latin territory. The Catholics decided that the Greek
clergy were to keep the churches in those regions inhabited exclusively by
Greeks, but in mixed areas the bishops were to be Latins. The hierarchy of the
Church in the conquered areas thus passed into the hands of the Catholics,
whereas the village priests remained Greek. With some exceptions the Latin
bishoprics were filled with adventurers little inspired by the religious life,
who treated their Greek parishioners as schismatics. Very often the Greek
clergy who conformed to the demands of the papacy and hence were supported by
Innocent were removed by fanatic Latin bishops who wished to take over all the
bishoprics.”[687]
The Pope was right that the Greeks would
now hate the Latins and consider them as dogs. But he was wrong in thinking
that for that reason they would not seek the union of the Churches. For as
their empire grew weaker and smaller, the Greeks’ attachment to it grew, until
they were ready to trade the purity of the faith for the continuance of the
empire. Almost all the emperors of the period made some attempts at a unia.
Thus the first Greek Emperor-in-exile, Theodore I Lascaris, whose capital was
Nicaea, unsuccessfully attempted to convene a Council of the Orthodox
Patriarchs and to decide, with them, on the opening of negotiations with the
Pope.
Then, as Fr. Ambroise Frontier relates,
“John Vatatzes, the new emperor, took as his second wife, Constance, the
daughter of Frederick II, the Emperor of the West. Upon becoming Orthodox she
took the name Anna. A great friendship linked Frederick II and John Vatatzes.
Even though Frederick II was a Roman Catholic he was in conflict with the Pope
and he showed much regard for the Orthodox Church: ‘… how can this so-called
pontiff every day excommunicate before the whole world the name of your majesty
and all the Roman subjects (at this time the Greeks were called Romans) and
without shame call the most orthodox Romans, heretics, thanks to whom the
Christian Faith was spread to the far ends of the world.’…
“In 1250 Frederick II died and his son Manfred, an enemy of the Nicaean
Empire, became King of Sicily. The relations between John Vatatzes and [Pope]
Innocent IV took a dangerous turn. Innocent IV tried to turn the Venetians and
the Franks of the East against the Nicaean Empire. This forced John Vatatzes to
concede the following privileges to the Pope: 1) Recognition of the Pope’s
supremacy, 2) Commemoration of the Pope’s name, 3) Recognition of the right to
appeal to the Pope. These concessions were sufficient for the time being to
change the Pope’s politics so that he supported the policies of the Nicaean
Empire.
“Other reasons also forced the Pope to
uphold the Emperor. Whole territories were breaking away from the Latin state
of Constantinople and were repudiating their forced submission to the Pope.
Innocent IV thought that it would be good, before the fall of the weakening
Latin state of Constantinople, to come to an agreement with the Greeks and thus
place the union on a more solid foundation. He thus imposed two more
conditions: 1) The Latin Patriarch installed by the Crusaders in Constantinople
in place of the legitimate Orthodox Patriarch would be kept in the capital, 2)
The doctrine of the Filioque, that is of the Holy Spirit’s procession
from the Father and the Son, a heretical doctrine, cause of the schism between
the two Churches and a stumbling block to all attempts at union, would be
introduced into the Orthodox Creed. Theodore II Lascaris, the successor of John
Vatatzes, a child of his first marriage, however, had other plans. He refused
the papal proposals and sent Innocent’s legates away. He even wrote a treatise
in which he defended the Orthodox dogmas and refuted the doctrine of the Filioque.”[688]
In 1261 the Greeks defeated the Latins and Emperor Michael Palaeologus
entered Constantinople. “The splendour surrounding the ‘New Constantine’,”
writes Uspensky, “was a reflection of the great national triumph. Not only the
courtiers and service people rejoiced, but also the patriots, the venerators of
the ancient glory; and they could hardly imagine what the restoration would
cost the real interests of the people. They had reasons for their joy. From its
many years of struggle with the foreign aggressors, the Greek nation emerged
not overcome, but united. Under the leadership of the Orthodox Church the
population from Thessalonica to Magnesia and Attalia was conscious of itself as
one body; the consciousness of nationality grew in strength – the Hellenic idea
– not a literary idea, but a popular one; and the Church herself, having borne
the struggle upon her shoulders, became still more dear, native, Greek. Some of
the educated people could still talk about the unia from the point of view of
an abstract dogma; the politicians… could reluctantly wish for peace with the
curia, but the simple people was lost for ‘the Latin faith’ forever.”[689]
So why did this (at the beginning) most popular of emperors, who united
the nation in joy at the deliverance from the Latin oppressors, once again seek
union with the Latins and thereby lose everything? Because his first aim, which
he pursued with fanatical persistence and ingenuity, was not the flourishing of
the Orthodox Church and therefore the spiritual salvation of his people,
but the political reunification of all the Greek lands under his
leadership – for which he needed the help of the Pope against his western
enemies, especially Charles of Anjou. And the Pope’s help could be bought only
at the price of a unia. But the people, in spite of their new-found national
unity and pride, were not prepared to place the nation above the faith, and
began to turn against the Emperor. Rumours about Michael’s blinding of John IV
Lascaris spread, and in Bithynia a rebellion broke out under a blind pretender
with the name John Lascaris.
The rebellion was suppressed with difficulty. But “it was more difficult
to force the Greek clergy to accept the unia in accordance with the Roman
curia’s programme. The authority of Michael Palaeologus had been shaken in the
eyes of the zealots of the canons already since the time of Patriarch Arsenius
Autorianus. On the death of Patriarch Nicephorus Arsenius was again called to
the throne and accepted it on conditions which are not known to us exactly. He
crowned Palaeologus a second time, without mentioning the name of John
Lascaris. When the project for a political marriage between Palaeologus and
Ann, the sister of [the German Emperor] Manfred and the widow of the Emperor
Vatatzes, the Empress Theodora refused to give him a divorce, and was supported
by the patriarch, who did not allow the marriage with Anna. This reignited the
enmity between the emperor and the patriarch. The blinding of the unfortunate
John Lascaris elicited the emperor’s excommunication from the Church by the
patriarch, and Palaeologus had to bear this punishment, ‘considering it
necessary to display royal magnanimity’. More than once through clerics he
besought the patriarch to remove the excommunication, but Arsenius replied: ‘I
let a dove into my bosom, but it turned out to be a snake and fatally bit me.’
Once, on listening to a rejection, Palaeologus said: ‘What then, are you
commanding me to renounce the empire?’ – and wanted to give him his sword.
Arsenius stretched out his hand, and Palaeologus began to accuse the old man of
making an attempt on the emperor’s life. In vain did the emperor embrace the
knees of the patriarch: Arsenius pushed him away and went off to his cell. Then
the emperor began to complain: ‘The patriarch is ordering me to abandon State
affairs, not to collect taxes, and not to execute justice. That is how this
spiritual doctor heals me! It is time to seek mercy from the pope’. The emperor
began to seek an occasion to overthrow Arsenius, but the patriarch’s life was
irreproachable. The emperor gathered several hierarchs in Thessalonica and
summoned Arsenius to a trial, but he did not come. The obsequious hierarchs
tried to demonstrate that the disjunction of the ‘soul of the State’ from the
Church was a disease that threatened order… Palaeologus decided to get rid of
Arsenius whatever the cost. Having gathered the hierarchs, he laid out to them
all the steps he had taken to be reconciled with the patriarch. ‘It seems that
because of my deed he wants me to abandon the throne. But to whom am I to give
the kingdom? What will be the consequences for the empire? What if another person turns out to be
incapable of such a great service? Who can guarantee that I will live
peacefully, and what will become of my family? What people ever saw the like,
and has it ever happened amongst us that a hierarch should do such things
without being punished? Doesn’t he understand that for one who has tasted of
the blessedness of royal power it is impossible to part with it except together
with his life? Repentance is decreed by the Church, and does it not exist for
emperors? If I don’t find it from you, I will turn to other Churches and
receive healing from them. You decide.’”[690]
Finally Arsenius was deposed for failing to appear at his trial, and
exiled. The more malleable Germanus was made patriarch in his place. But
Arsenius and his followers refused to accept the situation, and many of the
people were on their side.[691]
In justification of his deposition of Patriarch Arsenius, the emperor
invoked his right as “epistemonarkh” – the same defence as was used by the
absolutist emperors of the twelfth century. Then, writes Dagron, in a prostagma
of 1270, he “invoked yet again his title of epistemonarch of the Church to
force Patriarch Joseph I to give Deacon Theodore Skoutariotes, on whom he had
conferred the imperial title of dikaiophylax, a rank corresponding in
the hierarchy to the archontes of the Church. In order to settle this trivial
affair, the emperor, completely impregnated with the spirit of the Comneni and
the teachings of Balsamon, did not hesitate to affirm that the [Church’s]
choices of patriarch had to be aligned with those of the emperor and that the
ecclesiastical offices were nothing other than transfers of the imperial
offices, as was demonstrated in the Donation of Constantine.” [692]
Thus the Church was proving herself to be better able to resist the
temptation of caesaropapism than in the previous century. It “was no longer
tacitly agreeable; it profited from the grave crisis of the Union [with Rome
pushed through by the emperor] to limit the ‘epistemonarchy’ to the most modest
temporal dimensions. Job Iasites, in the name of Patriarch Joseph, restated the
issue a little after 1273: ‘It is true that he who wears the crown has received
in person the responsibility and the title of epistemonarch of the holy Churches.
However, that does not consist in electing, or deposing, or excommunicating, or
carrying out any other action or function of the bishop, but, in accordance
with the meaning of the term ‘epistemonarch’, it consists [for the emperor] in
wisely keeping the leaders of the Churches in order and rank, and in giving the
force of law to the canonical decrees which they issue. If these decrees are
truly canonical, it is not in his power, as epistemonarch, to oppose them…”[693]
Meanwhile, the opposition to the unia continued to gain in strength, in
spite of the emperor’s repressive measures. Even “the emperor’s spiritual
father Joseph went over to the opposition, counting on ascending the
patriarchal throne. He began to advise the emperor that Germanus was not able
to absolve him from the curse placed on him by Arsenius, and the emperor sent
Joseph to Germanus to persuade him to leave voluntarily. When Germanus was
convinced that this advice came from the emperor, he departed for the Mangana
monastery…
“Joseph achieved his aim and
occupied the patriarchal throne for seven years (1267-74)… The removal of the
curses from the emperor – his first task – was carried out with exceptional
triumphalism. In the presence of the Synod and the court the emperor crawled on
his knees, confessing his sin, the blinding of Lascaris. The patriarch and
hierarchs one by one read out an act of absolution of the emperor from the
excommunication laid upon him…”[694]
The emperor was now free to prepare the way for his main project – the
unia with Rome. Many of the opponents of the unia were imprisoned. One of these
was the future patriarch John Beccus, who was released after being “persuaded”
of the rightness of the uniate cause by the emperor. [695]
The unia with Rome was signed at Lyons in 1274. The emperor conceded all
the dogmatic points and promised to help the pope in his next crusade, in
exchange for which the pope promised to stop his enemies, especially Charles of
Anjou, from invading the Greek land. However, the compromise proved to be
unnecessary. When Pope Gregory X died, his successor, Martin IV, backed
Charles, and in 1281 broke off the unia. And then in 1282 the “Sicilian
Vespers”, a successful rebellion by the Sicilians against Charles, removed the
threat of invasion.
Already before that, however, an anti-uniate council had been held in
Thessaly, which condemned the actions of the emperor and his uniate patriarch,
John Beccus. “Two parties were formed,” writes Fr. Ambroise Frontier: “the
Politicals or Opportunists, who strangely resemble the Ecumenists of today, and
the Zealots, who were especially strong in Thessaloniki. The center of
Orthodoxy, however, was Mount Athos. The persecutions of Michael VIII and of
Beccus, his Patriarch, equalled those of the first centuries of Christianity.
The intruder Patriarch went himself to the Holy Mountain to impose the decree
of Lyons but he failed miserably. Only a few poor weak-minded monks followed
him. In the Menaion of September 22, we read the following rubric: ‘Memory of
the Holy Martyrs of the Monastery of Zographou, who chastized the Emperor
Michael Palaeologus, the latinizer and his Patriarch Beccus, and died, through
burning in the tower of their monastery.’ Yes, 26 monks died, burned in the
tower of their monastery, others were drowned in the sea in front of Vatopedi
and Iviron. At Karyes, the capital of Mount Athos, both laity and monks were
beheaded. These Martyrs assured the victory of Orthodoxy by their sacrifice and
with their blood washed away the shame of the treason of Lyons.
“To please the new Pope, Nicholas III, the servile Emperor ordered Isaac
of Ephesus to accompany the papal legates through the prisons of Constantinople
to show him the imprisoned Orthodox. Some had been tortured, others had their
hands and feet cut off, others their eyes punctured and others their tongues
ripped out. It is a fact: Christ is not discussed, He is confessed…
“The reaction of the Orthodox Patriarchs was thunderous. Pope Gregory X,
Patriarch Beccus and Michael VIII were excommunicated. On December 11, 1282,
Michael died, hated by his people. His wife, Empress Theodora and his son and
successor Andronicus II Palaeologus refused to give him burial and Church
honors. Andronicus II officially denounced the union and restored Orthodoxy. He
sent edicts to all parts of the Empire proclaiming an amnesty for all those who
had been exiled or imprisoned because of their zeal for the Church.
“Ten years after the council of Lyons, in 1285, an Orthodox Council was
held in the Church of Blachernae in Constantinople. Gregory of Cyprus was the
Orthodox Patriarch and Andronicus II the Emperor. The false union of Lyons was
rejected and the heresy of the Filioque was condemned. Later on,
Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, after the fall of the Empire
in the XVth century, declared this Council to be Ecumenical. To those who
considered it local because of the absence of the heretics and schismatics,
Gennadius answered that: ‘… the absence of heretics does not diminish in any
way the character of Ecumenicity.’”[696]
The temptation of the unia had been rejected for the time being,
together with the caesaropapist pretensions of the first of the Palaeologi
emperors.
When Constantinople fell in 1204, the
Slavic States, first of Bulgaria and then of Serbia, briefly promised to take
up the mantle of the Orthodox empire.
Let us begin with the resurrection of an
independent Bulgaria. In the 1180s the Normans, blessed by the Pope, invaded
Greece from the West. To counter this threat, the Byzantine government
increased taxation and conscription levels. In 1185, two Vlach (Romanian)
landowners near Trnovo asked for an alleviation of the new burdens. They were
contemptuously dismissed. Soon the whole of Eastern Bulgaria was in revolt.
Peter was proclaimed tsar, and an autocephalous archbishopric was created in
Trnovo.[697] The rebellion was
successful and the Bulgarians established a large Bulgar-Vlach-Cuman
(Polovtsian) state south of the Danube. In 1195 the relics of St. John of Rila
were transferred to Trnovo, the capital of the new State, signalling the
beginning of the “Second Bulgarian Empire”.
In 1202 the Greeks came to terms with
Bulgaria. But in ecclesiastical matters they were more unyielding, refusing to
grant the Church autocephalous status.
And so, writes Papadakis, when Tsar
Kaloyan “was faced by a blunt refusal of [the] Constantinopolitan authorities
to grant him imperial status, or a patriarchal status to his archbishop Basil,
he turned to the other universal Christian authority, which in the West had
replaced the empire as the source of both the political and ecclesiastical
powers: the Roman papacy.[698] His
correspondence has come down to us. Whatever the diplomatically subservient
language of Kaloyan’s letters to pope Innocent III (1198-1216), it is clear
that his ambiguous contacts with the papacy can hardly be interpreted as a
religious ‘conversion’.
“Papal envoys, ‘archpresbyter’ Dominic and
the ‘chaplain’ John, visited Bulgaria in 1200. During the negotiations, Kaloyan
shrewdly blackmailed the pope by referring to the Byzantine theory of the
‘diarchy’ emperor-patriarch, requesting that Rome sanction it for Bulgaria, to
avoid a return of the Bulgarians to Constantinople’s rule: ‘Come to us,’ the
Greeks supposedly promised Kaloyan, ‘we will crown you as emperor and will make
a patriarch for you, since an empire would not stand without a patriarch.’ On
February 25, 1204, the pope entrusted Cardinal Leo of Santa Croce with the
mission of crowning Kaloyan as ‘king’, not ‘emperor,’ and confirming archbishop
Basil as ‘primate,’ not ‘patriarch’: ‘It being understood,’ wrote the pope,
‘that these two titles, primate and patriarch, mean practically the same, since
primate and patriarch have one function, though the names are different.’
Furthermore, typically ignorant and distrustful of Eastern Christianity, which
does not know the practice of anointment at episcopal and priestly ordinations,
Innocent required that Basil and all the Bulgarian bishops be anointed by his
legate, because the Catholic church maintains this ‘by divine precept’.
“One may doubt that Kaloyan was fully
satisfied by the papal attitude.[699]
However, as he was crowned by the legate on November 8, 1204, and as archbishop
Basil was anointed and established as ‘primate’, he had little choice. A
Byzantine imperial legitimization of his ambitions had become impossible: the
crusaders had taken Constantinople in April of that year. It appeared for a
time that no alternative existed to a Latin Christendom, headed by the pope.
But Kaloyan was carefully looking for such alternatives. Indeed, he gave
shelter to the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch, John Camaterus, who had escaped
from the capital held by the Latins, and who died in Bulgarian-held
Didymotichus in 1206. Rejecting the suzerainty of the Latin emperor of
Constantinople, he attacked the Latins, defeated them, took emperor Baldwin
prisoner (1205), and ignored the pope’s pleas for peace and submission. When Kaloyan
died in 1207, his power dominated the Balkans. He had obtained papal
recognition of his power, but he was not at all playing by the rules required
from papal subjects. The church of Trnovo was de facto an independent
patriarchate, and its incumbent was using the patriarchal title, administering
territories almost identical with those of Symeon’s empire, although the city
of Ohrid and its autocephalous archbishopric remained part of the territories
controlled by the Greek despot of Epirus.”[700]
It is interesting to note that, just as
Charlemagne’s fall into heresy through his rejection of the Acts of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council and acceptance of the Filioque coincided with his
unlawful assumption of imperial authority, so the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan’s fall
into union with heretical Rome coincided with his assumption of the title
“emperor” – a title which his most powerful predecessor, Tsar Simeon, had never
assumed…
At this terrible nadir in Orthodox
fortunes, with the City in the hand of the heretics, the True Orthodox Greeks
warring among themselves and the only successful Orthodox power in the region,
Bulgaria, in a half-unia with Rome, a humble 29-year-old monk set off from
Mount Athos to his homeland, Serbia. St. Sava arrived in 1204 to find the
kingdom divided between his two older brothers, Vukan and Stephen.
“By secret negotiations with Hungary and
Pope Innocent III,” writes Fr. Daniel Rogich, “Vukan, the eldest of the three
brothers, who was bitter over the appointment of his young brother Stephen as
heir to the throne, was able to amass troops and capture Zeta [modern
Montenegro]; he then was set to launch a campaign against Rashka, King
Stephen’s portion of the divided kingdom…
“When he returned, Sava brought with him
the medicine to heal the entire situation: the relics of his father, the Grand
Zhupan and saint, Stephen Nemanja-Simeon the Myrrh-bearer and co-founder of
Hilandar. Upon entering Studenitsa monastery, St. Simeon’s foundational
monastery, Sava invited his two brothers to a proper and rightful Memorial
Service for their father. As the casket was opened, before their eyes the body
of their father was found to be sweet-smelling, exuding a fragrant oil and
myrrh, warm and aglow, looking very much alive, as if he were only restfully
sleeping. This act of veneration of their father was the first step in healing
the fraternal schism between Vukan and King Stephen. Shortly thereafter, the
civil war was halted and a peace agreement was drawn up, once again restoring the
kingdom of Serbia as it was under the reign of the great King Stephen
Nemanja-St. Simeon the Myrrh-bearer. In discussion with his reunited brothers,
Sava also designed plans for an immediate, systematic and far-reaching
missionary program to save the Orthodox soul of the Serbian people. Studenitsa
Monastery, with St. Simeon’s relics making it a national shrine, was chosen as
the outreach for all activities…”[701]
And so, with the healing of the schism in
the body politic, and the rejection of Roman Catholic influence, a beginning
was made to the recovery of Orthodoxy in the Serbian land. But there were
setbacks. Thus as a result of the confusion and turmoil in the international
situation, “King Stephen, at the advice of his wife, Queen Anna, decided to ally
Serbia with the Pope of Rome in order to stem the tide against the attacks of
the Hungarian King Andreas III and those of the Latinophiles in Constantinople.
This decision on the part of Stephen angered his brother Sava, who, due to his
loyalty to Orthodox and the Byzantine State, decided to return to the Holy
Mountain. Hence, in 1217, at age 42, after thirteen years of missionary
activity in his homeland, Sava travelled once again to his true spiritual home,
Hilandar Monastery…
“The moment he left, Serbia’s situation
worsened both domestically and internationally. The miracle-working oil exuding
from the holy relics of his father Simeon stopped flowing. The people were
outraged at King Stephen for driving Sava away. Under no terms would they accept
the Pope’s support and disavow Orthodoxy. As a result, Stephen wrote to Sava
imploring him to return. Stephen also renounced his western ties and attempted
to be reconciled with the Byzantine emperor in Nicea, Theodore Lascaris
(1204-1222). Spending his days and nights in prayer and vigil, guarding his
soul from all passions, and incessantly petitioning the Lord in behalf of his
Serbian people, Sava was elated to receive his brother Stephen’s repentant
letter. When he heard from Stephen, Sava immediately went to his cell and
prayed tearfully to his father Simeon: ‘O Saint, having been commanded by God
and implored by us, please disregard our transgressions. For whatever we are,
we are still your children. Allow, therefore the myrrh to flow again from your
body in the tomb as before, to bring joy and relief to your people now in
mourning.’ This prayer, which Sava sent to King Stephen in a letter, was read
aloud before the tomb of Simeon in Studenitsa Monastery and was then published
throughout the land. The letter also disclosed plans Sava had received in a
dream from Almighty God: to obtain from Nicaea the independence of the Serbian
Orthodox Church. When the letter was read aloud in Studenitsa, immediately the
miraculous myrrh from the relics of the holy patriarchal leader Simeon began to
flow once again. Thus, by the will of the Lord, Sava set out to journey
homeward for a second time from Hilandar in order to heal his people and to
bring them glad tidings of salvation, faith and unity.
“Prior to his return, Sava travelled
eastward to Nicea, the city where the Imperial Patriarch Manuel Sarantenos
(1215-1222) resided, the highest ecclesiastical authority permitted to grant
independence to a local Church. Sava… discussed his vision with the Patriarch
and Emperor Theodore. At first, the Patriarch was reluctant to grant Sava’s
request. Why hadn’t Sava, he thought, petitioned through the Archbishop of
Ochrid, who was the immediate jurisdictional authority over the Church of
Serbia?[702]
But after a careful review of the political and ecclesiastical difficulties in
the Balkans – not only in Serbia but also between Nicea and Epirus – this
request on the part of Sava began to make perfect sense to both the Patriarch
and the Emperor. By granting autonomy to the Church of Serbia, Rome and the
West’s attempts to capture the Balkans could be thwarted. Also, the Archbishop
of Ochrid was becoming too powerful; with independence granted to the Serbs,
his power would diminish. The Serbian Orthodox Church, now independent, would
remain under the direct jurisdiction of the Patriarchate. (As is well known,
the Serbian Orthodox Church did not receive her own Patriarch until over one
hundred years later, becoming autocephalous on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1346.)
Thus, the situation was quite favorable to all involved. At Patriarch Manuel’s
request, Sava was elected to be elevated to Archbishop…”[703]
St. Sava’s consecration was protested by
Archbishop Demetrius of Ochrid on the grounds that, as Papadakis writes, “he
did not recognize the legitimacy of the emperor in Nicaea: ‘We have no
legitimate empire,’ he wrote to St. Sava, ‘and therefore your ordination lacks
legal foundation.’ In the Byzantine understanding of the relations between
church and empire, it was understood that the emperor had the right to
establish boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdiction..."[704]
However, the Nicaean emperor had this
claim to legitimacy, as we have seen: that he had been anointed by the
legitimate patriarch of Constantinople, whom Demetrius himself still
commemorated. Moreover, some years later, in 1224 or 1227, Demetrius himself
consecrated chrism and anointed the Epirote emperor in Thessalonica, thereby
both raising himself and his secular patron, quite illegitimately, to
quasi-patriarchal and quasi-imperial
status respectively. Demetrius’ motivation was clearly political rather than
canonical: his aim was to exalt the ruler who had exalted him (we remember his
theory that emperors have all the power that patriarchs possess except the
strictly sacramental). It is now clear why St. Sava went to Nicaea rather than
Epirus with his petition: not only because, as his biographer, Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovich, writes, “the Archbishop of Ohrida himself was under the supreme
authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who then resided in exile in
Nicaea”[705],
but also because he regarded the legitimate emperor to be the Nicaean emperor.
However, not all Serbs agreed with him.
Thus on the death of King Stephen in 1228, his newly-crowned son Radislav called
for “a return of the fledgling Serbian Church to the protectorate of the Greek
Archbishop of Ochrid.”[706]
Such a move would have been disastrous because, as we have seen, the Archbishop
of Ochrid did not accept the legality of Sava’s consecration and would very
likely have rejected any autocephaly for the Serbian Church.
Sava refused to be reconciled with this
situation and set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way, he stopped
at Nicaea and obtained confirmation of the independence of the Serbian Church
from Ochrid. In 1234 he resigned his archbishopric and set off on another
pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
By this time the Bulgarians, too, had
renounced all ties with Rome and had been reconciled with Nicaea.[707] In
1235 the Bulgarian Church was given independence from Ochrid and its Archbishop
Joachim was proclaimed patriarch at Lamsacus. But, like the Serbs, the
Bulgarians were required to give the name of the Constantinopolitan Patriarch
precedence in the commemorative diptychs, and were not considered a fully
autocephalous Church by Patriarch Germanus.[708]
However, while the authorities in Nicaea
had accepted this new situation in Bulgaria, the Patriarchs of Jerusalem,
Alexandria and Antioch had not. So Sava went to the East to petition the
Eastern Patriarchs for agreement to the new status not only of the Serbian, but
also of the Bulgarian Church.
Having successfully completed his mission,
St. Sava died on January 14, 1235 in Trnovo on his way back to Serbia. In a
little more than 30 years he had achieved what might have seemed impossible at
the beginning: the reconciliation of the various warring Orthodox States and
Churches under the banner of uncompromising patristic Orthodoxy. He instilled
“a sense of supranational Orthodoxy unity (with the patriarch of Constantinople
somehow substituting for the unifying role played earlier by the emperor).”[709] As a result,
under the leadership of St. Simeon, St. Sava and their successors in Church and
State, Serbia entered her “golden age”.
Its secret was a near-perfect symphony
between Church and State, symbolised by the fact that Sava was son of the first
Serbian Orthodox king and brother of the second. For “Serbian history,” writes
Bishop Nikolai, “never knew of any struggle between Church and state. There
were no such struggles, but bloody wars have filled the history of Western
nations. How does one explain the difference between the two cases? The one is
explained by theodulia [the service of God]; the other by theocracy.
«Let us take two tame oxen as an example,
how they are both harnessed to the same yoke, pull the same cart, and serve the
same master. This is theodulia. Then let us take two oxen who are so
enraged with each other that one moment the ox on the left pulls himself out
from the yoke and gores the other one, goading him on to pull the cart alone,
while the next moment the ox on the right does the same to his companion on the
left. This is theocracy: the war of the Church against the state and the war of
the state against the Church; the war of the pope against kings and the war of
kings against the pope. Neither ox wished to be yoked and serve the Master;
each of them wanted to play the role of the Master and drive his companion
under the yoke. Thus the Master’s cart has remained stationary and his field
uncultivated and has eventually become completely overgrown with weeds. This is
what happened in the West.”[710]
The fall of Constantinople in 1204 was an
acid test of the depth of the filial feelings of the other Orthodox kingdoms
towards New Rome. As we have seen, the Serbs and Bulgarians passed the test,
after a certain wavering between Rome and Constantinople, as did Georgia under
St. Tamara. But having rejected temptation from the West, the Georgians had to
face another enemy in the East. The Persian Shah Jelal-ed-Dina overcame the
Georgians’ resistance and in June, 1227 tortured to death Prince Shalvo for his
refusal to accept Islam.
«After this Jelal-ed-Dina laid waste to
Armenia and with a large army set off for Tbilisi. The Georgian soldiers put up
a heroic resistance, but because of the treachery of the Persian citizens the
city could not hold out. Tbilisi was captured. ‘Not only the public and private
buildings, but also all the churches and holy places were given over to fire
and defilement; even the bones of the dead were not left in peace, and the
servers of the altar and all the clergy became victims of inhumanity. In a
word, Tbilis now looked as Jerusalem look when it was destroyed by Titus.’
“The cruel Shah ordered the cupola to be
removed from the cathedral church of Sion in honour of the Dormition of the
Mother of God, and in its place he put his tent, so as to have a good view of
the burning of the city and the torments of the Christians. He ordered the
Georgian prisoners to be converted to Islam. Ten thousand people were driven
onto the bridge over the river Kura, near the Sion cathedral. The prisoners
were offered freedom and generous presents from the Shak if they renounced
Christ and spat on the holy icons placed on the bridge.
“But the Christians, on coming up to the
holy icons, instead of defiling them offered them fitting honour and reverence.
Then the executioners cut off their heads and threw the headless bodies into
the Kura. In this way all ten thousand Georgian confessors were executed. One
could cross the river from one bank to the other stepping over the bodies of
the holy martyrs and without getting one’s feet wet in the water. The water in
the river, mixed with the blood of the martyrs, became red…”[711]
A similar pattern is discernible in
Russian history at this time: a rejection of pleas for union with the heretical
West, followed by devastation at the hands of the pagan or Muslim East. On
October 7, 1207, Pope Innocent called on the Russians to renounce Orthodoxy,
since “the land of the Greeks and their Church has almost completely returned
to the recognition of the Apostolic see”. The Russians, led by their
metropolitan, a Nicaean Greek, rejected the papal demands.
Then,
however, the Mongols invaded… In 1215, the year of the Fourth Lateran
Council and Magna Carta, China, the greatest despotism that the world
had seen, lost “the mandate of heaven” and fell to the Mongols under Chinghis
Khan. In the following years until his death in 1227 Chinghis extended his
conquests from Persia to Korea; and his successor Tamerlane even conquered
India. When the Mongol advance began again in 1236, it defeated and established
suzerainty over the North Russian principalities after the sacking of Vladimir
in 1237, and then completely destroyed Kiev in 1240. The Poles, the Teutonic
Knights and the Hungarians were defeated but not occupied, sending shock waves
throughout the West – and several missions to convert the Mongols to
Christianity before they could convert the rest of the world to dust. Then the
horde smashed the Turkish Seljuk Sultanate (in 1243) and the Arab Abbasid
Caliphate (in 1258).
The Mongols were at first pagans, but
later (after 1295) they adopted Islam, though without completely abandoning
paganism. Giovanni Pian de Carpini, the Vatican’s envoy, described their
despotic system: “The Great Khan of the Tartars has
extraordinary power over all his subjects. Nobody dares to settle in any part
of his empire without his express direction. In fact he determines the places
of residence for the dukes, the dukes in their turn those of the commanders of
a thousand, they in turn those of the commanders of a hundred, and the last
those of the commanders of ten. If at any time or place he gives them an order,
be it for war or for peace, be it for life or for death, they obey without
question. Even when he demands somebody’s daughter or sister for a wife, she is
given to him instantly without argument. Actually, every year, or every few
years, he orders maidens to be assembled, so that he may choose and keep those
he likes; the others he gives to those around him as he sees fit… In the event
of war, those who flee are all punished by death. If soldiers are taken
prisoner, then unless their comrades free them, they equally must pay with
their lives… The Mongols believe in one God, the creator of all the visible and
invisible world; they also believe that all the good and all the chastisements
in this world originate from him, but they worship him neither with prayers,
nor with hymns of praise, nor with any other religious ceremonies…
Nevertheless, they still have certain idols made out of felt in the shape of
human figures, which they set up on both sides of the entrance to the tents…
They also make an idol in honour of their first Emperor, Chingis-Khan. Some
Mongols put these idols on a beautiful covered cart, and anybody who steals
anything from this cart is put to death without pardon.”[712]
The only Russian principality not
destroyed by the Mongols was Novgorod in the North-West. This was because the
Novgorodians’ ruler, Great-Prince Alexander Nevsky of Vladimir, decided, in
spite of much opposition from his people, to pay tribute to the Mongols in the
East in order to concentrate all his forces in a successful war against what he
considered to be their more dangerous enemies in the West - the papist Swedes
and the quasi-monastic orders of the Teutonic Knights and the “Knights of God”.
These orders played a critical part in the crusades in both the Mediterranean
and the Baltic, and were answerable only to the Pope. Their wealth – and
violence – was legendary. As the Knights said in 1309: “The sword is our pope”.[713]
In 1240 St. Alexander defeated a Swedish
army on the Neva; and on April 5, 1242, he crushed the “Knights of God” on the
ice of Lake Chudov in present-day Estonia. Having failed with the stick, the
Pope now tried the carrot. In 1248 he sent “the two cleverest” of his cardinals
to Alexander, in order that he might “forsake the false way of corruption which
leads to the damnation of eternal death… and recognise the Roman church as
mother and obey its pope.“ But Alexander refused, saying that Holy Tradition,
the constant teaching of the Church from the beginning, had been passed down to
the Orthodox alone. [714]
Then, in accordance with his principle:
“Not in might, but in truth, is God”, he made the historic decision to submit
to the Mongols, who might subdue the Russians politically but would not harm
their Orthodox faith, rather than to the Pope, who would destroy both their
statehood and their faith.
However, there was strong opposition to
his policy. Thus one of his brothers, Andrew, having adopted the opposite
policy of standing up to the Tatars, was routed and had to flee to Catholic
Sweden. And the other brother, Yaroslav, placed himself at the head of the
anti-Alexander party in Novgorod, which led to an armed confrontation between
the two sides in 1255. The tax imposed by the Tatars was very burdensome; and
even in Vladimir-Suzdal there were uprisings. The Tatars responded harshly,
forcing the Russians to fight in their armies; and Alexander’s last major act
was to journey to the Khan to plead for mercy… He died on his return home,
exhausted by his efforts…
The Church strongly supported Alexander.
It was not simply that its leaders believed that it was necessary to give to
Caesar (the Tatars) what was Caesar’s: there were also substantial benefits for
the Church itself. For under the Tatars, as Fennell writes, “its lands and
possessions were secure and the clergy was immune from taxation and
conscription. Religious toleration had been Mongol policy ever since the time
of Chinghis Khan, and the khans of the Golden Horde, whether pagan or Moslem,
always showed consideration and even generosity to the churches in the lands
under their sway,”[715]
considering that God would look favourably on them if they honoured His
priests.
“Furthermore, as Papadakis writes, “the
metropolitan of Kiev, a prelate appointed from Nicaea and later from
Constantinople, was considered by the khans as a privileged representative of a
friendly power, which throughout the thirteenth and the fourteenth century
promoted commercial exchanges between the Far East and Western Europe. Before
the conquest, the Greek metropolitan stood above local political struggles
between the Russian princes. Respected as he was by the Tatars, he acquired
additional and exclusive powers, since he headed the only administrative
structure extending over the whole ‘land of the Rus’’, divided as it was now
between territories controlled by the Tatars, the Lithuanians and the Poles.”[716]
Indeed, Metropolitan Cyril II (1242-1281)
went freely through all the Russian lands, from the Galicia in the south-west,
where his former patron, Prince Daniel Romanovich, ruled to Vladimir in the
north-east, where St. Alexander ruled, being accepted as the leader of the
Church by all. Therefore as the old Kievan empire continued to disintegrate
towards the end of the thirteenth century it was becoming clearer that only in
and through the Church could Russia be reunited. Russia could not prosper
without strong political authority; but only the Church could decide who and where
that authority should be.
Early in the fourteenth century that
decision was made: the metropolitan, St. Peter, moved to the small Suzdalian
town of Moscow – that is, to the town whose princes, more than any others,
followed the “Alexandrian” pro-Tatar policy – and the process of rebuilding
began…
Papadakis writes: “Greatly expanded under
powerful leaders like King Stephen Uroš Milutin (1282-1321) and
particularly Stephen Dušan (1331-55), the Serbian kingdom annexed
traditionally Byzantine territories in Macedonia and northern Greece. In fact,
Stephen Dušan dominated the entire Balkan peninsula. It was inevitable
that, like Symeon of Bulgaria in the tenth century, he would dream of taking
Constantinople itself and assume the ‘Roman’ imperial title. In the expectation
of achieving this goal, he called himself – provisionally – ‘emperor and
autocrat of Serbia and Romania’ (1345) and raised the archbishop of Peč to
the rank of ‘patriarch of the Serbs and the Greeks’. The important city of
Skoplje, captured by Milutin, had, more than the other, smaller cities of the
Serbian realm, the appearance of an imperial capital. There, on April 16, 1346,
Dušan was crowned emperor by his newly-established patriarch Ioannikije.”[717]
Many Greeks
appear to have supported Dušan, whose court was heavily
Byzantinised and who presented his kingdom as a united one “of the Serbs and
the Greeks” – but not, as the Byzantines always called it, “of the Romans”.
Thus the protos of Mount Athos was present at Dušan’s coronation in
Skopje. However, the greatest hierarch of the age, St. Gregory Palamas,
remained loyal to Byzantium – even though Dušan had ransomed him from
captivity to the Turks. In this way he confirmed the traditional Byzantine
theory that just as there is only one
true God, so there can be only one Orthodox empire: “Will you transform into
two emperors that one emperor whom God has established for us on the earth?
Will you demonstrate that his empire is
composed of two empires?”[718]
Papadakis continues: “The Serbian
patriarchate was immediately recognized and supported by the patriarch of
Trnovo and the archbishop of Ochrid (the latter was now controlled by Serbian
power), as well as the monasteries of Mount Athos. It included within its realm
a number of Greek dioceses, located on territories conquered by Dušan. In
the circumstances, it is understandable that the establishment of such a
patriarchate was challenged in Constantinople: on December 1349, ecumenical
patriarch Callistus anathematized the Serbian Church.”[719]
Nevertheless, to anathematize a whole
Local Church neither for heresy nor for schism, but for appropriating to itself
a title that gave it practically no additional powers (for St. Sava had already
been granted autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarch Manuel and “the authority
to consecrate bishops, priests, and deacons within his country”[720]) was a drastic
step. It showed how anxious the patriarchate was, in the absence of a strong
imperial power, to retain the full centralising power of the patriarchate as
the “glue” holding the Byzantine commonwealth together. In the end, it was the
advance of the Turks which forced the Serbs to modify their political
ambitions, and the Greeks – their ecclesiastical centralisation policy.
For “the political situation changed
radically following the death of tsar Dušan (1355). The Serbian empire was
split into several independent principalities, none of which could cherish
further ambitions at the expense of Byzantium... The major problem was solved…
following the disastrous defeat of the Serbs by the armies of Sultan Murad I on
the river Maritsa (1371). The role of intermediary was played by a delegation
of Slavic monks from Mount Athos… Receiving the monks in Constantinople,
patriarch Philotheus sent his own plenipotentiaries to Serbia, the monks
Matthew and Moses, who solemnly lifted the anathemas against Dušan,
standing at the tomb in Prizren. They also concelebrated with the Serbian
clergy in Peč, and announced the recognition of Sava IV as patriarch of
Serbia.
“The several Serbian principalities were
conquered successively by the Turks. The famous battle of Kosovo Polje (1389),
during which Sultan Murad I was killed by a Serbian warrior and prince Lazar
was taken prisoner, to be executed, together with other Serbian nobles, by
Murad’s son and successor, Bayezid I (1389-1427), was the last – tragically
unsuccessful – attempt at stopping the Turkish advance.”[721]
According to tradition, on the eve of the
battle King Lazar had a vision in which he was offered a choice between an
earthly victory and an earthly kingdom, or an earthly defeat that would win him
the Heavenly Kingdom. He chose the latter, and so even now his relics continue
to work miracles.[722]
However, as he stood dying, supported in
the arms of a Turkish soldier, the holy king began to have doubts. What
happened next was described by the great Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich in
his work, The Will of King Lazarus, and retold as follows by Nun Ioanna:
“He prayed to God to reply to the question that was tormenting him: ‘I am a
sinner, and I am dying, but why are my people and my warriors condemned to this
torment, to these sufferings?’ And at this moment the king remembered that he
had once made a choice between the earthly kingdom and the Heavenly Kingdom. And
at that time he had chosen the Heavenly Kingdom. Perhaps his choice had been
incorrect, and he had stirred up his people, forcing it to suffer. This thought
tormented the dying king. Perhaps it was this decision of his that had become
the main reason for the defeat of Serbia and the destruction of his people, the
destruction of his closest friends.…
“At that moment, when the pain in the soul
of the king was so deep that he could no longer feel his physical sufferings,
he was suddenly overshadowed by a bright light, and before him there stood an
angel and someone else in shining raiment. (This was the Prophet Amos – King
Lazarus’ holy ‘slava’, that is, his heavenly protector – Nun I.).
“The angel addressed him with the
following words: ‘Do not grieve, King Lazarus. I am sent from God. I have been
sent to you to answer all the questions which are tearing your soul apart. Do
not suffer thinking that you made an incorrect choice. Your choice was
correct’.…
“He said: ‘Why has your country fallen?
Because it has grown old.’
“Seeing the perplexity of the king, the
angel explained that old age is not a physical condition, but a spiritual one
(more precisely, not old age, but spiritual paralysis). The poison of sin had
poisoned the Serbian nobility and made it old, and this poison was beginning
also to penetrate the people and poison its soul. Only a powerful storm could
sweep away this evil, the corrupting spirit of the poison, and save the people
from the destruction that threatened it. And so in order to save the country
spiritually (from sin), it would have to be overthrown. ‘Do not grieve, king,’
continued the Angel, ‘your choice was correct and in agreement with the will of
God. It is clear that Christ Himself and His angels, while confirming the
sufferings of life, have given them a special higher meaning and thereby forced
man to find in them a higher righteousness: to find in these sufferings the
path to a better life.’ King Lazarus had to understand this inner and higher
meaning of sufferings. These sufferings had to be perceived by him as a
voluntary exploit taken on by him and his people, an exploit of love for the
highest principles of life.
“The world cannot accept this love, for it
loves only itself with a love of the flesh and sensuality.
“’No, king, no,’ said the angel, ‘you made
no mistake in your choice, and therefore you will receive a double crown, both
a heavenly and an earthly. You have made the right choice, but you are sinning
in doubting it.’
“’But how can my choice of the Heavenly
Kingdom,’ asked the king, ‘bring good to my people?’
«Your choice of the Heavenly Kingdom will
undoubtedly give unwaning benefit to your people. It will purify their mind,
heart and will. It will transfiture their souls into radiant mirrors in which
eternal life will be reflected. The Heavenly Kingdom will enter into them and
will make them worthy of It. Their minds will be purified from impurity, and
their hearts will become worthy of grace. 'In Thy light shall we see light’...
“’Since neither the example of the saints
of your people, not the sermons of the priests have produced any benefit or
positive result, Providence allowed this terrible death, this killing of your
noble generals, and your death. Then will come a time of deep repentance,
silence and sufferings. And so, step by step, the hearts of people will have to
be drawn away from this world and return to Heaven. Their hearts must be freed
from the smoke of hell and be filled with the true Light...
“One more question tormented King Lazarus: ‘Will not slavery destroy
that feeling of inner freedom which is innate in my people? And will not all
their talents and abilities dry up under the heavy yoke of slavery?’
The angel replied: ‘Your words, O king,
witness to the fact that you are still in the chains of the flesh. But in the
Heavens human affairs are evaluated only in accordance with the motives that
rule man. All the rest: cities, palaces, mechanisms – are emptiness without any
value. Huge cities are all just the dust of the roads, smoke that vanishes. A
small, pitiful bee can laught on looking at your huge towers and empires. And
how is one to explain to a bird sitting in a cage this inner, deep meaning of
the freedom of a free bird? Those who have chosen the earthly kingdom cannot
understand those who have chosen the Heavenly Kingdom. Their evil will is
united with the demonic will and so they cannot look on the Heavenly Kingdom.
The entrance into it is closed to them. And they have no freedom, they are the
slaves of their flesh and the demons.
“’Understand, O king, that this sad day
may be the day of the turning of your people, not to evil, but to good. Until
now their earthly will has dragged them down into the abyss of eternal death.
Beginning from now, your people must carry out the will of another, and this
can teach them to carry out the will of God, separating them from self-opinion
and self-will.
“’They will have to submit
to the will of a cruel
tyrant, and so will be able to understand and hate their own tyranny, the
tyranny of their flesh over their soul. Through the years and centuries,
labours and sorrows will teach them to hate these evil power, their own will
and the will of their slave-owners.
“’And so the people will strive upwards,
to heaven, as a tree in a thick wood, and will seek the bright light of their
Creator, for, not possessing anything earthly, they will easily acquire the
Heavenly Light; for they will hate both their own will and the will of their
slave-owners. And then the Divine will will become for them sweeter than milk
and honey.
“’… And so, O king,
say to God: ‘Thy will be done.’ It is
possible to understand the meaning of the cross and sufferings only if one
voluntarily accepts to take up the cross sent by God. Taking up the cross is a witness to one’s love for God
through one’s voluntary sufferings. The cross is the witness of holy love.’
“The angel also explained the meaning of
freedom. What
does freedom mean? It is a symbol. The word ‘freedom’ has many meanings. When
the external form of freedom changes to the tyranny of one man over another,
and is not punished by the laws of the country, then the Lord takes away the
freedom of this nation and casts it into the ‘school’ of slavery, so that the
people may esteem and understand true freedom. But this true, golden freedom is
closely linked with the honourable cross. Only through the cross is golden
freedom revealed to people. Golden freedom is true, unfailing freedom. And only that mortal man who acquires such freedom becomes ruly
free, and not the slave of the flesh and passions. Then it truly becomes free
from illusons, fleshly passions and glory, free from people and demons, free
from himself, from his passions. Free at all times and in all places, wherever
he may be, whether in freedom or in slavery. This gem is preserved precisely in
the depths of the human soul. True freedom is that freedom which cannot be taken away from man by
prison or any foreign power. Without this freedom man is a pitiful slave, be he
a king or the meanest servant. This freedom is not from obedience to God, but
this freedom is in God - the true, eternal, joyful and golden freedom.
“… And the angel added: ‘It is better to
acquire the Kingdom of Heaven by sufferings that the kingdom of the earth by
evil. And there is no evil on earth, or in hell, that could conquer the eternal
wisdom of the Heavens.’
“After these words of the angel, Lazarus
was no longer spiritually the old man, but was renewed in spirit. His soul was
enlightened by the spirit of the Heavens. And although the battle still raged
around him, in his soul Lazarus felt a new, eternal life and eternal joy. He
sighed deeply and said: ‘Amen’.”[723]
The Slavic nations that fell under the Turkish yoke eventually lost
not only their political independence, but also their ecclesiastical
independence. Thus in 1766 the Serbian patriarchate of Peč, together with
the autocephalous archbishopric of Ohrid, was suppressed by the Ecumenical
Patriarch Samuel I, and Greek bishops were appointed to Serbian sees. Thus was
Constantinople’s struggle to retain power over the Serbian Orthodox finally
crowned with success.
There was a similar outcome to the
struggle between Constantinople and the Bulgarian Church. Under Tsar Ivan
Alexander (1331-71), who styled himself “Autocrat of all Bulgarians and
Greeks”, Bulgaria recovered a certain stability in the face of the Serbian
threat from the west and the Turkish threat from the south. However, St.
Theodosius, patriarch of Trnovo (+1363) prophesied that the Turks would conquer
the Bulgarian land because of its sins.[724]
And so it turned out: in 1393, four years after Kosovo Polje, Trnovo was
conquered by the Turks, the Bulgarian state was dissolved and the patriarch,
St. Euthymius, deposed….
Byzantium survived for over fifty years
after the fall of the Balkan Slavic states. In this we can perhaps see a moral:
that the persistent attempts of the Slavic states to achieve equal status,
ecclesiastically as well as politically, with Byzantium were not pleasing to
God insofar as the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox world was still
entrusted by God to Byzantium, even while its political power was collapsing.
But it was a different story with a third Slavic state to the north – Russia.
A new phase in the history of Russia had
begun in 1299, when Metropolitan Maximus of Kiev moved the seat of the Russian
metropolitanate from the devastated ruins of Kiev in the South to
Vladimir-Suzdal in the North. In this way the Church followed where the State,
in the person of St. Andrew of Bogolyubovo, had led in the previous century. A
generation later, the seat of Church government moved again, from Vladimir to
Moscow, signifying the beginning of the rise of Muscovy to leadership in the
Orthodox world...
However, the metropolitan’s move to the
north, while justified in the longer term, exposed the beginning of a major
fissure in Russian spiritual unity. This followed the lines of the political
division between the Tatar-controlled territories of the north and north-east
and the mainly Lithuanian-controlled territories of the south and south-west.
The former group of territories (which included Novgorod) now began to be
called “Great Russia”, and the latter group - “Little Russia”. The Ecumenical
Patriarchate had formerly fully understood the necessity of keeping all the
Russian dioceses under one metropolitan residing in Great Russia with its
relatively pro-Orthodox Tatar overlords. But now, at the request of
Grand-Prince Yury of Galicia (1301-1308), Patriarch Athanasius I consecrated a
“metropolitan of Galicia”. This set a dangerous precedent. For once the Russian
territories under Lithuanian rule had their own metropolitan, they might be
tempted to break with Great Russia ecclesiastically as well as politically. And
this in turn would certainly expose Little Russia to the danger of absorption
into Roman Catholicism.[725]
It appears that the patriarchate
recognised its mistake, because when Maximus died and Grand Prince Yury put
forward a Galician abbot, Peter, for the metropolitanate of Galicia, the
patriarchate appointed him “metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia” instead,
rejecting the candidate put forward by the great prince of Vladimir, Michael of
Tver. Beginning with St. Peter, the metropolitans very firmly maintained their
rights to rule over the whole of the Russian flock, imitating in this way the
conduct of the ecumenical patriarchs in relation to their Balkan flock, and
having for this the support of the Tatars in the same way that the ecumenical
patriarch would later have the support of the Turks. The Tatar Khan gave to the
prince of Moscow the same privileges in the State that he had already given to
the metropolitan in the Church. This is demonstrated by the remarkable gramota
of Uzbek Khan in 1315.
St. Peter advised Great Prince Ivan I
Danilovich to build a stone church dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy
Mother of God, which became the first church of Russia. “If, my son, you obeye
me, and build the church of the Most Pure Mother of God, and give me rest in
your city, God will bless you and make you higher than all the other princes,
and will extend this city more than all other cities. And your race will
possess this place to the ages”.[726] In
1326 St. Peter moved his see to Moscow, and died in December of the same year.
As he had prophesied, a process of political and economic centralisation around
Moscow now began. The first step in this process consisted in the replacing of
Tver by Moscow as the most favoured principality in the eyes of the Mongols
Now the Mongols liked to appoint one of
the Russian princes as their chief tax-collector for all their Russian
dominions. In
exchange for providing the Horde with regular income from their Russian
tributaries, this Russian prince was given the Great Princely title, was
protected from Mongol raids and had the opportunity of making considerable
gains for himself from the other tribute-paying princes. At the time of St.
Peter’s death, the prince of Tver had the “yarlik” of
tax-collector and Great Prince. Almost immediately, however, in 1327, the
citizens of Tver rose up in rebellion against the khan and killed a high-level
deputation from the Mongol capital of Sarai sent to oversee the collection of
tribute. After some hesitation, the prince of Tver sided with the rebels –
which gave Prince Ivan of Moscow his chance. He set off for Sarai and returned
at the head of a Mongol-Russian force which devastated Tver and a large part of
central Russia. In reward for this service, the khan bestowed the title of
Grand Prince on Ivan together with the responsibility of farming all the taxes
due to the khan from the whole of Russia. Thus did he acquire the nickname of
“Kalita” or “Moneybag”.
In
1345 Great-Prince Olgerd ascended the throne of Lithuania. He was a pagan; but,
as Papadakis writes, he “would extend his domains over Russian territories from
the Baltic to the Black seas, including the prestigious city of Kiev. His
avowed goal was to free Russia from the Mongol rule and assume the legacy of
the ancient Kievan princes. To reach that goal he was ready to embrace Orthodox
Christianity, which was already the religion of his two successive wives (who
were Russian princesses), of all his numerous children, and of the vast
majority of his subjects.
“In the circumstances,” writes Papadakis,
“the Church was actually holding the trump card: the real center of the country
had to be the metropolitan’s residence, since that prelate controlled the only
administrative structure covering Moscow, Novgorod, Kiev, Vilna (the Lithuanian
capital) and distant Galicia. He was, in addition, a representative of
Byzantium and a religious official respected by the Tatar khans.”[727]
Now it was at about this time, in 1347,
that three young Orthodox men, Anthony, John and Eustathius, were martyred by
Olgerd in Vilna for refusing to accept paganism. It then suddenly became clear
to all those with eyes to see that the interests of Orthodoxy lay with Moscow rather
than Lithuania.
At this point the issue of the
metropolitanate again became of political importance. Before his death in 1353,
Metropolitan Theognostus of Kiev, a Greek had “personally arranged his
succession in the person of a Russian, Alexis, whom he had consecrated as
bishop of Vladimir (1352)… In 1352 the Lithuanian grand-prince strongly
demanded from the patriarchate that the seat of the metropolitanate be returned
to Kiev, and even sent his candidate, Theodoret, to Constantinople for consecration.
Facing a rebuke, he took the unusual step of having Theodoret ordained by the
Bulgarian patriarch of Trnovo. Understandably, Theodoret was labelled a
schismatic in Constantinople and in Moscow. Upon the death of Theognostus,
political confusion in Constantinople – and strong political and financial
pressures from both Moscow and Vilna – led to the almost simultaneous (1354-5)
consecration, in the Byzantine capital, of two metropolitans: Alexis (the
candidate nominated by Theognostus) and Roman, pushed forward by Olgerd. Both
claimed the see of Kiev as Theodoret had was abandoned by his sponsor, Olgerd…
“Metropolitan Alexis, an experienced,
respected and able prelate (1354-70)[728],
continued the policies of his predecessors Peter and Theognostus. His prestige
at the Golden Horde was enhanced by a visit there, during which he healed the
influential widow of khan Uzbek, Taidul, from her sickness (1357).[729]
His influence in Byzantium led to the unification of the metropolitanate, under
his sole rule, following the death of Roman (1362). Since 1360, however, his
ability to administer the western dioceses, located within the domains of
Olgerd and of King Casimir the Great of Poland, was greatly limited by the fact
that he had become the de facto regent of the Moscow government, during
the minority of the grand-prince Dimitri. In fact, the metropolitan held the
ultimate responsibility for the political and military struggle against [the]
advancing Lithuanians, and was not welcome in western regions at all, where he
was seen as an ally of the Tatars. Nevertheless, patriarch Philotheus continued
to give his full support, at least until 1370 when two stern protests, coming
from Casimir of Poland and Olgerd of Lithuania respectively, were sent to
Constantinople. Casimir even threatened forcibly to convert the Galicians to
Roman Catholicism. Faced with an emergency situation, Philotheus reestablished
a separate metropolitanate in Galicia (1371), and called on Alexis to exercise
more even-handedness towards Olgerd and his Orthodox subjects. In 1375, he also
consecrated a man of his immediate entourage, the learned Bulgarian monk
Cyprian, as metropolitan in Lithuania. He made sure, however, that this
consecration would not lead to a lasting division of the metropolitanate:
Cyprian received the right to succeed Alexis. Upon his arrival in Kiev in 1376,
he restored order and the prestige of the metropolitanate in territories
controlled by Lithuania.”[730]
Great-Prince Jagiello of Lithuania was an
Orthodox Christian, and Metropolitan Cyprian urged a union between Orthodox
Muscovy and Lithuania against the Tatars. However, this policy was not favoured
by Great-Prince Demetrius of Moscow; and so on the death of St. Alexis in 1378
he expelled Cyprian from Moscow, which led to a prolonged struggle to fill the
vacant metropolitan’s throne.[731] It was at this
critical point of both political and ecclesiastical divisions that one of the
greatest saints of this or any other age, Sergius of Radonezh, assumed the
spiritual leadership of the Russian Church.
In 1380, a Tatar usurper, Mamai, invaded
Muscovy. St. Sergius blessed the
Great-Prince to fight only when all other measures had failed. “You, my lord
prince,” he said, “must care and strongly stand for your subjects, and lay down
your life for them, and shed your blood in the image of Christ Himself, Who
shed His blood for us. But first, O lord, go to them with righteousness and
obedience, as you are bound to submit to the khan of the Horde in accordance
with your position. You know, Basil the Great tried to assuage the impious
Julian with gifts, and the Lord looked on Basil’s humility and overthrew the
impious Julian. And the Scripture teaches us that such enemies want glory and
honour from us, we give it to them; and if they want silver and gold, we give
it to them; but for the name of Christ, the Orthodox faith, we must lay down
our lives and shed our blood. And you, lord, give them honour, and gold, and
sliver, and God will not allow them to overcome us: seeing your humility, He
will exalt you and thrust down their unending pride.” “I have already done
that,” replied the Great Prince: “but my enemy is exalted still more.” “If so,”
said the God-pleaser, “then final destruction awaits him, while you, Great
Prince, can expect help, mercy and glory from the Lord. Let us hope on the Lord
and the Most Pure Mother of God, that They will not abandon you”.[732]
Fortified by the blessing of
the saint, Great-Prince Demetrius defeated the enemy at the great battle of
Kulikovo Polje, at which over 100,000 Russian warriors gave their lives for the
Orthodox faith and their Russian homeland. Some have seen in this, the first
victory of the Russians over the Tatars, a sign that the Russians had changed
the policy of submission to the Tartars that they had inherited from St.
Alexander Nevsky, and that St. Sergius actively blessed a policy of rebellion
against those whom previous princes and metropolitans had seen as their lawful
sovereigns. However, as we have seen, the saint advised submission in the first
place, and war only if the Tatar could not be bought off. Moreover, it needs to
be borne in mind that Mamai was himself a rebel against the Horde, so that in
resisting him the Russians were in no way rebelling against their lawful
sovereigns. In any case, two years later the lawful khan came and sacked
Moscow; so there was not, and could not be, any radical change in policy (it
was not until a century later, in 1480, that the Muscovites refused to pay any
further tribute to the khans).
The real significance of Kulikovo Polje
lies in the fact that a union of Muscovite and Lithuanian princes had defeated
an external foe under the leadership of the Orthodox Church, thereby holding
out the promise that the spiritual unity of the Russian lands, which had never
been lost, could be complemented by that political unity which had been lost
two hundred years before. As it turned out, in spite of the pan-Russian vision
of such leaders as Metropolitan Cyprian and St. Sergius, political union with
Lithuania was not achieved: the conversion of the Lithuanian grand-prince to
Catholicism in 1386 led to the union of Lithuania with Catholic Poland and the
increasing identification of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodox statehood
with Muscovy alone. Nevertheless, the vision and the aim was a noble one; and
it helped produce that flowering of monasticism, iconography and missionary
activity that makes the Age of St. Sergius such a glorious one in the annals of
Russian history…
Especially striking in this age was the
extent to which political leaders took the advice of the Church in political
affairs, on the one hand, and used the spiritual power of Church leaders for
political ends, on the other. Sometimes the purely spiritual power of the
interdict was used over whole cities, as when, in 1365, for an act of
disobedience to the Grand Prince in Moscow on the part of his brother, Prince
Boris of Nizhni-Novgorod, “at the command of the holy Hierarch Alexis, St.
Sergius went to Nizhni, demanded that Boris appear in Moscow, and after his
refusal closed all the churches in Nizhni-Novgorod”.[733]
If this measure sounds drastic, it must be remembered that political
unity was a most pressing spiritual
necessity in that age in which politics and religion were so closely
intertwined. As Boris Zaitsev writes, for the leaders of the Russian Church
“the struggle for Moscow was the struggle for Rus’”.[734]
And so it was precisely the two greatest spiritual leaders of the age, Saints
Alexis and Sergius, who played the major role in finally bringing to an end the
appanage system in Russia and establishing the unquestioned central authority
of the Muscovite Great Prince.
For, as St. John Maximovich writes, “under
Demetrius Ivanovich the significance of the Great Prince grew mightily. The most powerful appanages
of the Great Prince – Tver and Ryazan – were forced to conclude agreements with
him in which they recognised themselves to be his younger brothers... Âàsil Demetrievich
continued the work of his father. He joined some appanages to Moscow, and with
the remaining appanage princes he concluded agreements to the effect that they
had to submit to him and not seek the Great Princedom”.[735]
The success of the Church in resolving
political disputes was striking. Thus in 1385, at the request of the Great
Prince, St. Sergius walked some 200 miles to see Prince Oleg of Riazan. “Oleg
had already heard much about the abbot of Radonezh: five years earlier he had not
decided to join the armies of Mamai only because the Moscow Prince had received
St. Sergius’ to go to war with Mamai, and now he was glad to see the holy elder
as his guest and to receive his blessing. The meek exhortations of the God-wise
Sergius softened the heart of the severe Prince of Ryazan, and he sincerely
revealed his thoughts to the saint ‘and concluded eternal peace and love with
Great Prince Demetrius to generation and generation’. This peace was later
sealed by a family union: the son of Oleg, Theodore, married the daughter of
the Great Prince, Sophia Demetrievna.
“Thus, under the unsleeping care and
fatherly direction of the holy Hierarch Alexis, and thanks to the active
participation of the abbot of Radonezh, our holy Father Sergius, the authority
of the Great Prince of Moscow gradually grew, and under its aegis the Russian
land, weakened by the quarrels of the appanage Princes, began gradually to
unite. Little by little these Princes became used to the thought that they had
to submit to the authority of the Muscovite Prince, and in the people there was
stirred up a consciousness of the need to come together into one, so that by
their combined forces they might cast off from themselves the hated Tatar yoke.
God knows whether the Great Prince of Moscow, left to himself and with the aid
of the Church in the persons of such holy men, filled with the Spirit and
strength, as the God-pleasers Metropolitan Alexis and the God-bearing Sergius,
abbot of Radonezh, would have been successful in this great work”.[736]
It was also under the influence of St. Sergius
that another very important element in the building of a stable and united
Muscovite state was initiated. Great-Prince Demetrius ordered
his children to observe a new order of inheritance, whereby his eldest son was
to inherit the Great Princedom, not allowing any quarrels or claims from the
other children. Once again, St. Sergius was entrusted with guarding this most
important decree, which served to strengthen the institution of one-man,
autocratic rule in Russia.[737]
The Russians’ defeat of the
Mongols at Kulikovo Polje in 1380 and the Serbs’ defeat by the Ottomans at
Kossovo Polje in 1389, represent the opposite poles of Orthodox fortunes in the
Middle Ages. The first marked the beginning of the rise of the last and
greatest of the Orthodox autocracies, while the second marked the beginning of
the end of Orthodox autocracy in its original Mediterranean homeland.
Returning
to Byzantium, in the 1330s another, more original
attempt to attain the unia with Rome was made: the Italian Greek monk Barlaam
was sent by the emperor to Avignon, where he argued for the unia on the basis
of agnosticism: the truths of the Faith cannot be proved, he said, so we might
as well take both positions, the Greek and the Latin, as private opinions! Pope
Benedict was no more inclined than the Byzantine Church to accept such
agnosticism, so the attempt failed. But the more important effect of Barlaam’s
philosophizing, in this as in other areas of theology and asceticism, was to
elicit a series of Councils between 1341 and 1351, in which the Byzantine
Church, led by St. Gregory Palamas, the future Archbishop of Thessalonica, was
able to define her teaching in relation to the new currents of thought
emanating from the West, and in particular to anathematize the teaching that
grace of God is created. Apart from their dogmatic significance, these Palamite
Councils presented an image that was infinitely precious: that of Orthodox
bishops convened by a right-believing emperor to define essential truths of the
faith and thereby preserve the heritage of Orthodoxy for future generations and
other nations.
However, from now on Byzantium declined
inexorably. The loss of its economic power to the Genoans and Venetians was a
serious blow, and an outbreak of the Black Death, which, according to one
source, killed most of the inhabitants of Constantinople, further undermined
the strength of the State. In 1396 the Byzantine armies suffered a crushing
defeat at Nicopolis, and Sultan Bayezid began a siege of Constantinople. The
City was saved at this time by the intervention of the Mongols under Tamerlane
in the Turkish rear. However, the continuing weakness of the State, and the
recurrent tendency of the later Byzantines to put the interests of the State
above the purity of the faith, combined to put the unia with Rome back onto the
agenda.
For, as Fr. Gregory Lurye writes: “It was
precisely in the 14th century, when immemorial Greek territories
passed over to the Turks, and some others – to the Latins, that there was
formed in Byzantine society those two positions whose struggle would clearly
appear in the following, 15th century. It was precisely in the 14th
century that the holy Fathers established a preference for the Turks over the
Latins, while with the humanists it was the reverse. Neither in the 15th,
nor in the 14th century was there any talk of union with the Turks – their invasion was thought to be only an
evil. But already in the 14th century it became clear that the
Empire would not be preserved, that they would have to choose the lesser of two
evils. In the capacity of such a lesser evil, although a very great one, the
holy Fathers were forced to make an irrevocable decision in favour of the
Turks, under whose yoke it was possible to preserve the Church organisation and
avoid the politics of forced conversions to Latinism. The danger of conversions
to Islam was significantly smaller: first, because the inner administration of
the Ottoman empire was based on ‘millets’, in accordance with which the civil
administration of the Orthodox population was realized through the structure of
the Orthodox Church and the patriarch, and this created for the Turks an
interest in preserving the Church, and secondly, because the cases of
conversion to Islam, however destructive they were for those who had been
converted, did not threaten the purity of the confession of the Christians who
remained faithful, while Latin power always strove to exert influence on the
inner life and teaching of the faith of the Orthodox Church. The Church history
of the 16th to 19th centuries showed that, in spite of
all the oppressions caused to the Christians in the Ottoman empire, it
protected the Christian peoples living within its frontiers from the influence
of European religious ideas and Weltanschauungen, whereby it unwittingly
helped the preservation of the purity of Orthodoxy…”[738]
St.
Gregory Palamas, too, though for a time a captive of the Turks, by no means
considered that the victory of the Turks would signify the end of Orthodoxy. He
wrote: “This impious people [the Turks]”, he said, “boasts of its victory over
the Romans, attributing it to their love of God. For they do not know that this
world below dwells in sin, and that evil men possess the greater part of it…
That is why, down to the time of Constantine, … the idolaters have almost
always held power over the world.”[739]
The relative tolerance displayed by the
Turks towards Orthodoxy raises the question: if the Byzantine rulers had made
the same choice that St. Alexander Nevsky had made in the 1240s – namely,
political submission to the infidels in exchange for the freedom to practise
the Orthodox Faith – might they have saved much more of their freedom and
statehood than they actually did?
They might indeed; but here the
Byzantines displayed a fatal weakness: they placed the security of the Empire
above that of the Church, the earthly kingdom above the Heavenly Kingdom. Like
Judah in the time of Jeremiah, they tried to play off one despotic power
against another – and lost to both. Unlike their great ancestors, who had often
defied heretical emperors for the sake of the Faith, they tried to preserve
their earthly kingdom at the price of the Kingdom of Heaven, forgetting that
the whole glory of the Christian Empire lay in its readiness to live and die
for its Heavenly King; "for here we have no lasting city, but seek the
City which is to come" (Hebrews 13.14). Unable to present a truly
catholic vision of Christian society to the world, the Byzantines fell into a
false union with, and submission to, the West with its heretical, but more
explicitly universal vision. And so they lost the name of Rome, whose whole
glory, even when her dominion was no longer universal, lay in her universal vision: “Where there is no vision, the
people perish” (Proverbs 29.18)…
John V was the first emperor since Michael
VIII to convert to Roman Catholicism. But in his time, in the 14th
century, the Church and the people were still strong enough not to follow his
personal decision (and there is some evidence that he returned to Orthodoxy
before his death). However, by the council of Florence-Ferrara in 1438-39, not
only the Emperor John VIII (although he repented before his death), but also
all the leading metropolitans of the Empire, with the exception of St. Mark of
Ephesus[740],
accepted the unia with Rome in exchange for the promise of military help
against the Turks – which, however, as Joseph Bryennios had prophesied, never
came[741].
The false ecclesiastical unia with Rome
spelt the end of the empire. For with Orthodoxy destroyed, what was the point
of it? It was fit only “to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men” (Matthew
5.13).
Until the Council of Florence the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch
in Russia remained unshaken. And so, as Ya.S. Lurye writes, “when in the 14th
century the Swedes suggested to the citizens of Novgorod that they have a
religious debate between the Catholics and the Orthodox, the Novgorodians
refused, suggesting to their opponents that they directly address the Patriarch
in Constantinople.”[742] Not surprisingly, however, the increase in the prestige of the
Muscovite Grand Princes towards the end of the fourteenth century, and the
decline in the power of Byzantium, led to a ñertain decrease in that filial respect for the Emperor in Byzantium
which had been a constant feature of the Kievan period.
The first cause of friction was the
decision, by the Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople in 1393, to appoint
their own candidate as metropolitan in Lithuania. Great-Prince Basil I reacted
by removing the name of the emperor from the diptychs and during the
celebration of the Liturgy. “We have a Church,” he
said, “but we do not have an emperor”. This produced a significant riposte from
the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthony IV. While not demeaning his own position as
Patriarch - “the Patriarch occupies the place of Christ and he sits on the
throne of the Lord Himself” – he hastened to the defence of the rights of the
Emperor: “The holy Emperor occupies a lofty position in the Church. He is not
what other, local princes and sovereigns are. In the beginning the Emperors
strengthened and confirmed piety throughout the oikoumene. The Emperors
convened the Ecumenical Councils; they confirmed by their own laws the
observance of that which the divine and sacred canons say about the right
dogmas and the good order of the Christian life, and they struggled greatly
against heresies. Finally, the Emperors, together with the Councils, defined by
their own decrees the hierarchical sees and established the boundaries of the
hierarchical territories and episcopal dioceses. For all this they have great
honour and occupy a lofty place in the Church. And if, by God’s permission, the
pagans have encircled the possessions and lands of the Emperor, nevertheless up
to the present day the Emperor receives the same position from the Church, is
anointed with the great chrism according to the same rite and with the same
prayers, and is established as Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans, that is, of
all Christians. In every place where Christians are named, the name of the
Emperor is commemorated by all the Patriarchs, Metropolitans and Bishops, and
this advantage is possessed by none of the other princes or local rulers. His
power, by comparison with all the others, is such that even the Latins, who
have no communion with our Church, do not refuse him such obedience as they
showed in former times, when they were in unity with us. All the more are
Orthodox Christians obliged to do this. And if the pagans have surrounded the
Emperor’s land, then Christians must not despise him for this; on the contrary,
let this serve for them as a lesson in humility and force them to think: if the
Great Emperor, Lord and Master of the oikoumene, who is clothed with
such power, has been placed in such a restricting position, what may other
local rulers and little princes suffer?... And so, my son, it is not good if
you say: ‘We have a Church, but we do not have an Emperor’. It is impossible
for Christians to have a Church without having an Emperor. For the Empire and
the Church are in close union and communion with each other, and it is
impossible to separate the one from the other. Only those emperors were
rejected by Christians who were heretics, and raged against the Church and
introduced corrupt dogmas. But my supreme and holy Autocrat is a most Orthodox
and faithful [sovereign], a fighter, defender and avenger of the Church. That
is why it is impossible to be a hierarch and not commemorate his [name]. Listen
to the Apostle Peter speaking in his first Catholic epistle: ‘Fear God, honour
the emperor’. He did not say ‘emperors’, so that nobody should think that he
had begun to mean those who are called emperors in various peoples, but ‘emperor’,
pointing to the fact that there is only one Emperor in the oikoumene.
And who was this [Emperor whom the apostle commands to be honoured]? At that
time he was still impious and a persecutor of Christians! But since he was holy
and an apostle, he looked into the future and saw that Christians would have
one Emperor, and taught that the impious Emperor should be honoured, so that we
should understand from that how a pious and Orthodox Emperor should be
honoured. For if some other Christians have appropriated to themselves the name
of emperor, all these examples are something unnatural and contrary to the law,
rather a matter of tyranny and violence [than of law]. In actual fact, what
Fathers, what Councils and what canons have spoken about these [emperors]? But
everything both from above and below speaks about a born Emperor whose laws and
commands are fulfilled throughout the oikoumene, and whose name, excluding all
others, is the only one commemorated everywhere by Christians.”[743]
This is a remarkable statement that shows
how far the conception of the emperor has changed from the one who rules by
might, if not always by right, to the one who rules by right, even if he has no
might. His right derives exclusively from his Orthodox faith and his unique
anointing. This makes him the one and only true king on earth, and the one whom
all Christians must acknowledge and all Christian bishops commemorate. All
other kings, however outwardly powerful they may be, must concede the
superiority in honour and grace to this king. Indeed, so inseparable is the grace of the
emperor from the grace of the Church as a whole that “it is impossible for
Christians to have a Church, but not have an Emperor”.
It seems that the Great-Prince accepted
this lesson in political theology, and there were no further attempts to
question the emperor’s unique position in the Orthodox world. However,
Patriarch Anthony did not expatiate on what would follow if the empire were to
fall – a possibility which no rational person could deny in view of the Turks’
encirclement of Constantinople. If it was truly “impossible for Christians to
have a Church, but not have an Emperor”, then, in the event of the fall of New
Rome, there were only two possible scenarios: either the reign of the
Antichrist had arrived, or (a more difficult idea for the Byzantines to
contemplate) the empire was to be transferred to another people and state…
Moreover, if the empire itself did not
fall, but the emperor became a heretic, was not the Russian Grand-Prince then
bound to reject his authority?
Forty years later, events began to move
precisely towards such an outcome. In 1434, on the death of Metropolitan Photius, Bishop
Jonah of Ryazan was elected to the metropolitanate in his place sent to Constantinople
for consecration.
“But here,” writes Protopriest Peter Smirnov, “obstacles were
encountered. The Greeks were going through their last years. The Turks had
moved up to Constantinople from all sides. The only hope of salvation was seen to
be help from the West, but that could be bought only by means of humiliation
before the Roman pope. Negotiations concerning the union of the Churches were
undertaken. On the Latin side, people were being prepared in the East who would
be able to agree to union, and they were given influential places and posts. Îne of these people was a
certain Isidore, a very talented and educated person, but one who from a moral
point of view was not especially firm, and was capable of changing his
convictions. It was he whom they hastened to appoint as metropolitan for Moscow
before the arrival of Jonah in Constantinople. St. Jonah was promised the
metropolitanate after Isidore.
“Soon after Isidore had arrived in Moscow,
he declared that the Eighth Ecumenical Council was being prepared in Italy for
the union of the Churches, and that it was necessary for him to be there. Then
he began to prepare for the journey. Great Prince Basil Vasilievich tried in every way to dissuade Isidore from taking part in the council. Finally he
said to him: “If you unfailingly desire to go to the eighth council, bring us
thence our ancient Orthodoxy, which we received from our ancestor Vladimir, and
do not bring us anything new and foreign, which we will not accept.’ Isidore
swore to stand for Orthodoxy, but at the council of Florence he was especially
zealous in promoting an outcome that was favourable for the pope. At the end of
the council and after the reception of the unia, Isidore… returned to Moscow,
and his first service began to commemorate the pope instead of the Patriarch of
Constantinople. The great prince publicly called him a Latin seducer and
heretic and ordered that he be placed under guard until a conciliar resolution
of the matter. The Russian bishops gathered in Moscow for a council and
condemned Isidore, who together with his disciple Gregory fled to Tver, from
Tver to Lithuania, and finally to Rome, where he remained for good with the
pope.
“After Isidore’s flight from Russia, St. Jonah remained for seven
more years a simple bishop, partly because of the disorders in Constantinople,
where, in hope of aid from Rome, they continued to call Isidore metropolitan…
Finally, in 1448, seventeen years after the election of St. Jonah, Basil
Vasilievich summoned all the bishops of the Russian land to a council. The
Fathers of the Council, on the basis of the Church canons, previous examples
and the decision of the Constantinopolitan Patriarch that St. Jonah should be
metropolitan after Isidore, appointed him to the see of the first-hierarch. At
a triumphant service in the Dormition cathedral the omophorion which had placed
on earlier metropolitans was placed on him, and the great metropolitan’s staff,
the symbol, of first-hierarchical power, was put into his hands.”[744]
The Russian Church was now technically
in schism from the Great Church of Constantinople, which had fallen into the
Latin heresy.
"However," writes Boyeikov,
"even after he had learned about the treachery of the Orthodox emperor and
the events which had shaken Byzantium, Basil did not consider that he had the
right to break the canonical dependence which the Russian Church had inherited
since the time of the Baptism of Rus', and after Jonah's election he wrote the
following: ‘After the death of Metropolitan Photius, having taken counsel with
our mother, the Great Princess, and with our brothers, the Russian princes,
both the Great Princes and the local ones, together with the lord of the
Lithuanian land, the hierarchs and all the clergy, the boyars and all the
Russian land, we elected Bishop Jonah of Ryazan and sent him to you in
Constantinople for consecration together with our envoy. But before his arrival
there the emperor and patriarch consecrated Isidore as metropolitan of Kiev and
all Rus', while to Jonah they said: "Go to your see - the Ryazan
episcopate. If Isidore dies or something else happens to him, then be ready to
be blessed for the metropolitan see of all Rus'.” Since a disagreement in the
Church of God has taken place in our blessed kingdoms, travellers to
Constantinople have suffered all kinds of difficulties on the road, there is
great disorder in our countries, the godless Hagarenes have invaded, there have
been civil wars, and we ourselves have suffered terrible things, not from foreigners,
but from our own brothers. In view of this great need, we have assembled our
Russian hierarchs, and, in accordance with the canons, we have consecrated the
above-mentioned Jonah to the Russian metropolitanate of Kiev and all Rus'. We
have acted in this way because of great need, and not out of pride or boldness.
We shall remain to the end of the age devoted to the Orthodoxy we have
received; our Church will always seek the blessing of the Church of Tsargrad
and obey her in everything according to the ancient piety. And our father Jonah
also begs for blessing and union in that which does not concern the present new
disagreements, and we beseech your holy kingdom to be kindly disposed to our
father Metropolitan Jonah. We wanted to write about all these church matters to
the most holy Orthodox patriarch, too; and to ask his blessing and prayers. But
we do not know whether there is a patriarch in your royal city or not. But if
God grants that you will have a patriarch according to the ancient piety, then
we shall inform him of all our circumstances and ask for his blessing.'
"On reading this gramota of
the Great Prince Basil, one is amazed at his tact and the restraint of his
style. Knowing that the emperor himself had betrayed the faith, that Patriarch
Gregory had fled to Rome, as also Isidore who had been sent to Moscow, Basil
II, instead of giving a well-merited rebuke to his teachers and instructors,
himself apologised for the fact that circumstances had compelled the Russian
bishops themselves to consecrate a metropolitan for themselves, and comes near
to begging him to receive Jonah with honour. It is remarkable that the Great
Prince at every point emphasises that this consecration took place 'in
accordance with the canons', while doubting whether there was a lawful
patriarch in Byzantium itself or not. The whole of this gramota is full
of true Christian humility and brotherly compassion for the emperor who had
fallen on hard times."[745]
The
Russian Church was now de facto autocephalous. Soon, after the fall of
New Rome in 1453, the Russian State, too, would be independent, not only in the
sense of being de facto self-governing (she had been that for
centuries), but also in the sense of owing no filial, de jure allegiance
to any other State. And indeed, the Russian Grand Prince Basil II was already
being called “Tsar” and “Autocrat” by his own people and “brother” by Emperor
John VII…[746]
The
question was: what did this mean for the theology of politics? Constantine the
Great had transferred the capital of the Roman empire from Old Rome to New Rome
– but it still remained the same empire. Serbs and Bulgarians had tried to
conquer New Rome – but it still remained the same empire. The Franks and Romans
had spoken of a translatio imperii to a completely different location –
but they had been heretics attempting to divide the indivisible and create a
radically new empire. Could Rome still remain Rome while being – Russia?
The last emperor, Constantine XI, was a
uniate[747],
and was not even crowned in Constantinople, but in Mystra, because of the
opposition of the zealots of Orthodoxy. Even after he returned to
Constantinople in 1449 he was never officially crowned emperor.[748]
The last step in the apostasy came in December, 1452. A uniate liturgy in which
the Pope was commemorated was celebrated by Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev in
Hagia Sophia. With both emperor and patriarch heretics, and the holiest shrine
in Orthodoxy defiled by the communion of heresy, the protection of the Mother
of God deserted the Empire, which had ceased to be the instrument of God’s
purpose in the world…
However, we must not forget those Byzantines who remained true Romans to
the end. Such as St. Mark of Ephesus, who, though under enormous pressure,
refused to sign the false unia at Florence, and declared: “There can be no
compromise in matters of the Orthodox Faith.”[749] And again: “Let no one lord it over
our faith, neither emperor, nor false council, not anyone else, but only the
One God, Who Himself handed it down to us through His disciples.”[750] Or his disciple, St. Gennadius
Scholarius, who repented of his previous uniate beliefs, and became the first
Patriarch of Constantinople after the conquest, thereby preserving the
religious, if not the political traditions of New Rome for future generations.
Or those metropolitans who signed the unia but later renounced their
signatures, concerning whom Michael Ducas records that, on returning from the
council of Florence, “as the metropolitans disembarked from the ships the
citizens greeted them as was customary, asking ‘What of our business? What of
the Council? Did we prevail?’ And they answered: ‘We have sold our faith; we
have exchanged true piety for impiety; we have betrayed the pure Sacrifice and become
upholders of unleavened bread.’”[751]
It is this capacity for repentance
intrinsic to Orthodox Christianity which ensures that the ideals of Rome –
Orthodox Christian Rome, Roma invicta et aeterna - will never die, even
if the States called to incarnate those ideals die. For even when one nation
staggers and falls, God will call on another to take up that cross, witnessing
to the truth on an ever more universal scale, in an ever more apocalyptic time.
That the world “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and
that believing it might have life through His name” (John 20.30).
“Every kingdom divided against itself,”
said the Lord, “is brought to desolation” (Matthew 12.25); and
Constantinople in its last period was fatally divided. In this lay the basic
reason of her fall, as it had been of the fall of Old Rome in the fifth
century, and as it would be of the Third Rome, Russia, in 1917.
We have already studied the division
between the Orthodox and the Latin-minded. But other divisions were hardly less
damaging. Thus Emperor was divided against Emperor, Emperor against Patriarch,
rich against poor.
Emperor against Emperor. First there was a bitter civil war between Andronicus II and his grandson Andronicus III. Then in 1341, after the death of Andronicus III, a civil war broke out between John V Palaeologus and the army’s choice, John VI Cantacuzenus (a firm believer in the dynastic principle and lifetime supporter of the Palaeologi!). This was followed by the forced abdication of John VI, probably the most talented and Orthodox emperor of the period. Then civil war again broke out between John V and his son Andronicus IV. Early in the fifteenth century, Manuel II was at war with his brother, Andronicus V; and in the very last years of the Empire John VIII had to contend with a rebellion from his brother Demetrius… These repeated coups showed that the introduction of imperial anointing in the thirteenth century did not increase – or only temporarily increased - the respect in which the anointed emperor was held by at least some of his subjects. The Lord’s command: “Touch not Mine anointed ones” (Psalm 104.15) continued to be violated, further undermining the already weakened foundations of Byzantine statehood.
Ivan Solonevich calculates that out of 109
Byzantine reigns, in 74 cases the throne was seized by a coup.[752]
However, it must be remembered, as K.N. Leontiev points out, that “they drove
out the Caesars, changed them, killed them, but nobody touched the holiness of
Caesarism itself. They changed the people, but nobody changed its
basic organisation”[753] –
although, as we have said, the organisation could not fail to be weakened by
such persistent acts of violence. Moreover, “it is known concerning the
Greeks,” writes Nikolsky, “that an anathema against those daring to undertake
rebellion was pronounced in the 11th to 14th centuries…
Thus, according to the Byzantine historian Kinnamas, Andronicus Manuel fell
under anathema in the 12th century. ‘This traitor, enemy of the
fatherland, made frequent assaults on the Roman lands from Persia, enslaved
many people and handed over much military booty to the Persians, for which he
was subjected to anathema by the Church.’… But the anathematisation against the
rebels and traitors was in all probability not introduced by the Greeks into
the Order of Orthodoxy”.[754]
Because of the weakness of the sanctions against usurpers and traitors,
the question of legitimacy still remained to be worked out. And according to
L.A. Tikhomirov, the Byzantines never in fact worked it out, mainly because of
“the bad state of relations between the Imperial power and the nation, and its
social forces”.[755] For certain definite historical
reasons (the multi-ethnicity of the Empire, the fact that at the time of
Constantine it was still largely pagan and remained so for some time, the
continual social upheavals caused by successive barbarian invasions, etc.), the
Empire failed to develop a concept of the “people” or “nation” that was
distinct from the people of the Church, on the one hand, and the people
directly employed by the Empire (the bureaucracy, the army), on the other.
Therefore when the Emperor needed administrators to carry out his will in the
provinces he came to rely almost exclusively either on the bishops or on the
bureaucrats, without allowing the development of any self-administrative organs
among the people.
This had several bad consequences. First,
by making Church institutions carry out the functions of social and political
institutions, it threatened to corrupt the Church herself. We have seen how the
Emperor Justinian tried to use his bishops as imperial administrators, which
threatened to draw them into the conduct of worldly affairs, in violation of
the apostolic canons and to the detriment of their spiritual calling. Of
course, this was not a necessary consequence. Nevertheless, the danger
remained, and it is likely that the bishops’ habit of serving the Emperor even
in a non-spiritual capacity contributed to their failure to prevent him
entering into the unia with Rome.
Secondly, it led to a highly developed
form of bureaucratism, with all the familiar problems which that can give rise
to among bureaucrats: (i) their loyalty first of all to their own caste with
its concentration in the capital city and lack of sensitivity to local and
provincial needs, (ii) their arrogance towards the people whose destinies they
control with the attendant temptations of bribery and corruption, and (iii)
their potential disloyalty to the Emperor himself, the limitations of whose
power they are in a good position to evaluate and exploit.
Apart from the historical factors
mentioned above, L.A. Tikhomirov points to another, still deeper cause of this
weakness in the Byzantine system: the fact that imperial power was based on two
distinct and mutually incompatible principles, the Christian and the Old Roman
(Republican).
According to the Christian principle,
supreme power in the State rested in the Emperor, not in the People. However, while
supreme, his power was not absolute in that it was limited by the Orthodox
Faith and Church; for the Emperor, while supreme on earth, was still the
servant of the Emperor of Emperors in heaven. According to the Old Roman
principle, however, which still retained an important place alongside the
Christian principle in the legislation of Justinian, supreme power rested, not
in the Emperor, but in the Senate and the People. But since the Senate and the
People had, according to the legal fiction, conceded all their empire and power
to the Emperor, he concentrated all executive power in his own person, and his
will had the full force of law: Quod Principi placuit legis habet vigorem,
et in eum solum omne suum imperium et potestatem concessit.
As Tikhomirov writes, “this idea was
purely absolutist, making the power of the Emperor unlimited, but not supreme,
not independent of the people’s will. The formula also contradicted the
Christian idea of ‘the King, the servant of God’, whose law could in no way be
simply what was ‘pleasing’ to him. But the conjunction of popular delegation
and Divine election gave Byzantine imperial power the opportunity to be very
broadly arbitrary. In the case of a transgression of the people’s rights, it
was possible to refer to the unlimited delegation of the people. However, it is
impossible not to see that this same conjunction, which gave the Emperor’s
power the opportunity to be arbitrary, at the same time did not give it
solidity. This power could be taken away from an unworthy bearer of it also on
a dual basis: for transgression of the will of God, or on the basis of the will
of the people, which did not want to continue the ‘concession’ it had given
before any longer.
“The idea of the delegation of the
people’s will and power to one person in itself presupposes centralisation, and
then bureaucratisation. Truly, as the point of concentration of all the
people’s powers, the Emperor is an executive power. In accordance with the
concept of delegation, he himself administers everything. He must do all the
work of the current administration. For that reason everything is centralised
around him, and in him. But since it is in fact impossible in fact for one
person, even the greatest genius, to carry out all the acts of State, they are
entrusted to servants, officials. In this way bureaucratisation develops.
“The king, ‘the servant of God’, is
obliged only to see that the affairs of the country are directed in the spirit
of God’s will. The people’s self-administration does not contradict his idea on
condition that over this administration the control of ‘the servant of God’ is
preserved, directing everything on the true path of righteousness, in case
there are any deviations from it. But for the Emperor to whom ‘the people
concedes all power and might’, any manifestation of popular
self-administration, whatever it may be, is already a usurpation on the part of
the people, a kind of taking back by the people of what it had ‘conceded’ to
the Emperor.”[756]
Emperor against Patriarch. Nor did
the Emperors respect the anointing of the high priesthood. Although fewer
Patriarchs were simply removed from office by the Emperors in this last period,
the subjection of the Church to the State in violation of the Symphony of
Powers was more evident than ever – in the almost idolatrous pomp of court
ceremonial[757],
and in the servile submission of the Hierarchy to the Emperor. The more modest
style of the Nicaean Emperors had given cause for hope. But the very first
emperor of the last period, Michael Palaeologus, on reconquering
Constantinople, had immediately gone back to the bad old ways of the
pre-Nicaean Emperors – and overriden the Church in his desire for a unia with
Rome. As Uspensky writes, “Palaeologus openly set out on the old path of the
Comneni and Angeli. Not only was the capital returned, but the old order, the
demands and expenses of the antiquated world order that had lived out its time,
was also reestablished. Palaeologus, a representative of the service
aristocracy, that was linked equally with the East and the West of the Greek
world, by his abilities and energies, and also by his cunning whereby he pushed
aside and destroyed the heir of the Nicaean Emperors, was the bearer of other
principles…”[758]
As
we have seen, some of the fourteenth-century Emperors returned to a true
symphony with the Church. But by the fifteenth century St. Simeon of
Thessalonica was writing: “Many pious kings, like, for example, Constantine the
Great, richly endowed the Bishops and gave them various honours. But now the
opposite is happening. The Bishop is not counted worthy of any kind of honour
for the sake of Christ, but rather his lot is dishonour; he is counted
immeasurably inferior to the emperor, who receives a blessing from the Hierarch.
At the present time the Bishop falls down at the feet of the emperor and kisses
his right hand. With the sanctified lips with which he recently touched the
Sacred Sacrifice, he servilely kisses a secular hand, whose function is to hold
the sword. And, O shame!, the Bishop stands while the emperor sits. For the
Bishop, as the delegate of the Church, all this reflects in an indecent and
shameful manner on Christ Himself. These absurd customs were introduced,
however, not by the emperors themselves, but by flatterers, who in an
undiscerning manner suggested to them that they should use the Divine for evil,
that they should ascribe to themselves power and install and remove the Bishop.
Alas, what madness! If the deposition of a Bishop is necessary, this should be
done through the Holy Spirit, by Whom the Bishop has been consecrated, and not
through the secular power. Hence come all our woes and misfortunes; hence we
have become an object of mockery for all peoples. If we give to Caesar what is
Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, then the blessing of God will rest on
everything: the Church will receive peace, and the State will become more
prosperous.”[759]
Thus the Byzantine Empire failed because,
although the emperor and patriarch remained in harmony to the end, this harmony
was not true "symphony", but an agreement to put the interests of the
nation-state above that of the Ecumenical Church.
This analysis is in accordance with the
witness of a Greek prophecy recently found in St. Sabbas’ monastery and dating
to the eighth or ninth century: "The sceptre of the Orthodox kingdom will
fall from the weakening hands of the Byzantine emperors, since they will not have proved able to achieve the symphony of Church
and State. Therefore the Lord in His Providence will send a third
God-chosen people to take the place of the chosen, but spiritually decrepit
people of the Greeks."[760]
The “third God-chosen people”, the Russians, would carry the traditions of
Byzantium into the modern period.
Rich and Poor. Perhaps most ominous
of all was the questioning of the very foundations of the autocracy during a
social revolution of the poor against the rich in the fourteenth century in
Adrianople and Thessalonica. This revolution betrayed, according to Diehl, “a
vague tendency towards a communistic movement”[761],
and in its final wave forced the abdication of John VI in 1354. St. Gregory
Palamas defended the principle of autocracy against the political “zealots”
(the revolutionaries) – but also chastised the rich whose selfishness had laid
the seeds for the revolution.
Everyone lost when Constantinople fell to
the despotic power of the Ottomans in 1453. The Orthodox came under infidel
rulers; the Western Catholics lost their best chance of being restored to Orthodox
Catholicism; and the Western Conciliarists, who were meeting in Basle at the
very moment of the council of Florence, and to whom John VIII had sent three
ambassadors, lost their chance of being united to the Conciliar Church par
excellence.[762]
The Pope quickly took advantage of his
victory over the Greeks to conclude separate unias with the Armenians, the
Copts, the Ethiopians, the Monophysite Syrians, the Chaldean Nestorians and the
Cypriot Maronites. This greatly increased the prestige of Rome, which contributed
significantly to “the ultimate defeat of the anti-council of Basle and of the
anti-Pope Felix IV, who eventually abdicated. All subsequent ‘unions’ were
clearly formulated as an unconditional surrender to the Church of Rome. The
shrewd Latins, choosing the Greeks first as their negotiation partners, broke
them down. Rome used this fact as an argument in their severe negotiations with
the other churches, from whom they extracted complete submission.”[763]
Many
Greeks fled to the West, mainly Italy, taking their learning and their culture
with them. But it was pagan poets such as Plato and Homer and the court
philosopher of Mystra, George Gemisthus Plethon, not saints such as John
Chrysostom or Gregory Palamas, whom the Westerners were eager to read. For as
Solonevich writes, “the Italian ‘Renaissance’ repeated the basic traits of
ancient Greece, but repeated none of the traits of ancient [and new] Rome”.[764]
The
true heroes of Byzantium did find admirers and imitators - but they were to be
concentrated, not in the Mediterranean homeland of Roman Christian
civilisation, but in the north – in the mountains of Romania, and the forests
of Holy Russia. Here Romanitas, the ideal of Christian Statehood,
remained intact; for it was the Russians who were that “third God-chosen
people” of the prophecy; it was they who were able to re-express the Christian
ideal of the symphony of powers for the modern age, the age of Rationalism and
Revolution, when the foundations, not only of the Church, but also of the State,
would be shaken to their foundations. But that is the subject of another book…
CONCLUSION:
THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST
I was
established as king by Him,
Upon Sion
His holy mountain,
Proclaiming
the commandment of the Lord.
Psalm 2.6.
The kingdoms of this world have
become
the kingdoms of our Lord and
of His
Christ, and He shall reign for
ever and ever.
Revelation 11.15.
For
the Orthodox Christian, for whom the “one thing necessary” is the worship of
God “in spirit and in truth”, the ideal of Christian Statehood is that system
of government which facilitates that worship to the maximum degree. Such an
ideal is unattainable if the People are not Christian, or only in a very small
part, or only in a weak or distorted form. That is why it took nearly three
centuries from the Resurrection of Christ before Christian autocracy appeared;
God enlightened the soul of the first Christian emperor, St. Constantine, only
after the Christian population of the empire had reached a certain critical
proportion (5-10%), and only after the fiery trial of Diocletian’s persecution
had purified and strengthened the People through the blood and example of the
holy martyrs.
Christian autocracy is “delegated Theocracy” – that is, that form of
Statehood which is the closest to direct rule by God, in which the ultimate
ruler, by common consent, is Christ the King. Willing obedience to Christian
autocracy is a commandment of the Lord, not only because, in a general sense,
“the powers that be are established by God”, and we are commanded to “fear God
and honour the king”, but also because, more particularly, the Christian
promises at his baptism to serve Christ “as King and as God”. Therefore in serving the Christian autocrat,
who is anointed by the Church to defend and extend the Kingship of Christ
throughout the world, the Christian is fulfilling his baptismal vows as they
relate to the political sphere.
At
first sight it might appear that “delegated Theocracy” can only be hierocracy –
that is, rule by the Church; for the Church is a true Theocracy, Christ is
already King in her, He has given her all His gifts of grace, and has promised
that she will overcome the gates of hell. However, God called the Emperor
Constantine when he was still outside the Church, and the Church accepted his
authority, even in the convening of Church Councils, while he was still a
catechumen, thereby demonstrating that the Christian Emperor was not to be
subject directly to the Church hierarchy. Of course, Constantine was baptised
on his death-bed, thereby bringing the State still more fully within the
grace-filled influence of the Church; and the classical statements of Byzantine
Church-State relations, such as Justinian’s Sixth Novella and St.
Photius’ Epanagoge, clearly speak of Church and State as two parts of a
single organism. Nevertheless, the relative autonomy of the State from the
Church within its sphere was an accepted axiom of the Byzantine world-view.
There is another reason why God has not permitted the Church to rule the
State: the Church cannot carry out her primary task of keeping the faith and
ministering to the spiritual needs of her flock if she also has to fight wars
and collect taxes and carry out all the material tasks that come within the
political sphere. Very shortly after the founding of the Church, the apostles
said: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the Word of God to
serve tables” (Acts 6.2), and delegated to the deacons the task of
looking after the material needs of the Church. Similarly, the Church delegates
to the Christian State “the serving of tables” on a universal scale; and in
recognition of this the Byzantine Church gave the Emperor a rank within the
Church equivalent to that of the diaconate.
New Rome was eventually
conquered by two external enemies: Papism from the West and Islam from the
East. Both these heretical systems (for Islam, too, has been called a Christian
heresy, albeit a rather extreme one) presented alternative theories of the
relationship between religion and politics to that presented by the Orthodox
Christian empire. Both, in imitation of the absolutist pagan empires, tended to
conflate Church and State, religion and politics, kingship and priesthood, into
a single institution or activity, in contrast to the duality of the two spheres
which is the norm in Orthodoxy. Both could therefore be called ecclesiological
analogues of the Monophysite-Monothelite group of heresies in Christology; and
perhaps not coincidentally the beginnings of the papist and Islamist heresies
coincide with the beginnings of the Monophysite and Monothelite heresies.
Orthodoxy,
by contrast, stands for the Chalcedonian unity-in-diversity of Church and
State, priesthood and kingship. The two powers are unconfused but undivided
under the One King of kings and Chief High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. The
eventual fall of Byzantium was preceded by the gradual decay of this symphonic,
Chalcedonian principle of Church-State relations, making its conquest by
anti-Chalcedonian principles easier.
M.V. Zyzykin summarises Church-State
relations in the New Rome of Constantinople as follows: “In reviewing the
world-view of the Byzantine canonists and writers concerning imperial power, we
could see that in the course of time from the Emperor Constantine to the 15th
century, the time of the fall of the empire, when the history of the relations
between the Church and the Christian State in Byzantium comes to an end, two
tendencies of thought are observed: one on the basis of various arguments
strives to continue the ancient Roman tradition of the divine Augustus pontifex
maximus, while the other proceeds from a consciousness of the profound
difference between the Church and the State, and, without rejecting the
protection of the Church on the part of the State, firmly maintains the
independence of the Church from a take-over of its functions by the secular
power. This view can place the king in a particular relationship to the Church
in view of his duties with regard to the defence of the Church, which it
imposes on him in the act of coronation, but it cannot recognise his possession
of such powers as would presuppose the presence of apostolic succession and the
presence of Grace-given gifts for the realisation of the rights of priestly
serving, teaching and pastorship, nor the rights founded upon these of
legislation, oversight and judgement in the ecclesiastical sphere. If, on the
side of the first tendency, we meet the names of the arianizing Emperor
Constantius, the iconoclast Emperor Leo the Isaurian, the canonist Balsamon,
who was prominent at the Byzantine court, and the Bulgarian Bishop Demetrius
Chomatenus, etc., then on the side of the other tendency there pass before us
St. John Chrysostom, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Theodore the Studite, St.
John of Damascus, etc. The inner worth of the second tendency finds its confirmation
also in the inner worth of men who were pleasing to God and sealed their
judgements with a martyric confession. The second tendency was assimilated by
the Church…”[765]
Thus Church and State are independent of
each other, in the Orthodox understanding, each deriving its origin from God
alone. But of the two, the Church is the higher, because it was founded
directly by Christ as His Divine-human Body, with the promise that the gates of
hell will never prevail over it, and the rights of binding and loosing, that
are not accorded to the State. This essential truth was expressed most
powerfully by the first Christian emperor and the model for all his successors,
St. Constantine, in his speech to the bishops at the First Ecumenical Council:
“God has placed you as priests and given you power to judge my peoples and me
myself. Therefore it is just that I should be subject to your sentence. It
would not enter my head to wish to be a judge over you.”[766]
The State is also founded by God, but
indirectly, as it were, without any promises about its future; it exists for
the sake of the Church, as its outer wall and guardian. The Church can exist
without the State, just as the soul can exist without the body; whereas the
State without the Church is like a body from which the soul has departed – a
dead and foul-smelling corpse. The ideal, however, is the “symphony” of Church
and State, their working together for the common goal, which is the salvation
of souls. “The theory of symphony, proceeding from the recognition of two
independent unions having equal rights, the Church and the State, in strictly
ecclesiastical matters gives the decisive significance to the Church, in purely
secular matters – to the State, and in mixed matters calls on the State
voluntarily to accept the exhortations of the Church.”[767]
The main task of Byzantine Church-State
relations was the “enchurchment” of the
State. This was accomplished, according to Zyzykin, by the 10th
century, “when all the main foundations of Church law had already been
established… This enchurchment did not go further than the bestowal on the
emperor of the rank of deacon, to which the rank of emperor was equivalent in
the Church. But the deacon… has the right to do sacred acts only within certain
limits, he has certain privileges in Divine services, such as communion under
both kinds, but he has the right neither of pastorship, nor of teaching…”[768]
Whatever rights the emperor had in the
Church were given to him by the Church, for the sake of the Church, and in view
of the fact that he was himself specially endowed with the Church’s
grace-filled gifts. This is a vitally important point which is often overlooked
by those who look on Church and State as necessarily warring principles. Just
as the soul and the body are not by nature warring principles, even if the fall
has often set them against each other, so it is with the Church and State. For,
as Professor A.V. Kartashev wrote: "The hierarchy of the relationships
between spirit and flesh, and therefore also of the Church and the State, has
its foundation in the creation itself. Just as the body must be the obedient
and perfect instrument of the spirit, so the State is ideally thought of as the
obedient and perfect instrument of the Church, for it is she that knows and
reveals to mankind its higher spiritual aims, pointing the way to the
attainment of the Kingdom of God. In this sense the Church is always
theocratic, for to her have been opened and handed over the means of the power
of God over the hearts of men. She is the ideal active principle, and the role
of the State in comparison with her is secondary. The Church leads the State
and the people, for she knows where she is going. The Orthodox State freely
submits to this leadership. But just as in the individual person the harmony of
spirit and flesh has been destroyed by the original sin, so is it in the
relationship between the Church and the State. Hence it is practically
difficult to carry out the task of Church-State symphony in the sinful world.
Just as the individual Christian commits many sins, great and small, on his way
to holiness, so the people united in the Christian State suffer many falls on
the way to symphony. Deviations from the norm are linked with violations of the
hierarchical submission of the flesh to the spirit, the State to the Church.
But these sins and failures cannot overthrow the system of the symphony of
Church and State in its essence."[769]
The rights of the Emperor in the Church
never included the authority to perform sacraments. “To be sure, the Emperor
wore vestments similar to those of the bishop and even had a special place in
the worship of the Church, such as censing the sanctuary at the Liturgy for the
Nativity of Christ, offering the sermon during Vespers at the commencement of
the Great Lent, and receiving Holy Communion directly from the altar as did the
clergy. Nevertheless, the Emperor was not a priest and many Greek Fathers
disapproved of even these privileges. Emperor Marcian (451-457) may have been
hailed as a priest-king at the Council of Chalcedon (451), but this did not
bestow sacerdotal status on him or any Byzantine imperator.”[770]
One of the rights entrusted to the Emperor
by the Church was that of convening Ecumenical Councils and enforcing their
decisions. This was a very important right – and duty - which, if not exercised
at critical times, would have meant the continuing triumph of heresy. It did
not empower the emperor or his officials to interfere in the proceedings on a
par with the bishops, but it did enable him to make quiet suggestions which
were often vitally important. Thus at the First Council it was the Emperor
Constantine who quietly suggested the word “consubstantial” to describe the
relationship between the Son of God and God the Father.[771]
Again, although the Emperor Marcian’s said that he had decided to be present at
the Fourth Ecumenical Council “not as a manifestation of strength, but so as to
give firmness to the acts of the Council, taking Constantine of blessed memory
as my model,”[772]
his firm but tactful intervention was decisive in the triumph of Orthodoxy.
Another of the emperor’s rights was his
choosing of the Patriarch from three candidates put forward to him by the Holy
Synod. As Simeon of Thessalonica witnessed, this right was not seized by the
emperor by force, “but was entrusted to him from ancient times by the Holy
Fathers, that is, by the Church itself”. Moreover, “if none of the three
candidates was suitable, the basileus could suggest his own candidate,
and the Hierarchical Synod again freely decided about his suitability, having
the possibility of not agreeing. The king’s right did not in principle violate
the Hierarchs’ freedom of choice and was based on the fact that the Patriarch
occupied not only a position in the Church, but was also a participant in
political life…Simeon of Thessalonica said: ‘He, as the anointed king, has been
from ancient times offered the choice of one of the three by the Holy Fathers,
for they [the three] have already been chosen by the Council, and all three
have been recognised as worthy of the Patriarchy. The king assists the Council
in its actions as the anointed of the Lord, having become the defender and
servant of the Church, since during the anointing he gave a promise of such
assistance. De jure there can be no question of arbitrariness on the
part of the king in the choosing of the Patriarch, or of encroachment on the
rights and freedom of choice [of the Hierarchs].’”[773]
Another of the emperor’s rights was that
of handing the Patriarch his staff. This should not be interpreted as if the
emperor himself bestowed the grace of the Patriarchy. Nor was it the same as
the ceremony of “lay investiture” in the West. The emperor did this, according
to Simeon of Thessalonica, “because he wishes to honour the Church, implying
also at the same time that he personally accepts the individual now consecrated
as his own pastor whom God has chosen for him.”[774]
“Simeon of Thessalonica explains that in
this act the king only witnesses to the fact of his agreement with the
installation of the new Patriarch, and after the bestowal of the staff he
witnesses to his spiritual submission… by the bowing of his head, his asking
for a blessing from the Patriarch and his kissing of his hand. By the grace and
action of the Hierarchy, the Patriarch does not differ from the Metropolitans
and Bishops. But in the dignity of his see, and in his care for all who are
under his authority, he is the father and head of all, consecrating
Metropolitans and Bishops, and judging them in conjunction with the Council,
while he himself is judged by a Great Council, says Simeon of Thessalonica. The
king was present at both the consecration and the enthronement of the Patriarch
in the altar…; but the consecration and enthronement were acts of a purely
ecclesiastical character, and the king’s participation in them was no longer as
active as in the first stages of the process, when he convened the Hierarchical
Council, chose one of the three elected by the Council and witnessed to his recognition
of him in the act of problhsiV [which gave the Patriarch his rights in Byzantine civil law]. In
the act of consecration [assuming that the candidate to the Patriarchy was not
already a bishop] Hierarchical grace was invoked upon the man to be consecrated
by the Metropolitan of Heraclea, while in the act of enthronement he was
strengthened by abundant grace to greater service for the benefit, now, of the
whole Church, and not of one Diocese [only].”[775]
These rights of the emperor in the Church were
paralleled by certain rights of the Church in the State, of which the most
important was the Patriarch’s right of intercessory complaint (Russian: pechalovaniye]
before the emperor. “In the interests of justice and the spiritual salvation of
the kings, the Patriarch was called to intercede for the persecuted and those
oppressed by the authorities, for the condemned and those in exile, with the
aim of easing their lot, and for the poor and those in need with the aim of
giving them material or moral support. This right of intercessory complaint,
which belonged by dint of the 75th canon of the Council of Carthage
to all Diocesan Bishops, was particularly linked with the Patriarch of
Constantinople by dint of his high position in the Byzantine State with the
king.”[776]
Also, State officials “were obliged to
help the Bishop in supporting Church discipline and punishing transgressors.
Sometimes the emperors obliged provincial officials to tell them about Church
disturbances which depended on the carelessness of the Bishop, but the emperors
gave the Bishops the right to keep an eye on officials, while the Bishops, in
carrying out this obligation imposed on them by the civil law, did not thereby
become State officials… In the Byzantine laws themselves the Church was
distinguished from the State as a special social organism, having a special
task distinct from that of the State; these laws recognised the Church as the
teacher of the faith and the establisher of Church canons, while the State
could only raise them to the status of State laws; Church administration and
Church courts were recognised as being bound up with the priestly rank.”[777]
“In reviewing Byzantine ideas on royal
power, we must recognise the fact that, in spite of the influence of pagan
traditions, in spite of Saracen Muslim influences leading to a confusion of
powers, in spite of the bad practices of arianising and iconoclast emperors, it
remained a dogma of Byzantine law to recognise the Church of Christ as a
special society, parallel to the State, standing separate and above the latter
by its aims and means, by dint of which the supreme head of the State was by no
means the head of the other, ecclesiastical union, and, if he entered into it
in the position of a special sacred rank, it was far from being the higher, but
was only equal to the deacon’s, being subject thereby to the canons which
established the Church as a Divine institution having its own legislation,
administration and court…”[778]
“The differences in nature between Church
and State indicated in Matt. 22.21 [“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and
to God what is God’s”] by no means presumes that the State was recognised by
the Saviour as being foreign to God and as not being obliged on its side and in
its own way to assist the realisation on earth of the aims of Christianity. It
is impossible to suppose that the Church, in directing mankind to union with
Christ, should recognise it as normal that the State should lead it to
Antichrist. God, as the supreme principle, cannot be removed from the State
either. After all, the State, according to the words of the Apostle Paul, is
called to serve people for the good by means of the forcible muzzling of evil,
through which the representatives of the State, too, are called servants of God
(Romans 13.2-6). The difference between the pagan and the Christian
State consists in the fact that the pagan State found its aim in itself, as
‘the society not knowing anything higher than itself’, in the words of
Aristotle, whereas the Orthodox Christian State recognises a higher aim set by
the Church over itself, and it finds its highest meaning and mission in
voluntarily and without compulsion serving this aim. Christianity does not
encroach upon the life of the State, it recognises its positive contribution in
the struggle with evil, and calls on it to carry through moral principles in
both its internal and its external political life. Christianity came into the
world to save the world, including its highest manifestation – the State, by
revealing to it its meaning and mission. Its legislature is not called on to
legalise natural relations, but to correct itself in accordance with the ideas
of a higher righteousness; the supreme power is exhorted to abandon the
deification of human arbitrariness and to convert itself to a special service
to the will of God; the representative of its power is not the possessor of all
the rights of human society, but the bearer of all the obligations of human
society in relation to the Church, that is, to the work of God on earth. In and
of itself the State does not give meaning to life, but receives it from
outside, from the Church; its political life itself requires higher principles
and aims coming from outside as its moving principle. The Christian outlook on
the world and man gives the State the basis to see in itself a weapon for the
attainment of the highest tasks of life. The Church comes out in relation to
the State as the star of the East.”[779]
“Christianity renews the State which has
corrupted its mission by moral principles, for the originally Divine origin of
power excludes neither abuses of power nor unlawful means of obtaining it. The
pagan Caesar even before Christianity possessed lawful power, but Christianity
regenerated the pagan elements of this institution. In royal anointing royal
power is not received from God, it is only sanctified and completed by special
gifts of grace so that in their actions the authorities may be a weapon of
Divine Providence. This act does not point to any rights of the secular authorities
over the spiritual Hierarchy, but obliges the king to be a devoted son of the
Church and a faithful minister of God’s work.
“There exist two independent spheres that
are distinct from each other: one in which relationships are developed in the
Church as a Divine institution directly established by God, and the other in
which civil relationships are developed.”[780]
“Jesus Christ abolished only the external
means by which the ideal of the Old Testament theocracy was realised, but not
the theocratic ideal itself. In the Church of Christ there is a purely
spiritual theocracy. Here the Holy Spirit invisibly admonishes through the
priests….”[781]
“In the close union of the Church and the State their immediate,
fundamental aims remain different. The State is first of all occupied with the
provision of the temporary prosperity of man, while the Church has in mind the
provision of means for inner pacification and blessedness, not only on earth
but also in heaven. But here there is also agreement in aims, for according to I
Timothy 2.2-3 a quiet and peaceful life, which the State is called to give,
is a means whereby we may live in piety and purity. The Church desires this
peaceful life so as to have the opportunity of better co-operating, under these
conditions, with the attainment of its aims. The Church does not remove the
earthly aims of the State, but directs them to her higher aims. In seeking the
city that is to come, she also reforms the city that passes, thereby also
strengthening civil prosperity; she leads into harmony law and morality, for
that which is just from a juridical point of view is not always morally good;
that which is just juridically speaking can be morally not good, while that
which is unjust from a juridical point of view can be turned into the morally
good. True Christians prefer the demands of morality. Besides this reworking of
law, the Church exerts a moral influence on law, transfiguring the forcible
demands of the law into a free habit, and elevating the moral level of humanity
by substituting the forcible demands of the law with the free demand for
righteousness.” [782]
As we have seen, the State is rooted in
the family, being in fact the family writ large, so that the head of the State,
the Emperor or King, is like the Father of all his citizens. This principle was
accepted in New Rome, and was particularly emphasised in the daughter of New
Rome, the Third Rome of Moscow, where the Tsar was affectionately known as the
“batyushka-tsar”, or “daddy-tsar”. However, if the Emperor is the father of his
people, the Patriarch is the father of the Emperor, and was so called in
Byzantium. We have seen how one of the most powerful of the Byzantine Emperors,
Theodosius the Great, embraced St. Meletius, president of the Second Ecumenical
Council, as his father. In Russia this spiritual relationship was even
exemplified in a physical form, when the first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail
Fyodorovich, ruled together with his natural father, Patriarch Philaret. This
did not prevent the Tsar being fully the master in the political sphere. But it
did emphasise that Christian politics, as represented by the Emperor or Tsar,
should ideally be conformed to – “begotten by”, as it were - the other-worldly spirit and aims of the
Christian faith, as represented by the Patriarch. For as the last Orthodox
Christian autocrat, King Boris III of Bulgaria, who was probably killed by the
Nazis in 1943, said: “Every true social order is based on the moral order” –
that is, the order ordained by God through the Church.[783]
*
So
much for the ideal: the practice, not surprisingly, often fell short, sometimes
far short, of the ideal. Some have claimed that this was the case only when the
emperors were outright heretics, as with the Arian emperors of the fourth century,
or the iconoclast emperors of the eighth century. However, as we have seen, absolutism or
“caesaropapism”, the attempt by the State to exert complete control over the
Church, - the flesh over the spirit, the son over the father, - was a recurrent
temptation of Byzantine history, and sometimes displayed itself most brazenly
when the emperors were formally Orthodox, as with the Angeli emperors before
the Fall of Constantinople in 1204.
The
internal absolutism of the emperor may be said to have cooperated with the
external absolutism of the Latins and the Turks to bring about the final Fall
of Constantinople in 1453, insofar as he more or less compelled the reluctant
hierarchs to sign the unia with Rome at the false council of Florence, thereby
sacrificing the Faith of the Church for the needs of the State. In this case,
the resistance of the People, led by a few anti-uniate clergy, saved the honour
of the Empire. But the Empire itself did not recover from the catastrophe; the
ideal continued to live in the hearts of the Greeks under the Turkish yoke, but
the incarnation of the ideal was entrusted by the King of kings to another
people.
The
situation was even worse in the West, where the fall of the last remaining
Orthodox autocracies in the eleventh century to the “papocaesarist” version of
the absolutist heresy, Papism, was not succeeded by the survival of the ideal
in the hearts of the people. Here not only the flesh, Christian Statehood,
died: the spirit, the Christian Faith and Church, was radically corrupted. So
in the West, in contrast to the East, there could be no transfer of the ideal
to another soil, no renovatio imperii…
Not
that there were no attempts to pretend that the old ideal was still alive and
well. The “Holy Roman Empire” of the Hohenstaufens (and later, of the
Hapsburgs) claimed to be the continuation and revival of the Roman and
Constantinian Empires. But where was the “symphony of powers” between the Roman
Church and Empire when one of the powers, the Church, was itself a State that
waged war – physical war – against the Empire?
Indeed, the continual wars between the Roman papacy and the “Holy Roman
Empire” in the later Middle Ages cannot be compared to the conflicts between
Church and State in Byzantium or Western Orthodox history for the simple reason
that they were not in fact wars between Church and State, but between State and
State. For ever since Pope Leo IX rode on horseback into battle against the
Normans in 1053, the very difference between Church and the State, between the
other-worldly spirit of Christian society and its this-worldly flesh, had been
obscured in the Western mind. Thus the sentence of the King of kings was
inevitable: “My Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh” (Genesis
6.3).
It is time to define more precisely the
religio-political heresy of absolutism, which, as we have seen, destroyed the
flesh of New Rome in the East, and both the flesh and the spirit of New Rome in
the West. L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “Absolutism… signifies a power that is not
created by anything, that depends on nothing except itself and that is
qualified by nothing except itself. As a tendency, absolutism can in fact
appear under any principle of power, but only through a misunderstanding or abuse.
But according to its spirit, its nature, absolutism is characteristic only of
democracy, for the will of the people, qualified by nothing but itself, creates
an absolute power, so that if the people merges with the State, the power of
the latter becomes absolute.”[784]
“Absolutism is characteristic of democracy”?! This is the height of
paradox to the modern Western (and Classical Greek) mind, for which absolutism
and democracy are polar opposites, and for which the ideal of Statehood (even
Christian Statehood) must consist in the complete extermination of absolutism
and the fullest possible installation of democracy. And yet the paradox is
true, for the absolutist ruler, be he emperor or king, pope or patriarch,
believes that all power on earth, in all matters, is given to him alone. In
pagan times, such a belief would be expressed in the idea that the ruler was
also a god. In Christian times, such open self-deification was no longer
expedient, so the phrase “vicar of God” or “deputy of God” was used instead. In
theory, such a title is compatible with a certain self-limitation, insofar as
the vicar or deputy of God is obliged to submit his will to the will of God;
and some rulers have succeeded in doing just that, becoming saints and
“equals-to-the-apostles” in the process. But if the ruler dispenses with an
independent priesthood, and is seen as the highest interpreter of the will of
God, the path is open to arbitrariness and tyranny on a vast scale, which is
precisely what we see in absolutist rulers throughout history, whether pagan or
Christian, religious, secular or atheist.
The arbitrariness and tyranny of the single unchecked will inevitably
elicits, sooner or later, the appearance of other wills determined to check or
completely subdue it. This, in its turn, is inevitably accompanied by a process
of debunking or desacralisation: since the authority of the absolutist ruler is
hedged around with an aura of divinity, the first task of the reformers or
revolutionaries is to strip away this aura, to reveal the ruler to be an
ordinary man. Then they will strive either to place one of themselves in the
place of the former ruler, endowing him with the same aura of divinity as he
had, or will put forward a general theory of the ordinariness of all men.
We
have seen how both courses were adopted in medieval western history: the first
in the struggle between the popes and the “Holy Roman Emperors” for absolute
power, and the second in the emergence of the doctrines of natural law,
conciliarism and democratism. The second course would appear to be radically
different from the first insofar as it abolishes the idea of sacred persons
altogether. But in fact it simply endows all men with the same absolutist
power, and hence sacredness, as was formerly attributed to pope or emperor.
Thus the old personal gods of pope or emperor make way for the new collective
god of the people: vox populi – vox Dei.
And so absolutism is characteristic of democracy insofar as the demos
is an absolute power, unchecked by any other power in heaven or on earth. In a
democracy the will of the people is the final arbiter: before it neither the
will of the (constitutional) monarch, nor the decrees of the Church, neither
the age-old traditions of men, nor the eternal and unchanging law of God, can
prevail. This arbiter is in the highest degree arbitrary: what is right in the
eyes of the people on one day, or in one election, will be wrong in the next.
But consistency is not required of the infallible people, just as it is not required
of infallible popes. For democracy is based on the Heraclitan principle that
everything changes, even the demos itself. As such, it does not have to
believe in, let alone justify itself on the basis of, any unchanging criteria
of truth or falsehood, right or wrong. Its will is truth, and if its
will changes, then the truth must change with it…
In
many ways the collective absolutism of democracy is a more absolute and
destructive absolutism than the personal absolutisms of popes and emperors. In
the period that we have studied in this book, although many absolutist rulers
appeared in both East and West, fundamental changes in society were slow to
appear (in the East they did not appear at all). Whatever absolutist rulers may
have thought or said about their own unfettered power, in practice they
conformed to tradition in most spheres. For they knew that the masses of the
people believed in a higher truth in defence of which they were prepared to die
– or at least, rise up in rebellion. Hence the failure of most absolutist
rulers to establish a firm tradition of absolutism: Julian the Apostate was
replaced by Jovian the Pious, Pope Nicolas I by Pope John VIII, Michael
Palaeologus by Andronicus II. Even the more enduring absolutism of the post-schism
popes was bitterly contested for centuries, and became weaker over time. But
the triumph of democracy in the modern period has been accompanied by the most
radical and ever-accelerating change: the demos that overthrew the
monarchy in the English revolution, even the demos that obtained
universal suffrage in the early twentieth century, would not recognise, and
most certainly not approve of, what the demos has created in
twenty-first-century England.
Democracy considers itself to be
at the opposite pole from absolutism, and justifies itself on the grounds that
its elaborate system of checks and balances, and the frequent opportunity to
remove the ruler at the ballot-box, preclude the possibility of absolutism.
However, the close kinship between democracy and absolutism reveals itself in
the persistent tendency of democracy, as Plato noted, to pave the way for absolutism. Thus the
democracy of the English Long Parliament paved the way for Cromwell; the
democracy of the French Estates General paved the way for Robespierre and
Napoleon; the democracy of the Russian Provisional Government paved the way for
Lenin and Stalin; and the democracy of the German Weimar Government paved the
way for Hitler.
Nor does the return of democracy mean a revulsion from all such
absolutisms. Thus a statute of Cromwell still stands outside the English Houses
of Parliament; Napoleon is still glorified in the modern French republic; and
Lenin’s body still graces Red Square in the modern Russian Federation. For
these dictators, for all their cruelty and absolutism, were nevertheless in
tune with, and carried out the will of, the iconoclastic spirit of democracy,
its exaltation of the will of man – any man – over the will of God.
*
The restoration of Romanity, whose central unifying element is the
Orthodox Christian autocracy, is the most pressing need of our time. Not only
the New Rome of Constantinople, but also the Third Rome of Russia, has been
destroyed; and, deprived of “him who restrains”, the world has been plunged
into a state of religious, moral, social and political anarchy on a scale
unseen in human history. To the fallen human mind there seems to be no hope, no
possibility that the apostasy can be checked, let alone reversed. But “love
hopeth all things” (I Corinthians 13.7), and in love and hope we have
attempted, in this little book, to present again that vision of Christian
Statehood without which the people will perish. It was at a similar moment of
blackness and despair that the Roman army in York raised on their shields the
Emperor Constantine, who proceeded to drive out the tyrant persecutors, and
exalt true Christian piety, throughout the civilised world. Let us pray that
Almighty God, for Whom all things are possible, will raise up a New Constantine
in our fallen land, that we may sing: “Ye faithful Christian kings, forechosen
by divine decree, rejoice. Receiving from God the Precious Cross, make this
victorious weapon your glory, for by it the tribes of the enemy that rashly
seek battle are scattered unto all ages…”[785]
[1] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 34 on I Corinthians. Thomas
Aquinas, in his concern to demonstrate the essential goodness of the state,
argued that the rudiments of the State already existed in the Garden, with Adam
ruling like a king over Eve. J.S. McClelland writes: “Thomas argues that there
must have been political life before the Fall. Some form of rulership must have
existed in the garden of Eden. Thomas accepts Aristotle’s opinion that men are
naturally superior to women, so he infers that God must have wanted Eve to be
guided by Adam; only then would life in the garden have been complete” (A
History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996,
p. 116).
[2] Metropolitan Anastasius, Besedy s sobstvennym serdtsem, Jordanville, 1998, p. 159 (in Russian).
[3] Hieromonk Dionysius, Priest Timothy Alferov, O Tserkvi, Pravoslavnom Tsarstve i Poslednem Vremeni, Moscow: “Russkaya Ideya”, 1998, p. 15 (in Russian).
[4] Metropolitan
Philaret, Sochineniya, 1848 edition, volume 2, p. 169 (in Russian). Cf.
Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov writes: “In blessed Russia, in accordance with the
spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the fatherland constitute one whole,
just as in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole.” (Sobranie
Pisem, Moscow, 2000, p. 781).
[5] Troitsky, Khristianskaia philosophia braka, Paris: YMCA Press, p. 178 (in Russian). This intuition is expressed in the ancient Russian custom of calling bridegroom and bride “prince” and “princess”, and in the ancient Roman custom of calling married couples - only married couples – “dominus” and “domina” (Troitsky, op. cit., p. 174), which is reflected in the modern Greek “kyrios” and “kyria” and in the modern English “mister (master)” and “mistress”.
[6] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Lev Regelson, Tragediya Russkoj Tservki, 1917-1945, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 24-25 (in Russian).
[7] What was this city? David Rohl (Legend: The Genesis of Civilization, London: Random House, 1998, pp. 198-200) suggests three alternatives from three neighbouring Mesopotamian cities: 1. Erech, known as Uruk, Unuk or Unug in Sumerian. The latter may be the same name as Enoch, Cain’s son, after whom the city was named according to the usual reading of Genesis 4.17. A later ruler of Erech-Uruk-Enoch was Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. 2. Eridu, which may be the same name as Jared, Cain’s grandson, after whom the city was named according to another reading of Genesis 4.17. 3. Ur, whose original name may have been Uru-Unuki or ‘City of Enoch’. This was, of course, the “Ur of the Chaldees” that Abraham was ordered to leave.
[8] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 24; quoted in Fr. Michael Azkoul, Once Delivered to the Saints, Seattle: Saint Nectarios Press, 2000, p. 219.
[9] St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.
[10] St. Gregory, Morals on the Book of Job, XXI, 15, 22, 23; cf. Azkoul, op. cit., p. 221.
[11] St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 15.
[12] Bishop Barnabas, Pravoslavie, Kolomna: New Golutvin monastery, 1995, pp. 128, 129 (in Russian).
[13] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 3.
[14] Boshchansky, “Zhizn’ vo Khriste”, in Tserkovnaya Zhizn’, NN 3-4, May-August, 1998, p. 41 (in Russian).
[15] Morris, The Genesis Record, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1976, p. 224.
[16] E. Kholmogorov, “O Khristianskom tsarstve i ‘voorushennom narode’”, Tserkovnost’, N 1, 2000, pp. 35-38 (in Russian).
[17] Solovyov, “Tri Sily”, republished in Novij Mir, N 1, 1989, pp. 198-199 (in Russian)..
[18] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaya Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg: “Komplekt”, 1992, pp. 76-77 (in Russian).
[19] “Tiger Shark”, Channel 4 TV programme, February 28, 1999.
[20] Smart, N. The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971, p. 299.
[21] Shafarevich, I.R. Sotzializm kak yavleniye mirovoj istorii, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977 (in Russian); Smart, op. cit., p. 299.
[22] Morris, op. cit., p. 252.
[23] Smart, op. cit., p. 298.
[24] "Taina Apokalipticheskogo Vavilona", Pravoslavnaya Zhizn’ , 47, no. 5 (545), May, 1995, pp. 14-16 (in Russian).
[25] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 4. Recently, Rohl (op. cit., p. 216) has argued that Nimrod is to be identified with the Sumerian Enmerkar, whose name means “Enmeru the hunter”. “Look at what we have here. Nimrod was closely associated with Erech – the biblical name for Uruk – where Enmerkar ruled. Enmerkar built a great sacred precinct at Uruk and constructed a temple at Eridu – that much we know from the epic poem ‘Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta’. The Sumerian King List adds that Enmerkar was ‘the one who built Uruk’. Nimrod was also a great builder, constructing the cities of Uruk, Akkad and Babel. Both Nimrod and Enmerkar were renowned for their huntsmanship. Nimrod, as the grandson of Ham, belongs to the second ‘generation’ after the flood (Noah-Ham-Flood-Cush-Nimrod) and this is also true of Enmerkar who is recorded in the Sumerian King List as the second ruler of Uruk after the flood (Ubartutu-(Utnapishtim)-Flood-Meskiagkasher-Enmerkar). Both ruled over their empires in the land of Shinar/Sumer.”
[26] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 78.
[27] "Taina", op. cit. Grant Jeffrey writes: “[In the nineteenth century] the French government sent Professor Oppert to report on the cuneiform inscriptions discovered in the ruins of Babylon. Oppert translated a long inscription by King Nebuchadnezzar in which the king referred to the tower in the Chaldean language as Borzippa, which means Tongue-tower. The Greeks used the word Borsippa, with the same meaning of tongue-tower, to describe the ruins of the Tower of Babel. This inscription of Nebuchadnezar clearly identified the original tower of Borsippa with the Tower of Babel described by Moses in Genesis. King Nebuchadnezzar decided to rebuild the base of the ancient Tower of Babel, built over sixteen centuries earlier by Nimrod, the first King of Babylon. He also called it the Temple fo the Spheres. During the millenium since God destroyed it, the tower was reduced from its original height and magnificence until only the huge base of the tower (four hundred and sixty feet by six hundred and ninety feet) standing some two hundred and seventy-five feet high remained within the outskirts of the city of Babylon. Today the ruins have been reduced to about one hundred and fifty feet above the plain with a circumference of 2,300 feet. Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt the city of Babylon in great magnificence with gold and silver, and then decided to rebuild the lowest platform of the Tower of Babel in honor of the Chaldean gods. King Nebuchadnezzar resurfaced the base of the Tower of Babel with gold, silver, cedar, and fir, at great cost on top of a hard surface of baked clay bricks. These bricks were engraved with the seal of Nebuchadnezzar… In this inscription found on the base of the ruins of the Tower of Babel, King Nebuchadnezzar speaks in his own words from thousands of years ago confirming one of the most interesting events of the ancient past....:‘The tower, the eternal house, which I founded and built. I have completed its magnificence with silver, gold, other metals, stone, enamelled bricks, fir and pine. The first which is the house of the earth’s base, the most ancient monument of Babylon; I built it. I have highly exalted its head with bricks covered with copper. We say for the other, that is, this edifice, the house of the seven lights of the earth, the most ancient monument of Borsippa. A former king built it, (they reckon 42 ages) but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words…’” (The Signature of God, Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale Publishers, pp. 40-41)
[28] I. Shafarevich, "Sotzializm", in A. Solzhenitsyn (ed.), Iz-Pod Glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, 1974, pp. 36-37 (in Russian).
[29] Graham Phillips has recently claimed to have discovered traces of it in Egyptian archaeology. According to his theory, the Pharaoh of Moses’ time was Smenkhkare, whose tomb was plundered and desecrated by his brother and successor, the famous Tutankhamun, in punishment for his failure to avert the catastrophe of the ten plagues of Egypt (Act of God, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1998).
[30] Quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, II, 1.
[31] Thus a typical letter to a pharaoh began: “To my king, my lord, my sun-god” (Bernhard W. Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament, London: Longman, 1967, p. 45, note).
[32] Phillips, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
[33] John Bright, A History of Israel, London: SCM Press, 1980, p. 39.
[34] Bright, op. cit., pp. 39, 40.
[35] Barbara Watterson, Ancient Egypt, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Company, 1998, pp. 18-19.
[36] David P. Silverman, Ancient Egypt, London: Piatkus, 1998, pp. 18-19.
[37] David P. Silverman, Ancient Egypt, London: Piatkus, 1997, p. 111.
[38] Thus Rohl writes (op. cit., p. 398): “Eridu’s great [water] god, Enki, had a first-born son called Asar-luki who was the local god of agricultural fertility. The Babylonians adopted him as their supreme national deity in the guise of Marduk son of Ea. To the Assyrians he was the eponymous ancestor-god of their capital city, Ashur. If Asur-luki of the Sumerians can be equated with the Assyrian god Ashur, then the Bible identifies him as Ashur, son of Shem and grandson of Noah who, according to Jewish tradition, was the eponymous founder of the Assyrian empire. However, he may also have an Egyptian identity. We know the great pharaonic god of agricultural fertility as Osiris after his Greek name, whereas the Egyptians simply knew him as Asur.”
[39] Rohl, op. cit., pp. 415-416.
[40] Rohl, op. cit., p. 156.
[41] Rohl, op. cit., pp. 398-399.
[42] Alexeyev, N.N. "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhia", Put', no. 6, January, 1927, p. 660 (in Russian).
[43] John Bright, op. cit., pp. 353, 360.
[44] Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1995, 1998, pp. 40-41.
[45] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 33, 34.
[46] Quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw: Synodal Typography, 1931, part II, p. 36 (in Russian).
[47] Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Zapiski na Knigi Bytiya, Moscow, 1867, p. 78 (in Russian).
[48] Melchisedek’s combining the roles of king and priest may also signify the Divine origin of both offices. See Protopriest Valentine Asmus, "O monarkhii i nashem k nej otnoshenii", Radonezh, N 2 (46), January, 1997, p. 4 (in Russian).
[49] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaya Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 126 (in Russian).
[50] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 17.
[51] Metropolitan Philaret, Iz Slova v den’ koronatsia Imperatora Aleksandra Pavlovicha. Sbornik propovednicheskikh obraztsov. Quoted in “O meste i znachenii tainstva pomazania na tsarstvo”, Svecha Pokayania (Tsaritsyn), N 4, February, 2000, p. 15 (in Russian).
[52] Johnson, op. cit., p. 57.
[53] Bright, op. cit., pp. 200-201.
[54] St. Jerome, Letter to Pope Damasus, quoted in Johanna Manley (ed.), The Bible and the Holy Fathers, Menlo Park, Ca.: Monastery Books, 1990, p. 412.
[55] St. Cyril, P.G. 70, 516B.
[56] A.A.Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952, p. 152.
[57] Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 139.
[58] Grant, The Classical Greeks, London: Phoenix, 1989, p. 130.
[59] “The Greeks did understand that one of the ways of getting round the problem of the vulnerability of a constitution on account of its age and its political bias was to pretend that it was very ancient indeed. That meant mystifying the origins of a constitution to the point where it had no origins at all. The way to do that was to make the constitution immortal by the simple expedient of making it the product of an immortal mind, and the only immortal minds were possessed by gods, or, as second-best, by supremely god-like men” (McClelland, op. cit., p. 11).
[61] Herodotus, History, London: Penguin Books, III, 80.
[62] Herodotus, History, III, 81, 82.
[63] Roberts, op. cit., p. 157.
[64] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 37. London: Penguin books, V, 89, 91-97.
[65] Thucydides, op. cit., V, 105.
[66] Socrates himself was probably not a democrat in the conventional sense. See Melissa Lane, “Was Socrates a Democrat?”, History Today, vol. 52 (01), January, 2002, pp. 42-47.
[67] Plato, The Republic, 488.
[68] Plato, The Republic, 557.
[69] Plato, The Republic, London: Penguin books, 1974, p. 282.
[70] Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press, 1987, pp. 29-31
[71] “The true Philosopher-Ruler,” writes McClelland, “is a reluctant ruler. His heart is set on the Good, and he accepts the burdens of rulership because the Good can only survive and prosper in a city which is ruled by just men. Rule by guardians is an attempt to universalise justice in so far as that is possible…” (McClelland, op. cit., p. 36).
[72] Plato, The Republic, 473.
[73] Thus he wrote in The Laws (691): “if one ignores the law of proportion and gives too great power to anything, too large a sail to a vessel, too much food to the body, too much authority to the mind, everything is shipwrecked. The excess breaks out in the one case in disease, and in the other in injustice, the child of pride. I mean to say, my dear friends, that no human soul, in its youth and irresponsibility, will be able to sustain the temptation of arbitrary power – there is no one who will not, under such circumstances, become filled with folly, that worst of diseases, and be hated by his nearest and dearest friends.”
[74] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen
Unwin, 1946, pp. 127-128. Metropolitan Anastasius (op. cit., p. 40)
writes: “Society is always more willing to run after the fanatic or decisive
opportunist than after a great-souled dreamer who is unable to convert words
into deeds. The philosophers to whom Plato wished to entrust the rule of his
ideal state would more likely be very pitiful in this situation and would
inexorably lead the ship of state to shipwreck. Political power that is firm,
but at the same time enlightened, rational and conscious of its responsibility,
must be the object of desire of every country, but such happiness rarely falls
to the lot of peoples and states.”
[75] McClelland, op. cit., p. 39.
[76] McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.
[77] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, volume I, part II, p. 96.
[78] Aristotle, Politics, London: Penguin books, 1981, p. 362.
[79] Copleston, op. cit.., p. 97.
[80] Copleston, op. cit.., pp. 98-99
[81] Plato, The Republic, 544.
[82] McClelland, op. cit., p. 84. Again, we find this characteristically Greek connection between good government and good character drawn by the French historian and Prime Minister, François Guizot, who wrote in his History of France (1822): “Instead of looking to the system or forms of government in order to understand the state of the people, it is the state of the people that must be examined first in order to know what must have been, what could have been its government… Society, its composition, the manner of life of individuals according to their social position, the relations of the different classes, the condition [l’état] of persons especially – that is the first question which demands attention from… the inquirer who seeks to understand how a people are governed.” (quoted in Sidentop’s introduction to Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997).
[83] McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.
[84] McClelland, op. cit., p. 117.
[85] Aristotle, Politics, I, 2 1253a25; quoted in Azkoul, op. cit., p. 225.
[86] Quoted by M.V. Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 7. Other ancient writers said the same. Thus Lactantius in his work De Ira Dei: “Only the fear of God keeps men together in society… With the removal of religion and justice we descend to the level of mute cattle deprived of reason, or to the savagery of wild beasts.”
[87] Bowden, “Greek Oracles and Greek Democracy”, The Historian, N 41, Spring, 1994, pp. 3,4,7,8.
[88] Held, op. cit., p. 21.
[89] Copleston, op. cit., p. 143.
[90] Johnson, op. cit, p. 101.
[91] E.E. Rice, Alexander the Great, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997, pp. 63-65. At the same time, it must be remembered that Classical Greek religion’s confusion of gods and men implicitly raised the possibility of men becoming godlike.
[92] Roberts, op. cit., p. 173.
[93] Roberts, op. cit., p. 175.
[94] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 76-77.
[95] McClelland, op. cit., p. 82.
[96] Liberman, “Hanukkah”, Orthodox Christian Witness, vol. XXXIII, N 10 (1483), January 17/30, 2000, p. 5.
[97] Johnson, op. cit., p. 102.
[98] Liberman, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
[99] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 107-109.
[100] Paryaev, “Tsar Irod i ego Coobshchiki: Istoriya i Sovremennost’”, Suzdal’skiye Eparkhial’niye Vedomosti, N 3, January-February, 1998, pp. 31-32 (in Russian).
[101] He was “the son of Antipater who founded the Idumean dynasty. King Herod ruled over Galilee and Judaea from 40 BC until the Birth of Christ. He divided his kingdom among his sons Archelaus (Matthew 2.22). Herod Antipas, and Philip. Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea and is the Herod who slew John the Baptist (Matthew 14.1-12). In the Acts of the Apostles there mention of later members of this Idumean dynasty: Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12) and Herod Agrippa II (Acts 25 and 26)” (The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, House Springs, MO.: Chrysostom Press, 1992, p. 23, note).
[102] Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of Argentina recounts a tradition from the Midrash “that when the members of the Sanhedrin learned that they had been deprived of the right to try criminal cases (in AD 30), they put on sackcloth and, tearing their hair, gathered and began to cry out: ‘Woe to us, woe to: it has been a great while since we had a king from Judah, and the promised Messiah is not yet come!’ This occurred at the very beginning of Jesus Christ’s ministry” (“On the Threshold”, Orthodox America, vol. XVIII, no. 5 (161), January, 2000, p. 12).
[103] Bishop Alexander (ibid.) writes: “Daniel’s prophecy so explicitly and synonymously points to Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah, that the Gemaric rabbi forbids his compatriots to calculate the dates of the Daniel septenaries, saying, ‘Those who calculate the times will hear their bones rattle’ (Sanhedrin 97).”
[104] Johnson, op. cit., p. 112.
[105] Paryaev, op. cit., p. 33.
[106] Paryaev, op. cit., p. 34.
[107] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in S. Fomin & T. Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Moscow, 1994, vol. I, pp. 320-321 (in Russian).
[108] Alferov & Alferov, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
[109] The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 1997, p. 136. See also Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), "Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution", Orthodox Life, vol. 35, no. 4, July-August, 1988, pp. 11-31.
[110] St. Chrysostom, Homily 85 on John, P.G. 59:505, col. 461.
[111] Aristotle, Politics, 1252 b 28.
[112] Origen, Contra Celsum II, 30.
[113] Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 67.
[114] St. Gregory, Oratio IV, P.G. 47, col. 564B.
[115] Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans; in Jenkyns, op. cit., pp. 72-74.
[116] St. Leo, Sermon 32, P.L. 54, col. 423.
[117] Festal Menaion, Great Vespers for the Nativity of Christ, "Lord, I have cried", Glory... Both now...
[118] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke, Homily 12, New York: Studion Publishers, 1983, p. 89.
[119] Glazkov, “Zashchita ot liberalizma”, Pravoslavnaya Rus’, N 15 (1636), August 1/14, 1999, p. 10 ®.
[120] Florovsky, “Antionomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 68- 69.
[121] Bishop Nikolai, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, September 30, pp. 395-396.
[122] Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), "Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution", Orthodox Life, vol. 35, no. 4, July-August, 1988, pp. 11-31.
[123] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, July 22, p. 94.
[124] Professor Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, chapter 1.
[125] The Works of St. Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome in Russian translation, vol. 1, p. 101. Quoted in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T. Rossiya pered Vtorym Prishestviyem, Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 56 (in Russian).
[126] St. Basil, The Morals, Rule 79 (Cap. 1).
[127] Blessed Theodoret, P.G. 66, col. 864, commenting on Romans 13.5; in Dagron, op. cit., pp. 308-309.
[128] St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.
[129] Quoted in Richard Betts and Vyacheslav Marchenko, Dukhovnik Tsarskoj Sem’i: Svyatitel’ Feofan Poltavskij, Ìîscow: Balaam Society of America, 1994, p. 213.
[130] Some saw in I Peter 5.13 a similar identification of Rome with Babylon, but this is doubtful. The identification of pagan Rome with Babylon does not preclude other, more eschatological interpretations of the whore. However, there can be no doubt that for John’s first readers the image of Babylon would have reminded them in the first place of Rome under Nero and Domitian.
[131] Hieromartyr Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse.
[132] St. Athanasius, Contra Gentes, 9. Cf. Arnobius (The Case against the Pagans, I, 37): “We worship one born a man. What of that? Do you worship no one born a man? Do you not worship one or another, yes, countless others? Indeed, have you not elevated from the level of mortals all those you now have in your temples and made a gift of them to heaven and the stars?”
[133] M.V. Zyzykin
writes: “In the beginning the priestly functions, being a constituent part of
the imperium, had been carried out by State officials and only later
were transferred to the particular duty of the priests…
“[Religion]
without the State did not have that independent life and task, distinguishing
it from the task of the State, that the Christian religion has. Its task was to
guard the material interests of the State. Each god was in charge of some
aspect of earthly life and State life; prayers to the gods included only
requests for material good things; each god was besought in accordance with his
speciality, but the Roman gods did not touch the moral side of life...
“Not one
single god was concerned with questions of morality. None of the gods inspired
or laid down moral rules. Care for the morality of the people lay on the family
and the State; philosophical morality also appeared without the gods… It worked
out that it was not the gods who ruled the will of the Romans, but the Romans –
the will of the gods…
“The priesthood among the Romans was not a special form of service established from on high. Among the Romans the right and duty to carry out sacrifices was indissolubly bound up with the imperium. In private life the priest was a representative of authority – the head of the family, of the tribe, of the college, of the brotherhood. In State life the natural priest was the head of the State… [Thus] the highest official of the State was the guardian of religion, and not only of State order…” (Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, pt. I, pp. 37, 38, 42, 43) (V.M.)
[134] J.M. Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 203.
[135] Roberts, op. cit., p. 203.
[136] Dio Cassius, LI, 20, 6-8; translated by S. Ireland, Roman Britain: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 175.
[137] McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, pp. 84, 85.
[138] See Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Éditions Gallimard, 1996, pp. 142-143. Philip and his son and heir, also called Philip, were baptised by Hieromartyr Fabian, Pope of Rome. See Velimirovich, op. cit., vol. 3, July 1, p. 5, August 5, pp. 157-158).
[139] Sordi, op. cit., p. 117. The change in relationship between the Church and the Empire was indicated by the fact that in 270 the Christians of Antioch appealed to the Emperor Aurelian to remove the heretical bishop Paul of Samosata.
[140] Fr. Michael Azkoul, The Teachings of the Orthodox Church, Buena Vista, Co.: Dormition Skete publications, 1986, part I, p. 110.
[141] Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.
[142] Quoted in Sordi, op. cit., p. 169.
[143] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 189, 198.
[144] Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, 5.2.
[145] Charles Davis, op. cit., p. 68.
[146] Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1996, p. 128.
[147] Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.
[148] Sordi, op. cit., p. 148.
[149] Sordi, op. cit., p. 148.
[150] Kholmogorov, “Vybor Imperii”, Epokha, ¹ 11, 2001, pp. 15-16
[151] The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 93.
[152] Tertullian, Apologeticum
33.1.
[153] Sordi, op. cit., pp. 172-73.
[154] Sordi, op. cit., p. 173.
[155] For he could
have been accused of preparing the fall of Rome, aeterna et invicta,
which would have given them an excuse for persecuting the Christians on the
same basis as they persecuted the Jews – as political revolutionaries. (V.M.). Ñf. Patriarch Nicon of Moscow: «It is necessary to investigate: who is he who restrains, and why does
Paul speak about him unclearly? What hinders his appearance? Some say – the grace of the Holy Spirit, others – Roman power. I agree
with the latter. For if Paul had meant the Holy Spirit, then he would have said
so clearly. But he [the antichrist] was bound to come when the gifts of the
Holy Spirit should become scarce, they have already become scarce a long time
ago. Butif he is speaking of Roman power, then he had a reason for concealment,
for he did not want to draw from the Empire persecution on the Christians as if
they were people living and working for the destruction of the Empire. That is why he does not speak so clearly, although he definitely
indicates that he will be revealed at the fitting time. For ‘the mystery of
iniquity is already at work’, he says. By this he understands Nero, as an image
of the antichrist, for he wanted people to worship him as god. … When he who restrains now will be taken away, that is, when Roman
power will be destroyed, he will come, that is, as long as there is fear of
this power nobody will introduce anarchy and will want to seize for himself all
power, both human and Divine. For, just as earlier the Median power was destroyed by the Babylonian, and the Babylonian by the Persian, and the Persian by the
Macedonian, and the Macedonian by the Roman, so this last will be destroyed by
the antichrist, and he by Christ...» (quoted by
Zyzykin, op. cit., part 2, pp. 48-49).
[156] St. Chrysostom, Homily 4 on II Thessalonians, quoted in The Orthodox New Testament, Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1999, vol. 2, p. 343.
[157] Archbishop Averky, Rukovodstvo k izucheniyu svyaschennykh pisanij Novago Zaveta, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, vol. II, 1956, pp. 307-308 (in Russian).
[158] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, vol. II, pp. 171-173 (in Russian).
[159] Florovsky, op. cit., pp. 69-72.
[160] Oration in Honour of Constantine.
[161] Deyania Vselenskikh
Soborov, vol. IV, part. 2, Êàzan, 1908, p. 54 (in
Russian).
[162] Quoted in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 155.
[163] St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 1994, volume I: September 16, pp. 266-267.
[164] Lactantius, Divine Institutions; quoted in Robert Garland, “Countdown to the Beginning of Time-Keeping”, History Today, vol. 49 (4), April, 1999, p. 42.
[165] Florovsky,
“Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture,
Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 72, 74.
[166] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Regelson, Tragediya Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, p. 23 (in Russian).
[167] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, I, 28; quoted in John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 39.
[168] Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 43.
[169] Florovsky writes: “It seems that one of the reasons for which he was delaying his own baptism, till his very last days, was precisely his dim feeling that it was inconvenient to be ‘Christian’ and ‘Caesar’ at the same time. Constantine’s personal conversion constituted no problem. But as Emperor he was committed. He had to carry the burden of his exalted position in the Empire. He was still a ‘Divine Caesar’. As Emperor, he was heavily involved in the traditions of the Empire, as much as he actually endeavoured to disentangle himself. The transfer of the Imperial residence to a new City, away from the memories of the old pagan Rome, was a spectacular symbol of this noble effort” (op. cit., p. 73).
[170] Menaion, May 21, Mattins for the feast of St. Constantine, sedalen.
[171] Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo, Moscow, 1997, p. 27 (in Russian).
[172] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
[173] Quoted in Charles Freeman, “The Emperor’s State of Grace”, History Today, vol. 51 (1), January, 2001, p. 11.
[174] Barnes, op. cit, pp. 212-213. Peter Salway writes: “What must have really shocked traditional Romans was Constantine’s transfer to the Church of certain powers that had always been the prerogative of Roman magistrates. Even Constantine’s own praetorian prefect, himself a Christian, was not sure that he had understood the emperor correctly when Constantine decided that either party in a legal action could have the case transferred out of the ordinary courts to the local bishop – and that, if necessary, the secular authorities were required to enforce the judgement. This extraordinary ecclesiastical privilege did not, admittedly, last, but it sheds an interesting light on how revolutionary Constantine was prepared to be” (A History of Roman Britain, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 249-250).
[175] Khrapovitsky, “The First Ecumenical Council”, Orthodox Life, vol. 34, no. 6, November-December, 1984, p. 9.
[176] Àrchbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 71.
[177] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, II, 28.
[178] A. Tuskarev (Hieromonk Dionysius (Alferov)), Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve, Staritsa, 1992, p. 75 (in Russian).
[179] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, I, 44; IV, 24.
[180] Quoted in J. Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 36, and K.M. Setton, The Christian Attitude towards the Emperor in the fourth century, Columbia University Press, pp. 78-79. In his History of the Arians (77) Athanasius also calls him “’the abomination of desolation’ spoken by Daniel”.
[181] St. Athanasius, History of the Arians, 52; P.G. 25, 756C.
[182] Quoted (with some small changes) from F.W. Farrar, The Lives of the Fathers, Edinburgh:
Adam and Charles Black, 1889, vol. I, p. 617.
[183] St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, April 17; S.V. Bulgakov, Nastol’naya Kniga dlya svyaschenno-tserkovno-sluzhitelej, Kharkov, 1900, p. 140 (in Russian).
[184] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, III, 19; V.A Konovalov, The Relationship of Christianity to Soviet power, Montreal, 1936, p. 35 (in Russian).
[185] St. Gregory, First and Second Words against Julian.
[186] St. Gregory, First Word against Julian, 35; Second Word against Julian, 26.
[187] Ñf. St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, October 20. Another soldier martyred by Julian, St. Eusignius of Antioch, rebuked him citing the shining example of St. Constantine. Lives of the Saints, op. cit., August 5.
[188] Paul Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines: the rhythm of imperial renewal in Byzantium, 4th-13th centuries, Aldershot: Variorum, 1994, pp. 2, 3.
[189] Magdalino, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
[190] Quoted in Marjorie Strachey, Saints and Sinners of the fourth century, London: William Kimber, 1958, p. 78). St. Ambrose of Milan and the fifth-century Church historians Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Rufinus all confirm St. Gregory’s story
[191] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Éditions Gallimard, 1996, p. 167
(in French).
[192] St. Basil, Rule 79.
[193] St. Gregory, Sermon 17.
[194] St. Chrysostom, On the Priesthood.
[195] St. Chrysostom, quoted in Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 68.
[196] Apostolic Constitutions, XI, 34.
[197] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, V, 7, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume III, Oxford and New York, 1892, p. 135.
[198] Norwich, op. cit., pp. 112-113.
[199] St. Ambrose, Letter 40, quoted in Sergius Fomin and Tamara Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 69 (in Russian).
[200] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 164.
[201] Quoted in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1997, p. 156.
[202] St. Ambrose, Epistles, xxix, 18; quoted in Norwich, op. cit., p. 101.
[203] St. Chrysostom, Sixth Sermon on the
Statues. Ñf. St. Ephraim the Syrian: «From the Empire
– laws, from the priesthood – absolution. When both are soft, it is not good,
and when both are cruel it is hard. Let the first be strict while the second is
merciful, in the mutual understanding of each other’s task. Let threats and
love be mixed! Let our priests be merciful, and our emperors severe! Let us
praise Him Who gave us this double hope!» (A. Muraviev, “Uchenie o
Khristianskom Tsarstve u prep. Efrema Sirina», Regnum Aeternum, Ìîscow: “Nash Dom”, 1996, p.
74; quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 65.) St. Ephraim
also wrote about rulers: «For he (the leader) is the servant of God, since
through him is accomplished the will of God on the righteous and the lawless» (Interpretaion
of the Epistle to the Romans).
[204] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, V, 17, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, op. cit., pp. 143-144.
[205] Aristotle, Politics, IV, 10.
[206] Quoted in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., pp. 66, 102. The difference between king and tyrant is also implicit in the Church services. Thus: “Caught and held fast by love for the King of all, the Children despised the impious threats of the tyrant in his boundless fury” (The Nativity of Christ, Mattins, Canon, Canticle Seven, second irmos). Again the implication that the pious worshippers of the true King will reject the threats of tyrants.
[207] St. Isidore, Letter 6 to Dionysius.
[208] Benveniste, Slovar’ indoevropejskikh sotsial’nikh terminov, Moscow: “Univers”, 1995, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 48, 49 (in Russian).
[209] Îstrogorsky, «Îtnoshenie Tserkvi i gosudarstva v Vizantii»; quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 103-104. At the same time, there were significant differences in emphasis between East and West from as early as the fifth century. See below.
[210] Barnes, op. cit., p. 254.
[211] St. Cyril, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 72.
[212] Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.
[213] Eusebius;
quoted in Fomin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 56.
[214] Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.
[215] Ê.V. Glazkov, «Zaschita ot liberalizma», Pravoslavnaya Rus’, ¹ 15 (1636), 1/14 August, 1999, pp. 10, 11 (in Russian); Sacred Monarchy and the Modern Secular State, Montreal, 1984, p. 4; St. Gregory, Oration 3, 2. The exact words of St. Gregory are: “The three most ancient opinions about God are atheism (or anarchy), polytheism (or polyarchy), and monotheism (or monarchy). The children of Greece played with the first two; let us leave them to their games. For anarchy is disorder: and polyarchy implies factious division, and therefore anarchy and disorder. Both these lead in the same direction – to disorder; and disorder leads to disintegration; for disorder is the prelude to disintegration. What we honour is monarchy…” (Sermon 29, 2).
[216] St. Theodore, in The Philokalia, volume IV, p. 93; quoted in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaya Ideologia, St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 46-47.
[217] Dagron, op. cit., p. 70.
[218] Ì.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, vol. I, pp. 69-70. However, Theodosius II, contrary to his instructions to others, interfered heavily and to the detriment of the truth, in the “robber council” of Ephesus in 449. Later examples of emperors who occupied a scrupulously neutral approach with regard to the debates of the bishops include Constantine IV at the time of the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-681 and Basil I during the “Photian” and “anti-Photian” councils of 869-870 and 879-880 (Dagron, op. cit., p. 305).
[219] The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Eerdmans edition, pp. 488, 489,
[220] Holy Transfiguration Monastery, “The Seat of Moses”, quoted in The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, Boston, 1982, p. 65.
[221] St. Isidore, Tvorenia, Moscow, 1860, vol. 3, pp. 400, 410; quoted in Alferov and Alferov, op. cit., p. 59.
[222] St. Isidore, quoted in Zyzykin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 244.
[223] The speech of the Emperor Marcian at this Council recalled the very similar words of St. Constantine at the First Council: “When by the decree of God we were elected to the kingdom, then amidst the very many needs of the State, there was no matter that occupied us more than that the true and Orthodox faith, which is holy and pure, should remain in the souls of all without doubts” (quoted in Sobolev, op. cit., p. 71).
[224] J. Ìåyendorff, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, p. 11.
[225] Again, Pope Leo I wrote to Emperor Leo I: “You must always remember
that royal power has been given to you not only to rule the world, but also and
in particular to rule the Church.” (Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume
I, p. 73). Of course, this “rule” over the Church was not to be understood
literally, but rather in the sense of powerful help, and when the emperor fell
into heresy, the popes reverted to a more assertive posture, as we shall see in
the next chapter.
[226] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 314-315.
[227] Quoted in Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 214.
[228] A. Gerostergios, Justinian
the Great: the Emperor and Saint, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine
and Modern Greek Studies, 1982, p. 82.
[229] Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 291.
[230] L.A. Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaya Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg: “Komplekt”, 1992, p. 162 (in Russian).
[231] Dagron, op. cit., p. 313.
[232] Êàrtashev, Vossozdanie Svyatoj Rusi, Ìoscow, 1991, p. 83.
[233] I.N. Andrushkevich, "Doktrina sv. Imperatora Yustiniana Velikago", Pravoslavnaya Rus', N 4 (1529), February 15/28, 1995, pp. 4-12 (in Russian).
[234] Canon 12, Fourth Ecumenical Council; Canons 11 and 12 of Antioch;
Canon 3 of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
[235] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 17.
[236] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 32. For example, in episcopal elections there was a contradiction between Justinian’s laws, according to which the electoral body was to include the leading laymen of the locality – an enactment which gave an avenue for imperial influence on the elections through the local potentates, - and the laws of the Church, according to which only bishops were to take part in the election. In practice, the Church’s laws prevailed in this sphere, but Justinian’s laws remained in force. See Bishop Pierre L’Huillier, “Episcopal Elections in the Byzantine East: a few comments”, Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 1, Spring, 1968, pp. 4-7, and The Church of the Ancient Councils, Crestwood, NY; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, pp. 36-38, 40, 41.
[237] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 32-33, 34.
[238] Medvedev, in S. Fomin & T. Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 138-139.
[239] However, there was no attempt to force Greek (or Latin) upon the non-Greek parts of Christendom. Thus in the East Syriac and Coptic were still spoken by millions, and some of the Fathers of the Church, such as St. Ephraim the Syrian, spoke no Greek at all. (V.M.)
[240] Metallinos, Fr. G. "Apo ti Romaiki oikoumenikotita stov Ethnistiko Patriotismo", Exodus, Athens, 1991, p. 38 (in Greek). This international quality of the Empire was underlined by the Emperors’ diverse nationalities. Thus Constantine was a Roman crowned in Britain, Theodosius I was a Spaniard, Justinian I was a Thracian or Illyrian from Skopje, Maurice and Heraclius were Armenians and Leo the iconoclast was Syrian.
[241] Agobard, quoted in R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, 1988, p. 147.
[242] Thus the Monophysite Catholicos Moses II refused to participate in a council with the Orthodox: “I shall not cross the Azat river to eat the baked bread of the Greeks, nor will I drink their hot water.” The Orthodox, unlike the Monophysites, used leavened bread and zeon, hot water, in the Divine Liturgy. See Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 284. (V.M.)
[243] A.H.M. Jones, “Were Ancient Heresies National or Social Movements in Disguise?”, Journal of Theological Studies, 1959, X, p. 293. See also Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 104-109.
[244] Jones, op. cit., p. 295.
[245] According to Paul Johnson, there were about eight million Jews at the time of Christ, including 10 per cent of the Roman empire (A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 171).
[246] Quoted in Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, South Africa, 1978, p. 48.
[247] Mango, Byzantium, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980, p. 91.
[248] See I. Antonopoulos, Agapi kai synomosia, Athens, 1979, pp. 36-37 (in Greek).
[249] Reed, op. cit., p. 93
[250] Reed, op. cit., pp. 89-91. The Zohar also says: “Tradition tells us that the best of the Gentiles deserves death” (Section Vaiqra, folio 14b, quoted in Webster, op. cit. p. 407).
[251] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. 1, pp. 201-202.
[252] Quoted in Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, The Talmud Unmasked, St. Petersburg, 1892; translated by Bloomfield Books, Sudbury, Suffolk, pp. 43, 80, 81.
[253] See the life of the Holy Martyr Al-Harith, in St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, MO; Chrysostom Press, 1995, vol. II, pp. 351-376; Mango, op. cit., p. 92; L.A. Tikhomirov, Religio-philosophskie Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997 ã., chapters 41 and 42.
[254] Keys, Catastrophe, London: Arrow books, 2000, pp. 91-92.
[255] Graetz, Istoria Evreev, Odessa, 1908, vol. 6, pp. 31-32. Something very similar took place when the Muslims conquered Spain in 711. According to Graetz, the Spanish Jews entered into an alliance with the conquerors, whereby, on conquering a city, the Arab regimental commanders would entrust its garrisoning to the Jews, leaving only an insignificant detachment of Muslims in it, since they needed the latter for the conquest of the country. Thus the hitherto enslaved Jews became the masters of the cities of Cordoba, Granada, Malaga and others. In Toledo, while the Christians were in the churches praying, the Jews opened the gates to the Arabs and received them triumphantly (op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 133-134).
[256] Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem, London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 233.
[257] Dagron writes: “In reply to Basil’s initiative came a pamphlet from the best theologian and canonist of the day, Gregory Asbestas, who did not content himself with defending the dogmas and the canons, but preached rebellion and threatened the imperial power with anathema” (op. cit., p. 207). (V.M.)
[258] Mango, op. cit., pp 92-93. By that time (the tenth century) the population of Jews in the Empire had fallen to between one million and one-and-a-half million (Johnson, op. cit., p. 171).
[259] Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 19.
[260] Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, 2.
[261] Troitsky, Khristianskaia philosophia braka, Paris: YMCA Press, p. 207 (in Russian).
[262] Dagron, op. cit., p. 178.
[263] Dagron, op. cit., p. 181.
[264] The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., p. 12.
[265] The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
[266] Îstrogorsky, op. cit., quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. 1, pp. 104.
[267] St. John of
Damascus, Second Apology against those who attack the Divine Images, 12. It may be pointed out, however, that I Corinthians 12.28 includes among the gifts
that of “governments” (kubernhseiV), which could plausibly be interpreted as referring to political
government.
[268] Quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 91. As Gervais Dumeige points out, the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea was freer than “Constantinople II [the Fifth Council], which felt the strong pressure of the Emperor Justinian, and more even than Constantinople III [the Sixth Council] where the presence of Constantine IV risked imposing on the conciliar debates… At Nicaea the men of the Church dealt with the affairs of the Church, under the direction of a man of the Church who knew the desires and wishes of the sovereigns. It was on a path prepared in advance that the bishops were able to advance freely” (Nicée II, Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1978, p. 195).
[269] Quoted in
Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 91.
[270] St. Gregory II, in Fomin
and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 87
[271] Pope Gregory
II, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 82.
[272] Menaion, May 12, Service to St. Germanus of Constantinople, Vespers, “Lord, I have cried”.
[273] Quoted in
Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 88. The
later iconoclast emperor, Constantine Copronymus, was also anathematised and
denied the title of emperor: «the tyrant, ànd not Emperor» (op. cit., p. 89). Even more emphatic was the anathematisation of Emperor Leo V the Armenian: “the evil first beast, the
tormentor of the servants of Christ, and not Emperor Leo the Armenian» (op.
cit., p. 94).
[274] J.M Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, pp. 252-253.
[275] Quoted in Charles Oman, The Dark Ages, AD 476-918, London, 1919,
p. 207.
[276] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, London: Phoenix, 1995, pp. 140-141.
[277] T. P Miloslavskaya, G.V. Miloslavsky, “Kontseptsia
‘islamskogo edinstva’ i integratsionnie protsessy v ‘musulmanskom
mire’», in Islam i problemy natsionalizma, Ìoscow: nauka, 1986, p. 12 (in Russian).
[278] For example, Colin McEvedy writes that “the successors of Mohammed, the Caliphs, combined, as he had, the powers of Emperor and Pope” (The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, London: Penguin, 1961, p. 36). (V.M.)
[279] Thus Ninian Smart writes that Islam “demands institutions which cover the whole life of the community. There is nothing in Islam… corresponding to the Church. There is no place for a special institution within society devoted to the ends of the faith. For it is the whole of society which is devoted to the ends of the faith” (The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971, p. 538) (V.M.).
[280] Lewis, op. cit., pp. 138-139.
[281] Lewis, op. cit., p. 72.
[282] John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000, London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 75.
[283] Lewis, op. cit., pp. 143-144. The question whether the caliphate should be elective or hereditary was one of the questions dividing the Sunni from the Shiite Muslims. “The Shia maintained that the caliphate should be hereditary in the line of the Prophet, and therefore that all the caliphs, except only for the brief rule of Ali and of his son Hasan, were usurpers. The more generally accepted view of the Sunni Muslims was that the caliphate was elective, and any member of the Prophet’s tribe, Quraysh, was eligible” (op. cit., p. 139). Al-Mansur in Spain made the caliphate there hereditary, but thirty years after his death the people abolished it altogether (Man, op. cit., p. 77).
[284] Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 308-312.
[285] Another difference between the Sunnis and the Shiis was that the latter believed in a certain separation between the Church (the imamate) and the State. Karen Armstrong writes: “The doctrine of the imamate demonstrated the extreme difficulty of incarnating a divine imperative in the tragic conditions of ordinary political life. Shiis held that every single one of the imams had been murdered by the caliph of his day.” In 934 it was believed that the last of the imams had been miraculously concealed by God. “The myth of the Hidden Imam… symbolized the impossibility of implementing a truly religious policy in this world, since the caliphs had destroyed Ali’s line and driven the ilm [the knowledge of what is right] from the earth. Henceforth the Shii ulama [learned men, guardians of the legal and religious traditions of Islam] became the representatives of the Hidden Imam, and used their own mystical and rational insights to apprehend his will. Twelver Shiis (who believe in the twelve imams) would take not further part in political life, since in the absence of the Hidden Imam, the true leader of the ummah [the Muslim community], no government could be legitimate” (Islam, New York: Modern Library, 2002, pp. 67, 68-69).
[286] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin, 1997, pp. 42, 55.
[287] Cragg, The Arab Christian, London: Mowbrays, 1992, pp. 57-58.
[288] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-philosophskie Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, pp. 296-297, 298-299 (in Russian).
[289] This is an allusion to a chapter heading from Dagron, op. cit.
[290] Theosteriktos, Life of St. Nicetas of Medikion; in Dagron, op. cit., p. 197.
[291] It is perhaps significant that several of the patriarchs of the period – notably Tarasius, Nicephorus and Photius – had worked as laymen in the imperial administration before becoming patriarchs. The same is true of St. Ambrose of Milan. Evidently close experience of imperial administration from within is a good qualification for a patriarch who has to stand up against imperial power!
[292] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 198-199.
[293] St. Theodore,
quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 94.
[294] Lurye, “The 15th Canon of the First-and-Second Council”, Vertograd-Inform, N 14, December, 1999, pp. 13-14 (English edition). See Herrin, op. cit., p. 210.
[295] Îstrogorsky writes: «Ìy reposed friend N.M. Belaev indicated that in the art of medieval Byzantium the ideas of the Kingdom and the priesthood were incarnate in the images of Moses and Aaron, while in the early Byzantine period both ideas were united in the image of Melchizedek, and that the turning point here must be seen to be precisely the VIIth century» (quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit, vol. I, p. 105).
[296] Dagron, op. cit., p. 234.
[297] See Lurye, op. cit.
[298] “Remember that you are a human being, even though you are Emperor. Remember that we are clothed with the same flesh, whether we are kings or private persons, and that we share the same nature. Remember that we have a common Master and Fashioner and Judge… Respect nature, revere the common laws of mankind, revere the common rights of the Roman Empire, Do not allow an unheard of story to be told of your life: namely, once an emperor who professed goodness and kindness, having made a high priest a friend and co-parent, under whose hands he himself and his empress were anointed with the chrism of emperorship and put on this office, by whom he was exceedingly loved and to whom he had given pledges and awesome assurances, whom he showed to all that he loved exceedingly and cherished; him he gave up to exile and bitter hunger, wore down with countless other ills, while he was praying on his behalf, and sent on to his death.” (D.S. White, Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, pp. 164-165).
[299] White, op. cit., p. 155.
[300] Quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 95.
[301] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 41, 42.
[302] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 237-238.
[303] Dagron, op. cit., p. 236.
[304] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 240, 241.
[305] See Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Books, 1988.
[307] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 102.
[308] Joseph later fell into the heresy of iconoclasm. See Patrick Henry, “The Moechian Controversy and the Constantinopolitan Synod of January AD. 809”, Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., vol. XX, part 2, October, 1969, pp. 495-522.
[309] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 89-93.
[310] Dagron, op. cit., p. 36. He claimed, according to Dorothy
Wood, “to be head of Church and State in the sense that, if the Church as led
by the Patriarch was irreconcilably opposed to the Emperor, the Emperor could
resolve the conflict” (Leo VI’s Concept
of Divine Monarchy, London: Monarchist Press Association, 1964, p. 15). On
the other hand, he did not claim that the grace of the kingship was greater
than that of the priesthood, only saying: «the grace of Imperial power is much inferior
to that of the priesthood» (quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 97).
[311] P.G. 91.197.
[312] Life of Euthymius, quoted in Wood, op. cit., p. 11.
[313] Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 334.
[314] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 90.
[315] That is, born in the imperial family, a condition, writes Dagron, which “confers on the new-born a sacred character: the divine unction from the womb of his mother… {St.} Theophano, in order to explain to Leo VI that he was born in the purple without experience of unhappiness or poverty, said to him: ‘You have been anointed from the womb’” (op. cit., p. 61).
[316] Dagron, op. cit., chapter 1.
[317] “In the middle of the 9th century, the Khazars dispatched an envoy to [St.] Constantine/Cyril, who had landed in their country to evangelise it; and this ‘astute and malicious’ man asked him: ‘Why do you persist in the bad habit of always taking as emperors different people coming from different families? We do it according to the family?’ To which the missionary replied by quoting the example of David, who succeeded to Saul when he was not of his family by the choice of God.” (Dagron, op. cit., pp. 33-34). The comparison between the Byzantine idea of legitimacy and the Chinese “mandate of heaven” is not completely frivolous. For, as Roberts writes: “Confucian principles taught that, although rebellion was wrong if a true king reigned, a government which provoked rebellion and could not control it ought to be replaced, for it was ipso facto illegitimate.” (op. cit., p. 360).
[318] Lemerle, in Rosemary Morris, “Succession and usurpation: politics and rhetoric in the late tenth century”, in Magdalino, op. cit., pp. 200-201.
[319] See St. Irene’s life in The Lives of the Spiritual Mothers, Buena Vista, CO; Holy Apostles’ Convent, 1991, p. 325.
[320] D.S. White, Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, p. 34.
[321] Leo the Deacon, quoted in
Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 99.
[322] Morris, in Magdalino, op. cit., p. 201.
[323] Morris, in Magdalino, op. cit., p. 205.
[324] Unless we are to believe the rather extraordinary theory of the
canonist Balsamon, according to which the emperor’s anointing washed out all
his previous sins! (Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 99).
[325] Morris, op. cit., p. 211.
[326] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 38, 39.
[327] St. Methodius with his brother St. Cyril had originally been invited to the court of Prince Rostislav of Moravia (canonized by the Czech Orthodox Church in 1994), but the German bishops of Passau and Salzburg persuaded Pope Stephen V to ban Slavonic as a liturgical language (reversing the decision of his predecessor, John VIII), and so St. Methodius and his disciples had been forced to flee to Bulgaria.
[328] Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 239.
[329] St. Nicholas the Mystic, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit. vol. I, p. 107.
[330] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 241-243.
[331] Archimandrite Doctor Seraphim, “The Life of King Boris-Michael, Converter of the Bulgarian People to Christianity”, Orthodox Life, vol. 35, no. 3, May-June, 1985, p. 14.
[332] “On his own testimony, while meeting an attack from the Turks, both he and his enemies saw S. George protecting him; and on another occasion, he was saved from instant death by a special act of faith, when a thunderbolt falling upon him was prevented from hurting him by the golden image of the Archangel Michael which he wore on his breast” (P. Ioseliani, A Short History of the Georgian Church, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, p. 115).
[333] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 139, 140, 141, 143-144.
[334] Ioseliani, op. cit., p. 122.
[335] The Synod of Ruisi-Urbnisis decreed that “an Orthodox Christian was not authorized to contract a marriage either with a heretic or an infidel… Armenians and other monophysite dissidents upon returning to the unity of the Orthodox faith were legally compelled to be rebaptized” (Papadakis, op. cit., p. 142).
[336] Eastwood, “Royal renewal in Georgia: the case of Queen Tamar”, in Paul Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines, op. cit., pp. 284, 285, 286.
[337] Eastwood, op. cit., p. 289.
[338] The word RwV appears in Ezekiel 38.2, as part of the coalition of powers called “God and Magog” coming against Israel “from the extreme parts of the north” in the last times. Several interpreters identified RwV with Russia. See Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov, Sobranie Pisem, Moscow, 2000, p. 840 (in Russian).
[339] Àrchimandrite Nikon (Ivanov), Protopriest Nicholas (Likhomanov), Zhitia russkikh svyatykh, Tutaev, 2000, vol. 1, 15/28 July, pp. 817-818 (in Russian).
[340] Karamzin, Predania Vekov, Ìoscow: Pravda, 1989, p. 65 (in Russian).
[341] I. Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia, Minsk: Luchi Sophii, 1998, p. 214 (in Russian).
[342] Karamzin, op. cit., p. 65.
[343] St. Andronicus, O Tserkvi, Rossii, Fryazino, 1997, p. 132 (in Russian).
[344] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii, Shangai, 1936, Podolsk, 1994, p. 3 (in Russian).
[345] Archbishop Nathanael (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom”, Epokha, N 10, 2000, pp. 37-38 (in Russian).
[346] However, according to D. Rybakov, St. Olga received Holy Baptism at the end of 944 in Kiev, possibly together with her husband, Great Prince Igor (“Otkuda est’ poshla Russkaia zemlia, i otkuda Russkaia zemlia stala est’”, Vestnik I.P.Ts., N 2 (12), April-June, 1998, p. 43 (in Russian)).
[347] St. Photius,
quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 123.
[348] Quoted in R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, London & New York: Longman, 1988, p. 228.
[349] Thus Blessed Jerome wrote from Bethlehem: “At the news my speech failed me, and sobs choked the words that I was dictating. She had been captured – the City by whom the whole world had once been taken captive.” (Letter 26, P.L. 22, col. 1094). And again: “The flame of the world has been extinguished and in the destruction of a single city, the whole human race has perished!” (Commentary on Ezekiel, prologue).
[350] Tertullian, Apologeticum, 32.
[351] Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, London: Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 584.
[352] St.
Augustine, The City of God, XVIII, 2.
[353] St. Augustine, The City of God, IV, 4.
[354] St. Augustine, The City of God, V, 17.
[355] However, New Rome quickly filled up with the statues and monuments of paganism. See Judith Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 11.
[356] See Dirk Bennett, “Ecstasy in Late Imperial Rome”, History Today, vol. 48 (10), October, 1998, pp. 27-32.
[357] Quoted in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1996, p. 74.
[358] Grant, op. cit., pp. 75, 76, 78.
[359] Grant, op. cit., p. 60.
[360] Quoted in Grant, op. cit., p. 127.
[361] See J.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church to A.D.500, London: Methuen, 1982, pp. 181-184.
[362] Quoted in Grant, op. cit., p. 132.
[363] St. Leo, Sermon LXXXII, on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.
[364] Thus in 445 Emperor Valentinian III declared in his Constitution: “We are convinced that the only defence for us and for our Empire is in the favour of the God of heaven: and in order to deserve this favour it is our first care to support the Christian faith and its venerable religion. Therefore, inasmuch as the pre-eminence of the Apostolic See is assured by the merit of S. Peter, the first of the bishops, by the leading position of the city of Rome and also by the authority of the Holy Synod, let not presumption strive to attempt anything contrary to the authority of that See” (in Henry Bettenson and Christ Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1999, pp. 24-25).
[365] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 515.
[366] As when Leo I’s embassy to Attila the Hun succeeded in turning him away from Rome, or when Gregory I sent St. Augustine and 40 monks to re-evangelise the former Roman province of Britain.
[367] As when Leo I rejected the 28th canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which gave the see of the new capital of Constantinople equal status with that of Old Rome.
[368] Thus Pope Leo I wrote to Emperor Leo I: “You must unceasingly remember that Royal power has been entrusted to you, not only for administering the world, but also and in particular to rule the Church”. (quoted in Sergius Fomin and Tamara Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 73).
[369] Metropolitan Philaret, Zapiski rukovodstvuiuschaia k osnovatel’nomu razumeniu Knigi Bytia, Moscow, 1867, part. 2, p. 80 (in Russian).
[370] Gelasius, Tractatus IV; translated from Dagron, op. cit., pp. 190-191.
[371] Gelasius, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op.
cit., volume I, p. 74.
[372] Dagron, op. cit., p. 191.
[373] Ranson and Motte, introduction to Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale, Lausanne: “L’Age d’Homme, 1987, p. 11 (in French).
[374] Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues, I (2, VI).
[375] Paulinus, Vita Sancti Ambrosii, chapter 19, in the translation by E.R. Hoare.
[376] See Christopher Snyder, An Age of Tyrants, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, chapters 2, 8 and 9.
[377] Zosimus, New History, 6.2.
[378] Procopius, The Vandal War, 3.2.38.
[379] St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 4.1, 5.1, 15.1.
[380] The Britons and the Irish were, of course, Celts; and Fr. Gregroy Telepneff, in his study of Celtic monasticism, concludes that “early Celtic monasticism was Byzantine in character, i.e., a manifestation of the Eastern Orthodox Faith. The cultural hegemony of the Roman Empire, which extended beyond its political borders, decisively shaped the spiritual environment of ancient Hibernia [including the Celtic lands on the mainland of Britain]” (The Egyptian Desert in the Irish Bogs, Etna, Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998, p. 70).
[381] St. Patrick, Letter to Coroticus, 21, 19.
[382] St. Gildas On The Ruin of Britain, 25. Bede interprets this to mean that they were “of royal race”.
[383] St. Gildas On The Ruin of Britain, 27.
[384] As the Irish saint, Columbanus of Luxeuil, wrote to Pope Boniface IV: “All we Irish, inhabitants of the world’s edge, are disciples of Saints Peter and Paul and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon by the Holy Ghost” (G.S.M Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera, The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970, p. 34).
[385] Quoted in A.W.
Haddan & W. Stubbs, Councils and
Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1869, 1964, volume I, p. 122.
[386] Aldhelm: The Prose Works, translated by
Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren, Ipswich: Brewer, 1979, p. 158. The Latin
text is in Haddan & Stubbs, op. cit., pp. 202-203.
The Welsh Church remained in schism until
Bishop Elbod of Bangor restored the northern Welsh to unity in 768 (the
southerners followed in 777). Iona was brought into line early in the eighth
century through the efforts of the holy Abbots Egbert and Adomnan.
[387] Quoted in Haddan & Stubbs, op. cit. p. 126.
[388] Peter Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages, London: Constable, 1996, pp. 23, 24.
[389] J.M. Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 239.
[390] St. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, II, 38, p. 154. During the coronation of the Russian Tsars, too, the bystanders were showered with gold and silver, symbolising the betrothal of the Tsar with the State. See Fr. Nikita Chakirov (ed.), Tsarskie Koronatsii na Rusi, New York: Russian Orthodox Youth Committee, 1971, p. 22 (in Russian).
[391] Thus Joseph Canning writes that after the Gothic wars “it seems that no western kings sought imperial confirmation of their rule” from the Roman Emperor (A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 17).
[392] Tim Newark, Warlords, London: Brockhampton Press, 1996, p. 323.
[393] Quoted in A.A. Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 151.
[394] C.A.A. Scott, Ulfilas, Apostle of the Goths, Cambridge, 1885, p. 199; quoted in E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 65-66.
[395] David Keys, Catastrophe, London: Arrow Books, 2000, p. 204.
[396] They converted from Arianism to Orthodoxy in the 550s.
[397] St. Gregory of Tours wrote (History of the Franks, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, V, 38) that Hermenegild “joined the party of the Emperor Tiberius, making overtures to the Emperor’s army commander, who was then invading Spain”, but that “as soon as Leovigild ordered his troops to advance Hermenegild found himself deserted by the Greeks”.
[398] Aloysius K..Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1930, p. 30. See also Thompson, op. cit., p. 76.
[399] St. Gregory, History of the Franks, III, 30.
[400] St. Dmitri of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, November 1. And not for Spain only. Soon after the Visigoths’ conversion in 587-589, King Sisebut wrote a letter to the Arian king of Lombard Italy urging him, too, to accept the Orthodox faith. See Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 121-122.
[401] The Russian Slavophile Alexis Khomyakov even traced the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition to this period. See his third letter to William Palmer in W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years, London: Rivington, Percival & co., 1895, p. 65.
[402] Ziegler, op. cit., p. 54.
[403] Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), The Christian Faith and War, Jordanville, 1973, p. 12.
[404] Trefor Jones, The English Saints: East Anglia, Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1999, pp. 13-21.
[405] Roberts, op. cit., p. 237.
[406] Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 8.
[407] Cf. The earliest work of English hagiography, a monk of Whitby’s Life of St. Gregory: “When all the apostles, leading their Churches with them, and each of the teachers of separate races, present them to the Lord on Judgement Day in accord with Gregory’s opinion, we believe he will wondrously lead us, that is, the English nation, taught by him through the grace of God, to the Lord. There.. entering the home of that strong man whom Christ bound, he shall contend for the vessels which we are, ‘once darkness, but now light in the Lord’” (C.W. Jones, Saints’ Lives and Chronicles in Early England, Cornell, 1947).
[408] Llewellyn (op. cit., p. 254) writes that, during the pontificate of Pope Pascal (early ninth century) “the English colony of the Borgo, near St. Peter’s, which followed its native custom of building in wood, lost its houses in a disastrous fire, the first of many to sweep the crowded quarter around the basilica. Pascal, roused at midnight, hurried barefoot to the scene and supervised the fire-fighting operations himself; ever solicitous of pilgrims, he granted the Saxon community estates and money for rebuilding, with woods for a supply of timber.”
[409] Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996, p. 15.
[410] Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester University Press, 1970, p. 259.
[411] “On the Saints of the Church of York”, in Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, York, 1974, p. 160.
[412] Harold Nicolson, tells the story as it was recounted some 300 years later: “On that occasion there was such a crowd in church that the priest who arrived with the holy oil with which the king was to be anointed was unable to push through the throng. The bishop, having no oil available, paused; a state of embarrassed tension descended on the king and the congregation. At that moment a dove fluttered into the cathedral bearing in its beak a lekythion or phial of scented oil brought straight from heaven. It was with this sacred oil that Clovis was anointed and the lekythion was thereafter preserved in a reliquary shaped like a dove. This precious relic, known as la sainte Ampoule, was jealously preserved by succeeding Archbishops of Rheims, who insisted that no French monarch could claim to have been properly anointed unless the ceremony were performed at Rheims and the oil of the sainte Ampoule (which had the magic property of renewing itself at every coronation) poured over his head and hands. Even Joan of Arc refused to recognise Charles VII as King of France and always addressed him as Dauphin until he had been anointed at Rheims.” (Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 23)
[413] Thus according to Hieromonk Makarios: “When the moment came for anointing the newly-baptized King with holy Chrism, the Bishop saw that it was lacking. Raising his eyes to Heaven, he implored God to provide it, whereupon a white dove came down from Heaven with a vial of miraculous oil” (The Synaxarion, Convent of the Annunciation of our Lady of Ormylia (Chalkidike), 1998, volume I, October 1, p. 254).
[414] St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 21.4.
[415] “The Life of the Holy Hierarch Gregory, Bishop of Homer”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, no. 6, November-December, 1996, pp. 5-6. This life was published in Russian by Monastery Press, Montreal.
[416] St. Adomnan of Iona, Life of Columba
[417] Nor had India, which provides another early example of sacramental kingmaking in the consecration of King Barachias by St. Ioasaph. See St. John of Damascus, Barlaam and Ioasaph, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967, pp. 552-553.
[418] Roger Collins, “Julian of Toledo and the Royal Succession in Late Seventh-Century Spain”, in P.H. Sawyer & I.N. Wood, Early Medieval Kingship, University of Leeds, 1979, p. 47.
[419] Quoted in Collins, op cit., pp. 41-42.
[420] Nelson, J.L. “Inauguration Rituals”, in Nelson, J.L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, London: Hambledon Press, 1986, p. 59.
[421] St. Isidore of Seville said: “You will be king if you act rightly; if you do not, you will not be”, which contains a play on the words rex, “king”, and recte, “rightly” (Etymologiae, 9.3.4, col. 342). In the Latin version of Justinian’s famous sixth novella, there is also a clear indication that, for the symphony of powers to be effective, the king must rule rightly (recte).
[422] Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 55.
[423] This more interventionist role that the Church ascribed to herself was not restricted to Francia. We shall see it also in the crowning of the English King Edward the Martyr in 975.
[424] Canning, op. cit., p. 63.
[425] Canning, op. cit., p. 59.
[426] Archimandrite Pantaleimon, “On the Royal Martyrs”, Orthodox Life, vol. 31, no. 4, July-August, 1981, p. 22.
[427] Janet Nelson, “Hincmar of Rheims: Kingship, Law and Liturgy”, in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, op. cit., pp. 169-170.
[428] Quoted by Janet Nelson, in “National Synods, Kingship and Royal Anointing”, in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, op. cit., p. 253.
[429] Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 62.
[430] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 329-330.
[431] Norman Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 288-290.
[432] Herrin, op. cit., p. 47.
[433] Mary Garrison, “The Teacher and the King”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 2, no. 7, July, 2001, p. 25.
[434] However, see the life of St. William of Toulouse (+812), for an example of a completely non-acquisitive warrior lord (Living Orthodoxy, vol. V, no. 2, March-April, 1983, pp. 3-5).
[435] Tacitus, Germania.
[436] Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, p. 15.
[437] Translated by
Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, York:
Sessions Book Trust, 1974, p. 111.
[438] Canning, op. cit., p. 50.
[439] Canning, op. cit., p. 49.
[440] Romanides, op. cit., p. 31.
[441] Herrin, op. cit., pp. 117-118.
[442] Quoted in A.A. Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 268.
[443] Quoted in Richard Chamberlin, Charlemagne, Emperor of the Western World, London: Grafton books, 1986, p. 52.
[444] Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 268. There is an interesting parallel to this theory of the One Christian Empire in contemporary China. Thus when the Chinese empire actually split between the Khitans and the Sung in 1004, “to preserve the myth of indivisibility the relationship between the two emperors was henceforth expressed in the language of a fictional blood relationship” (“China in the year 1000”, History for All, vol. 2, issue 6, December / January, 2000, p. 37).
[445] Quoted in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 148.
[446] Romanides, op. cit., p. 18.
[447] Thus Pope John pleaded with St. Photius for time to extirpate the heresy of the Filioque from among the Franks before condemning them outright. See P.G. 102, 813; translated by Richard Haugh, Photius and the Carolingians, Nordland, 1975, p. 137; V. Moss, "Western Saints and the Filioque", Living Orthodoxy, volume IV, no. 1, January-February, 1982.
[448] Adso, Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist.
[449] Leontiev, “Vizantinizm i Slavyanstvo”, in Vostok, Rossiya i Slavyanstvo, Moscow, 1996, pp. 94-95 (in Russian).
[450] A.W. Haddan & W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, op. cit., vol. III, p. 524.
[451] Herrin, op. cit., pp. 124, 128.
[452] Quoted in Abbé Guettée, The Papacy, New York: Minos, 1966, p. 305, note.
[453] Quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 416.
[454] Nicholas said: “Before the coming of Christ it was the case that there existed, in a type, men who were at once kings and priests: sacred history tells us that the holy Melchisedech was one of these. The devil, as one who ever strives, with his tyrannical spirit, to claim for himself what belongs to the worship of God, has imitated this example in his own members, so that pagan emperors might be spoken of as being at the same time the chief pontiffs. But He was found Who was in truth both King and Pontiff. Thereafter the emperor did not lay hands on the rights of the pontificate, nor did the pontiff usurp the name of emperor. For that one and the same ‘Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’ (I Timothy 2.15), so separated the functions of the two authorities, giving each its own proper activities and distinct honours (desiring that these properties should be exalted by the medicine of humility and not brought down again to the depths by man’s arrogance…” (Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 104-105).
[455] Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 81.
[456] Geoffrey Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, chapter five.
[457] Keen, The
Penguin History of Medieval Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 57.
[458] Ivan Solonevich, Narodnaya Monarkhiya, Minsk: Luchi Sophii, 1998, pp. 270-272 (in Russian).
[459] Aristides Papadakis, The Orthodox East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, pp. 18-19.
[460] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 19-20.
[461] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 21-22, 23.
[462] Roberts, op. cit., p. 336.
[463] Lavelle, Aethelred II: King of the English 978-1016, Stroud: Tempus, 1002, p. 29.
[464] Some see in this event less a submission of the northern kings to Edgar as a kind of peace treaty between them. Be that as it may, it is true to say that the power of the Anglo-Saxon kings never really extended into Scotland, where a native dynasty beginning with Kenneth MacAlpin (840-858) “destroyed the last Pictish kings, and imposed Gaelic customs and the Gaelic language throughout the kingdom of Alba” (Ann Williams, “Britain AD 1000”, History Today, vol. 50 (3), March, 2000, p. 34). One of these Scottish Orthodox kings was Macbeth (+1057), made famous by the hero of Shakespeare’s play. He made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he “scattered money like seed among the poor”.
[465] Lavelle, op. cit., p. 31.
[466] Already in the middle of the tenth century one archbishop of Canterbury, St. Oda “the Good”, and one archbishop of York, Oskytel, were Danish by race. See V. Moss, The Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1993, volume II, pp. 38-41.
[467] ‘Passio et Miracula Sancti Edwardi Regis et Martyris’, in Christine Fell, Edward King and Martyr, University of Leeds, 1971; V. Moss, “Velikij Muchenik Eduard, Tsar’ Anglii”, Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti, N 7, March-May, 1999, pp. 9-12 (in Russian).
[468] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E, 979, 1014.
[469] Quoted in Chaney, op. cit., p. 14.
[470] We may recall that Cathwulf in his letter to Charlemagne had also compared the king to the Father and the bishop to the Son.
[471] Chaney, op. cit., epilogue.
[472] Barlow, The English Church, 1000-1066, London: Longmans, 1979, p. 5.
[473] See, for example, St. Dunstan’s speech to King Ethelred at his coronation (Bishop W. Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, Rolls series, 1874, pp. 356-357).
[474] Barlow, The English Church, op. cit., p. 141.
[475] R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, 1988, pp. 209-210.
[476] R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
[477] R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 213.
[478] R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 217.
[479] Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 51.
[480] Thus although,
as Charles Davis writes, “Otto’s emissary Liudprand of Cremona, told the
emperor at Constantinople that Otto was the true Roman emperor,.. Liudprand
also revealed a hostility to what was Roman and a pride in what was German that
he probably shared with other personages at Otto’s court. According to his
report of his embassy to Constantinople in c.
969, he and his people were insulted by Nicephorus Phocas with these rude
words, ‘You are not Romans, but Lombards.’ Liudprand then said he replied as
follows:
“’History tells us that Romulus, from whom the Romans got their name, was a fratricide born in adultery. He made a place of refuge for himself and received into it insolvent debtors, runaway slaves, murderers and men who deserved death for their crimes. This was the sort of crowd whom he enrolled as citizens and gave the name of Romans. From this nobility are descended those men whom you style ‘rulers of the world’. But we Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, Bavarians, Swabians and Burgundians so despise these fellows that when we are angry with an enemy we can find nothing more insulting to say than ‘You Roman!’ For us in the word Roman is comprehended every form of lowness, timidity, avarice, luxury, falsehood and vice.” (“The Middle Ages”, op. cit., pp. 82-83).
[481] Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale, op.
cit., pp. 59-60.
[482] This had already been increasing under Alberic, whose “insistence on the forms of Byzantine administration and court hierarchy… checked the growth of any real feudal devolution of government such as the rest of Europe [outside Rome] was experiencing” (Peter Llewellyn, op. cit., p. 307).
[483] Jean-Paul Allard, “Byzance et le Saint Empire: Theopano, Otton III, Benzon d’Albe”, in Germain Ivanovv-Trinadtsaty, Regards sur leÓrthodoxie, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1997, p. 39 (in French).
[484] Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), personal communication.
[485] Allard, op. cit., p. 40
[486] Thus Roberts writes: “Half Byzantine by birth, [Otto] saw himself as a new Constantine. A diptych of a gospel-book painted nearly at the end of the tenth century shows him in state, crowned and orb in hand, receiving the homage of four crowned women: they are Sclavonia (Slavic Europe), Germany, Gaul and Rome. His notion of a Europe organized as a hierarchy of kings serving under the emperor was eastern…” (op. cit., p. 321).
[487] R. Lacy & D. Danzinger, The Year 1000, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999, p. 190.
[488] Some years before in words reminiscent of Alcuin’s accolade of Charlemagne: “You are Caesar, emperor of the Romans and Augustus. You are of the highest birth among the Greeks. You surpass the Greeks in empire, you rule the Romans by hereditary right, and you surpass them both in mind and eloquence.” (quoted in R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 221).
[489] Charles Davis, op. cit., p. 84. In this exposure he was correct, even if he was wrong in his dating of the forgery to the middle of the tenth century (Allard, op. cit., pp. 45-46; Canning, op. cit., pp. 73-74.).
[490] Pope Sylvester, Letter 192, quoted in Fr. Andrew Phllips, “The Three Temptations of Christ and the Mystical Sense of English History”, Orthodox England, vol.. I, number 2, December, 1997, p. 6.
[491] John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000, London: Penguin Books, 1999.
[492] As Wil van den Bercken writes: “In the eleventh century, when with the exception of the Finns and the Baltic peoples all the European peoples had adopted [Orthodox] Christianity as their national religion, [Orthodox] Christian Europe had formally become a historical reality” (Holy Russia and Christian Europe, op. cit., p. 115).
[493] Even the Jews had a quasi-monarchy in the form of their Exilarch in Baghdad-Babylon. But in 1040 this power came to an end. The only independent Jewish State since the fall of Jerusalem, Khazaria, fell in 966-967.
[494] Richards, op. cit., p. 369.
[495] Man, op. cit., p. 102.
[496] Man, op. cit., p. 75.
[497] “Things”, or parliaments, were a characteristic of many Viking lands. Cf. the Tynwald, or “Thingwald” of the Isle of Man, which has lasted from the eleventh century to the present day, and the “Veche” of Novgorod.
[498] Man, op. cit., p. 98.
[499] Man, op. cit., p. 91.
[500] Man, op. cit., p. 40; Gwyn Jones, The Vikings, London: The Folio Society, 1997, pp. 266-270.
[501] Trostnikov, V.N. "The Role and Place of the Baptism of Rus in the European Spiritual Process of the Second Millenium of Christian History", Orthodox Life, vol. 39, no. 3, May-June, 1989, p. 34.
[502] St. Gregory the Great, Epistle 33. As Fr. Michael Azkoul writes: “In a letter to St. John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory advised him not to assume the title ‘universal bishop’. Although it had been given to his predecessors by the Council of Chalcedon, neither he nor any Pope before him ‘seized upon the ill-advised title’, lest ‘by virtue of the pontifical rank, he took to himself the glory of singularity which denies the office of bishop to all their brethren’ (Epistle 18, bk. V, P.L. 77 740C).
“St. Gregory wrote the same to Patriarchs Eulogius of Alexandria and Anastasius of Antioch. ‘Not one of my predecessors ever consented to the use of this profane title, for, to be sure, if one Patriarch is called ‘universal’, the name of Patriarch is denied to the others’ (Epistle 43, bk. V, 771C). No one, no council, may act ‘contrary to the statutes and canons of the Fathers committed to us’ (Epistle 7, bk. IV, 674A)…. Gregory perceived the claim of the Patriarchs to have been pretentious. He considered the appellation to be a ‘blasphemy’ (Epistle 20 ad Emp. Maur., bk. V, 746AC).” (Once Delivered to the Saints, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 2000, pp. 189-190).
[503] Translated by Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church, London, 1963, p. 52.
[504] Of course, there is an inherent contradiction in this theory. If it was St. Constantine who gave the authority to St. Sylvester, then the ultimate authority rests with the Emperor and not with the Pope. But this consequence was ignored in the face of the urgent necessity of finding some justification for the papacy’s expansionist plans. Centuries later, in 1242, a pamphlet attributed to Pope Innocent IV connected this flaw in the theory of papism by declaring that the Donation was not a gift, but a restitution (Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 86).
[505] Aristides Papadakis, The Orthodox East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 28. However, Papadakis dates this transformation to 962 rather than 1002, on the grounds that “during the century following the revival of the empire [in 962], twenty-one popes from a total of twenty-five were virtually hand-picked by the German crown” (p. 29).
[506] Ranson and Motte, introduction to Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale, Lausanne, 1987, p. 14 (in French).
[507] Lampryllos, op. cit., pp. 65-66.
[508] Runciman, The
Eastern Schism, Oxford, 1955, p. 161.
[509] The founder of the movement, Abbot Odo of Cluny, had even been appointed archimandrite of Rome by Alberic with authority to reform all the monastic houses in the district (Peter Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages, London: Constable, 1996, p. 309).
[510] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 34, 36-37. Peter de Rose (Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 420) agrees with this estimate: “The chief reason for maintaining the discipline [of clerical celibacy] was the one dearest to the heart of Gregory VII: a celibate priest owed total allegiance not to wife and children but to the institution. He was a creature of the institution. The Roman system was absolutist and hierarchical. For such a system to work, it needed operatives completely at the beck and call of superiors. The conservatives at Trent [the papist council of 1545] were quite frank about this. They actually said that without celibacy the pope be nothing more than the Bishop of Rome. In brief, the papal system would collapse without the unqualified allegiance of the clergy. Celibacy, on Trent’s own admission, was not and never was primarily a matter of chastity, but of control…”
[511] Ranson and Motte, op. cit., p. 14.
[512] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 76-77.
[513] Ñf. À.Barmin, “Sovremennaya istoriografia o
datirovke tserkovnoj skhizmy mezhdu Zapadom in Vostokom khristianskoj ekumeny”,
in D.E. Afinogenov, A.V. Muraviev, Traditsii i nasledie Khristianskogo
Vostoka, Moscow: “Indrik”, 1996, pp. 117-126; V. Moss, Krushenie Pravoslavnoj Anglii, Tver, 1998; “Kogda upal Zapad ot Pravoslavia?”, Pravoslavnaya Tver’, NN 10-11 (47-48),
October-November, 1997, pp. 4-5 (in Russian).
[514] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Éditions Gallimard, 1996, p. 247
(in French).
[515] Quoted from Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky), Khristianstva net bez Tserkvi, Moscow: “Pravoslavnaya Beseda”, 1991, p. 63 (in Russian).
[516] Canning, A History of Western Political Thought, 300-1450, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 86-87.
[517] Canning, op. cit., p. 76.
[518] Quoted in David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050-1100, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969, p. 132.
[519] Douglas, op. cit., p. 155.
[520] Douglas, William the Conqueror, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964, p. 121.
[521] Jean-Paul Allard, “Byzance et le Saint Empire: Theopano, Otton III, Benzon d’Albe”, in Germain Ivanovv-Trinadtsaty, Regards sur lÓrthodoxie, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1997, p. 55 (in French).
[522] Quotd in Papadakis, op. cit., p. 21.
[523] The Fathers of the Council, led by St. Isidore of Seville, “begged that there should be no usurpations in Spain, no attempts to stir up rebellion, no plots against the lives of the monarchs. In future, when a king died, his successor must be appointed by the magnates of the whole kingdom sitting along with the bishops in a common council. Three times the bishops repeated their awful anathema against anyone who should conspire to break his oath of allegiance, or make an attempt on the king’s life, or try to usurp the throne. Three times the anathema was read out to the concourse with profound solemnity, and three times the notaries copied it into the minutes. All the clergy and laymen present shouted out their agreement. Then the bishops called upon Sisenand and his successors for ever to rule moderately and mildly, with justice and piety, over the peoples entrusted to them by God. Any successor of Sisenand’s who ruled harshly or oppressively would be anathema. After this impressive scene the bishops condemned and sentenced Suinthila and his family. By recognizing Sisenand as king the Council contradicted the spirit of its own extraordinarily earnest enactment… What the bishops anathematized was what the King had done and what they themselves by their very presence at the Council had condemned” (E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 174, 175).
[524] Canning, op. cit., p. 51. See the whole of chapter 2 for Carolingian ideas on kingship.
[525] Thus in the synaxarion for the feast of St. Photius (February 6), we read: “What manner of struggles did the thrice-blessed one not undertake for the Orthodox Faith: against the Manichaeans, the iconoclasts, and other heretics, and foremost against the papal heresy which then first manifested itself, whose leader, the wicked Nicholas, Pope of Rome, father of the Latin schism, he denounced, employing proofs from the writings of the Fathers; and having justly cast him down, he drove him from the Catholic Church synodically, giving him over to anathema.”
[526] Douglas, William the Conqueror, op. cit., p. 187.
[527] F. McLynn, 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998, pp. 182-183.
[528] Anonymous, Vita Aedwardi Regis, edited by Frank Barlow, Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1962.
[529] Howarth, 1066: The Year of the Conquest, Milton Keynes: Robin Clark, 1977, p. 164.
[530] Fr. Andrew Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996, p. 27.
[531] Moss, Krushenie Pravoslavnoj Anglii, op. cit.
[532] Douglas, William the Conqueror, op. cit., pp. 6-7.
[533] Hudson, “The Norman Conquest”< BBC History Magazine, vol. 4, no. 1, January, 2003, p. 23.
[534] Romanides, “A Critique of the Balamand Agreement”. http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenists/frjr_balamand.htm
[535] R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, pp. 284, 285.
[536] Quoted in Robinson, op. cit., p. 177.
[537] Edmer, Istoria Novorum in Anglia; translated by Geoffrey Bosanquet, London: Cresset Press.
[538] Quoted in Douglas & Greenway, English Historical Documents, Eyre & Spottiswoode, p. 647.
[539] Quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, p. 113.
[540] Like another forerunner of the Antichrist, Napoleon, who said: “If I were not me, I would like to be Gregory VII.” (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 66).
[541] De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 65, 66.
[542] Canning, op. cit., pp. 96, 97.
[543] Quoted in Azkoul, op. cit., p. 193, from Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 110.
[544] Quoted in Canning, op. cit., pp. 91-93.
[545] De Rosa, op.cit., p. 69.
[546] Peter Damian, Letter 8, 2, P.L. 144 436.
[547] I.S. Robinson, “Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ”, History, vol. 58, no. 193, June, 1973, pp. 174-175.
[548] St. Ambrose, Liber de Incarnationis Dominicae Sacramento, 4, 32, col. 826.
[549] Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1999, p. 113.
[550] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 114.
[551] Robinson,
op. cit., p. 175.
[552] Quoted by R.W. Southern, Western Society and the
Church in the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 102.
[553] Robinson, op. cit., pp. 177, 178.
[554] Canning, op. cit., pp. 90, 91.
[555] Tyutchev, “Papstvo i Rimskij Vopros”, in Politicheskie Stat’i, Paris: YMCA Press, 1976, pp. 57-58 (in Russian).
[556] The
large-scale emigration of the English to Constantinople and Kiev
(where Harold’s daughter Gytha married Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh)
demonstrates the spiritual kinship between pre-1066 England and the Orthodox
East. See V. Moss, Krushenie Pravoslavnoj
Anglii, op. cit.
[557] Roberts, op. cit., p. 395.
[558] Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, London: Virago Press, 1998, pp. 171-172.
[559] Helmold of Bosau, in Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 484.
[560] Bernard, in Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 487-488.
[561] Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 65. Bernard preached the necessity of the second crusade, in which he expressed “bloodthirsty anti-Greek fulminations”, in Runciman’s phrase (op. cit., p. 100).
[562] Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 125.
[563] Paterson, “Sonar ship homes in on Atlantis of North”, Sunday Telegraph (London), September 26, 1999, p. 39.
[564] Thus
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa once wrote to Saladin claiming, like the most
powerful Roman emperors, to have dominion over the whole of the Middle East and
Africa as far as Ethiopia! See R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 309.
[565] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 67.
[566] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 68.
[567] Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., pp. 123-124.
[568] In 1152 the English Pope Adrian IV by his bull Laudabiliter reminded the English King Henry II that Ireland, like all islands, belonged to St. Peter and the Roman Church in accordance with the Donation of Constantine. He therefore blessed Henry to invade Ireland in order to extend the boundaries of the Church, extirpate vice and instill virtue. As John of Salisbury wrote in his Metalogicus of 1156 of Adrian: "At my solicitation he granted Ireland to Henry II, the illustrious King of England, to hold by hereditary right, as his letter to this day testifies. For all Ireland of ancient right, according to the Donation of Constantine, was said to belong to the Roman Church which he founded.” Henry duly obliged in 1172 by invading Ireland. See Michael Richter, “The First Century of Anglo-Irish Relations”, History, 59, N 196, June, 1974, pp. 195-210.
Presumably when King John gave England to Pope Innocent, he also gave Ireland back to the papacy at the same time…
[569] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 71
[570] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 72.
[571] Ehrenreich, op. cit., p. 172.
[572] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 147.
[573] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ii. Q. xi; in Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., pp. 147-148.
[574] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 164.
[575] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 171.
[576] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 60.
[577] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 177.
[578] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 73.
[579] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 52.
[580] Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp. 33, 34-35.
[581] Charles Davis, op. cit. pp. 87-88,
88-89.
[582] Quoted in R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 310.
[583] Quoted by Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, from whom it was quoted by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 648.
[584] Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, vol. 2, part II, p. 129.
[585] McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, p. 123..
[586] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 118-119.
[587] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 138-139.
[588] The assassination of a tyrant was approved by the twelfth-century theorist, John of Salisbury, but only if he acted against the holy faith or disregarded the interests of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
[589] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 139-140.
[590] Canning, op. cit., p. 131.
[591] Alcuin of York, Letter to Charlemagne, M.G.H., 4, letter 132.
[592] Canning, op. cit., pp. 132, 133.
[593] Aquinas, On Kingship, VII.61.
[594] D.J.A. Matthew, “Reflections on the Medieval Roman Empire”, History, vol. 77, N 251, October, 1992, p. 382.
[595] For a detailed biography of Frederick, see Abulafia, op. cit.
[596] Matthew, op. cit., p. 389.
[597] Le Goff, Saint Louis,
Paris: Gallimard, 1996, p. 681 (in French). But Louis sometimes went too
far: “The lord king,” he said, “whose
predecessors founded the churches of the kingdom and endowed them with their
goods for the maintenance of the worship of God… has the right to take all the
treasures of the churches and all their temporal goods as if they were his own,
in order to meet the necessities of himself and his kingdom” (Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. VI, p. 110).
[598] Davis, op. cit., p. 369.
[599] Quoted in Canning, op. cit., p. 99.
[600] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi, USA, 1993, p 140 (in Russian).
[601] Canning, op. cit., p. 109.
[602] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 79.
[603] Richard Cavendish, « Boniface VIII’s Bull Unam Sanctam », History Today, vol. 52 (11), November, 2002, p. 63.
[604] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 79.
[605] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 358.
[606] This was most clearly evident in Pope Clement V’s full cooperation with – or rather, subjection to - King Philip in the destruction of the (probably completely innocent) Templars. See Piers Paul Read, The Templars, London: Phoenix Press, 1999, part 3.
[607] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 123.
[608] Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 179-180.
[609] During the Reformation, several of the Elector Princes became Protestant, further limiting the power of the Catholic Emperor.
[610] Canning, op. cit., pp. 154, 155.
[611] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 141-142.
[612] Canning, op. cit., p. 156.
[613] McClelland, op. cit., p. 145.
[614] Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, pp. 192-193, 195.
[615] Another influence on Richard was, according to Nigel Saul, “the ideas of the Roman – in other words, the civil – lawyers. In general terms, civilian thought emphasised the scope of the King’s will. To the civilian, a King’s power should be unlimited because his rule was just. At a number of points, correspondences are to be observed between Richard’s governance and a popular civilian-influenced tract, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum (c. 1277-9)” (“Richard II: Author of his own Downfall?”, History Today, vol. 49 (9), September, 1999, pp. 40-41).
[616] Nicolson, op. cit., p. 195.
[617] N.N. Àlexeev, “Idea ‘Zemnago Grada’ v Khristianskom verouchenii”, Put’, N 5, October-November, 1926, p. 566.
[618] Thompson, J.W., Johnson, E.N., An Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938, p. 966.
[619] Thomson & Johnson, op. cit., p. 967.
[620] Thomson & Johnson, op. cit., pp. 976-977.
[621] Keen, op. cit. p. 290.
[622] Quoted in Keen, op. cit., p. 287.
[623] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 149; Papadakis, op. cit., p. 375.
[624] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 376.
[625] Wycliff, De Christo et Suo Adversario Antichristo, 8; in R. Buddensig (ed.), John Wicliff’s Polemical Works in Latin, London: The Wicliff Society, 1883, volume II, p. 672.
[626] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 100.
[627] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 100.
[628] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 404.
[629] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 460.
[630] A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 477.
[631] For a history of this term, see Gilbert Dagron, “Vostochnij tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii”, http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177 (in Russian).
[632] Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus, quoted in Svetlana Lurye, «Translatio Imperii”, Epokha, ¹ 10, p. 20 (in Russian).
[633] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Éditions Gallimard, 1996, pp.
259-260 (in French).
[634] Dagron, op. cit., p. 261.
[635] Chomatianos, quoted in Protopriest Valentine Asmus, "O Mînarkhii i nashem k nej otnoshenii", Radonezh, N 2 (46), January, 1997, p. 5; Sergius Fomin and Tamara Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Ìîscow, 1998, vol. I, p. 121 (in Russian).
[636] Dagron, op. cit., p. 267; Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 120.
[637] Îstrogorsky, «Îtnoshenie Tserkvi i gosudarstva v Vizantii», quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 104 (in Russian).
[638] Dagron, op. cit., p. 271.
[639] Balsamon,
quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 120.
[640] Balsamon, quoted in
Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol.
I,
p. 120.
[641] Nicetas
Choniates, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 108.
[642]
Nicetas Choniates, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 109.
[643] R.J. Macrides, “From the Komnenoi to the Palaiologio: imperial models in decline and exile”, in Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines, op. cit., p. 278.
[644] Nicetas
Choniates, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 120.
[645] G. Podskalsky, Khristianstvo iBogoslovskaya literature
v Kievskoj Rusi
(988-1237 ãã.), St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 68 (in Russian).
[646] Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 278.
[647] Alferov and Alferov, O Tserkvi, pravoslavnom
Tsarstve i poslednem vremeni, Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, p. 18
[648] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 67-68. “Yet it was a quite exceptional case,” writes G. Fedotov, “when the author of the panegyric of Prince Andrew of Vladimir dared to apply to him the famous definition of Chrysostom-Agapit, so popular in later Moscow: ‘Caesar by his earthly nature is similar to any man, but by the power of his dignity he is similar to God alone” (The Russian Religious Mind, Harvard University Press, 1966, vol. I, p. 398).
[649] Àlferov and Alferov, op. cit., p. 21.
[650] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 62-63.
[651] Podskalsky, op.
cit., pp. 63, 64-65.
[652] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 66-67,
71.
[653] Fedotov, op.
cit., pp. 398-400. Thus the very first saints canonized in Kievan Rus’
were Princes Boris and Gleb, the sons of St. Vladimir, who were killed by their
evil brother.
[654] G. Podskalsky, op. cit., p. 62.
[655] Ivan Solonevich, Narodnaia
Monarkhia, Ìinsk, 1998,
p. 153 (in Russian).
[656] Solonevich,
op. cit., pp.
265-267. As G.G. Litavrin writes: “(The Great Prince) was not the only one
amidst others, like the Byzantine Emperor, - he was only the first among
equals” (quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 177).
[657] Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, London: Penguin Books, second edition, 1995, p. 38.
[658] Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966, volume II, pp. 188-190, 191.
[659] N.M. Karamzin, Predania Vekov, Ìîscow, 1989, p. 207 (in Russian).
[660] Kàramzin, op. cit., p. 214.
[661] V. Georgievsky, Svyatoj
Blagovernij Velikij Knyaz’ Andrej
Bogolyubskij, St.
Petersburg, 1900, Ìîscow: “Preobrazhenie”, 1999, p. 4 (in Russian).
[662] L.A. Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’,
St. Petersburg:: “Komplekt”, 1992, p. 232 (in Russian).
[663] Georgievsky,
op. cit., p. 83.
[664] Athelstan Riley (ed.), Birkbeck and the Russian Church, London: Macmillan, 1917, pp. 170, 172-173.
[665] Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304, Harlow: Longmans, 1983, p. 1.
[666] Litavrin,
quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., pp. 177-178.
[667] Klyuchevsky, quoted in Solonevich, op. cit., p. 296.
[668] Îstrogorsky, G.A. “Evolyutsia vizantijskogo
obryada koronovania”,
quoted by Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 117.
[669] Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 14.
[670] Zemskova,
personal communication, August 11, 2000. There is in fact little agreement about the date at which this
sacrament was introduced in Byzantium. According to Fomin and Fomina, (op.
cit., vol. I, p. 96), it was introduced in the ninth century, when Basil I
was anointed with the chrismation oil or with olive oil (P.G. 102.765); according to Ì.V. Zyzykin (Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931,
part 1, p. 133) – in the 10th century, when Nicephorus was anointed
by Patriarch Polyeuctus; according to Canning (op. cit., p. 15) – in the
12th century; according to Dagron (op. cit., p. 282) and G.
Podskalsky (op. cit., p. 70) – in the 13th century. Nicetas
Khoniates mentions that Alexis III was “anointed” at his coronation in 1195;
but according to Vera Zemskova (personal communication) it is likely that this
meant “raising to the rank of emperor” rather than anointing with chrism in the
literal, bodily sense. In this distinction between visible and invisible
anointing lies the crux of the matter, for even bishops, who (in the East)
received no visible anointing, were often described as having been anointed. And
when St. Photius said of the Emperor Michael III that God “has created him and
anointed him since the cradle as the emperor of His People”, he was clearly
speaking about an invisible anointing. (V.M.)
[671] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 282-283.
[672] Zosimas,
quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 118.
[673] St. Gregory, Oration IV, P.G. 47, col. 564B.
[674] Menaion, May 21, Vespers, Litia, sticheron.
[675] Menaion, May 21, Mattins, sedalion after the first chanting of the Psalter.
[676] Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 521.
[677] Vasilievsky, quoted in Vasiliev, op. cit., pp. 521-522.
[678] Patriarch Germanus, in F.I. Uspensky, Istoria Vizantiiskoj Imperii, Moscow: “Mysl’”, 1997, p. 412 (in Russian).
[679] Archbishop Demetrius, in Uspensky, op. cit., p. 413.
[680] Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 212.
[681] John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, London: Penguin books, 1996, pp. 188, 189.
[682] Macrides, op. cit., pp. 280-281. “A great miracle occurred when his relics were exhumed to be translated. As his tomb was opened, no unpleasant odo was noticed, but rather a certain fragrance and grace mixed with a sweetness, like unto an aromatic garden. The reposed one sat upon a throne with all his members intact and without any corruption, taint, or other sign of death about him. Though he had been buried seven years before, he looked as if he were not alive, with his members in their natural condition and his face still ruddy. Even the saint’s royal vesture remained undecayed, as it it had been tailored that very day… Afterward, his relics wrought many miracles in Magnesia (Translated from The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, vol. 11 (November), Athens, 1979, pp. 154-156; in Orthodox Life, vol. 32, no. 6, November-December, 1982, p. 44).
[683] Uspensky, op. cit., pp. 463-464.
[684] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 486.
[685] Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 617.
[686] Quoted in R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longmans, 1988, p. 333.
[687] Speros Vryonis, Jr., Byzantium and Europe, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, p. 161.
[688] Frontier, “The Council of Lyons and the False Union of 1274”, The True Vine, vol. 2, no. 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 5-6.
[689] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 496.
[690] Uspensky, op. cit., pp. 510, 511.
[691] The Arsenites remained in schism from the official Church for several more decades. They insisted that “all elections to the see of Constantinople after the patriarch’s deposition (1265) were uncanonical and invalid. No less irregular in their opinion was the status of those elevated to the episcopal dignity by Arsenius’ ‘illegitimate’ successors.” (Papadakis, op. cit., p. 219). In 1310 most of them were reconciled to the official Church. Some, however, such as St. Theoliptus, metropolitan of Philadelphia, considered that the Church had been reconciled too easily with the Arsenites and broke communion with the official Church for a period. (A.I Sidorov, “Sv. Feolipt Filadel’fijskij I ego uchenie o Tserkvi”, Pravoslavnij Put', 1997, p. 16 (in Russian)).
[692] Dagron, op. cit., p. 262
[693] Dagron, op. cit., p. 263.
[694] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 513.
[695] This conversion reminds us of the similar conversion – to union with the Soviets – of Metropolitan Sergius of Nizhni-Novogord, deputy leader of the Russian Church, after his spell in prison in 1927.
[696] Frontier, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
[697] R.J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 24.
[698] Crampton (op. cit., p. 24) gives another reason for Kaloyan’s turning to the Pope: his desire to secure his western frontier before attacking the crusaders who had declared him their vassal. (V.M.)
[699] Borislav Primov writes that Kaloyan had styled himself emperor even before he received the title of rex, “king”, from the Pope. “However, he was not completely satisfied and continued to call himself ‘emperor’ in his letters” (Primov, “The Re-Establishment and Consolidation of the Bulgarian State and Medieval Europe (from the end of the 12th to the 13th century), 1300 Years of Bulgarian Culture, Sofia Press Agency, p. 30). (V.M.).
[700] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 246-248.
[701] Rogich, Serbian Patericon, Forestville, CA: St. Paisius Abbey Press, volume I, 1994, p. 82.
[702] The Archbishop of Ohrid was loyal to the “Emperor” of Epirus rather than Nicaea, so he was not likely to pass on such a petition to a patriarch loyal to Nicaea rather than Epirus. (V.M.)
[703] Rogich, op. cit., pp. 86-88.
[704] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 255.
[705] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, The Life of St. Sava, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 103.
[706] Rogich, op. cit., pp. 92-93.
[707] The Bulgarian ruler John Asen had dropped his claim to be “emperor” as opposed to simply “tsar”. Thus after his victory of Theodore Angelus, he erected a column in Trnovo with the inscription: “I, John Asen, in Christ God the faithful Tsar and Autocrat of the Bulgars, …. set forth on a march upon Romania and defeated the Greek troops, and there captured the Emperor himself, Theodore Comnenus… The Latins have kept only the cities round Tsargrad itself, but they have become subject to the power of my Majesty, for they have no king but myself, and only thanks to me have they continued their existence” (quoted in Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 525).
[708] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 215-216. Moreover, in 1355 Patriarch Kallistos of Constantinople told the Trnovo clergy that they had been given a patriarch only “through condescension”, and he was “not to be counted” among the most holy patriarchs (Uspensky, op. cit., p. 446).
[709] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 269.
[710] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality, Grays lake, Ill.: Free Serbian Diocese, 1988, pp. 23-24.
[711] Àrchimandrite Nikon (Ivanov), Protopriest Nicholas (Likhomanov), Zhitia Russkikh Svyatykh, Òutaev, 2000, vol. 1, p. 675 (in Russian).
[712] Quoted in Francis Carr, Ivan the Terrible, London: David & Charles, 1981, pp. 39, 44.
[713] Quoted in Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 502.
[714] Ya.K. Begunov, A.P. Kirpichnikov, Knyaz’ Aleksandr Nevsky i ego epokha, St. Petersburg, 1995, p. 200 (in Russian).
[715] Fennell, op. cit., p. 121.
[716] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 332; Fennell, op. cit., p. 113.
[717] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 258-259.
[718] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, III, 2, 27, in Défense des saints hésychastes, edited by John Meyendorff, Louvain: Sacrilegium Sacrum Lovaninese, 1973, pp. 692, 693 (in French and Greek).
[719] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 259.
[720] Rogich, op. cit., p. 90.
[721] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 259, 260.
[722] Tim Judah, The Serbs, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 39.
[723] Nun Ioanna, “Taina kosovskoj bitvy – dukhovnoe zaveschanie tsarya Lazarya”, Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, N 7 (583), July, 1998, pp. 15, 16, 19, 21, 22-23 (in Russian).
[724] I. Marchevsky, Apokaliptichnata Perspektiva ot Kraya Vremenata v Svetootecheski Sintez, Sofia: “Monarkhichesko-Konservativen Seyuz”, 1994, p. 80 (in Bulgarian).
[725] That this was a real threat already in the fourteenth century, and even in some parts of Great Russia, is illustrated by an incident that took place in Novgorod, which was traditionally, because of its foreign merchant colony, less anti-Catholic than other parts of Great Russia. “On one occasion at the end of the fourteenth century, the city, in bargaining with the patriarch of Constantinople for privileges for its archbishop, threatened to go to Rome as a final argument. This threat was not serious and did not fail to elicit a severe rebuke from the patriarch, but, up to the time of the loss of their independence, the Novgorodians saw no objection against a political alliance with the Catholic kings of Lithuanian Poland” (Fedotov, op. cit., p. 336).
[726] St. John
Maximovich,
Proiskhozhdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii, Podolsk,
1994, p. 9 (in Russian).
[727] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 337.
[728] Sic. This should read: (1354-1378). (V.M.).
[729] For this St. Alexis was awarded a plot of land in the Kremlin where he built the Chudov («miracle”) monastery. (V.M.)
[730] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 338-339.
[731] For details of this struggle, see A. Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii russkoj tserkvi, Paris: YMCA Press, 1959, vol. I, pp. 326-334 (in Russian).
[732] Àrchimandrite
Nikon, Zhitie i Pobedy Prepodobnago i Bogonosnago Otsa Nashego Sergia,
Igumena Radonezhskago, Sergiev Posad, 1898, p. 149 (in Russian)..
[733] St. John Maximovich, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
[734] Zaitsev, “Prepodobnij Sergij Radonezhskij. Sergij i gosudarstvo”, http://portal-credo.ru/site/index.php?act=lib?id=149 (in Russian).
[735] St. John Maximovich, op. cit., p. 12.
[736] Àrchimandrite Nikon, op.
cit., pp. 168-169.
[737] Àrchimandrite Nikon, op.
cit., p. 169.
[738] Lurye, commentary on J. Meyendorff, Zhizn’ i Trudy Svyatitelia Grigoria Palamy, St. Petersburg: Byzantinorossika, 1997, pp. 396-397 (in Russian).
[739] Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964, p. 104.
[740] Strictly speaking, St. Mark was not the only hierarch who did not sign. Bishop Isaiah of Stavropol, the Bishop of Tver and Bishop Gregory of Georgia secretly left the city to avoid signing. George Scholarius, the future patriarch, together with John Evgenios, the saint’s brother and the Despot Demetrius also left earlier without signing. And the signature of Methodius of Lacedaemon is nowhere to be found. See The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1990, p. 466. It is surely no accident that Russia and Georgia were the only two Orthodox countries to retain their independence thereafter.
[741] Fomin and
Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. 1, p. 123.
[742] Ya.S. Lurye, «Perepiska Groznogo s Kurbskim v obschestvennoj
mysli Drevnej Rusi», in
Ya.S. Lurye and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim,
Ìîscow: «Nauka», 1993, p. 229 (in
Russian).
[743] Patriarch Anthony, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 188.
[744] Smirnov, Istoria
Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, Ìîscow: Êrutitskoe
podvorye, 2000, pp.
159-160 (in Russian).
[745] Boyeikov, Tserkov',
Rus' i Rim, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983. (in Russian).
See Fr. John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge
University Press, 1981.
[746] Fomin and
Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. 1, p. 193.
[747] Pope Nicholas V wrote to him: “From this man [the imperial legate, Andronicus Vryennios] and from your own letters, we have learned that you desire union and accept the synodal decree” (P.G. 160, 1201B). See “The Long-Awaited King”, Orthodox Christian Witness, May 7/20, 1979. St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite appears to have believed that Constantine was not a uniate and therefore inscribed him in some calendars. But there appears to be no doubt that he was a uniate and therefore cannot be counted as an Orthodox saint.
[748] Constantine Tsipanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence, New York: Kentron Vyzantinon Erevnon, 1986, p. 74.
[749] Tsipanlis writes: “In the eyes of Mark even the complete political extinction of the Byzantine State was not as important as the preservation of the integrity of Orthodoxy” (op. cit., p. 60).
[750] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 124.
[751] Quoted in Norwich, op. cit., p. 388.
[752] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 77.
[753] Leontiev, “Vyzantinizm i Slavyanstvo”, in Vostok, Rossiya i Slavyanstvo, Moscow, 1996, p. 97 (in Russian).
[754] Nikolsky, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 122.
[755] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 163.
[756] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.163.
[757] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 104-112.
[758] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 494.
[759] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 122-123.
[760] Archbishop Seraphim, “Sud’by Rossii”, Pravoslavnij Vestnik, N 87, January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7 (in Russian).
[761] Quoted in Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 684.
[762] The Council of Basle deposed Pope Eugene on June 25, 1439, ten days before the signing of the council of Florence. See The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, op. cit., p. 464.
[763] The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, op. cit., pp. 476-477.
[764] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 18.
[765] Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, part I, p. 123 (in Russian).
[766] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 266.
[767] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 316.
[768] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 133. All Orthodox commune of both the Body and Blood of Christ. However, the emperor was given the right of communing within the altar like a priest (op. cit., p. 110).
[769] Kartashev, Svataia Rus' i Puti Rossii, Paris, 1956 (in Russian); quoted in A. Tuskarev (Hieromonk Dionysius (Alferov)), Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve, Staritsa, 1992, pp. 34, 35 (in Russian).
[770] The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, op. cit., p. 125.
[771] Archbishop Averky of Syracuse, Syem’ Vselenskikh Soborov, Moscow, 1996, p. 11 (in Russian).
[772] Averky, op.cit., p. 71.
[773] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 116, 117.
[774] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 322-323.
[775] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 120-121.
[776] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 121.
[777] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 137.
[778] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 139.
[779] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 294-295.
[780] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 303.
[781] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 304.
[782] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 305.
[783] Quoted in Tsankov, Protopriest S. "Pokoynij Tsar Boris, kak religiozno-nravstvennaya lichnost'", Pravoslavnaya Rus', N 18 (1495), 15/28 September, 1993, p. 15 (in Russian).
[784] Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 92 (in Russian).
[785] Festal Menaion, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, Mattins, Canon, Canticle Eight, troparion.