THE MYSTERY OF CHRISTIAN POWER

Or: The Christian Roman Empire and its Pre-Christian Origins

to the Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Vladimir Moss

© Vladimir Moss, 2004

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.

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, Acts of the Fourth Ecumenical Council.

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’.

Emperor Constantine VII, On the Government of the Empire

CONTENTS

Foreword………………………………………………...….…..……………5

Part I: The Origins of the Power

1. Pre-Christian Statehood…………………………………….…………...8

Paradisial Statehood – The Mark of Cain - Nimrod’s Babylon – The Egyptian Pharaohs – Israel: The Pilgrim State – From Theocracy to Autocracy – The Davidic Kingdom – Athenian Democracy - 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………..………………...……...……………………….……..84

Christ and the Roman Empire – Old Rome: Protector or Persecutor? – Why Rome? – Rome and China - Rome and the End of the World – Church and State in Old Rome

Part II: The Triumph of the Power (306-1000)

3. New Rome: the East..…..…………………….……………………..…120

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 – St. Vladimir the Great

4. New Rome: the West…………….…………………….…………..….203

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 Power (1000-1453)

5. The Resurrection of Old Rome……...………………………...……..271

The Germans and the Filioque – The Reform Movement – The Schism of 1054 - The Fall of Orthodox England – The Gregorian Revolution – The Crusades – The Apotheosis of Papism: Innocent III – Medieval Revolutionaries: Jews, Albigensians and Templars – The Kabbala - The Resurrection of Roman Law – Natural Law - The Crisis of the Medieval Papacy: Boniface VIII – Proto-Protestantism: Marsilius, Wycliff, Hus - The Conciliar Movement

6. The Fall of New Rome…...…………...…………...…………...…..…351

The Slide towards Absolutism – Church and State in Kievan Rus’ - The Breakup of Kievan Rus’ – Autocracy Restored: St. Andrew of Bogolyubovo – Georgia under the Bagratids – The Nicaean Empire and Royal Anointing – The Nicaean Emperors 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…………….…………….………438

The Two Kingdoms – The Rights of the Orthodox Autocrat – Absolutism and Democracy – The Restoration of Romanity

FOREWORD

The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet.

Psalm 109.1.

Grant peace in the midst of wars to Thy commonwealth, and strengthen the Orthodox kings whom Thou hast loved, O only Lover of mankind.

Festal Menaion, Feast of the Meeting of the Lord, Kontakion.

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, whose end is almost 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 to 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 origins, triumph and decline, in the context of the period when most Christians in both East and West fervently believed in the possibility of a universal Christian empire subject in reality, and not merely theoretically, to Christ the King.

In the writing of this book I am indebted above all to the writings of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church. Among more recent Fathers and Church writers, I have especially drawn on the work of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, L.A. Tikhomirov, M.V. Zyzykin, Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Lubny, St. John Maximovich, Archbishop of San Francisco, Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Jordanville and Syracuse and Bishop Dionysius (Alferov). I should also like to thank my friend Anton Ter-Grigorian for our stimulating discussions on this subject, and also my pastor, Hieromonk Augustine (Lim) for his steadfast encouragement and help.

Although I have tried to preserve theological and historical accuracy to the best of my ability, it goes without saying that I, and I alone, am responsible for any errors that may have crept into this book, for which I ask forgiveness.

This book is dedicated to Abbot Methodius and the Monks of the Monastery of the Holy Ascension, Esphigmenou, Mount Athos, one of the last surviving outposts of true Christian power in the world today.

Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us! Amen.

August 6/19, 2004.

The Transfiguration of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

East House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking, Surrey, England.

PART I: THE ORIGINS OF THE POWER
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.

Paradisial Statehood

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 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, enabling 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[3], and comes into the world already as a member of a family. So, contrary to the teaching of some heterodox thinkers, 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 has a father as its head, so the state has a king as its head. As 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.”[4]

One of those who expounded this theme in the most detail and the greatest clarity was Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow. He emphasised 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…”[5]

In a sense the first king and queen were Adam and Eve. For “from the beginning,” says St. John Chrysostom, “He made one sovereignty only, setting the man over the woman. But after our race ran headlong into extreme disorder, He appointed other sovereignties also…”[6]

S.V. Troitsky writes: “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).”[7]

Are we to conclude, then, that 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.”[8] 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 original sin of Adam and Eve 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)[9]…

The Mark of Cain

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…”[10] Again, St. John Chrysostom says: “Since equality of honour often leads to fighting, He has made many governments and forms of subjection.”[11] 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.”[12]

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). [13]

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 had 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 was coming at the end of the ages, would 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."[14]

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.”[15]

Noah 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.[16]

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.”[17]

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…[18]

At this point we must agree with the judgement of L.A. Tikhomirov, following Korkunov, that the idea that“the state is ‘the monopoly of violence’ completely coincides with the Christian attitude to the state. The complete removal of violence from private right and its exclusive concentration in the hands of the state has this meaning, that violence in personal interests is unconditionally removed and forbidden. But it is allowed only in those hands, in which there is in principle no personal interest, but only the interest of justice. With the monopolization of violence in the hands of the state violence is released only to support justice.”[19]

Thus all true political authorities are established by God: “there is no authority that is not from God” (Romans 13.1). This is true especiallly 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).

Nimrod’s Babylon

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 Soloviev 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.”[20]

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 Tikhomirov: (i) the deification of the forces of nature, and (ii) the cult of ancestors. [21]

The religion of Nimrod’s Babylon 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".[22] 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.[23]

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!”[24]

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,[25] 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.”[26]

“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."[27]

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.”[28]

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.’”[29]

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..."[30]

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 Egyptian Pharaohs

The second battle between the Church and the State 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).[31] 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]…”[32]

“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.[33] 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.”[34]

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”[35] – 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.”[36]

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.[37]

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”.[38]

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! 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.

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.”

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!”39

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. For, as Solomon says, “the worship of idols not to be named is the beginning, the cause and the end of all evils” (Wisdom 14.27).

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."[41]

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.[42]

This similarity between the 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…

Israel: The Pilgrim State

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, on the other hand, and in 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: “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.”[43]

But there was no democracy in the modern sense. Although every man in Israel 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.”[44]

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).”[45]

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[46], 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.[47] 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.”[48] 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, who simply had to follow the man God had elected, as when He said to Gideon: “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).

From Theocracy to Autocracy

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.

That law, a law which governed the life of the People in all its spheres, including the religious, was provided by God Himself as the Supreme Ruler of the people (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 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.”[49]

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).

To modern readers Saul's sins mght 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.[50]

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]

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 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).

Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem and carrying away of the Jews to Babylon, writes Tikhomirov, “was understood by the Jews as a punishment of God for their apostasy and corruption. In Babylonia, therefore, there began a process of repentance and regeneration. But on the other hand a powerful spiritual temptation awaited the Jews. Chaldea at that time had become an advanced country of pagan culture. In respect of religion it preserved all the charms of the magic of ancient Sumeria and Akkad, adding to it the astronomical and astrological science of Assyrian star-gazing. The three main branches of ‘Chaldean wisdom’ combined a considerable fund of real scientific knowledge with the higher philosophy worked out through the ages by the mind of the Assyro-Babylonians, combined with the teaching of Zoroaster and offshoots of Hinduism. Paganism presented itself before the captives from Jerusalem as a huge intellectual power armed with everything that men could learn and assimilate at that time.

“To this we must add that Babylon had attained the highest level of political might and represented a remarkable system of state structure which was hardly excelled by all the ancient states. A profoundly worked out law guaranteed the inhabitants’ rights, and the Babylonian citizens of other tribes here came upon such perfect civil conditions as they could not even imagine in their native countries. The agriculture, industry and trade of Babylon was at a high level of development. As captives of another tribe, crushed materially and morally, recognizing that they had betrayed their Lord, the Jews came into a country that was striking by its might, glitter, wealth, knowledge, developed philosophical thought – everything by which one nation could influence another. If they ‘sat by the waters of Babylon and wept’, dreaming of revenge on the destroyers of their fatherland, they also could not help being subjected to the influences of Chaldean wisdom.

“They had grown up in the thousand-year conviction of the loftiness of their chosen people, of which there was no equal upon the earth. They remembered amazing examples of the help of the Lord in the past, when He had crushed the enemies of Israel, including the Assyrians themselves. They were filled with determination to raise themselves to the full height of their spirit and their providential mission. On the other hand, they did not have the strength not to submit to the intellectual influence of Babylon. In general, the age of the Babylonian captivity was the source of very complex changes in Israel. In the higher sphere of the spirit prophetic inspirations finally matured to the vision of the nearness of the Messiah. In the conservative layer of teachers of the law there arose a striving to realize that ‘piety of the law’, the falling away from which, as it seemed to all, had elicited the terrible punishments of God. There began the establishment of the text of the law and the collection of tradition; an embryonic form of Talmudic scholarship was born. Beside it, the masses of the people involuntarily imbibed the local pagan beliefs, and the teachings of ‘Chaldean wisdom’ was reflected in the minds of the intelligentsia; there was born the movement that later expressed itself in the form of the Cabbala, which under the shell of supposedly Moisean tradition developed eastern mysticism of a pantheistic character…”[57]

Athenian Democracy

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 same time as the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, is no exception to this rule. 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.”[58]

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.”[59]

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.[60] 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 thought shows that the movement towards democracy went hand in hand with religious scepticism.[61]

It is in the context of this gradual loss of faith in the official “Olympian” religion that Athenian 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 (); 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.’”[62]

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.’”[63]

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. Riurik, 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.

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 a foreign power and the most evil despotism yet seen in history.

This element of selfish and 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.”[64]

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 Athenian democracy could be as cruel and unjust and imperialistic as any despotism. It was exemplified in the Athenians’ cruel treatment of the inhabitants of the little island of Melos simply because they did not want to become part of the Athenian empire. [65] 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

It was the reflections on the failure of their state that prompted Plato to undertake the construction of the first systematic theory of politics and of the relationship of politics to religion.

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 merely 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] Thus he wrote: “Until philosophers are kings, 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 deny that there are elements of utopianism 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 lechers and 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, 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 according to which “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 ideal 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. Nor was this ideal just a pipedream – he tried to introduce it into Syracuse. But it led just as surely to hell in the form the despotism 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.[76]

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).[77] 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”.[78]

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.”[79] 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.”[80]

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.”[81] 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?[82]

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.”[83]

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.[84]

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.”[85] 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.”[86]

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, together with the happiness of its citizens understood in a purely secular sense, 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 ”the first duty of the State is concern over the gods”, he recognised that politics cannot be divorced from religion.[87] 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…”[88]

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 issues relating to democracy were raised in the Classical 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[89], while Plato’s ideas about philosopher-kings and guardians, child-rearing, censorship and education found a strong echo in the “people’s democracies” of twentieth-century communist Eastern Europe.

In the intervening period, only two major ideas made a significant contribution to thinking on politics. One was Christianity, which we shall discuss in detail later. And the other 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 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.”[90]

Another important element in Stoicism was fate. Stoicism took the idea of fate, and 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’.”[91]

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.[92] 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.[93] 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).”[94]

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.

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…”[95]

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…”[96]

From Zerubbabel to the Maccabees

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 in 586, 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. However, the book of Esther shows that piety was not completely extinguished even among those Jews who stayed in Persia, and we know that Zerubbabel returned to Babylon to work on strengthening the exilarchate, becoming the first “Prince of the Exile” (Resh goluta).[97]

In Israel, the most important Jewish leader was the priest Ezra. “His main task,” writes Tikhomirov, “was the re-establishment of the Law of Israel. Under him there began a collecting of the Sacred Scriptures and traditions, and the people’s getting to know them, and a multiplication of copies of Scripture. Around him there gathered the so-called soferim – the first ‘scribes’, the forerunners of the Pharisees. Under their leadership the regeneration of Israel progressed, but this regeneration was placed in the soil of the most narrow exclusiveness. The inhabitants of Palestine in the time of the captivity, the Samaritans and others, wanted to join the Jews and serve Jehovah together with them, but they were severely rejected. Since a very large number of mixed marriages had been entered into, and a significant number of children had been born from them, a triumphant repentance of the people was appointed, the marriages were broken, and the foreign wives and their children were sent back to their parents.

“The task of the religious conservatives, who were first of all national patriots, consisted in strongly organizing the Jewish people and concentrating it under the leadership of the intelligentsia of that time – the Pharisees. This was not a priestly party and was even hostile to the ‘Sadducees’, the priestly party. The Pharisees constituted the intelligentsia, who, inflating the cult of the law, received in it the means for holding the whole people in their hands. The interpretation of the law given by the Pharisees was in general rational and humane, being adapted to the conditions and way of life of the time. But the endless details of the law thus interpreted required a special class of scholars, since the mass of the people had no opportunity to study these details and subtleties and had to seek enlightenment and guidance from the specialists.

“It was these nationalists who at that decisive moment of history determined the destinies of Israel…”[98]

However, we are running ahead of our story…

In spite of the attempt to revive observance of the law under Ezra and Nehemiah, piety declined in Israel, 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. Those who were occupied with this and guided the people, that is, the Pharisees and Scribes, … produced interpretations by their joint efforts and composed the ruling class. They were undoubtedly deeply convinced people who faithfully served the idea of the Jewish fatherland and were able to achieve popularity. According to their interpretation, the Messiah who was to come had to appear as the political leader of Israel and accomplish the domination of the Jews in the pagan world. The Kingdom of God was understood as the earthly kingdom of Israel. Their passionate conviction that these dreams would be fulfilled showed itself in successive rebellions of the Jews, in those ‘zealots’ whose first representative was Judah of Galilee, who died in a rebellion in the time of Christ.

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.”[99]

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.”[100]

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.”[101]

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…”[102]

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.

Herod the Great

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 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.”[103] 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).[104] 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?[105] 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.[106]

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.”[107]

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.”[108] 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.[109] 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.

The last Jewish king mentioned in the New Testament, also called Herod, was eaten by worms for allowing himself to be hailed as a god (Acts 12). The wheel had turned full circle. The Jews, who had always prided themselves on being ruled by God alone, had become become like the pagans in worshipping a man as 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.”[110]

The Christian people can survive under other systems of government than autocracy, but not prosper. Thus Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) 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’”[111] – 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 as follows. 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 Saul was removed from the kinship for taking it upon himself to offer sacrifices, and 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 Theophylact 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”.[112]

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.”[113]

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…

Paradoxically, the Jews’ submission to the pagans, to their rulers and their gods, was the result of their rejection of their mission to bring the knowledge of the True God to the pagan world. Instead of serving as God’s priests to the pagan world, enlightening them with the knowledge of the One True God Who had been revealed to Abraham and Moses, they were puffed up with dreams of national glory and dominion over the nations. And so God subjected them to those same nations whom they despised and whom they had refused to enlighten, and entrusted the same mission of enlightenment to the New Israel, the Church of Christ.

“On coming into the world,” writes Tikhomirov, “the Saviour Jesus Christ as a man loved his fatherland, Judaea, no less than the Pharisees. He was thinking of the great role of his fatherland in the destinies of the world and mankind no less than the Pharisees, the zealots and the other nationalists. On approaching Jerusalem (during His triumphal entry) He wept and said: ‘Oh, if only thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!’…, and recalling the coming destruction of the city, He added: ‘because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation’ (Luke 19.41,44). ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… which killest… them that are sent to thee!’ He said a little earlier, ‘how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and yet would not!’ (Luke 13.34). What would have happened if the Jews at that decisive moment had accepted the true Messiah? Israel would have become the spiritual head of the whole world, the beloved guide of mankind. At that very time Philo of Alexandria wrote that ‘the Israelites have received the mission to serve as priests and prophets for the whole world, to instruct it in the truth, and in particular the pure knowledge of God’. If they had recognized this truth in full measure, then the coming of the Saviour would have confirmed forever that great mission. But ‘the spirit of the prophets’ turned out to be by no means so strong in Jewry, and its leaders repeated the role of Esau: they gave away the right of the firstborn for a mess of pottage.

“Nevertheless we must not forget that if the nationalist hatred for the Kingdom of God, manifested outside tribal conditions, was expressed in the murder of the Saviour of the world, all His disciples who brought the good news of the Kingdom, all His first followers and a multitude of the first members of the Church to all the ends of the Roman empire were Jews by nationality. The greatest interpreter of the spiritual meaning of the idea of ‘the children of Abraham’ was the pureblooded Jew and Pharisee, the Apostle Paul. He was a Jew by blood, but through the prophetic spirit turned out to be the ideological director of the world to that place where ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek’.”[114]

The End of the State

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”.[115]

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”, “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. And 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. This coincidence pointed, for many of the Holy Fathers and Church writers, 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, coming into existence precisely for the sake of the Christian Church, and creating a political unity that would help and protect the spiritual unity created by the Church.

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.”[116] Origen considered that the 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.[117]

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.”[118]

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.[119]

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."[120]

This teaching was summed up in a liturgical verse: "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.”[121]

That the Roman Empire came into existence for the sake of the Church was, on the face of it, 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…”[122]

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).[123]

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,” writes Fr. Georges Florovsky, “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….”[124]

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 Blessed Theophylact writes: “He said: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’, and again: ‘It is not from here’, but He did not say: It is not in this world and not here. He rules in this world, takes providential care for it and administers everything according to His will. But His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, but from above and before the ages, and ‘not from here’, that is, it is not composed from the earth, although it has power here”.[125] Again, 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…”[126]

The Lord 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.[127] 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 forbade the bringing of any accusations 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.[128] 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).[129]

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).

The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia wrote in 1933 that Soviet power could not be compared with “the Roman authority, submission to which the Apostles Peter and Paul demanded of the Christians of their time, even though it too later persecuted the followers of Christ. The Romans by nature were distinguished by their moral valor, for which, according to the words of Augustine in his book On the City of God, the Lord magnified and glorified them. To the genius of the Romans humanity owes the working out of a more perfect law, which was the foundation of its famous governmental structure, by which it subjected the world to itself to an even greater degree than by its renowned sword. Under the shadow of the Roman eagle many tribes and nations prospered, enjoying peace and free internal self-government. Respect and tolerance for all religion were so great in Rome tht they were at first also extended to recently engendered Christianity. It is sufficient to remember that the Roman procurator Pilate tried to defend Christ the Savior from the malice of the Jews, pointing out His innocence and finding nothing blameworthy in the doctrine He preached. During his many evangelical travels, which brought him into contact with the inhabitants of foreign lands, the Apostle Paul, as a Roman citizen, appealed for the protection of Roman law for defense against both the Jews and the pagans. And, of course, he asked that his case be judged by Caesar, who, according to tradition, found him to be innocent of what he was accused ofl only later, after his return to Rome from Spain, did he undergo martyrdom there.

“The persecution of Christians never permeated the Roman system, and was a matter of the personal initiative of individual emperors, who saw in the wide dissemination of the new Faith a danger for the state religion, and also for the order of the State, until one of them, St. Constantine, finally understood that they really did not know what they were doing, and laid his sword and sceptre at the footstool of the Cross of Christ…”[130]

For this reason, the early Christians always expressed loyalty to the emperor – even those who were killed by him. Thus in the second century St. Justin the Martyr wrote: “We worship God only, but in other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging you as emperors and rulers of men and women, and praying that with your imperial power you may also be found to possess sound judgement…”[131]

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).”)[132]

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.”[133] 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.”[134] 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’.”[135] 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.”[136]

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.[137] 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.”[138]

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.”[139]

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.[140] 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…”[141]

An important change in Roman religion came with Augustus’ introduction of eastern ideas of divine kingship, which he had come to know 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.

“After Augustus,” writes Roberts, “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.”[142]

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."[143]

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.”[144]

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.[145] 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.”[146]

Why Rome?

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, not the Kingdom of Christ but that 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.[147]

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.”[148]

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 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”.[149] The classical Greek concepts of citizenship and equality before the law were now given a vastly deeper connotation and wider denotation.

Indeed, the universalism of Roman law, applying a single standard to all citizens of the Roman empire, regardless of race or culture or creed, came to be, with Christianity, one of the two main pillars of European civilization, giving 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…”[150]

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.

Rutilius Namatianus said of Rome: “You have made out of diverse races one patria”.[151] 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:

She is the only one who has received

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.[152]

“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.”[153]

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…”[154]

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.”[155]

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…”[156]

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”.[157] 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. In fact, emperor-worship had become a lifeless formality by the third century.

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.”[158] 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”.[159]

Sordi comments on these words: “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’.”[160]

Rome and China

Although Rome encompassed all the major kingdoms of the Mediterranean basin except Persia, there was another contemporary kingdom that also claimed universality and would seem to have had at least an equal claim to greatness – China. Moreover, the Chinese empire lasted much longer than Old Rome, expiring at almost the same time, the early twentieth century, as the Third Rome, Russia, and even eventually succumbed to the same enemy – communism. But China not only was not destined to become the cradle for the growth of Christian civilization, but remained more impervious to the True Faith than any other major nation on earth, acquiring its first truly Christian martyrs only in 1900. Why? By attempting to answer this question, we may gain further insights into the specific qualities of Rome that made it the object of the Lord’s election as the Guardian of the Ark, the saving Ark of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

China acquired unity in both cultural and political unity at about the same time as Rome – in the late third century BC. Just as the Rome’s final conquest of Carthage in 202 BC finally established her as the dominant power in the West Mediterranean, which dominance was extended to the East by the battle of Actium in 31 BC, so the victory of the Ch’in over their last enemy in 221 BC established that there would be only one Chinese State on the North China plain, while the early Han dynasty had extended this rule over almost the whole of modern China by its fall in 9 BC. Each universal empire proclaimed its exclusion of the northern barbarians who did not share in their civilization by the building of a wall – Hadrian’s wall in the Roman West, and the far longer (1400-mile) and more massive Great Wall of China.

But there the similarities end. Let us begin with the walls. Hadrian’s wall was built by Roman professional soldiers, at no significant cost in lives. But the Great Wall of China, according to legend, cost a million lives, and this was only one of the empire’s vast public works, such as the system of canals which linked the Yangtse river with the Yellow River to the north and Hangchow to the south. Roberts writes: “Millions of labourers were employed on this and on other great irrigation schemes. Such works are comparable in scale with the Pyramids and surpass the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. They imposed equally heavy social costs, too, and there were revolts against conscription for building and guard duties.”[161]

In other words, China was essentially the same kind of despotism as the pagan empires of Egypt and Babylon, whereas Rome, as we have seen, evolved a unique state system composed of republican, aristocratic and despotic elements. This meant that the characteristic, and vitally important combination of freedom and discipline that characterised Roman statehood was lacking in China. Moreover, the ancestor-worship which was at the root of the Egyptian and Babylonian systems of king-worship was still more clearly the root of Chinese despotism.

“As a rule,” writes Tikhomirov, “all the monotheistic religions are more favourable to the appearance of a monarchical form of supreme power [as opposed to aristocratic or democratic forms], while polytheistic religions, on the contrary, are not very favourable to it, unless the cult of ancestors creates the deification of the representative of a dynasty in some ascending line of kinship.

“It is understandable how the deification of ancestors, who were at the same time the founders of the royal dynasty, confers on the king the significance of being the living expression of the spirit and faith of the people. The presence of this element is more or less noticeable in all the ancient kingdoms. In Assyria the chief god was Assur, who was also worshipped as the protector of the dynasty. He is called the son of Shem [and therefore the nephew of Ham] in the Bible. In Egypt they openly declared that originally the gods ruled in the country - in other words, the ancestors of the kings were counted among the gods. As regards China, our well-known Sinologist S. Georgievsky has very convincingly explained the significance of the worship of ancestors through an analysis of Chinese hieroglyphs. As is well known, the hieroglyphs of the Chinese express, not sounds, but concepts and combinations of concepts, and therefore the analysis of hieroglyphs gives us the opportunity to determine what circumstances and facts conditioned the composition of a given hieroglyph. Thus, for example, we can clearly see from what elements ‘state’ or ‘army’ or ‘people’, etc., were constructed.

“Such an analysis of the hieroglyphs led Georgievsky to the conclusion that the ancient Chinese kings were no more than elected leaders. They were elected as leaders for their military services, since the hieroglyph ‘dai’ expresses precisely the fact that the royal person is skilled in military matters. And then this originally elected leader is later turned into a representative of Heaven itself.

“The general picture that emerges is as follows. One of the dynastic founders of the Chinese, having been elected as leader during their conquest of their present territories, was gradually turned into a supreme god, while the Chinese emperors became his ‘sons’. The son of the first leader, who had probably not been very powerful yet, offered sacrifices to him in accordance with the demands of ancestor-worship. Consequently he became a necessary mediator between the people and the dead leader, whose spirit was necessary to the people as a protector. In this way the authority of his descendants grew from generation to generation. All the later kings, on their death, filled up heaven with yet more spirits, who were protectors of the Chinese, and all of them lived in ‘Shan-Di’ (Heaven). But each Emperor was ‘the son of heaven’, and his very reign was called ‘the service of heaven’. In reality the ‘service of heaven’ was at the same time both a family obligation of the Emperor in accordance with ancestor-worship, and administration of the people over whom all these spirits had ruled during their lives, becoming the protectors of their former subjects after death.

“The ancestor-worship that was obligatory for each separate family had no significance for all the other families of the Chinese people, while the cult of the powerful tribe of Shan-Di touched them all. The ancestors of the other families remained domestic spirit-protectors, while Shan-Di gradually grew into the main national Divinity. It is understandable what an aura of power the cult of Shan-Di gave to the Chinese Emperor, who was unquestionably the natural preserver of this cult by inheritance. In submitting to heaven, that is, Shan-Di, the people were thereby obliged to submit to his earthly representative, the Chinese Emperor, and could not refuse him obedience without at the same time refusing obedience to heaven itself. Thus from the original, fortunate war-leader, who was raised from the midst of the leaders of the Chinese clans equal to him, there grew, on the soil of ancestor-worship, a supreme power that no longer depended on the people’s desires and choices, but on the will of ‘heaven’, ‘Shan-Di’.”[162]

The concept of the will of heaven was especially important at moments of dynastic change, as when the earliest, Shang dynasty was overcome by the Chou in 1027 BC. For, as Roberts writes, “the Chou displacement of the Shang was religious as well as military. The idea was introduced that there existed a god superior to the ancestral god of the dynasty and that from him there was derived a mandate to rule. Now, it was claimed, he had decreed that the mandate should pass to other hands.”[163]

Already in the Shang monarchy the king, according to Gernet, was both “head of the armies and chief priest”. “All activities are dependent on the royal palace, which vaguely assumes functions which are simultaneously political, religious, military, and economic.”[164] Shafarevich has produced evidence that the kings even in this very early period ruled in a despotic, quasi-socialist manner: they called their subjects “cattle”, their graves were surrounded by thousands of corpses of those killed to accompany them into the next life, agriculture was controlled by the king’s bureaucrats, even the time of marriages was determined by the State.[165]

These despotic tendencies came to their peak in the reign of the first Ch’in emperor and probably the most powerful ruler in history to that date, Shihuang. Guisso and Pagani write: “Although Shihuang had only eleven more years to live after [uniting the Warring States and] founding his dynasty, under his rule a total transformation of the land we now call China took place. He created new administrative units for the capital city of Xianyang and the rest of the country, he abolished the feudal system of landholding and removed the aristocratic warlords. Weights, measures and currencies were standardized throughout the land, and even such details as the width of chariot axles were regulated to help prevent ruts in the thousands of miles of new roads that were being constructed. The various and confusing local scripts were eliminated and one standardized script used throughout the land where a uniform and enormously detailed code of law was imposed everywhere.

“Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of labourers and convicts were conscripted into Shihuang’s great building projects – the canals and irrigation works plus the hundreds of palaces and pavilions for the nobles whom he had moved away from their own conquered territories in order to weaken their power. His most magnificent works, those which would make his name immortal, were also being carried out during this period of enormous change – the Great Wall, his fabled palace at Afang and his enormous tomb where his childless concubines were buried with him.

“And in the year 213 BC an event took place which would make the First Emperor infamous to all succeeding generations – the burning of the country’s books followed by the deaths of 460 scholars of the period whom he buried alive.”[166]

In many ways, Shihuang represents the archetypal despot: his rise to power as a warrior, his drive for uniformity, his cruelty, megalomania and paranoia, his building projects, his militarisation of society, his mass displacement of vast numbers of people, his distrust of thinkers and book-learning, his fear of death and search for immortality.[167]

After his death his empire collapsed very quickly. However, the essential structure of Chinese despotism continued for over 2000 years, succumbing finally only to Western democracy in the twentieth century. This vast structure rested upon a complex of ritual rules and hierarchies of family cults whose summit and linchpin was the emperor.

It is the emperor, writes Gernet, who, by creating titles and ranks based on merits and demerits, “’secretes’ the order which ensures the regular functioning of society as a whole. Since he does this, he does not intervene in quarrels; he contents himself with installing a mechanism which avoids them because it is based on the universal consensus… being completely impartial, he is the source and guarantor of universal order…”[168]

“No private undertaking nor any aspect of public life could escape official regulation. In the first place there was a whole series of state monopolies… This welfare state superintended, to the minutest detail, every step its subjects took from the cradle to the grave…”[169]

However, the most extraordinary thing about the First Emperor was not the vastness of his despotism, but its permanence. After all, in spite of changes of dynasty, Chinese despotism lasted for another 2100 years and more! Such extraordinary longevity requires an explanation…

The first reason must be found in the fact that China, unlike Rome, was geographically isolated and so had few rivals. With the exception of the Mongols, no other nation made a serious attempt to conquer it, whereas Rome had to contend with Carthaginians and Parthians, Picts, Irish, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Goths, Alans, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Russians, Khazars, Arabs, Turks and Jews, not to mention innumerable internal revolts by disaffected generals. Moreover, the Chinese managed to swallow up the barbarians that invaded her, making them into another form of Chinese, whereas the Romans were too few numerically to do that. In spite of that, the Romans had striking success in Romanizing many of the barbarians, especially through the religion that they adopted in their maturity – Christianity. But no Germanic tribal ruler, however great his admiration for Roman civilization, would have done the equivalent of what one Tatar ruler did in 500 – impose Chinese customs and dress on his people by decree.[170]

However, this seeming strength of Chinese civilization was also one of its major weaknesses. The Romans were able to see the superiority of the Greek civilization which it absorbed, and to learn from it. And their adoption from the Jews of the religion of the True God under St. Constantine probably extended the life of the empire for another millennium. The Chinese, on the other hand, were so convinced of their infinite superiority over all non-Chinese, which conception was reinforced by the attitude of other eastern peoples to them, that when the first western embassies came to them in the nineteenth century they thought that they must be bringing tribute, and could not understand the westerners’ refusal to kow-tow to them. That arrogance cost them dear, and led to the final collapse of the Chinese empire in 1911 and its surrender to communism in 1949.

But the most important element determining the fate of any empire is its religion. And it is in the dominance of Confucianism in China that we must seek for the clue not only to the extraordinary stability and longevity of the Chinese empire, but also to its unfittingness to become the cradle of the Church. It might have been different if Taoism, for example, with its numerous extraordinary foreshadowings of Christianity, had become dominant.[171] But while “for his personal spiritual satisfaction, the [first] emperor turned to Taoism and the folk beliefs which had become a part of it”, “for ruling the state, he selected Legalism with its emphasis on strength, discipline and organization”, and “for ruling his Blackhaired people, he chose Confucianism”.[172]

Confucius (551-479 BC) reinforced despotism through his heavy emphasis on conservatism, order, and respect for, and submission to, elders; for Confucius’ definition of good government was: “May the prince be a prince, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.”[173]

“Over a social ocean in which families were the fish that mattered presided one Leviathan, the state. To it and to the family the Confucians looked for authority; those institutions were unchallenged by others, for in China there were no entities such as Church or communes which confused questions of right and government so fruitfully in Europe”.[174]

This is not to say that Confucianism never countenanced any rebellion against the state. But rebellion was rationalised in terms of a new “mandate from heaven” in such a way as to preserve the foundations of society intact. “For 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.”[175]

Thus Hegel’s later idea of the State as "the divine idea on earth" was in essence a reformulation of the Confucian Chinese conception of the State as the reflection of the impersonal heavenly order which rules the world and man. For, as Alexeyev writes, "for Confucius, as for Hegel, the State is 'the highest form of objective morality', than which there is nothing higher".[176] This may partially explain why the Chinese accepted communism with its Hegelian philosophical roots so quickly…

Although there were other trends in Chinese thought, even among Confucius’ own disciples, and Legalism, Taoism and, later, Buddhism all contributed their influences, they were all absorbed into the dominant Confucian stream.[177] “The canonical texts,” writes Roberts, “were established soon after 200 BC. True, Han Confucianism was a syncretic matter; it had absorbed much of legalism. But the important fact was that Confucianism had been the absorbing force. Its ethical precepts remained dominant in the philosophy which formed China’s future rulers. In 58 AD sacrifices to Confucius were ordered in all government schools. Eventually, under the T’ang, administrative posts were confined to those trained in this orthodoxy. For over a thousand years it provided China’s governors with a set of moral principles and a literary culture doggedly acquired by rote-learning. The examinations they underwent were designed to show which candidates had the best grasp of the moral tradition discernible in the classical texts as well as to test mechanical abilities and the capacity to excel under pressure. It made them one of the most effective and ideologically homogeneous bureaucracies the world has ever seen and also offered great rewards to those who successfully made the values of Confucian orthodoxy their own….

“In the Chinese state there was little sense of the European distinction between government and society. Official, scholar and gentleman were usually the same man, combining many roles which in Europe were increasingly to be divided between government specialists and the informal authorities of society. He combined them, too, within the framework of an ideology which was much more obviously central to society than any to be found elsewhere than perhaps in Islam. The preservation of Confucian values was not a light matter, nor satisfiable by lip-service. The bureaucracy maintained those values by exercising a moral supremacy somewhat like that long exercised by the clergy in the West – and in China there was no Church to rival the state. The ideas which inspired it were profoundly conservative; the predominant administrative task was seen to be the maintenance of the established order; the aim of Chinese government was to oversee, conserve and consolidate, and occasionally to innovate in practical matters by carrying out large public works. Its overriding goals were regularity and the maintenance of common standards in a huge and diverse empire, where many district magistrates were divided from the people in their charge even by language. In achieving its conservative aims, the bureaucracy was spectacularly successful and its ethos survived intact across all the crises of the dynasties.”[178]

There were other features making for the uniqueness of this monolithic and self-perpetuating system. “Chinese government,” writes Dominic Lieven, “though still ultimately dependent on local landowners’ collaboration, was far more direct, centralized and bureaucratic than the Roman even in the first and second centuries, let alone subsequently under the Song and Ming dynasties. Writing on the period 27 BC to AD 235, one authority on Roman government comments that ‘the Roman empire remained undergoverned, certainly by comparison with the Chinese empire, which employed, proportionately, perhaps twenty times the number of functionaries.’ Even after the dramatic increase in bureaucracy and centralization under Diocletian in the next century, the late Roman empire still had only one-quarter of the Chinese level of bureaucrats.”[179]

This meant, however, that the Roman empire could make dramatic changes of course more easily than the Chinese. Thus Constantine, coming immediately after Diocletian, was able to ignore the Senate and the bureaucracy and introduce an entirely new official religion. This would have been impossible in China, where the bureaucrats, having a virtual monopoly of education and power (it should be remembered that the army had less prestige and therefore less power in China than in Rome), and committed to the perpetuation of their caste and its ideology, would have stopped any such moves.

Indeed, the Chinese emperor, for all his godlike status, was trapped inside the bureaucracy. “The emperor’s dilemma,” continues Lieven, “was partly due to the fact that China and its bureaucracy was vastly larger and more sophisticated than was the case with any European state before the nineteenth century. In addition, Chinese bureaucrats had a unique esprit de corps. Most bureaucracies worship their procedures and precedents but few see thm as guarantees of cosmic harmony and the moral order of society. The Chinese did, largely because the Confucian bureaucrat filled the roles that in Europe were divided between royal official and priest. Many monarchs, and in particular many modern European ones, have felt deeply frustrated and alienated by the bureaucratic machinery through which they have been forced to rule. China provided stark precedents for this. In the late sixteenth century, for instance, the Ming emperor Wanli refused for many years to appoint new officials, conduct business or meet his ministers. ‘As an emperor who actually carried on a strike against his own bureaucrats over a long period of time, Wanli has come down in history without any close parallel.’ Chinese history taught another crucial, albeit commonsensical, lesson about emperors’ relations with great bureaucratic machines. The ruler who sought to dominate his government must devote his life to this task. In her brilliant account of the reign of Emperor Youngzheng (1723-35), one of China’s most effective monarchs, Beatrice Bartlett comments that his system of rule required a monarch who ‘threw his energies into the hurley-burley of governing, his long days and half his nights consecrated to his mission of ruling. Most hereditary monarchs were neither willing nor able to make this sacrifice, particularly over the span of a long reign. Yongzheng himself commented that ‘one man’s strength is not sufficient to run the Empire’ and died after twelve years on the throne.”[180]

Rome and the End of the World

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’.”[181]

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.[182] 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.”[183]

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.[184] 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."[185]

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 between the State and the other-worldly Kingdom of the Church. 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…

From the day that Rome became Christian, her external universalism became immeasurably more important, precisely because it raised the possibility that the internal universalism of Orthodox Catholicity would spread throughout the world…

Сhurch 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 7God, 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…”[186]

PART II. THE TRIUMPH OF THE POWER

(306-1000)

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.[187]

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.[188]

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.”[189] 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.

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.”[190]

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: “Our purpose is to grant both to the Christians and to all others fully authority to follow whatever worship each man has desired; whereby whatsoever divinity dwells in heaven may be benevolent and propitious to us, and to all who are placed under our authority”.[191] Fr. Alexis Nikolin writes: “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 change in those forms.”[192]

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?”[193] 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.”[194]

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.

For, 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…”[195]

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.”[196] 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.[197]

Although Constantine was not baptised until he was on his deathbed[198], and never received a Christian anointing or 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.”[199]

In 324, Constantine defeated Licinius and imposed his rule on the East, thereby 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.

Indeed, long before his defeat of the last tyrant, Constantine 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).”[200]

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.”[201]

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.”[202]

Constantine also defended the Christians against the Jews. He ordered the release of all slaves whom the Jews had dared to circumcise, and those Jews who killed their co-religionists for converting to Christianity were themselves executed.[203]

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.”[204]

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.[205] 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.”[206]

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.”[207]

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 (Bishop Dionysius (Alferov)) 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."[208]

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 bishops whose jurisdiction is withint the Church: I also am a bishop, ordained by God to oversee those outside the Church.” Eusebius immediately explains that Constantine’s “bishopric” here consisted, not in liturgical priestly acts, but in “overseeing [epeskopei] all the subjects of the empire” and leading them towards piety.[209] 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 did not mean that he was thought to have 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 amidst the sepulchres of the twelve apostles. For in his person the Church had indeed found an “equal to the apostles”. In his reign the process of converting the world that began at Pentecost reached its first climax…

The Heretical and Pagan Reaction

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. Consequently, 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.[210] For, as he wrote to Constantius: “Judgement is made by bishops. What business is it of the Emperor’s?”[211]

Another bishop who spoke out against Constantius was 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.”[212]

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, he 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.[213]

This 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.[214]

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?”[215] Gregory called Julian not only an “apostate”, but also “universal enemy” and “general murderer”, a traitor to Romanity as well as to Christianity,[216] explicitly denying that his was a power from God and therefore requiring obedience: “What demon instilled this thought in you? If every authority were acknowledged as sacred by the very fact of its existence, Christ the Savior would not have called Herod ‘that fox’. The Church would not hitherto have denounced ungoldly rulers who defended heresies and persecuted Orthodoxy. Of course, if one judges an authority on the basis of its outward power, and not on its inner, moral worthiness, one may easily bow down to the beast, i.e. the Antichrist, ‘whose coming will be will with all power and lying wonders’ (II Thessalonians 2.9), to whom ‘power was given… over all kindred, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwelt upon the earth shall worship him, whose names were not written in the book of life of the Lamb’ (Revelation 13.7-8).”[217]

This raises the question: what made Julian the Apostate 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”.[218] In this way he questioned the legitimacy of the Christian Empire as such – a revolutionary position very rare in Byzantine history. 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”[219], 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.”[220] 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 Emperor Hadrian’s decree in 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 tells how the Jews enthusiastically set about the rebuilding. But “suddenly 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.” [221]

But if Julian had succeeded, then, wondered the Christians, what would have prevented him from sitting in the Temple as God – that is, from becoming 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…”[222]

The Fathers were no less bold in their claims on Orthodox emperors. Thus St. Basil the Great wrote: “The Emperors must defend the decrees of God”.[223] 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?”[224] Again, 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.”[225] 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.”[226]

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.”[227]

Kingship and Tyranny

A clear example of the heavenly refusing to bow down before the earthly was provided by St. John Chrysostom in his relations with the Empress Eudoxia. In 403 a silver statue of the empress was erected in Constantinople, before which the public games were performed. “These,” writes Socrates Scholasticus, “John regarded as an insult offered to the Church, and having regained his ordinary freedom and keenness of tongue [after his first exile], he employed his tongue against those who did these things… The empress once more applied his expression to herself as indicating marked contempt towards her own person: she therefore endeavoured to procure the convocation of another council of bishops against him. When John became aware of this, he delivered in the church that celebrated oration beginning with: ‘Again Herodias raves, again she is troubled, again she dances, and again she desires to receive John’s head on a platter’.”[228]

A still clearer example of this new assertiveness of the Church towards the Empire is provided by 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. Thus in 380 he decreed that everyone should become a Christian: “It is Our Will that all the peoples We rule shall practise that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans. We shall believe in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity. We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with divine judgement.”[229]

While only a general, Theodosius had 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”[230] – 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.”[231]

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!”[232] “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.” [233] 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.”[234] St. Ambrose showed an awesome courage in the face of State authority. He knew from his experience as a governor, as well as from his Christian faith, 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”.[235]

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”.[236]

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.” [237]

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.”[238]

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.”[239]

St. Ephraim, in first of his Hymns against Julian, makes a similar distinction: “The royal sceptre governed men and cared for cities and chased away wild animals; the opposite was the sceptre of the King who turned to paganism. The wild animals saw it and were glad…”[240] Since Julian revived paganism and made himself a pagan priest, he was compared to the apostate kings of old, like Ahab and Manasseh, and was destroyed by God.

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."[241]

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.”[242]

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 15^th 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...”[243]

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, 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”.[244]

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.”[245] “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”.[246]

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 the image of the Heavenly King excluded both the pagan idea of the despotic king-god-man and the equally pagan idea of democratism. Thus Eusebius: “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.”[247]

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 К.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”.[248]

This teaching of the fourth-century Fathers оn 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."[249]

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 epithets “beast”, “tyrant” and “forerunner of the Antichrist” in Byzantine liturgical and hagiographical 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…”[250]

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.[251]

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.”[252]

That the Emperor, as well as the hierarchs, was required to defend the faith can be seen in the life of St. Hypatius of Rufinianus: “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…”[253]

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.”[254] Such “interference” was justified, in St. Isidore’s view, because “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”.[255]

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 which anathematised the Monophysite heresy. For, as Marcian said at the 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”. [256]

The faithful bishops welcomed the “interference” of the emperors at such times. Thus St. Leo, Pope of Rome, wrote to the Emperor Marcian: “I have learned that although the impious [Monophysite] Eutychius is in exile as he deserves, in the very place of his condemnation he is still more desperately pouring out many poisons of blasphemies against Catholic purity, and, in order to ensnare the innocent, he is with the greatest shamelessness vomiting that which the whole world was appalled at in him and condemned. And so I think your grace with complete justification ordered that he be sent to a more distant and remote place.”[257]

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 the grace they had received, at any rate in view of the fact that the clergy had forsaken their vocation and trampled on that grace they had received. 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”.[258]

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 often applied to the rulers. 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.[259] 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 6^th 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.”[260]

It was therefore on the basis of a common understanding of the politico-theological 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.[261] 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)[262]

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 – again, on earth - was the emperor.

This unity was not achieved without some pressure, especially on the Roman patriarchate. 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…”[263]

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.”[264]

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.

These laws included 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 (ierwsύnh) and the empire (basileia) is small, as it is between the sacred goods and the goods that are common to the community.’”[265]

The unity of the Christian world under the Christian emperor had as its foundation-stone this “symphony” between the emperor and the patriarch, this symphony being grounded in their common origin in God. However, insofar as the symphony is said in the Novella to exist, not only between two men, but between two institutions, the priesthood and the empire, it goes beyond the relationship between emperor and patriarch. As Hieromonk (now Bishop) Dionysius Alferov writes: “Symphonicity in Church administration only began at the level of the Emperor and Patriarch, and continued at the level of the bishop and eparch (who also received the blessing of the Church for his service) and was completed at the level of the parish priest and its founder. With such a deep ‘churchification’ from all sides of the life of the Orthodox Empire, and the symphonicity of all levels of the Church-State pyramid, the violations of symphony at the highest level were, while annoying, not especially dangerous. The most important thing still remained the service of ‘him who restrains’, which was carried out by the Orthodox Emperor in symphony with the whole Church, and not only personally with the Patriarch. The decisive factor was the personal self-consciousness of the Emperor and the activity based on that. Thus Justianian conceived of himself completely as a Christian sovereign, and strove throughout the whole of his life to make the whole world Christian. His symphony with the Patriarch was desirable as a useful means towards that end, but it was not an end-in-itself. During Justinian’s time five Patriarchates entered into the Empire, including the Roman, and the Emperor did not establish ‘symphonic’ relations with all of them personally (as, for example, with Pope Vigilius, who did not want to accept the decisions of the 5^th Ecumenical Council). But symphony with the whole Church did exist, and a proof of this is provided by the 5^th Ecumenical Council, which was convened through the efforts of Justinian and accepted the dogmatic definitions against the heresies that he presented; and by the multitude of saints who shone forth during his reign and who related completely ‘symphonically’ to him (for example, St. Sabbas the Sanctified); and by the general flourishing of Christian culture.”[266]

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, the minister of religions under the Russian Provisional Government, points out, ‘this is no longer symphony, but cacophony’. [267] 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.[268]

If the emperor were seriously to observe 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[269], 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’.”[270]

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)”.[271]

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 10^th 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.”[272]

It is from the reign of Justinian that the Roman Emperor is evaluated primarily for his services to the Church rather than for his secular successes. As Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes: “After the holy Emperor Justinian any Christian monarch must confess, and reverently and unhypocritically believe that ‘Christian piety is the foundation of the strength of the empire’. For greater clarity let us indicate an example. The Emperor Justinian himself, while paying great attention to theology, Divine services and the building of churches, completely neglected the army and the navy, which under him came to a state of decline. But for his unfeigned piety and faith the Lord protected the empire from invasions and subjected to Justinian a part of the barbarians. After him the iconoclast emperors Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus were outstanding military commanders who reorganized the army and repelled opponents (the Arabs and Bulgars) far from the empire. But the heresy they introduced and their general impiety shook the foundations of Byzantium from within and brought it to the verge of extinction. Therefore amongst the qualities of an exemplary ruler his faith and piety occupy the first place. For the sake of these the Lord protects his kingdom from many woes. His practical capabilities in raising national life are already in second place.”[273]

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.

The Symphony of Nations

The Orthodox Roman empire inherited from its pagan predecessor the idea that Rome encompassed the whole oikoumene or “inhabited world”. “In Roman eyes,” as Dominic Lieven writes, “the Roman Empire was a universal monarchy: it encompassed the whole globe, or at least all of it that was worth bothering about. The barbarians beyond the empire’s wall they regarded in terms somewhat similar to nineteenth-century European colonists’ view of ‘natives’. Their only imperial neighbour, the Parthian empire, was considered by the Romans to be ‘an oriental despotism, a barbarian, braggart and motley nation’. As in every other aspect of their culture, the Roman sense of universalism owed much to the Greeks. Alexander had conquered virtually the whole of the known world and although his empire was very short-lived the spread of Hellenistic culture was not. ‘The Greek philosophers, in particular the Stoics, stressed the notion that all mankind formed one community, partaking of universal reason… it was, indeed, the Greeks who from the second century BC had regarded the Roman Empire and the universe (oikoumene) as one… Ideas such as these made a deep impression on the minds of the political and intellectual elite of Rome, and through their influence the two notions of orbis terrarum and imperium came to be regarded in the first century as identical: from then on no distinction was ever made between them.’

“The adoption in the fourth century of Christianity, a world religion which recognized no ethnic or cultural borders, could only increase the Roman imperial sense of universalism. In time Christian clergy undertook evangelizing missions outside their polities’ borders, converting whole peoples to their religion and therefore, in the end, to a great extent to their culture. This the rulers of imperial Rome had never conceived of…”[274]

And so, parallel to the concept of the symphony of powers, whose model was the the relationship between the two natures of Christ, there emerged the concept of the symphony of nations, whose model was the hierarchical relationship between father and son. The Roman Emperor was the head and father of a family of Christian rulers, a family not united by a single political or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but by a common belonging to the civilisation of Christian Rome.[275] 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[276], 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."[277]

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.

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."[278]

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 Armenia, which 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.[279]

“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.”[280]

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.” [281]

Byzantium and the Jews

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).[282]

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."[283]

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.”[284] However, they 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 115-117, 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. [285]

The Jews were fiercely anti-Christian. As the Jewish Professor Norman Cantor writes: “Insofar as they thought about the Christians in the first seven or eight decades after the Nazarene’s death, the rabbis considered them only a desperate underclass heretics, at best pathetic, more evidently contemptible and damnable. They made jokes about Mary. She was a whore, they cackled, and Jesus was the offspring of one of her sloppy unions…”[286]

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 corrupting 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). “Ye blind guides,” He said, “who strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew 23.24). And concerning their disputes, that former Pharisee, St. Paul, said: “Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and striving about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless” (Titus 3.9).

Douglas Reed, the London Times correspondent in Central Europe in the 1930s, wrote: “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’.”[287]

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…”[288]

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”.[289]

Another name that the Jews had for the Christians was Edom, and the Roman 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.”[290]

The teaching of the Talmud incited the Jews to terrible crimes against Gentiles, especially Christians. “Under Theodosius II,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “it was discovered that the Jews, on the day of the feast of the execution of Haman [Purim], had introduced the practice of burning the Cross. The government had to undertake repressions against the blasphemy, but the Jews were not pacified. Under the same Theodosius II, in the city of Imma, the Jews during one of their feasts took hold of a Christian child, crucified him on a cross and with scourges cut him into pieces. The disturbed Christians took to arms, and a bloody battle took place. This incident, as they said, was not unique. The Christian historian Socrates relates that the Jews more than once crucified Christian children. At that time it was not a matter of ‘ritual killings’, and in such acts only the hatred of the Jews for Christans and mockery of them was seen. In the give case Theodosius II executed those guilty of the murder, but at the same time the government began to take measures to weaken Jewry. Theodosius destroyed the Jewish patriarchate in Palestine and confiscated the sums collected throughout Jewry for the patriarchate. But all these repressions did not quickly pacify the Jews. Under the same Theodosius II there took place in 415 the well-known brawl in Alexandria elicited by the killing of Christians by the Jews. All this boldness of the Jews in the face of a power that was evidently incomparably greater than theirs seems improbably. But we must bear in mind that this was an age of terrible Messianic fanaticism on the part of the Jews. It often drove them to acts that were senseless, in which pure psychosis was operating. Here, for example, is a purely internal incident having no relation to the Christians. At about the same time, in 432, on the island of Cyprus there took place an event which shows to what an inflamed condition the Jews of that time could come. On the island there appeared a man who was evidently mad, called Moses, the same who had led the people out of Egypt through the Red Sea. He declared that he now had an order from the Lord to lead the Jews out of Cyprus into Palestine through the Mediterranean Sea. His preached attracted crowds of Jews who did not hesitate to follow the prophet. These hordes went to the sea and, at a sign from Moses, began to hurl themselves from a lofty cliff into the water. Many crashed against the rocks, others drowned, and only the forcible intervention of the Christians saved the rest: fishermen dragged them from the water, while other inhabitants forcibly drove the Jews from the shore. This mass psychosis shows to what lengths the Jews could go in the name of the idea of the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel…

“The [Western] Church had already quite early, in the sixth century, begun to take measures to protect Christians from the influence of the Jews. Councils in Orleans in 538 and 545 decreed the suppression of relations between Christians and Jews and, moreover, forbade the Jews from publicly showing themselves during the Christian Pascha, doubtless to cut off the possibility of any blasphemous outrages. But we can understand why these measures could not be maintained, nor were they systematic, and relations inevitably continued, having two kinds of consequences: some they spiritually cut off from Christianity and drew them into heresy, and others they filled with hatred for the Jews.”[291]

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.[292] 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 [by the mad tyrant Phocas] 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.”[293]

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. When the Persians conquered Jerusalem, most of the Christians were sent into captivity to Persia. However, “the Jews distinguished themselves at this point with a beastly cruelty unique in the history of the world. They spared no money to buy many Christians from the Persians with one purpose only – to gain enjoyment in killing them. They say that in this way they bought and destroyed 80,000 people. The Jewish historian G. Graetz glides silently over this terrible fact, saying only: ‘Filled with rage, the Jews of course did not spare the Christians’ and ‘did not spare the holy things of the Christians’. Graetz reduces the number of Christians killed to 19,000.”[294].

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.’”[295]

Meanwhile, in what remained of the Byzantine empire there were intermittent attempts to return to the policy of Phocas and 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.[296] 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…”[297]

The Khazarite Jews are the ancestors of today’s Ashkenazi Jews, who constitute the great majority of Jewry world-wide. As the Hungarian Jew Arthur Koestler writes: “In the 1960’s, the number of the Sephardim was estimated at 500,000. The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million.”[298]

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 religion 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, non verberibus).[299] ‘The mystery of salvation,’ writes St. Gregory the Theologian, ‘is for those who desire it, not for those who are compelled’. The 108^th 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.’ [Ad Scapulam, 2]”[300]

The Dissonance of Powers: Monothelitism and Iconoclasm

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.[301]

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’”[302]

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.”[303]

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.”[304]

In the next century, the iconoclast Emperor 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.”[305]

Again, an epistle 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”.[306]

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”.[307]

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...”[308]

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.”[309]

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[310], and was anathematised by the Church as “the tormentor and not Emperor Leo the Isaurian”.[311]

In fact, just as the Seventh Ecumenical Council brought to an end the period of Christological debates in the history of the Church, so it brought to an end the debates over the role of the Emperor in the Church. The Emperor was an icon of Christ the King, but only so long as he remained Orthodox. He was in the Church, being second in rank after the Patriarch, but not above it. “The priest is the sanctification and strengthening of the Imperial power, while the Imperial power is the strength and firmness of the priesthood”.

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.”[312]

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?”[313]

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…”[314]

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.[315]

However, this indivisibility of powers resulted in a gradual undermining of the quasi-democratic, almost anarchical ideal of early Islam by 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.”[316] 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 despotism no less fierce than the monarchies that Islam had destroyed. Thus in 747, 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 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 believed he was god.[317]

“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.”[318]

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.[319]

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.[320]

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.”[321]

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....”[322]

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.”[323]

St. Photius the Great, the “Royal Patriarch”[324]

With the fall of iconoclasm in Byzantium in 843, there also fell the absolutist theory of Church-State relations preached by the iconoclast emperors. Under the new dynasty of Macedonian emperors, the empire entered a glorious period of increased power and prosperity. However, the patriarchs of the period were in no mood to concede more power than was necessary to the new dynasty, however Orthodox it might be.

One reason for this was was the particularly prominent – and damaging - role that the emperors had taken in the recent persecutions, in which several of the leading hierarchs themselves had suffered (St. Methodius had been in prison, while St. Photius’ parents had been martyred). 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. “The ancient heresies came from a quarrel over the dogmas and developed progressively, whereas this one [iconoclasm] comes from the imperial power itself.”[325] The patriarchs therefore laboured to raise the profile of the patriarchate in society, as a defence against any return to antichristianity on the part of the emperors.[326]

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.”[327]

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)”.[328] And it was the triumph of Studite rigorism – on this issue, at any rate – that determined the attitude of the patriarchs to the emperors after the final Triumph of Orthodoxy over iconoclasm in 843. For Patriarchs Methodius, Photius and Ignatius, all of whom were later canonised, quite consciously tried to exalt the authority of the patriarchate in relation to the empire.

However, 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.[329] 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.”[330]

However, St. Photius soon came into conflict with one 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.

It was partly because of her healthy scepticism about the corruption of secular power, had been the most faithful to Orthodoxy of all the patriarchates. But her consciousness of this fine record had bred 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 15^th 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.

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.[331] 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.” [332]

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”.[333]

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 as ‘the living law’ [nomoV emyucoV].”[334]

The Emperor 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.”[335]

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 of 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, 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 and 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”.[336]

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.[337]

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” greatly reduced her prestige and influence.[338] 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.[339] Thus 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 hierarchy, in the former case, and to the emperor, in the latter.

Church Canons vs. Imperial Laws

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.[340]

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”, St. Theodore the Studite broke communion with both patriarchs, and returned into communion with St. Nicephorus only when he had again excommunicated Joseph.[341] St. Theodore allowed no compromise in relation to the Canons. 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.[342]

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.

However, he was deposed again by Basil’s son, Leo the Wise, who shifted the balance of Church-State relations back towards caesaropapism, saying: “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.”[343] 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”.[344] 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”[345], 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”![346] 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.”[347] 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?”[348]

The Question of Legitimacy

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)”[349], 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.[350] 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.[351]

Thus, according to Lemerle, “usurpation… has… 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.”[352]

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.”[353] St. Photius also accepted the new emperor – but refused him communion in church.[354]

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”.[355]

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’).”[356] 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.”[357]

But if this resolved the question of Tzimiskes’ legitimacy (for the Church, if not for Nikephoros’ relatives, who continued to rebel against the empire), it did not wipe out his sin. [358] 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.”[359]

“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…”[360]

The First Bulgarian Empire

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.[361] 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.”[362]

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”.[363]

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, with capitals at Constantinople, Aachen and Preslav!) 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.

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.”[364] 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…

St. Vladimir the Great

In 860 a new nation which St. Photius called “Ros” (RwV)[365] 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 Ros… 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 weres laid the foundations of the conversion of the last of the major Christian nations. St. Photius sent Bishop Michael to Russia (perhaps the holy equal-to-the-apostles St. Methodius also went). 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.[366] 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.[367]

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.”[368]

As I. Solonevich notes[369], this appeal was similar to that of the British Christians to the Saxons Hengist and Horsa. 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, 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.[370]

As New Hieromartyr 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”.[371]

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. Еven Svyatoslav preferred to live in Bulgaria, which he had conquered, аnd 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, they say, 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 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.”[372]

Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna writes: “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…”[373]

It was St. Vladimir’s grandmother, St. Olga, who in 957 initiated the Christianisation of her country by submitting to baptism in Constantinople. Her godfather was the Byzantine Emperor himself.[374] 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 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 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 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…”[375]

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.

I pray Thee, O Son of God, that the Catholic order may grow with me, to the benefit of Thy faithful people. And grant to this temple the same function that Thou didst assign to the Temple of Solomon.

King Liutprand, inscription on church of St. Anastasius, Pavia (729).

The Fall of Old Rome

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. The new capital, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, was to be “a bond of union between East and West to which the most distant extremes from all sides were to come together, and to which they look up as the common centre and emporium of their faith.”[376] For the old capital, weighed down by its pagan past, was in no position to defend and unify the newly Christianized empire, and would soon prove incapable of defending even herself.

In 410 and 455 Old Rome was conquered by barbarians. In 476 she fell permanently under barbarian rule until Justinian’s conquests in the sixth century. The shock was great[377], 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”[378], 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.”[379]

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, and to show that the disasters suffered by the empire were allowed by God to chasten and purify His people; “for God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind.”[380]

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”.[381] 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?”[382]

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?”[383] 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, 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.[384] 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.[385] 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”.[386]

“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.”[387]

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.”[388]

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.”[389]

Even the Huns, who were still more barbaric than the Germans, respected the greatness of Rome. Attila was turned back from sacking Rome in 452 by the eloquent embassy of Pope Leo I and a vision of SS. Peter and Paul, who appeared in a vision with St. Leo and threatened him with death.[390]

Churchmen such as the Italian St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, the Spanish priest Orosius and the Gallic priest Salvian of Marseilles, were hopeful that a new Romano-Germanic order could be constructed.[391] 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.[392]

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.[393]

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.”[394]

But the fifth century proved to be the great watershed, the “stone of separation” (Zachariah 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.[395] 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.”[396]

The Rise of the Popes

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, this apostasy 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 constitute 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 were 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.[397] 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,[398] 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.[399]

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”.[400] 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, has been characteristic of all the major forerunners of the Antichrist, and will be characteristic of the Antichrist himself 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…. ”[401]

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.”[402]

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 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.”[403]

And so Augustinian scepticism with regard to secular authority, together with the unparalleled prestige and power of the Popes in the West, combined to introduce a new, 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...

The Remnants of Romanity: (1) Britain

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.

Fr. 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.”[404]

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”.[405] 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.”[406] In 388 he was defeated and executed by the Eastern Emperor Theodosius.

The very fact that 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. 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.[407] 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.”[408]

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”.[409] And yet many, perhaps most Britons continued to consider themselves to be Romans and to preserve the Roman traditions in Church and State.[410] And the distinction between true kings and tyrants continued to be made.

Let us see 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).[411] 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].[412] 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 about 540, 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”.[413] And then, at the turn of the century, came the famous King Arthur. He won twelve victories over the Saxons, fighting with a cross or icon of the Virgin Mary on his back, and halted the pagan advance westwards for at least a generation, until his death in 519. 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.[414]

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…”[415]

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 rebellion manifested itself again – and led, this time, to 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)[416], 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.

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. For the next century they went into schism, and were received as schismatics by the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Churches. 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”.[417] 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’.”[418]

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[419], 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 I, 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, 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.

The Remnants of Romanity: (2) Italy and France

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[420], 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…”[421]

Theodoric was an Arian, but Clovis, king of the Franks, was an Orthodox Christian. St. Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, congratulated him on his baptism in terms that showed that he regarded Clovis’ kingdom as still part of the Eastern Roman Empire: “Let Greece rejoice indeed in having chosen our princeps”.[422]

Again, St. Gregory of Tours wrote 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.”[423]

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[424], 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.[425] 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.”[426]

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…

The Remnants of Romanity: (3) Spain

In the fourth century Spain had been an important part of the Roman Empire, producing such great Christians as St. Osius, bishop of Cordoba, and the Emperor Theodosius I. 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 had 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 refuse 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.”[427] As Keys writes, “Hermegild’s conversion was a massive challenge to the political system as a whole.”[428]

The rebellion of Hermenegild, though aided by the Orthodox Sueves in the north-west[429] and the Byzantines in the south-east[430], 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”[431]

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”[432], 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”.[433] Led by the Church, Spain now entered perhaps the greatest period in her history, marred only by ever-increasing persecution of the Jews.[434]

It is true that it was the king who effectively appointed the bishops in Spain. 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…”[435]

The Church’s glorification 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 heterodox power 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.[436]

The power of the Spanish Orthodox kings continued until 711, when the Muslims conquered Spain. According to the Jewish historian Graetz, the Spanish Jews then 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. Thus the 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.[437]

Romanity Restored: Anglo-Saxon England

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.[438]

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,”[439] 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.[440] 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. As we read in 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.”[441]

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.[442] 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 Rwmeiosύnh 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…”[443]

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 and body of canonical law, to which all the Christian kings of England submitted and which formally recognised the first Six Ecumenical Councils. Bishops like SS. Wilfrid, Egwin and Aldhelm strengthened the links with Rome by frequent trips there, and abbots like SS. Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid imported books, icons 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.”[444]

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.[445]

The Sacrament of Royal Anointing

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.[446] But this may in fact have been the sacrament of chrismation that is normally administered immediately after baptism, and not specifically royal anointing.[447]

Early 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…”[448]

One possibility is that anointing to the kingdom 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.”[449]

Not long after this, in 574, the Irish apostle of Scotland, St. Columba, consecrated (by laying on of hands rather than anointing) the first Orthodox King of Scotland, Aidan Mor, who was to become the ancestor of all the Celtic kings of Scotland and, through James VI of Scotland and I of England, of the present British royal family. [450]

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 [probably Jura], 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.”[451]

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[452]; 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.”[453] 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.”[454]

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.”[455]

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[456] – 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.”[457]

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.[458]

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”.[459]

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”.[460]

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.[461] 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”[462] As he put it 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.”[463]

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…

Romanity Threatened: (1) Charlemagne

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[464], 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. [465] 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.[466] Moreover, from this time the popes began to change the dating of their documents, and to issue their own coins.[467]

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 the English missionary archbishop of Mainz, St. Boniface. 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. 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:

From the high citadel of a new Rome my Palemon sees

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.[468]

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.[469] 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.”[470]

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, in spite of the fact that all additions to the Creed were forbidden by the Ecumenical Councils. 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.”[471] 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 (in a letter to the brothers in Lyons) – 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."[472]

According to Alcuin, Charlemagne, like King David, combined the functions of royal leadership and priestly teaching in order to guide his people to salvation.[473] 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.”[474]

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. 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"![475]

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[476]), hoping “thus to unite the Eastern and Western provinces”, as the chronicler Theophanes put it[477] - not under his sole rule, for he must have realised that that was impossible, 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…

The Byzantines at first 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.”[478] As Russell Chamberlin writes: “The Byzantines derided the coronation of Charlemagne. To them he was simply another barbarian general with ideas above his station. Indeed, he took care never to style himself Imperator Romanorum. His jurists, dredging through the detritus of empire, came up with a title which me with his approval: Romanum gubernas imperium ‘Governing the Roman Empire’. The resounding title of the first of the post-classical Western Emperors was ‘Charles, Most Serene Augustus, crowned by God, great and merciful Emperor, governing the Roman Empire and by the mercy of God, King of the Lombards and the Franks’.”[479]

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!”[480]

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.’”[481]

But Louis’ arguments were in vain. In 879-80, a Council in Constantinople under the presidency of St. Photius condemned Pope Nicolas I, as a heretic 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 East and West agreed that it was the Western, Frankish empire that was not Orthodox.[482] 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 the most exalted significance being attached 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…”[483]

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 (9^th 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… Russia.”[484]

Romanity Threatened: (2) Nicholas I

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. 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.[485]

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 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, the ultimate gainer from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 may well have been 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.”[486]

So the foundations were laid for the growth of papal power in the political as well as the ecclesiastical spheres 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, 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…”[487]

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.”[488]

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.[489] 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.[490] 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 lay bruised, not completely scotched; 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 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.[491]

As a defensive system to preserve a minimum of order in a time of foreign invasion, feudalism undoubtedly had merits. But it was much inferior not only to Byzantine-style autocracy, but also to the Carolingian system. 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.

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.”[492]

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. This 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.”[493]

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…”[494]

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...”[495]

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…”[496]

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 kingdom. 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, founded on a strong monastic revival supported by a powerful king, Edgar, and a sainted archbishop, Dunstan. 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.”[497]

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.[498] “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.”[499]

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[500], 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. [501]

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.

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.” [502]

The historian David Starkey[503] has hailed this agreement between King Ethelred and the English leaders as a kind of “Magna Carta two hundred years before the Magna Carta” and a sign of the maturity and sophistication of English political life at that time. From an Orthodox Christian point of view, it would be better to characterise it as the beginning of the end of the English Orthodox Autocracy and the beginning of a kind of constitutional monarchy. Fortunately, however, in 1016, after Ethelred had died and the Danish King Canute had conquered the land, full autocratic rule was restored. This was characterised by the king’s complete control in the political sphere, while the Church retained her supremacy in the spiritual sphere (Canute became a Christian). However, in 1051-52, and again in 1065, the aristocracy again raised its head against the king, which presaged the final fall of the English Autocracy in 1066…

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”.[504] 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).[505] 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.”[506]

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.”[507]

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.[508] 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.”[509]

The German Monarchy

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 for the All-English kingdom that eventually encompassed three nations: the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes in the East and the Celts in the West. 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.

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.”[510] As he wrote to Bruno, “you have both priestly religion and royal strength”.[511] 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 the local judges and tax-collectors.

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.”[512]

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…”[513]

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”.[514] 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,[515] just as Old Rome had little time 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…”[516]

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,[517] 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.”[518]

“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.[519] 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.”[520] 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.[521] 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.[522]

Indeed, the ideal described a little later by Peter Damian looked close to being fulfilled: “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.”

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.[523] Again, it was Sylvester who, in 1001, inspired Otto to issue an act demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.[524] 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."[525]

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.

The Year 1000: The Apex of Monarchism

A recent survey of the world in the year 1000[526] 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. In the year 1000 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 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.[527] 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. [528]

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[529], 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.”[530] Even the Fatimid Islamic ruler Al-Hakim accepted that he was the godhead.[531]

In all the Orthodox lands we find strong kings allied to 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[532], 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:

Carrying out the teachings of Buddha

Is the basis for the cultivation of the self;

Carrying out the teachings of Confucius

Is the source for regulating the state.[533]

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”.[534]

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 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.[535]

And so these societies combined two characteristics which, from the modern point of view, cannot be combined: the “collectivist” belief that men 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".[536] 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 POWER

(1000 TO 1453)

5. THE RESURRECTION OF OLD ROME

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 were condemned as heretics – for example, the Monothelite Pope Honorius I was anathematised by the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and this 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”.[537]

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.”[538]

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. [539]

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 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. “But the Romans,” writes Chamberlin, “rose against [Otto], drove him and his pope out of the city, and reverted to murderous anarchy. He died outside the city in January 1002, not quite twenty-two years of age. Sylvester survived his brilliant but erratic protégé by barely sixteen months. His epitaph summed up the sorrow that afflicted all thoughtful men at the ending of a splendid vision: ‘The world, on the brink of triumph, in peace now departed, grew contorted in grief and the reeling Church forgot her rest.”

“The failure of Otto III and Sylvester marked the effective end of the medieval dream of a single state in which an emperor ruled over the bodies of all Christian men, and a pope over their souls.”[540]

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.”[541]

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.”[542]

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.”[543]

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.[544] 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.[545] They stressed papal authority, clerical celibacy and ecclesiastical centralisation.

Leo IX introduced the principles of the Cluniac movement into the government of the Church at the highest level – but with results 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…”[546]

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…”[547]

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; 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 compared 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.

The Schism of 1054

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. Late in 1053, Patriarch Michael Cerularius had criticised certain liturgical practices of the Latins in a letter to Bishop John of Trania, and had asked the latter to convey his views to Pope Leo IX. The Pope replied: “You, beloved brother of ours, whom we still call in Christ and primate of Constantinople, with extraordinary presumption and unheard-of boldness have dared openly to condemn the apostolic and Latin Church – and for what? For the fact that she celebrates the commemoration of the sufferings of Christ on unleavened bread. That is your imprudent abuse, that is your unkind boasting, when you, supposing that your lips are in heaven, in actual fact with your tongue are crawling on the earth and striving by your human reasonings and thoughts to corrupt and shake the ancient faith. If you do not pull yourself together, you will be on the tail of the dragon [cf. Rev. 12], by which this dragon overthrew and cast to the earth a third of the stars of heaven. Almost 120 years have passed since the Saviour suffered, and do you really think that only now must the Roman Church learn from you how to celebrate the Eucharist, as if it means nothing that here in Rome there lived, worked for a considerable period, taught and, finally, by his death glorified God he to whom the Lord said: ‘Blessed are thou, O Simon, son of Jonah’.”

“Then,” continues A.P. Lebedev, “the Pope explained in detail why the Roman Church could not tolerate any instructions from other Churches, but remained the leader of all the rest. ‘Think how senseless it would be to admit that the heavenly Father should conceal the rite of the visible sacrifice [of the Eucharist] from the prince of the apostles, Peter, to whom He had completely revealed the most hidden Divinity of His Son. The Lord promised to Peter, not through an angel, nor through a prophet, but with His own lips: ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church’ (Matthew 16.16). But in the opinion of the Pope an important place in the question of the headship of the Roman high priest was occupied by the miracle-working power of Peter’s shadow. This argument of the Pope in his favour was so original that we cite it in full. ‘In Peter,’ said the Pope, ‘what is particularly remarkable is that the shadow of his body gave health to the infirm. Such power was given to none of the saints; even the Holy of holies Himself did not give the gift of healing from His own most holy body; but to His Peter alone He gave this privilege that the shadow from his body should heal the sick. Here is a great sign of the Church of the present and the future, that is, Peter has become the manager of both Churches and indicates their condition beforehand in himself: it is precisely the present Church which by the power of its visible sacraments and those that are still to come as it were by her shadow heals souls on earth, and presents to us an as yet invisible but firm image of truth and piety on earth.’ Or here is one more cunning papal interpretation of one saying with which the Lord addressed Peter, and interpretation whose aim was to prove the overwhelming significance of the Roman high priests among the other bishops of the whole Church. The Pope takes the saying of the Lord: ‘I have prayed for thee, O Peter, that thy faith should not fail, and when thou art converted strengthen thy brethren’ (Luke 22.32).

“’By this the Lord showed,’ says the Pope, ‘that the faith of the other brethren will be subject to dangers, but the faith of Peter will remain without stumbling. Nobody can deny that just as the whole door is ruled by the hinge, so by Peter and his successors is defined the order and structure of the whole Church. And as the hinge opens and closes the door, while remaining itself unmoved, so Peter and his successors have the right freely to pronounce sentence on every Church, and nobody must disturb or shake their condition; for the highest see is not judged by anybody (summa sedes a nemine judicatur).’”[548]

But the most interesting part of Leo’s pretensions was his claim to have royal as well as priestly power. Thus 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).”[549] Moreover, this “royal priesthood” - which St. Peter (I Peter 1.1-2, 2.9-10) ascribes to the whole people of God, - 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”.[550]

“Of much greater importance and interest in the given letter,” continues Lebedev, “are the very new papal ideas about his secular lordship, which are developed by the Pope in his letter to Cerularius and which rely on a false document – the so-called Donatio Constantini. Setting out his superior position among the other hierarchs of the Church, the Pope, in order to humiliate the Church of Constantinople – the aim of the letter – he develops the thought that the Popes are immeasurably superior to the representatives of all the other Churches since they are at one and the same time both first priests and emperors. In the East, it would seem, nothing of the sort had ever been heard; and for that reason it is understandable how such a novelty would affect the Church of Constantinople!

“Since the time of Constantine the Great the Popes had become at the same time emperors, insinuated Leo to Cerularius. The Pope wrote: ‘So that there should remain no doubt about the earthly [secular] power of the Roman high priest, and so that nobody should think that the Roman Church is ascribing to herself an honour that does not belong to her, we shall cite the proofs of from that privileged deed which the Emperor Constantine with his own hands laid upon the holy tomb of the heavenly key-bearer [Peter], and that the truth should be manifest and vanity disappear.’ In this privileged deed Constantine, according to the words of the Pope, declared the following: ‘We have considered it necessary, we together with all our rulers, the Senate, the nobles and the people of Rome, that, just as St. Peter was the vicar of the Son of God on earth, so the high priests, the heirs of the prince of the apostles, should retain the power to rule – and to an even more complete extent than is given to the earthly imperial dignity. That is, we are decreeing that reverent honour should be accorded both to our earthly imperial might, and in exactly the same way to the most holy Roman Church, and, so as more fully to exalt the see above our own earthly throne, we ascribe to her a royal power, dignity and honour. Moreover, we decree that the see of Peter should have the headship over the four sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople and also over all the Church in the inhabited world; the high priest of this Roman see must be considered for all time to be higher and more glorious than all the priest of the whole world, and in relations to questions of Divine service and faith his judgement should rule over all.’ Then Pope Leo describes what precisely Constantine bestowed upon his contemporary, Pope Silvester, so as to exalt the papal altar. In the opinion of the Pope, it turns out that Constantine bestowed upon the Pope first of all the palace in Rome. The privileged deed, according to the letter of Pope Leo, said the following about this: ‘We cede to the holy apostles themselves, the most blessed Peter and Paul, and through them to our father Pope Silvester and all his successors who will be on the see of St. Peter to the end of the ages the Lateran palace, which is superior to all the palaces in the world.’ Then the Emperor Constantine adorns, as the Pope puts it, the person of the Roman high priest with royal regalia. The deed, according to the words of Pope Leo, said this about that: ‘We transfer to the Pope of Rome the diadem, that is the crown, from our own head, the garland that adorns the imperial neck, the purple chlamys, the scarlet tunic and all the other royal vestments. We entrust to him the imperial sceptre and all the other marks of distinction and the shoulder-belt – in a word, all the appurtenances of royal majesty.’ The letter even informs us that the Emperor with his own hands want to place his crown on the Pope’s head, but ‘the Pope did not want to use a crown of gold, and for that reason the Emperor placed on him with his own hands his Phrygian wreath (phrygium), shining white and signifying the Resurrection of Christ.’ In the words of Pope Leo, the Emperor Constantine, having adorned the Pope with royal regalia, in correspondence with this wanted to put the clergy who constituted his suite on a level with the royal courtiers. The deed, in the words of the letter, made the following legal ruling: ‘We raise the most honourable clergy of every rank in the service of the Roman Church to the same height of power and brilliance as our Senate, and decree that they should be adorned as our patricians and consuls are adorned. In a word, just as there are various kinds of servants attached to the imperial dignity – bed-makers, doormen and guards, so must it be with the holy Roman Church. And more than that: for the sake of the greater brilliance of the papal dignity let the clergy travel on horses adorned with the whitest of materials, and let them wear exactly the same shoes as are worn by the senators. And in this way let the heavenly [papa] power be adorned like the earthly [imperial], to the glory of God.’ In his concern for the person of the Pope and those close to him, according to the words of the Pope’s letter, Constantine bestowed on Silvester and his heirs a broad, de facto royal power over a whole half of the Roman kingdom: the Roman high priest became the Roman emperor. In the words of the Pope, the deed said the following on this score: ‘So that the high priestly power should not decline, but should flourish more than the imperial power itself, we have decreed that besides the Lateran palace, the city of Rome, the provinces of Italy and all the western lands, and all the places and cities in them, should be transferred to our father Silvester, so that he should have complete use of and dominion over them.”[551]

An embassy led by Cardinal Humbert was sent to Constantinople with similarly overweening letters to the Emperor and Patriarch. Thus to the Patriarch the Pope wrote: “We believe and firmly confess the following: the Roman Church is such that if any nation (Church) on earth should in its pride be in disagreement with her in anything, then such a Church ceases to be called and to be considered a Church – it is nothing. It will already be a conventicle of heretics, a collection of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan.”[552]

When the Patriarch and Emperor refused to enter into negotiations with the legates of the Pope, the latter, on July 16, 1054 anathematized the Church of Constantinople, accusing her of every possible heresy. The decree was laid on the altar of Hagia Sophia during a service. Four days later, on July 20, Patriarch Michael convened a Council which anathematised the legates and those attached to them. The other Eastern Churches were informed of the decision, and accepted it. 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[553]), the balance of evidence remains in favour of it.[554]

In 1059 a quasi-royal coronation was introduced into the rite of the inauguration of the new Pope, Nicholas II. Then 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’.”[555] Sixty years before, Otto III had bombastically claimed that he had “ordained and created” the Pope.[556] 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 who had recently seized a large swathe of land of Lombard and Byzantine land in Southern Italy. The Pope now 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.”[557]

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"[558] - 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”[559] – 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.[560] 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.”[561]

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!

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”[562]

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.”[563]

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. 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. Its 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.”[564]

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’.”[565]

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.[566] 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.”[567]

The defeat of King Harold at Hastings was the prelude for the greatest genocide in European history to that date. According to one source, every fifth Englishman was killed[568], and even if this figure is an exaggeration, Domesday Book (1086) shows that some parts of the country were a wasteland a generation after the Conquest. 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.[569]

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.”[570]

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…”[571]

In other words, the whole course of European history might have been changed…

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.”[572]

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."[573]

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."[574]

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."[575]

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.

The Gregorian Revolution

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. 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. And perhaps to emphasise his kinship with Gregory VI. For both popes were of the Jewish Pierleone family.[576]

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.”[577]

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.’”[578]

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.”[579] 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?”[580]

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 16^th 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”.[581]

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”.[582] 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.”[583] But this would have remained just words, 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”.[584] 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”.[585]

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…”[586]

By absolving subjects of their allegiance to their king, Gregory “effectively,” as Robinson writes, “sanctioned rebellion against the royal power…”[587]

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."[588]

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…”[589]

This was power politics under the guise of an anti-politics; 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…

Canossa became the enduring symbol of the papocaesarist heresy.

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.[590]

It looked as if Gregory had failed, but his ideas endured - as did the conflict between papacy and empire, which rumbled on for centuries.

And not only between papacy and empire, but also between papacy and people. Thus only about one hundred years after Gregory, the Waldensians were showing signs of lay rebellion:

“Raymond of Deventer: This – oh Waldo – is the principle cause of complaint against you. You are in a state of rebellion against the Church of Rome! You no longer obey her priests or bishops. You violate the principles of Scripture which says: ‘Obey your rulers’.

Peter Waldo: If bishops and priests disobey the Word of God, we must choose to obey God rather than man.”[591]

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…”[592]

The Crusades

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, which 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.[593]

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.”[594]

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.”[595]

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 in the 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.”[596] 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.”[597] 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.”[598]

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]”.[599]

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. 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 12^th century when the Crusaders launched a never fully explained campaign in northern Europe…”[600]

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[601], 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 were 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.”[602]

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.”[603]

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.

In accordance with this teaching, Innocent intervened vigorously in the election of the German Holy Roman Emperors. Thus he 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. He 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[604] 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”.[605]

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.”[606] We shall return to this concept of natural law, which presented a theoretical challenge to the papacy’s claims of the greatest significance…

Innocent also intervened in France, when in 1209 he gave an expedition against the Cathar (Albigensian) 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…’”[607]

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…”[608]

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.”[609]

So in 1231 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.”[610]

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.”[611] 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.”[612]

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.”[613]

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…”[614] 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.”[615]

Thus did the Roman Church consciously and completely openly declare that truth is not truth, or goodness goodness – if the Pope so decrees. Later, during the Reformation, 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 Medieval Revolutionaries: Jews, Albigensians and Templars

The Jews began to become influential in the West (“Ashkenaz”) during the reign of Charlemagne, who protected them and gave them the freedom of the empire, much to the dismay of the bishops. With the decline of the Carolingian empire, the Jewish merchants made Rouen, the capital of Normandy, their own capital in the West (excluding Spain, which was called “Sepharad”, literally “the East”), and they were also well-established in Mainz and other Rhineland towns. After the Norman conquest of England, the Jews penetrated there as well, and the Norman kings of England came to rely on them financially…[616]

The movement of the Jews westward was facilitated by two disasters they suffered in the East: the destruction of the Khazar kingdom by the Russians in the tenth century, which was followed by their being banned from
Russia under Vladimir Monomakh in the twelfth century, and their expulsion from Mesopotamia by the Muslims in 1040. Mesopotamia had been their homeland for many generations, the seat of their government-in-exile and the place where the Babylonian Talmud, the real “Bible” of Judaism, received its finished form.

But in the West, as in the East, the Jews were an “alien, apparently indigestible element in society”; they were “always and everywhere in society and in the state, but never properly of either one or the other”.[617] The reasons given for this alienation of the Jews in the course of history have basically been of two diametrically opposing kinds. According to the Christians and those who are called by the Jews “anti-semites”, the Jews were alien because they wanted to be alien, because their law, the Talmud, which has only the most strained and tangential relationship to God’s revelation in the Old Testament, ordered them to be alien and hostile to all non-Jews, whom they exploited through their money-lending activities and against whose political authorities they very often rebelled. In other words, Christian anti-semitism was the regrettable but fully understandable consequence of Jewish anti-Gentilism. According to the Jewish and pro-semitic view, on the other hand, it was the Christians who imposed this alienation upon the Jews, forcing them to live in ghettoes, to take up money-lending as a profession, to rebel out of self-defence.

In fact, as L.A. Tikhomorov writes, “the Jews were well organized in every country, and Jewish organizations in all countries were in constant contact with each other, warning about dangers, preparing refuges in case of persecution and helping each other internationally in respect of trade and industry. This gave Jewry an exceptional power. Wherever a Jew went with a view to practising trade and industry, he found ready support. But the dominance that flowed from this in trade and industry placed a heavy burden on the non-Jewish population. The rulers of the countries – kings, dukes, landowning princes – greatly valued the Jews for their ability to get for them money and think up all kinds of financial operations. Even during times of persecution of the Jews generally, people with property and even town magistrates each wanted ‘to have his own Jew’ for himself, as a consequence of which the persecutions lost their systematic character. But for the population their financial talents were very burdensome, and dissatisfaction and hatred continued to grow against the Jews. This was felt everywhere. In Portugal, for example, where there prevailed the firmest and most exceptional goodwill towards the Jews, the masses of the people hated them. Also, the Jews’ disdain for Christianity could not fail to irritate the Christians. This disdain the Jews did not try to hide in the least. The most broad-minded Jews, such as Judah Halevy [1075-1140] who, of course, had the most superficial understanding of Christianity, and of Islam too, put the one and the other on a level with paganism. Judah Halevy said that although Christianity and Islam ‘in their original form’ were institutions for the purification and ennoblement of the non-Jews (their preparation for Judaism), nevertheless they had turned into paganism: the Christians worshipped the Cross, and the Muslims – the stone of the Kaaba.[618] The Jews expressed their criticisms wherever they could. Undermining Christianity became part of their mission. And meanwhile they occupied the most prominent position in such dark sciences as alchemy, astrology and every kind of theurgy. Their mysticism and kabbalistic theories had a great influence on Christian society. All kinds of magic and witchcraft, to which the superstitious middle ages was avidly drawn, were closely linked with Jewish elements. An example of the degree to which Jewish influence could go is presented by the south of France, which was called French Judaea. The Jews exhibited constant close links with all the enemies of Christianity, with the Arabs, with the heretics of the most disgusting sects, such as Manichaeism. Michelet, in evaluating the Albigensians [the Cathari, or Manichaeans, of Southern France], says: ‘The southern nobility was overflowing with the children of Jews and Saracens [Histoire de France (A History of France), vol. II, p. 159].’ They were more developed people, in Michelet’s opinion, than the northern nobility. However it was here that there developed a terrible opposition to religion, and a collapse of morality. The more eminent women were just as debauched as their husbands and fathers, and the poetry of the troubadors was completely filled with blasphemies against God and the stories of lovers. ‘This French Judaea, as Languedoc was called, was reminiscent of the Judaea in the East not only because of its olive groves and aromas: it had its own Sodom and Gomorrha… The local scholars openly taught the philosophy of Aristotle, while the Arabs and Jews in secret taught the pantheism of Averroes and the subtleties of the Kabbala.’ [Michelet, op. cit., pp. 393-404].

“The Jewish historian G. Graetz confirms the essence of this characterisation. ‘The Albigensians,’ he says, ‘especially energetically protested against the papacy, and their opposition was partly owing to their relations with the educated Jews and knowledge of Jewish works. Amidst the Albigensians there existed a sect which directly said that the Jewish Law is better than the Christian. Those princes who protected the Albigensians also protected the Jews.’ [Istoria Evreev (A History of the Jews), Odessa, 1906, vol. III, p. 69].

 “We can see what a socially demoralising influence this was from the same Albigensians. We are accustomed to speak only about the persecutions against the Albigensians. But we must also remember what was being done in those levels of the population which are labelled by the general name of ‘Albigensians’. There were overflowing with people having no social restraint. ‘The heroes of the great highways,’ writes Michelet, ‘together with the peasants… dressed their wives in sacred vestments, beat up the priests and mockingly forced them to sing mass. One of their entertainments consisted in disfiguring representations of the Saviour, cutting out the hands and legs. These trouble-makers were dear to the landowning princes precisely for their godlessness. Unbelievers, like our contemporaries, and as savage as barbarians, they lay as a heavy burden on the country, stealing, blackmailing and killing whoever came to hand, carrying out a terrible war’…

“From the ninth century in France children began to disappear, and rumour began to accuse the Jews of stealing them. First they said it was for selling into slavery, then there appeared rumours that the Jews were killing them. In the twelfth century the Jews were accused of crucifying Christians. It appears that at that time they were not talking about the Jews’ use of Christian blood for ritualistic ends. This accusation appeared only in the thirteenth century. The constant friendship of the Jews with the Saracens elicited suspicion and hatred that was the stronger the more intense became the struggle with Islam.

“So the era of the crusades elicited stormy pogroms of the Jews. Before the crusades themselves, in 1014, in France, killing of Jews for such reasons took place everywhere. The Jews of Orleans sent an ambassador to Sultan Hakim in Jerusalem, advising him to destroy the Church of Sepulchre of the Lord. Hakim (Fatimid) did indeed destroy the Church. But for that Jews were killed throughout France, while their ambassador, on his return from Jerusalem, was burned in Orleans.

“The first crusade began in 1096, and if the correct crusading armies did not touch the Jews, the motley crowds of people drawn to the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre beat up Jews along the way and forced them to be baptised against their will. Against there sounded the voices of the Roman popes, but they remained powerless in face of the excited masses. Pogroms began to become a common phenomenon. Even in England, where nobody had touched the Jews before, in 1189 the first pogrom broke out, while one hundred years later, in 1290, the kings decided to expel them completely from England.[619] Thus for 350 years the Jews had no access to England until Cromwell, who again allowed them to live in the country. On the continent a terrible pogrom broke out in Fulda, where on the occasion of the killing of some Christian children a crowd burned several tens of Jews, although it remained unclear who had killed the children. In the fourteenth century Europe began to be devastated by the so-called ‘Black Death’ (the plague), and the general voice of the peoples accused the Jews of poisoning the water and supplies set aside for the use of the Christians. The year 1348 was a fatal date for the Jews. In 1453 the Jews suffered universal extinction in Silesia. It goes without saying that the persecuted Jews everywhere sought salvation in new emigrations to such places where they were not killing them at the given moment, although after a certain time the refugees perhaps had to seek a new refuge. During this period there was a countless number of accusations that they had committed ritual killings. Moreover, in a majority of processes – even, perhaps, in all of them – there were Jews who confessed to the crime, and even described the details of how they did it. But the trials of the time took place with the help of tortures, whose horrors we can hardly imagine. In the same period there were many trials of magicians and witches, who were compelled to make confessions by the same tortures. Looking objectively, there is no possibility of reaching an exact conclusion about what these magicians and witches were, and in exactly the same way whether there were cases of ritual killings among the Jews.

“In the interesting collection of I.O. Kuzmin [Materialy k voprosu ob obvineniakh evreev v ritual’nykh ubijstvakh (Materials on the question of the accusations against Jews of ritual murders), St. Petersburg, 1913] there is a long list of trials (mainly Polish) on ritual killings. And it is impossible even to understand what amount of truth there could be in the depositions and confessions extracted by tortures, which make one’s hair stand on end. Dr. Frank [Ritual’nie ubijstva pered sudom istiny i spravedlivosti (Ritual murders before the court of truth and justice), Kiev, 1912, p. 50] cites the conclusion of the Jesuit Friedrich von Sprey, who said: ‘I swear that amidst the many women sentenced to burning for supposed sorcery, whom I accompanied to the fire, there was not one whose guilt was established. Apply this kind of tortures to judges, to spiritual fathers, to me – and you would recognize all of us to be sorcerers.’ We could say the same about the confessions of ritual murders. But on the other hand the centuries we are talking about did indeed constitute the peak of various kinds of sorcery and ‘black magic’, combined with the most disgusting crimes. Moreover, blood was considered to be one of the most important materials used in magic. It is said that the sacrifice of a child and the drinking of his blood was part of the so-called ‘black mass’ [S. Tukholk, Okkul’tizm i magia (Occultism and Magic), St. Petersburg, 1911, p. 92]. The translator of the Russian edition of the book of the so-called Monk Neophytus [O tajne krovi u evreev (On the Mystery of Blood among the Jews), St. Petersburg, 1914] adduces in the foreword examples of the murder of children with the aim of making incantations among people belonging by blood and birth-certificate to the Christians. Thus in 1440 the Marshal of France Giles de Lavalle was condemned and burned; he tortured and killed many children to find the philosopher’s stone. The remains of the tortured children were found in a cellar. ‘From their blood, brains and bones,’ says the translator, ‘they prepared some kind of magical liquid.’

“Since among the Jews various kinds of sorcery and magic were as well developed as among the Christian peoples, and in this respect the Jews were even rather the teachers of the others since the time of the Babylonian captivity, then one can, of course, imagine that some among them were capable of such evils. But the accusers among the people spread this slander on the whole of Jewry.

“On these grounds, besides tortures and court burnings, a number of pogroms were stirred up against the Jews by crowds in all countries. In exactly the same way terrible persecutions were raised agains the Jews during the so-called ‘Black Death’, which ravaged Europe. The people shouted that the Jews were preparing destructive concoctions out of poisonous plants, human blood and urine, etc., and sorcerers were poisoning people with this mixture. Excited crowds destroyed the homes of the Jews, plundered their property, and killed them. It goes without saying that it is easy to imagine there were people who deliberatedly stirred up the people against the unfortunate Jews with the aim of profiting from their inheritance. This was perhaps the most difficult era in the life of the Jewish people.”[620]

Somewhat similar to the fate of the Jews was that of the Knights Templar, a mysterious monastic-military sect under the protection of the Pope that was founded in 1118 and destroyed in 1312. After a distinguished beginning to their history during which they displayed great courage in support of the crusaders in the Holy Land, they were soon corrupted by wealth and began to betray the Christian cause through deals with the Saracens. Worst of all, they accepted dualistic, Manichaean-Albigensian doctrines and began to worship an idol called “Baphomet”, accompanied by the renunciation of Christ and homosexual orgies.

These facts were established during trials of their members by King Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V. Some authorities assert that they were innocent; and certainly the use of torture in the earlier trial, by King Philip, makes the use of that evidence unsafe. [621] However, others, and in particular Tikhomirov, think the evidence of their guilt is overwhelming, and take seriously the claim that the Templars are the link between ancient paganism and modern Freemasonry.[622]

The Kabbala

The expulsion of the Jews went hand in hand with the banning and destruction of their evil anti-Christian and anti-Gentile books, especially the Talmud and the Kabbala.

“The Byzantine emperors,” writes Platonov, “were unconditional opponents of the Talmud, forbidding the Talmud on their territory. In this policy the Russian sovereigns followed the Byzantine emperors. Right until the end of the 17^th century the import of the Talmud into Russia was forbidden under pain of death.

“The tradition of the non-allowance of the Talmud onto the territory of Christian states was broken after the falling away of the Western church from Orthodoxy and the strengthening of papism. The mercenary Roman popes and cardinals for the sake of gain often entered into agreements with the Jews and looked through their fingers at the widespread distribution of the Talmud in Europe. Nevertheless, amidst the Roman popes there were found those who tried to fight with this ‘book worthy of being cursed’, from the reading of which ‘every kind of evil flows’.

“Popes Gregory IX in 1230 and Innocent IV in 1244 ordered all Talmudic books to be burned. In England in 1272 during the expulsion of the Jews searches for copies of the Talmud were carried out in their homes and they were handed over to be burned…”[623]

As regards the Kabbala, Nesta Webster writes: “The modern Jewish Cabala presents a dual aspect – theoretical and practical; the former concerned with theosophical speculations, the latter with magical practices. It would be impossible here to give an idea of Cabalistic theosophy with its extraordinary imaginings on the Sephiroths, the attributes and functions of good and bad angels, dissertations on the nature of demons, and minute details on the appearance of God under the name of the Ancient of Ancients, from whose head 400,000 worlds receive the light. ‘The length of this face from the top of the head is three hundred and seventy times ten thousand worlds. It is called the “Long Face”, for such is the name of the Ancient of Ancients.’ The description of the hair and beard alone belonging to this gigantic countenance occupies a large place in the Zoharic treatise, Idra Raba.

“According to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a mystery only to be solved by the initiated. By means of this system of interpretation passages of the Old Testament are shown to bear meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary reader. Thus the Zohar explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a lion whilst he was in the ark, the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related with an extraordinary wealth of imagination, whilst the beautiful story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman is travestied in the most grotesque manner.

“In the practical Cabala this method of ‘decoding’ is reduced to a theurgic or magical system in which the healing of diseases plays an important part and is effected by means of the mystical arrangement of numbers and letters, by the pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the use of amulets and talismans, or by compounds supposed to contain certain occult properties.

“All these ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working miracles by the use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation of the Kabbala by the Jews became the particular practice of Jewish miracle-workers, appears to have originated in Chaldea…”[624]

How could this paganism – for that is what it is - ever have entered the rigorously anti-pagan religion of Judaism? One may well ask. The pro-semite author Paul Johnson writes: “The sages were both fascinated and repelled by this egregious superstition. The anthropomorphism of God’s bodily measurements went against basic Judaic teaching that God is non-created and unknowable. The sages advised Jews to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the law and not to probe dangerous mysteries… But they then proceeded to do just that themselves; and, being elitists, they tended to fall in with the idea of special knowledge conveyed to the elect: ‘The story of creation should not be expounded before two persons, and the chapter on the chariot [Ezekiel 1] before even one person, unless he is a sage, and already has an independent understanding of the matter.’ That was the Talmud; indeed the Talmud and other holy writings contained a good deal of this suspect material…”[625]

L.A. Tikhomirov writes that the mysticism of the Kabbala “was based on the idea of the self-sufficiency of nature, on the substitution of nature for the idea of God the Creator, the Personal God Whose essence was beyond the whole of creation created by Him.

“Therefore the Kabbala undermined both the Mosaic faith and the Christian.

“In social relations it also undermined that order which was based on the law given by God, for it made man the independent orderer of his own social relations. This side of the Kabbala aroused alarm in Jewish society, too, exciting it sometimes to struggle against Kabbalism by force. And indeed, in, for example, its newest manifestation, Hassidism, the Kabbalistic idea undermined the authority both of the rabbis and of Jewish society itself and opposed to it the ‘Tsadiks’ – a power that was, so to speak, independent by dint of the mystical link it presupposed with the Divine principle. The Jews therefore found in Kabbalism a kinship with Christianity, where, as they supposed, ‘Christ made himself God’. In exactly the same way in the triads of the Sephiroth they saw a similarity with the Christian idea of the consubstantial Trinity. But if Kabbalism excited the alarm of the Jewish world, they still were able to deal with it there, since the Kabbalists in general were also penetrated by Jewish national patriotism, and, in all probability, it was precisely Kabbalist influences that served as the basis for that original form of messianism which sees in the Messiah not a special ambassador of God, but the Jewish people itself, and understands the coming kingdom of the Messiah as the universal kingdom of the people of Israel.

“But the Kabbala had a more destructive impact on Christian society.

“In the Christian world Kabbalism was also supposed to be closer to Christianity than Talmudism, so that the Kabbalists were sometimes protected even by the Roman popes. But if there were cases of the conversion of Kabbalists to Christianity, in general Kabbalism has the same relationship to Christianity as Gnosticism, that is, it can give birth only to heretical teachings. And that is how it worked in history, undermining Christian ideas about God, Christ, the Church and, finally, the whole order of Christian society through its ability to join up with all and sundry. The survivals of Gnosticism and the heresies went hand in hand with Kabbalism right from the Middle Ages. It undermined the same things, and first of all the Church; and it gave birth to the same ideals of public life.

“This does not mean that Kabbalism whenever it appeared put forward political or social programmes. It had nothing of the kind, as there was nothing of the kind in occultism. Like occultism, Kabbalism was always only a well-known religio-philosophical world-view. If it had politico-social consequences, then only because this world-view undermined the Christian-ecclesiastical world-view, and through it also the order founded upon it, and those forms of discipline which it held to.

“That intellectual-social movement, a constituent part of which in its religio-philosophical aspect was Kabbalism, together with occultism and Gnosticism undermined the bases of the Christian order confirmed in the middle ages. It was in fact reformist, emancipatory and revolutionary, since it opposed to the social discipline of old Europe the democratic idea. The democratic idea in itself, through its internal logic, was put forward in opposition to the hierarchical idea, when the idea of submission to the will of God was substituted by the idea of human autonomy. It was for that reason that the secret societies and tendencies, in whose world-view the Kabbala found its place, played, together with Gnosticism and occultism, a reformist and revolutionary role. Such, especially, was the role of Freemasonry.

“But we must not conclude from this that the Kabbalistic idea was in essence ‘emancipatory’ and democratic. Quite the opposite. If Kabbalism, like occultism, will at any time begin to introduce into the ordering of society its own ideas, they will give birth to a society that is in an idiosyncratic way aristocratic and very despotic. We see this in part in the social order of Kabbalistic Hasidism, in which the Tsadiks are absolute masters to whom the whole of their community submits unconditionally. And that is understandable.

“According to the idea of Kabbalism, people have by no means equal rights, they are not identical. Over humanity in general there is no authority higher than human authority, and human authority goes back even to the heavens. But people are not all identical, authority does not belong to all of them, because they are not equally powerful. Some people are rich in occult abilities, whose power can be developed by exercise to an infinite degree. But are people are weak in this respect or even nothing. And these weak people must naturally be in the hands of the strong, receive directions from them and be under their administration. This power of the mystical aristocracy is incomparably more powerful than the power of hereditary aristocracy, because the latter is not united with great personal power, while the mystical aristocracy has an invincible personal power. It possesses the ability to rule over the whole of nature, over the angelic powers, over the souls of men, not because such a rule was given to it by some human law or ‘constitution’, but because these higher men are incomparably more powerful than others, while the weak cannot oppose them. Moreover, there is no need to oppose them, because the higher nature will be able to construct a life that is much better for the weak than they can build themselves.

“On this basis heredity can arise. Among the Tsadik hassidim there soon arose ‘dynasties’ in which power was passed down by inheritance.

“And so in itself the Kabbalistic idea by no means leads to democracy…

“As is well-known, in Freemasonry, too, in spite of the external democratism and elective nature of its institutions, in actual fact the secret power of the ‘higher degrees’ is exceptionally great. It is noteworthy that a man of the ‘higher degrees’, when placed among people of the lower degrees, does not receive any external power. He seems to be equal to all his co-members, but is obliged to direct them in the direction indicated to him from above. He must do this by means of influence. What kind of influence is this? In all probability, as they say, he must possess the ability of a hynpotist and magnetist. It is also thought that reception into the higher degrees of Masonry takes place on the basis of the degree to which these ‘occult’ abilities are revealed and proved in a man.

“Concerning Kabbalism, we must further note the possibility of its national role. From ancient times there has existed in Jewry the conviction that the ‘Godchosenness’ of Israel is defined by special ‘prophetic abilities’ of the descendants of Abraham. One can well imagine that the special abilities necessary for Kabbalism belong in the highest degree only to the Jews. With this presupposition we can understand why ‘the Jewish Kabbala’ stands separate from ‘the European’, and the time for the influence of the Kabbalists were ever to come, it would probably coincide with the world influence of Jewry. We can also suppose that this is linked to the preponderance of Jewry in the highest centre of Freemasonry, about which the investigators of the latter speak. But so little is known both about the Kabbalistic organizations and about the higher organizations of Freemasonry, and all ideas about them have so little basis in fact, that one should not attach any serious significance to hypotheses of this sort…”[626]

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a conflict arose between the rationalists, led by Maimonides, who rejected the paganism of the Kabbala, and the “mystics”, led by Nahmanides, who accepted it.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) is to Judaism what the Spanish Arab philosopher Averroës is to Islam and Thomas Aquinas is to Christianity – the first to attempt to reconcile the faith of his fathers with scientific knowledge, and in particular the science of Aristotle which was becoming known again in Spain and Western Europe. For this proto-rationalist project he was criticized by many of the rabbis of his time. But in his opposition to the Kabbala he showed himself faithful to the monotheistic roots of Judaism.

“Nahmanides,” however, as Johnson writes, “made it possible for kabbalists to pose as the conservatives, tracing the origin of their ideas back to the Bible and Talmud, and upholding the best and most ancient Jewish traditions. It was the rationalists who were the innovators, bringing to the study of the Torah the pagan ideas of the ancient Greeks. In this respect, the campaign against the works of Maimonides could be described as the last squeak of the anti-Hellenists.

“Nahmanides himself never joined the witch-hunt against rationalism – on the contrary, he opposed it – but he made it possible for the kabbalists to escape similar charges of heresy, which in fact would have been much better grounded. For kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different religion: pantheism. Both its cosmogony – its account of how creation was conceived in God’s words – and its theory of divine emanations led to the logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajar, produced a summa of kabbalistic lore, the Sefer-ha-Zohar, generally known as the Zohar, which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and everything is united in Him, ‘as is known to the mystics’. But if God is everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being, non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism has always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the plain one that Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind…”[627]

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, secular and spiritual, in favour of the idea a single 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 forgeries, such as The Donation of Constantine. However, from the twelfth century we begin to witness, as Charles George writes, “the emergence from feudal and Catholic concepts of the idea of a ‘state’…: one must learn to interpret the novelties couched in the rites of the new coronation ceremonies designed to celebrate the monarchs as God-instituted power transcending feudal limits, and the newly devised funerary rites for kings which emphasized the immortality of the king’s other body – the body politic, the fictive ‘state’.”[628] A state that was in principle independent of both Catholic and feudal law was a direct threat to the whole papist view of the universe.

A critical influence in the emergence of these seemingly new ideas of the state was the rediscovery in Italy of certain more genuine works of Christian Rome, such as Justinian’s Digest, as well as works from pre-Christian antiquity, such as Aristotle’s Politics. 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. 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 as 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 in 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.”[629]

Re-entry into the Orthodox fold was indeed the only way for a Western 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. From the 1140s the Roman commune was looking for support against absolutism. Thus from Justinian’s Digest 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’.”[630]

But Frederick had little time for 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. They had reason to fear; for papism as a real power 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, communism and ecumenism.

Natural Law

However, it is possible to discern the beginnings of democratism in papism itself. For if 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 here 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.

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’.”[631]

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? 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? So a monarch might be freed from the laws of the State, and the pope might be freed from the canon law of the Church. But they were both theoretically subject to another kind of law. This higher law was called by medieval theorists natural law.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the concept of natural law was formulated with greater precision by Thomas Aquinas, the most famous of the medieval Catholic theologians who practised that corruption of Christian theology by Greek pagan philosophy, especially Aristotelianism, known as scholasticism. However, in his general political theory Aquinas remained more Christian than Aristotelian, and closer to the Orthodox concept of the two powers than to the papist theory of the complete subordination of the State to the Church. Thus, as the Jesuit Fr. Frederick Copleston interprets his thought: “The end of the Church, a supernatural end, is higher than that of the State, so that the Church is a society superior to the State, which must subordinate itself to the Church in matters bearing upon the supernatural life; but that does not alter the fact that the State is a ‘perfect society’, autonomous within its own sphere. In terms of later theology, then, St. Thomas must be reckoned as an upholder of the indirect power of the Church over the State… St. Thomas does not say that man has, as it were, two final ends, a temporal end which is catered for by the State and a supernatural, eternal end which is catered for by the State: he says that man has one final end, a supernatural end, and that the business of the monarch, in his direction of earthly affairs, is to facilitate the attainment of that end. The power of the Church over the State is not a potesta directa, since it is the business of the State, not the Church, to care for economic concerns and the preservation of peace; but the State must care for these concerns with an eye on the supernatural end of man. In other words, the State may be a ‘perfect society’ [pace Aristotle], but the elevation of man to the supernatural order means that the State is very much a handmaid of the Church. This point of view is based not so much on medieval practice as on the Christian faith, and it is, needless to say, not the view of Aristotle who knew nothing of man’s eternal and supernatural end.”[632]

So far so good. However, the revolutionary concept of “natural law” goes back to the early Greek philosophers and is not equivalent, as we shall see, to any Scriptural or patristic concept of law. Fr. Copleston defines it as “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.”[633] But how do we know what is “right reason” and “the good of nature”? Another interpreter of Aquinas, J.S. McClelland, explains: “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.”[634] But “papal pronouncement” often contradicts “the writings of the Fathers of the Church”, “what the philosophers say” takes us still further away from the Fathers, and “the common practices of mankind, both Christian and non-Christian” opens the way to almost complete liberty – or licence - of interpretation…

Aquinas defined the relationship of natural law to man-made laws 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.”[635] If this concept could be made precise, it could provide a basis on which to justify rebellion against the powers that be, whether in Church or State.

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.”[636]

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.”[637]

”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[638] 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.”[639]

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.’”[640]

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 darkened by the fall 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.

In the eighth century Deacon Alcuin of York had expressed this principle in its political application in a letter 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.”[641]

The difference between Alcuin and Aquinas is the difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Orthodoxy presents the apostolic teaching of obedience to secular authorities on the basis of a profound understanding of the fall of man, from which the intellect of man, whether as an individual or en masse, is not immune. Catholicism exempts the intellect from the fall, but thereby undermines the basis of obedience to all authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical.

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”.[642] On the other hand, his doctrine of natural law opens the way for the people – or individuals purporting correctly to interpret natural law – to judge and depose both popes and kings.

Aquinas does recognise that the king is the Lord’s anointed.[643] 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), and “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 already being overturned and therefore must be defended at any cost…

The Crisis of the Medieval Papacy: Boniface VIII

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the war between the Popes and the Western Emperors reached its climax, when Emperor Frederick II, “the last medieval emperor who has to be taken seriously as a ruler of imperial stature”,[644] made a last attempt to carve out an independent position for himself vis-à-vis the Papacy. Frederick controlled a vast 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, Gregory IX, set out to destroy him. First he excommunicated him for not fulfilling his vow of going on crusade, then he invaded his lands while he was on crusade. When Frederick returned and restored his authority, the Pope began 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. [645]

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.[646] 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.”[647]

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 was 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.”[648]

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.”[649]

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.”[650]

However, the papists, notably John of Mantua, turned the allegory on its head by claiming that both the secular and the spiritual swords 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 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”.[651]

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.”[652]

In 1302, in his famous bull, Unam Sanctam, Boniface declared that submission to the Pope was a necessary condition of salvation for every creature. And he returned to the image of the sword: “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.”[653]

Two years earlier, writes Fr. Seraphim Rose, Boniface had “seated himself on the throne of Constantine, arrayed himself in a sword, crown and sceptre, and shouted aloud: ‘I am Caesar – I am Emperor.’ This was not just an act but an indication of something extremely deep in the whole of modern thought: the search for a universal monarch, which will be Antichrist.”[654]

Boniface’s self-coronation and his bull Unam Sanctam were issued as part of a power struggle between the Pope and King Philip the Fair of France. They were 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.[655] But an aide of the King of France noted: “The Pope’s sword is merely made of words; my master’s is of steel.”[656] 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…”[657]

After the death of Boniface VIII, the papacy came under the domination of the French[658], 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 to a half 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”.[659] 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”.[660]

Proto-Protestantism: Marsilius, Wycliff, Hus

However, the decline of the power of the papacy in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire did not lead to a resurrection of the power of the empire; 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, and who invariably demanded various concessions in exchange for their support, thus guaranteeing his political weakness. (During the Reformation, several of the Elector Princes became Protestant, further limiting the power of the Catholic Emperor.) In fact, both France and Germany remained conservative backwaters for centuries, while the “advances” in political theory and practice took place in other lands.

The first such advance was accomplished by Marsilius of Padua. Marsilius had 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.”[661]

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,” continues 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.”[662]

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.”[663] 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.”[664] Nevertheless, the democratic and revolutionary potential of his ideas is self-evident…

Later in the century, the Englishman John Wycliff was similarly concerned to buttress the power of secular rulers against the Church, and had the similar effect of encouraging the development of revolution and democratism. Thus in his Tractatus de Officio Regis, “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… Richard II 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’.[665] 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’.”[666]

And yet “right given by conquest” is a lesser, and less Divine right than “right given by the anointing of the Church”, that right which Shakespeare described, putting the words into the mouth of Richard II (Richard II, III, ii, 54-57):

Not all the water in the wide rough sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

The problem for kings was: in opposing (with justification) the overweening power of the heretical papacy, they deprived themselves of ecclesiastical sanction in the eyes of the people, who were therefore more likely to rebel against the king themselves. This is precisely what happened in the most important event of Richard’s reign, the peasant uprising of 1381, which has a good claim to be called the first revolution in European history in which the characteristic ideas of the later democratic and socialist revolutions can already be seen. (The revolution of the zealots in Thessalonica a few decades earlier is another claimant; but it lacked the ideological element present in the English uprising.) The English peasant revolt illustrated the important principle that in the heretical society of the West, the decline in the authority of the papacy and the rise in the authority of the secular rulers did not necessarily lead to the resurrection of the idea of the “symphony of power” characteristic of the earlier, pre-schism age, but rather led to further rebellions, further assertions of “rights”, on the part of lower classes of society.

The radical writer Charles George writer: “Although the pretext for revolt was a tax grievance against the government of Richard II’s minority, and was linked therefore to the heavy and unpopular burden of the Hundred Years’ War, the motives of he insurgents went deeper. Their anger, like that of the German peasants one hundred and fifty years later, was directed against primary mechanisms within the social system: the customary manorial services to the lord, the restrictive aristocratic forest laws, the wealth of the Church. These demands for the freer sharing of the land and game of England, for greater security and opportunity for the farmer in the village through fixed rents, and the animus expressed against institutional Christianity represented more than a temporary disaffection resulting from the fortuitous bad luch with nature and disease and the stupid wars of the century. The English historian, G.M. Trevelyan, puts the case strongly, perhaps, but interestingly:

“’Nothing is more remarkable than the change in the temper and mental activity of the lower orders during the fourteenth century. Professor Davis has summed up the reign of Henry III with the words: “Of all the contrasts which strike us in medieval life, none is so acute as that between the intellectual ferment in the upper class and the oriental passivity of their inferiors.” But in the reign of Edward III the peasants could no longer be accused of “oriental passivity”, and the “intellectual ferment” in their ranks reminds us of a moder labor movement. Village unions strike for higher wages, villains demand freedom in return for 4d. an acre rent, and men ask each other in every field that deep-probing question –

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?’”[667]

Thus one of the revolt’s leaders, “the crazy priest” John Ball, as Froissart writes, “was accustomed every Sunday after mass, as the people were coming out of the church, to preach to them in the market-place and assemble a crowd around him; to whom he would say, ‘My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us? And for what reason do they thus hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show, or what reasons give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, that in making us labor and work for them to spend. They are clothed in velvets and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear poor cloth. They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of the straw; and, if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labors in the fields; but it is from our labor they have wherewith to support their pomp. We are called slaves; and, if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice. Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our servitude, telling him we must have it otherwise or that we shall find a remedy for it ourselves. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the appellation of slaves, or are held in bondage, will follow us in the hopes of being free. When the king shall see us, we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then seek ourselves to amend our condition.”[668]

These words remind us of nothing so much as the words of another “crazy priest”, Gapon, in the “Bloody Sunday” clash of January, 1905 in St. Petersburg. Over 600 years separate the two incidents, and yet the commonality of spirit is evident. And indeed, there is a red thread connecting the rebellions of 1381 in England, of 1415-1437 in Bohemia, of the 1520s in Germany, of the Levellers in England in the 1640s, of the Jacobites and Baeuvites in France in the 1790s, of many nineteenth-century revolutions, and of the Russian revolution in the twentieth-century. Thus in Bohemia the followers of Jan Hus, who was much influenced by John Wycliff, 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.[669]

Hus himself, like Wycliff, was not a social revolutionary so much as a proto-Protestant. A particular target of his wrath was the Pope’s issuing of “indulgences” – the same issue that would launch Luther’s Reformation. But, as in the case of Wycliff, his excommunication and execution at the Council of Constance in 1415 was to have major social and political consequences; and the Czech Hussite rebellion was put down with the greatest difficulty and after much bloodshed.

The more radical branch of the Czech revolution was called Taborism. T.L. Frazier writes: “The Taborites set about constructing a theocratic society in their territory in southern Bohemia. In theory, there was to be no human authority, for all were brothers and sisters. Of course, the theory was ‘modified’ somewhat to allow for the necessity of government. The older brothers obviously needed to look after their younger siblings. It was also supposed to be a classless society, and a primitive version of communism was attempted. Private property, rents, taxes, and dues were abolished. Peasants from all over Bohemia and Moravia sold all their worldly possessions to contribute to the common purse. In the first part of 1420, chests were set up by the Taborite clergy in which the people were expected to deposit all their money. But here, too, reality, didn’t always conform to theory. The leadership concentrated so much on common ownership that they took no thought of motivating people to produce anything.

“Rather than construct a functioning economy for their newly established Kingdom of God, the Taborites turned to simple banditry whenever the communal chests were empty. As the people of God, they reasoned, they had a right to all of God’s wealth found on the earth. Conversely, those who were not of the people of God, that is, all who were not Taborites, had no claim to the resources of the earth. Thus raids on the property of non-Taborites were rationalized and became common.

“According to Taborite plans, after all of Bohemia was subjected to Taborite control, the purification of the rest of the world would follow through conquest and domination. This belief was deeply engrained in the Taborite movement. Norman Cohn writes: ‘As late as 1434 we find a speaker at a Taborite assembly declaring that, however unfavorable the circumstances might be at present, the moment would soon come when the Elect must arise and exterminate their enemies – the lords in the first place, and then any of their own people who were of doubtful loyalty or usefulness.’”[670]

Taborism added to the embryonic revolutionary consciousness of Europe the element of the ancient Christian heresy of chiliasm or millenarianism, - the idea that the Kingdom of heaven will be achieved here on earth, by the efforts of men and in the conditions of the fall. In the opinion of some, this is the heart of the revolutionary movement and modern secularized thought in general.

The Conciliar Movement

In 1378 there began the Great Schism in the Roman church, with one Pope in Rome and another at Avignon. This added to the division of authority caused by the conflicts between popes and emperors by 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.

As regards 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.”[671]

Thus as regards the State, the Conciliarists were 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.”[672]

Pure Protestantism! And the origin of their 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…”[673]

Even some cardinals sympathised with these ideas. Thus Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly wanted to see the cardinals as a kind of elected parliament above the Pope. 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. Nevertheless, the cardinals convened a council at Pisa in 1409 which deposed both existing popes and elected another, Alexander V. But since this counil had no ecumenical or papal authority, it 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.”[674]

As Nicholas of Cusa summed it up a few years later: “The council is superior to the pope… since the representation of the Church in the general council is surer and more infallible than the pope alone.”[675]

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, 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, and with the people as a whole sobered by the terrible calamity of the Black Death (which killed perhaps of third of the whole of Western Christendom), 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 Pope 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”.[676]

Moreover, it was at this time that the Byzantine Emperor Manuel made an extended visit to the West, and made a considerable impression (but without receiving any help). Tragically, however, at precisely the time that the West was, for the first time in many, 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.

Nevertheless, 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.”[677]

Although the pope, Eugene IV, was obliged by the decrees of the council of Constance to attend this council, he refused.[678] 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].”[679]

With the conciliarist movement in disarray, the Czech Hussite rebellion against the Church crushed, and with 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…”[680]

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 the origins of European statehood, 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.

We have seen that political power, even Christian political power, was always evaluated ambiguously by the Holy Fathers. On the one hand, it was a force for law and order, a focus of unity in the Church, and the support of missionary work beyond the boundaries of the Church. On the other hand, it could be the object of naked ambition, the instrument of the oppression of Christians and even of open revolt against God.

We find this ambiguous assessment in, for example, St. Symeon the New Theologian (+1022), who, while never saying a word against the institution of the Orthodox autocracy as such, was fierce in his criticism of its abuse at the hands of Emperor Basil II. As Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) writes: “Following the thought of the Apostle Paul (I Corinthians 1.27-28) that ‘God has abandoned the wise and powerful and rich of the world, and has chosen in His inexpressible goodness the weak and foolish and poor of the world’, Symeon the New Theologian draws the following contrast between the Divine and the earthly kingdom: ‘People are disgusted by them (i.e. the weak, the foolish, the poor), the earthly king cannot bear the sight of them, their ruling men turn away from them, the rich despise them and, when they meet them, pass by them as if they did not exist, and nobody considers it desirable to mix with them, while God, Who is served by an innumerable number of angels, Who upholds all things by the word of His power, Whose majesty is unbearable for all, did not refuse to become father and friend and brother of these outcasts, but wanted to become incarnate, so as to become like us in everything except sin and make us participants in His glory and kingdom.’ In this excerpt from the second Catechetical Sermon, what is interesting is not only the vivid description both of the ‘rich’ with their disgust and disdain towards the ‘weak and poor’, and of the ‘king’ who cannot even ‘bear the sight of them’, but also the contrast between the ‘earthly king’ and the heavenly King, God, Who, in contrast to the earthly did not refuse to become poor and a man like us, our brother. As we can see from this, St. Symeon the New Theologian was foreign to the thought that the ‘earthly king’ was an image of God on earth, and that the earthly kingdom is a reflection of the Heavenly Kingdom. On the contrary, the earthly kingdom with all its customs seems to him to be the opposite of the Kingdom of God”. [681]

Unfortunately, from the twelfth century, the negative image of the earthly king was to become more dominant in Byzantium.

The Slide towards Absolutism

However, before that we are presented with the much rarer image of a papocaesarist patriarch in the person of Michael Cerularius. This is somewhat ironical because, as we have seen, it was in the patriarchate of Michael Cerularius that the papocaesarist patriarchs of the West fell away from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, being condemned precisely by him and his Synod. But if we are to believe Psellos, the patriarch “tried to rule over the Empress” Theodora, overthrew her successor, Michael VI (1056-1057), forcibly tonsuring him, and set up Isaac Comnenus (1057-1059) in his place. Then, “losing all shame,’ according to Psellos, “he joined royalty and priesthood in himself; in his hand he held the cross, while from his mouth imperial laws came.” But gradually Isaac asserted his power, arrested Cerularius and tried him for high treason in 1059.”

It is a striking coincidence that in the same year, 1059, in which Pope Nicholas II obtained an imperial-style coronation, Patriarch Michael Cerularius should attempt the same. But Nicholas succeeded, whereas Michael failed, defeated by the power of the Orthodox Emperor. That was the difference between East and West.

Or rather, the difference between East and West consisted in the fact that while deviations from the “symphonic” norm of Church-State relations were common in the East and the West, this norm was never forgotten in the East, where it was officially and triumphantly rejected in the West.[682] Thus we see the norm expounded in a letter of Emperor John Comnenus to Pope Honorius (1124-1130): “In the course of my reign I have recognized two things as being completely distinct from each other. The one is the spiritual power, which was bestowed by the Great and Supreme High Priest and Prince of the world, Christ, upon His apostles and disciples as an unalterable good through which, according to Divine right, they received the power to bind and to loose all people. The other thing is the secular power, a power directed towards temporal things, according to the Divine word: Give to Caesar that which belongs to him; a power shut up in the sphere belonging to it. These are the two dominant powers in the world; although they are distinct and separate, they act for their mutual benefit in a harmonious union, helping and complementing each other. They can be compared with the two sisters Martha and Mary, of whom the Gospel speaks. From the consensual manifestation of these two powers there flows the common good, while from their hostile relations there flows great harm.”[683]

But the norm was more and more often defied as the later Comneni Emperors took it upon themselves not only to convene Church Councils, but even to take the leading part in them and punish hierarchs who did not agree with them. This tendency is already evident in Alexis I, who also ordered one of the very rare executions for heresy in Orthodox history, that of the Paulician Monk Basil.[684]

Again, the powers that Manuel I 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.”[685] The origin of this obscure power of “epistemonarchy” 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.”[686]

Using this invented power, the Emperors tended to choose patriarchs who would be obedient to them. As George Acropolites writes: “The Emperors in general want the patriarchs to be humble people, not greatly endowed in mind, who would easily give in to their desires as to law-giving decrees. And this happens all the more frequently with uneducated people; being ignorant in word, they are not capable of bold speaking and bow before the Emperor’s orders.”[687] Similarly, the historian Nicephorus Gregoras writes: “The Emperors choose (simple, uneducated) people for such lofty (patriarchal) posts so that they may unhesitatingly obey their commands, like slaves, and so that they should not offer any resistance.”[688]

And yet they did not always get their way. The extent, but also the limits, of the Emperor’s power was strikingly illustrated by a debate that took place towards the end of the reign of Manuel I. The Emperor convened a Council in order to strike out the following words found in the rite for the reception of Muslims to Orthodoxy: “Anathema to the God of Mohammed, about whom Mohammed says that… He does not beget and is not begotten, and nobody is like Him.” However, the hierarchy did not want to strike out this phrase. Then the Emperor “issued a second decree, in which he again insisted on his opinion and then appointed another Council in Scutari, where the Emperor had withdrawn because of illness to make use of the pure country air. Thither the Emperor summoned the Patriarch and Bishops, but Manuel because of his illness could not enter into personal conversation with the Fathers: the matter was conducted through the Emperor’s beloved secretary. The latter in the person of the Emperor presented two papers to the Council. These were, first, a document in which Manuel set out his point of view on the question being debated, and secondly, his letter to the Patriarch. The Emperor demanded that the Bishops should sign the indicated document. And in the letter he in every way reproached the Patriarch and Bishops for their stubbornness and defiance, even threatening to convene a Council in which he wanted to entrust the presidency to none other than the Pope of Rome (it can be understood that the Pope in this letter served for Manuel only as a kind of scarecrow). In the same letter to the Patriarch the Emperor wrote: ‘I would be ungrateful to God if I did not apply all my efforts so that He, the true God, should not be subjected to anathema.’ But the Patriarch and Bishops even now did not want to share the Emperor’s opinion. On this occasion the noted Eustathius, Metropolitan of Thessalonica, spoke out with special zeal against the Emperor’s demands. He was a man of wide learning, distinguished by the gift of eloquence. He heatedly declared: ‘I would consider myself completely mad and would be unworthy of these hierarchical vestments if I recognized as true some Mohammedan God, who was his guide and instructor in all his disgusting deeds.’ The unusual boldness with which Eustathius began to oppose the Emperor horrified everyone. The hearers almost froze at these words of Eustathius. The Emperor’s secretary immediately set off to inform Manuel about his. The Emperor was indescribably amazed and considered himself deeply offended by Eustathius’ words. He said: ‘Either I shall justify myself and prove that I do not believe in a God that is the teacher of all impiety, and then I shall subject him who vomits blasphemy against the Anointed of God to merited punishment, or I shall be convicted of glorifying another God, and not the true one, and then I will be grateful that I have been led away from a false opinion.’ Patriarch Theodosius set off for the quarters of the Emperor, and for a long time tried to persuade him to forgive the act of Eustathius, and finally, to reduce the Emperor’s anger, promised that he, the Patriarch, and the Bishops would agree to accept the removal of the formula about the God of Mohammed from the trebniks. And apparently, the Council did in fact cease to oppose the will of the Emperor. Manuel was delighted, forgave Eustathius and sent the Bishops off to Constantinople in peace. But the Emperor somewhat deceived himself in his hopes. The next day, early in the morning, an envoy of the Emperor came to the Patriarch demanding impatiently that the Bishops should assemble and sign a decree of the Emperor. The Bishops quickly assembled at the Patriarch’s, but refused to sign the decree. Although, the day before, the Bishops, probably out of fear for Eustathius, had agreed completely to accept the opinion of Manuel, now, when the danger had passed, they again began to oppose the Emperor. They began to criticise the decree, found inaccuracies in it, began to demand changes and removals. Learning about this, the Emperor became very angry against the Bishops and showered them with indecent swear-words, calling them ‘pure fools’. History does not record what happened after this. At any rate the end of the quarrel was quite unexpected: the historian Gregoras records the ending in only a few words. The Bishops, he says, somehow agreed to reject the formula which had enticed the Emperor, and replaced it with a new one, in which, instead of the anathema on the God of Mohammed there was proclaimed an anathema on Mohammed himself and on his teaching and on his followers.”[689]

Byzantine canonists were found – for example, Patriarch Theodore Balsamon of Antioch (12^th century) and Archbishop Demetrius (Chomatianos) of Ochrid (early 13^th century) – who 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 the faith.

According to Balsamon, “the Orthodox Emperors can enter the holy altar when they want to, and make the sign of the cross with the trikiri, like hierarchs. They present catechetical teachings to the people, which is allowed only for local bishops.” “Since the reigning Emperor is the Lord’s Anointed by reason of his anointing to the kingdom, but our Christ and God is, besides, a bishop, similarly the Emperor is adorned with hierarchical gifts.”[690]

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.”[691]

We see here how important the sacrament of royal anointing had become - and how quite unorthodox conclusions were being justified by reference to it.

Chomatianos is hardly less clear than Balsamon in his caesaropapist views: “The Emperor, who is and is called the general supreme ruler of the Church, stands above the decrees of the Councils; he gives to these decrees their proper force. He is the standard in relations to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the lawgiver for the life and conduct of the priests, to his jurisdiction belong the quarrels of bishops and clergy and the right of filling vacant sees. He can make bishops metropolitans, and Episcopal sees – metropolitan sees. In a word, with the single exception of carrying out Divine services, the Emperor is endowed with all the remaining Episcopal privileges, on the basis of which his ecclesiastical resolutions receive their canonical authority. Just as the ancient Roman Emperors signed themselves: Pontifex Maximus, such should the present Emperors be considered to be, as the Lord’s Anointed, for the sake of the imperial anointing. Just as the Saviour, being the Anointed One, is also honoured as First Priest, so the Emperor, as the Anointed one, is adorned with the charismata of the firstpriesthood.”[692]

Ostrogorsky characterises the ideas of Balsamon and Chomatianos as “merely echoes of old and antiquated ideas”.[693] 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 10^th 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…”[694]

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…”[695]

Again, Balsamon wrote: “The emperor is subject neither to the laws nor to the Church canons”.[696] 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”.[697]

Isaac Angelus deposed several patriarchs, one after another… And he said: “The Emperors are allowed to do everything, because on earth there is no difference in power between God and the Emperor: the Emperors are allowed to do everything, 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.”[698] Moreover, he ascribed to himself the power to correct what was done in the Church contrary to the Church canons.[699] Moreover, the encomiasts addressed Isaac as “God-like” (qeoeikele, qeoeidei) and “equal to God” (isoqee).[700]

When the Emperors exalted their dignity to the level of 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… As Hieromonk Dionysius (Alferov) writes: “No more than 15,000 Latin crusaders stormed the well fortified city with its population of one million and its five-times larger garrison! After this the same band of wandering knights took possession of the whole of Balkan Greece and founded their Latin empire on its ruins. Nobody thought of resisting, of saving the capital, of defending the Orthodox monarchy. The local Byzantine administration itself offered its services to the new masters. In the lower classes apathy reigned towards all that had happened, and even evil joy at the wealthy city’s sacking. Using the suitable opportunity, local separatists sprang into life: not only Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria separated and declared their independence, but also the purely Greek provinces of Epirus, Trebizond and some of the islands…”[701]

Not the last cause of this tragic fall was the absolutist attitude of the last pre-fall emperors. Twelve years after the fall of the City, Nicetas Choniates wrote: “For most of the Roman Emperors it was quite intolerable merely to give orders, 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”...[702]

The Byzantines never really recovered from the first fall of the City, in 1204, which became 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 G. 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.”[703]

Thus the Emperor became the sponsor at the baptisms 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.”[704]

The inferiority of the other Orthodox rulers to the Byzantine Emperor was indicated in various ways: by differences in titles (the Russian princes were called arconteV), and by the fact that only the emperors were anointed at their enthronement (and that not before the beginning of the 13^th 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 knyazya), which included the crowning of the prince, but contained no anointing.”[705] 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…[706]

From the beginning Church and State were exceptionally close in Kievan Rus’. St. Vladimir threatened those who threatened this order as follows: “If anyone breaks my rule, whether he be my son or a servant, or anyone of my race or one of the boyars, and interferes into the ecclesiastical affairs of the metropolitan, which I gave into the hands of the metropolitan, and of the Church, and of the bishops in all the cities in accordance with the canons, he will be judged and punished. If anyone tries to seize the judgement of the Church, he will be deprived of the name of Christian, and may all such be cursed by the Holy Fathers.”[707]

As an example of the closeness of Church and State in Kievan Rus’, 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”.[708]

The relationship between Church and State in Kievan Rus’ is described by 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….”[709]

“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 11^th 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.”[710]

“In general, in the course of the civil wars of the 11^th-12^th centuries, the Church acquired a new moral authority in the eyes both of the princes and the people, while the State, for its part, received from the Church a confirmation of its divine purpose for the sake of the common good. 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 laid 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 11^th 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.”[711]

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…”[712]

And yet 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 Sviatopolk. And it was the disobedience of the Kieven Russians to their princes that was to bring down their kingdom…

The Breakup of Kievan Rus’

The unity of Kievan Rus’ under St. Vladimir and his immediate successors was an extraordinary achievement in view of its lack of natural frontiers, constant invasions of barbarians and multinational character. 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”.[713]

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[714] – was that the Great Prince of Kiev would divide up his realm into principalities and give each of his sons one part, which opened the gates to fratricidal strife…

However, Solonevich considers the civil wars of the Kievan princes to be insufficient to explain why none of the Kievan principalities 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 Kievan 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 it 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 [assemblies or parliaments], 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 11^th 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 11^th 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’.”[715]

Archpriest Lev Lebedev is in essential agreement with this verdict: “What a misfortune is democracy, whether it be of the veche or of the boyars! And what madness! Never was the people (or even the best part of it) the source of power and law, nor can it be. In democracy everyone wants to ‘drag’ things in their direction, as a result of which they ‘break up’ the Russian Land, as the chronicler puts it… The fall of great Kiev was accomplished to a significant degree under the influence of the veche. Often it either summoned princes that it liked, driving out the lawful ones, or, on the contrary, invited the latter and drove out the others, thereby ‘helping’ the princes ‘to break up’ Great Kievan Rus’, which had been gathered together by the great labours of St. Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise and Vladimir Monomakh.”[716]

Autocracy restored: St. Andrew of Bogolyubovo

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 small southern principality of Vyshgorod 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”.[717] It was therefore the perfect base for Andrew, who, “having not only a good heart, 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”.[718]

This policy was not adopted without influence from the heavenly realm, as Archpriest Lev explains: “In Vyshgorod at that time, in 1154-55, there was a holy icon of the Mother of God which had been brought not long before from Constantinople. This was a special holy thing! It was one of the icons created by the Evangelist Luke, which he painted having before his eyes the Most Holy Theotokos herself. He painted this icon on part of a plank from a table which had belonged to the Holy Family in Nazareth. Kiev, however, did not value this holy thing in a fitting manner. But meanwhile it worked miracles. It was often found in Vyshgorod, having departed from its place [in Kiev]. In 1155 it again moved, as it were showing that it did not want to remain there [in Kiev]. This time Prince Andrew was a witness of the event. He to his knees in prayer before the icon. And the Most Pure Mother of God told him what he should do. That night, secretly, without asking his father, Andrew of Bogoliubovo took the icon of our Lady and some priests of Vyshgorod and their families, and went away to the North… Again on the instructions of the All-Pure One he did not take it to Rostov, but left it in Vladimir. From that time this great icon began to be called the Vladimir icon. In accordance with God’s providence (for otherwise it is impossible to explain it), the father was not angry with his son. Prince Andrew remained in Vladimir, and built next to it the village of Bogoliubovo in which he constructed his palace. In 1157 Yury Dolgoruky [his father] died. His son did not go to live in Kiev. Moreover, he began to petition in Constantinople for the founding of a metropolitan see in Vladimir, that is, a see having the same ecclesiastical significance as that of Kiev. [However,] he was blessed to have only a bishopric. But then Bishop Theophanes of Vladimir was murdered in a bestial manner in Kiev at the command of the new Metropolitan, Constantine II, who had been despatched there from Constantinople. In reply to this evil act, and also because of the other injustices of the Kievans, Prince Andrew sent an army there, taking the Polovtsians as his allies. In 1169 Kiev was terribly burned down and looted. The churches were also looted.

“The Great Prince, who already bore the title ‘of Kiev’, moved the centre of Rus’ to Vladimir, to the North. Here, in Vladimir-Suzdalian Rus’, he erected about 30 churches, among them the noted Dormition cathedral in Vladimir, and the first church in honour of the new feast of the Protecting Veil of the Theotokos – the wonderful ‘Pokrov on the Nerl’. The ‘Golden Gates’ of Vladimir are also his creation. Thus, not accidentally, but consciously, a new capital of Rus’ was being constructed in the image of the former. Prince Andrew himself put his hand to the writing of a service to the feast of the Protecting Veil, which did not exist in the Greek Church, so that it became the first purely Russian national feast.[719] It is also thought that he participated in the composition of the service to the All-Merciful Saviour and the All-Holy Theotokos on August 1/14 in commemoration of the victory of the Volga Bulgars, when the Vladimir icon and the icon of the Saviour gave out heavenly rays that were visible to all. The Byzantine Emperor Manuel had the same vision in the same year and day during his battle with the Saracens, as Andrew and Manuel learned from letters they wrote to each other. Prince Andrew also composed a prayer that was attached to the ‘Instruction’ of Vladimir Monomakh. Andrew loved God and people, and they loved him, not in vain giving him the nickname ‘God-loving’ [Bogoliubskij]. To the end of his days he had a special veneration for the passion-bearer Prince Boris, and always had his cap and sword by him.

“But, as in the life of a people, so in the earthly life of a man, not everything is unambiguous. Here they live partly according to Christ, but partly still according to the old Adam. Andrew, for all his love for God, could ‘become spiteful’, as was already said, against Kiev. He also ‘became spiteful’ in 1170 against wilful Novgorod. And he sent a powerful army there. But none other than the Mother of God Herself now began to become the Opponent of Prince Andrew, through her icon of the Sign defending the Novgorodians and bringing about a stinging defeat for the Suzdalian armies. However, Bogoliubsky nevertheless later brought Novgorod into obedience by ‘peaceful’ means – by cutting off the movement of bread to it from the Volga region and Ryazan.

“Having moved to the North, Prince Andrew himself hardly waged war at all. Here he was the builder of a state. And not everything was in order in the land. He was an opponent of paganism in everything, including such manifestations of it as the veneration of the military war-band and the ancient veche, which was especially strong in Rostov. He did not want to obey the old war-band nobles of his father. A plot was hatched among them. Prince Andrew wanted to be and become autonomous, an Autocrat, relying on the new Vladimir, and in general on the new people who were settling the new Rus’. For old Rostov was a stronghold of resistance not only to Prince Andrew personally. Here, as far back as the Baptism of Rus’, there had been strong opposition to the Christian faith, and there had been a rebellion of the sorcerers. Then they had expelled the bishops, not allowing them to preach, so that the holy Hierarch Leontius had had to begin teaching the people outside the city with teaching the children. Then, in the 12^th century, through the efforts of may saints, Orthodoxy shone out there also. But something from paganism, and above all self-will and pride, still remained. And these are always the sources of every kind of disturbance. Therefore, while wanting to crush them, Prince Andrew of Bogolyubovo did not at all want to become a tyrant and disregard the rule of the Russian princes of ruling ‘together with the land’, having its voice as an advisor. That is how he ruled – but as an Autocrat, and not as a plaything in the hands of the powerful boyars, or of the people’s veche!…

“In 1174, in Bogolyubovo, Prince Andrew was killed in a terrible way by plotters. Before this one of them had stolen the sword of Prince Boris from his bedroom. Thus did the first Autocrat of Great Russia end his life in a martyric fashion, and the commemoration of his death is celebrated on the very day, July 4/17, when the last Autocrat of Great Russia, his Majesty Nicholas Alexandrovich, was killed together with the whole of his Holy Family!…”[720]

Andrew’s achievement, 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”.[721]

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.”[722]

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”.[723]

Vsevolod’s rule, according to Kliuchevsky, “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.”[724]

However, on the death of Vsevolod in 1212 disturbances again broke out between the princes of Russia. Novgorod separated from Vladimir, and the brothers and nephews of the Great Prince held sway in different cities of the land of Vladimir-Suzdal. As a result, “because of our sins”, as the chronicler put it, “God sent upon us the pagans”, that is the Tatars…

Georgia under the Bagratids

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).[725] 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.”[726]

However, Tamar defeated the Turks when they tried to conquer Georgia. “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.”[727]

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 two factors. One was the internal unity of the State under its strong and pious rulers. A second was its strictness in relation to heresy. Thus the Georgians were much firmer in relation to the heretical Armenians than the Byzantines were in relation to the heretical Latins during the same period. This refusal to make concessions on the faith for the sake of political gains reaped both spiritual and material fruits for the Georgians.[728]

The unity of the kingdom was not achieved without a struggle, even a struggle, at one point, against a form of parliamentary democracy! Thus “in the first year of Tamara’s reign, an officer of the royal court, Kurltu-Arslan, whose dream was to become the Minister of Defense, insisted that a parliament be established in Iani, where, according to his plan, all internal and external problems of the country were to be discussed, and only after that was a notice to be sent to the king for approval. The Isani Parliament was planned to appropriate the legislative power and leave the monarch a symbolic right to approve decisions already made and give orders to carry out the will of the members of this parliament. Thus, the very foundations of the royal institution blessed by God Himself were shaken and the country found itself face to face with the danger of civil war.

“Tamara ordered that Kurlu-Arslan be arrested, but his followers, bearing arms, demanded the release of their leader. In order to avoid imminent bloodshed, Tamara came to a most wise and noble solution, sending to the camp of the rebels as negotiators two of the most respectable and revered ladies: Huashak Tsokali, the mother of the Prince Rati, and Kravai Jakeli. The intermediation of the two noble mothers had such an effect on the conspirators that they ‘obeyed the orders of their mistress and knelt in repentance before her envoys and swore to serve the queen loyally.’ The country felt the strong arm of the king. Tamara appointed her loyal servants to key government posts…”[729]

At the same time, the Georgians saw themselves as sons of the Byzantines. 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…”[730]

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.[731] 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…

The Nicaean Empire and Royal Anointing

After the fall of Constantinople to the crusaders in 1204, asks Hieromonk Dionyius, “what remained for the few Byzantine patriots and zealots of Orthodoxy to do? Correctly evaluating the situation, they understood that the process of the fall was already irreversible, that neither the empire nor the capital could be saved by them. Having elected Theodore Lascaris as emperor on the day before the fall of Constantinople, they left the capital with him and founded a centre of resistance in the hilly and wooded district of Bithynia. It is noteworthy that the centre became the city of Nicaea, the place in which the First and Seventh (the last) Ecumenical Councils had been conducted. Here, to Nicaea, there flowed the church hierarchs who had not submitted to the Roman pope and his puppet – the new patriarch of Constantinople. These zealot bishops elected their own Orthodox Nicaean patriarch. The Niceaen patriarch received St. Savva of Serbia and gave autocephaly to the Serbian Church; and it was he who appointed our Metropolitan Cyril, the fellow-struggler of the right-believing Prince Alexander Nevsky. In this way the Nicaean Greeks had communion with the Orthodox in other countries.

“The material and military forces of the Nicaean Empire were tiny by comparison with its mighty enemies: the Latin West and the Muslim East. And in spite of that the Nicaean Kingdom survived for more than half a century. The Providence of God clearly preserved it, destroying its dangerous enemies in turn: the Turks constricted the Latins, and these same Turks were themselves defeated by the Mongols.

“The Nicaean Empire relit in the Greeks the flame of zeal for Orthodoxy and its national-state vestment. It opposed faith and life according to the faith to the society that had been corrupted by base materialist instincts. The first three Nicaean emperors Theodore I Lascaris, John Vatatzes and Theodore II were people of burning faith, firm and energetic rulers and courageous warriors.

“Interesting is the reply of the second Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes to Pope Innocent III. Rejecting the pope’s offer of a unia, and replying to his mockery (what kind of emperor are you, he said, if you sit in the woods and not in the capital), John replied: ‘The emperor is he who rules not walls and towers, not stones and logs, but the people of the faithful.’ And this people was those who for the sake of the preservation of Orthodoxy abandoned the capital and gathered with him ‘in the woods’.”[732]

So 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.”[733]

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.[734] 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…”[735]

Dagron considers that the Theodore Lascaris’ 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.”[736]

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”.[737]

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, purifying and raising to a new, consciously Christian level. 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 12^th or 13^th century. After all, the pagan emperors had been recognized by Christ and the apostles although they came to power independently of the Church. 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", God, which is why the Empire did not need to be re-instituted by the Church.

Of course, the fact that the Empire, like the Church, was of Divine origin did not mean that the two institutions were of equal dignity. Whereas the Church was “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. The Church was like the soul which survives the death of the body, being by nature superior to it.

Having said that, the fact that the Empire, like the body, was created by God was of great importance as against those who asserted, like Pope Gregory VII, that its origin lay 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, when Roman power appeared to be divided among a number of mini-states.

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.”[738]

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.”[739]

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 earlier (in 1208) and by a hierarch whom everybody recognised as having a greater authority – Patriarch Michael IV Autoreianus. As 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?”[740]

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…”[741]

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.”[742]

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.[743] 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.

Another reason for its prosperity was that 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…”[744]

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….”[745]

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.[746] 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 uniate 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…

The Nicaean Emperors and the Unia

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. However, these early naïve negotiations came to an abrupt end after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. The Latins tried to impose their faith on the Greeks, but 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.”[747]

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.”[748]

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.”[749]

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.”[750]

However, there were ominous signs. “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…”[751]

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.

However, “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.’”[752]

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.[753]

In justification of his deposition of Patriarch Arsenius, the emperor invoked his right as epistemonarch – 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.” [754]

However, the Church now began to show greater independence, aroused by the emperor’s desire for union with Rome. 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…”[755]

On the one hand, this absolution gave the emperor greater freedom in planning the unia. 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.[756] On the other hand, the patriarch was now determined to limit his use of 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…”[757]

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 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 emperor and his uniate patriarch, John Beccus. And the Fathers of Holy Mount Athos joined in the condemnation, writing to the emperor: “It is written in the explanation of the Divine Liturgy that the liturgizer commemorates the name of his hierarch, showing his exceeding obedience to him, and that he is in communion with him both in faith and as a steward of the Divine Mysteries… [But] he who receives a heretic is subject to the curses laid on him, and he who gives communion to an excommunicate is himself excommunicate.”[758]

“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.’”[759]

The fall of the uniate project led to a reassertion of the power of the Church in relation to the State. Thus Patriarch Isaiah said to Emperor Andronicus I: “You order me to occupy myself only with the affairs of the Church, while you offer yourself, in accordance with your personal will, to rule the State. But that is the same as if the body were to say to the soul: ‘I don’t need your help in carrying out my functions; I will do my work as I will, and you do yours as you are able.’”[760]

The Age of Saint Sava

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.[761] 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.[762] 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.[763] 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.”[764]

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 in opposition to the only true Empire in Constantinople, 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, and which marked him out as a usurper…

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 semi-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.

A few years earlier, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox dynasty, Stephen Nemanja had abdicated the throne, and in 1197 retired to the monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos. He conferred the throne on his second son, Stephen, “the first-crowned” in a ceremony described by the monk Teodosije: “After having heard the Liturgy and prayed, the king and the holy bishop made a blessing with the cross and then both placed their hands on the head of Stephen and proclaimed him grand zhupan and king of the whole Serbian land. And all the noble lords bowed down before him, asking God to grant him many years…”

However, “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…”[765]

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 Orthodoxy 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?[766] 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…”[767]

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..."[768]

But 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”[769], 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.”[770] 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 the Greek Empire and Patriarchate in Nicaea.[771] In 1235 the Bulgarian Church was given independence from Ochrid and its Archbishop Joachim was proclaimed patriarch at Lampsacus.

However, 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.[772] 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.[773]

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).”[774]

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.”[775]

Russia between the Hammer and the Anvil

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…”[776]

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 cruelty of the Mongol invasion of Russia was illustrated by the destruction of Ryazan, where “the prince with his mother, wife and sons, the boyars and inhabitants, without regard to age or sex, were slaughtered with the savage cruelty of Mongol revenge… Priests were roasted alive, and nuns and maidens were ravised in the churches before their relatives. No eye remained open to weep for the dead…”[777]

The only Russian principality not destroyed by the Mongols was Novgorod. 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”.[778]

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. [779] 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.

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, having taken the schema as Monk Alexis. “My children,” said Metropolitan Cyril, know that the sun of the land of Suzdal has now set! For nevermore shall such a prince be found in the land…”[780]

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,”[781] 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.”[782]

Indeed, Metropolitan Cyril II (1242-1281) went freely through all the Russian lands, from Galicia, where his former patron, Prince Daniel Romanovich, ruled to Vladimir, 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.

Kosovo Polje

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 Skopje, 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.”[783]

By this time the way in which the Serbian kings were portraying themselves was almost indistinguishable from the symbolism of the Byzantine Emperors. Thus Desanka Milošević describes a portrait of Tsar Milutin in Gračanica in which “the king had all the prerogatives of power of the Byzantine Emperor, except for the title. The crown, the garments, the loros and the sceptre were all identical to the Byzantine Emperor’s. Before Milutin, something like this would have been absolutely unthinkable, for only the Byzantine Emperor was Christ’s regent on earth…”[784]

Dušan went further: directly challenging the authority of the Byzantine Emperor, he called his kingdom the united one “of the Serbs and the Greeks” (not, following Byzantine custom, “of the Romans”). However, Dušan had come to the throne by rebelling against and then strangling his own father, St. Stephen Dečansky. So his claim even to the Serbian throne, not to speak of the Byzantine, was weak. In spite of this, many Greeks supported his claims, and the protos of Mount Athos was present at his 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?”[785]

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.”[786]

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”[787]) 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.

However, Patriarch Ioannikije died in 1354, and Tsar Dušan in 1355. “It was as if,” writes Fr. Daniel Rogich, “the passing of two great religious and secular leaders created a huge vacuum over the empire which was filled by a black cloud of lack of faith and political disaster. The upcoming events and internal and external strife would bring Serbia to the brink of political and religious disaster.

“The new leadership fell into the hands of Dushan’s son, King Urosh IV and Empress Helen. Urosh was only seventeen years old at the time… Being truly humble in spirit and less worldly than his departed father, Urosh was unable to control such a vast territory. In fact many began to call him Urosh ‘the Weak’. As a result, the next twenty years saw the breakup of the entire region of the southern territory of the Serbian empire, as well as a vying for power in the northern half.”[788]

In 1371 the Serbs were disastrously defeated by Sultan Murad I on the Maritsa, and in the same year Tsar Urosh died. However, at this point the Serbian Prince Lazar of Krushevac gradually began to reunite the Serbs with the slogan, Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava, that is, “Only Unity Saves the Serbs”. Still more important, in 1371, he finally managed to heal the ecclesiastical break with Constantinople.

“In the spring of 1375, Holy Lazar called a National Church Assembly, inviting all civil leaders and bishops to his palace in Krushevac. The widowed Empress Helen, Dushan’s wife, was given a special place of honor, and Patriarch Sava IV served as the ecclesiastical head of the meeting. It was decided at the gathering to bless the virtuous monk Isaiah of Hilandar, with monks Theophanes, Silvester, Niphon, and Nicodemus as companions, to travel to Constantinople to visit His Holiness, Patriarch Philotheos (1364-1376). Due to the letters of the Patriarch and Holy Tsar Lazar, Patriarch Philotheos granted, as Archbishop Danilo II wrotes in his Lives of the Kings and Archbishops of Serbia, ‘that the Serbs would no longer simply have an archbishop, but an autocephalous Patriarch over whom no one would exercise authority.’ The Patriarch also forgave Tsar Dushan, Patriarch Ioannikios, Patriarch Sava IV, King Urosh IV, and all the Serbian Orthodox Christians. He also sent two hieromonks, Matthew and Moses, to Prizren to celebrate Divine Liturgy with His Holiness Patriarch Sava IV, and to pronounce over the grave of Tsar Dushan in Pristina the revocation of the anathema. This took place on Thomas Sunday, April 29, 1375. Shortly thereafter Patriarch Sava IV fell asleep in the Lord, and Tsar Lazar summoned the Synod of Bishops, which elevated the venerable elder Ephraim as the new Patriarch of Serbia”.[789]

In spite of this inspiring miracle of political and ecclesiastical peacemaking, the Turks continued to make inroads into Serbia, culminating in the famous battle of Kosovo polje in 1389, at which the Sultan was killed, but also 77,000 Serbs, including Tsar Lazar. 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.[790]

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[791]: “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’.”

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.

It was a similar story in the struggle between the Greeks and the Bulgars. 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.[792] 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….

The Rise of Muscovy

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, whose title now included the phrase “of all Russia”, 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. This indicated that the political leadership of Russia had to come from the north, from the area that we shall now call “Great Russia”, as opposed to “Little Russia” centred on Kiev or “White Russia”, which was increasingly coming under the dominion of the pagan rulers of Lithuania.

On the death of Maximus, Grand-Prince Yury of Galicia (1301-1308 petitioned Patriarch Athanasius I to consecrate a “metropolitan of Galicia”. This move was potentially very dangerous for the unity of the Russian lands. 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, which threatened from Poland and the Baltic German lands.[793]

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. St. Peter moved the seat of Church government again, from Vladimir to Moscow – that is, to the town whose princes, more than any others, followed the “Alexandrian” pro-Tatar and anti-Catholic policy, and which was neither too far east to be under the shadow of the Tatars nor too far west to be under the shadow of the Lithuanians.[794] And 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 obey 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”.[795]

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.

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.”[796]

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)[797], 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). His influence in Byzantium led to the unification of the metropolitanate, under his sole rule, following the death of Roman (1362).”[798]

In 1369 Great Prince Demetrius Ivanovich of Moscow, having consolidated his position within Great Russia, made his first step towards gathering the other Russian lands under his dominion by sending an army against Lithuanian-controlled Smolensk and Briansk. “At the same time Metropolitan Alexis excommunicated from the Church those princes who had entered into union with the Lithuanian pagans against the Christian prince of Moscow.”[799] The Lithuanian prince Olgerd hit back by petitioning Patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople to grant a second metropolitan for all the lands which he and his allies controlled. He was supported by a threat coming from King Casimir of Poland “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.”[800]

At the same time, Great Prince Demetrius of Moscow was bringing Tver, which previously had been in the Lithuanian sphere of influence, in vassalage to himself, and Prince Sviatoslav of Smolensk broke his agreement with Olgerd and entered into union with Demetrius. With the change in political orientation in these lands, Metropolitan Alexis was able to appoint new bishops for Smolensk and Briansk. As Lithuania began to be threatened by the Catholic Teutonic knights from the Baltic lands, the swing in the balance of power towards Moscow was further accentuated by Prince Demetrius’ taking the title “Great Prince of all Russia” when signing a treaty with Novgorod; and it looked as if the reunification of the Russian lands under Moscow was about to begin….

At about this time the Metropolitan of Lithuania 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.[801] It was at this time 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”.[802]

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: although, in 1383, the Lithuanian Great Prince Jagiello signed a treaty with Moscow and agreed to convert to Orthodoxy, he quickly changed his mind and instead, in 1386, converted to Catholicism, which led to the union of Lithuania with Catholic Poland and the increasing identification of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodox statehood with Muscovite Great Russia alone.

Nevertheless, although only Great Russia remained faithful to the ecumenical vision of Orthodoxy, that vision, drawing strength from the Palamite renewal of monasticism taking place in Constantinople and the Balkan lands, 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. The northern forests were covered with new monasteries founded by the disciples of St. Sergius (over 100 of whom were canonized). And icon-painters such as Andrei Rublev glorified the newly-built churches and cathedrals with their wonderful works.

Moreover, it was in this time that important steps were taken towards the unification of Great Russia. Under the influence of St. Sergius, 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.[803]

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... Ваsil 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”.[804]

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 of the Orthodox autocracies, while the second marked the beginning of the end of Orthodox autocracy in its original Mediterranean homeland.

Тhe Sultan’s Turban and the Pope’s Tiara

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 the 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 Lourié writes: “It was precisely in the 14^th 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, 15^th century. It was precisely in the 14^th 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 15^th, nor in the 14^th century was there any talk of union with the Turks – their invasion was thought to be only an evil. But already in the 14^th 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 16^th to 19^th 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…”[805]

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: “This impious people [the Turks] 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.”[806]

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 – in the sense of universal, non-nationalistic - 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). Thereafter, their successors no longer called themselves Romans, but Greeks (only their Turkish conquerors kept the memory in the phrase Millet Rum, where Rum means “Rome”); while it was another people, the Russians, who would strive to preserve their political inheritance as “The Third Rome”.

John V was the first emperor since Michael VIII to convert to Papism. But in his time, in the 14^th century, the Church and the people were still strong enough not to follow his personal decision (and he returned to Orthodoxy before his death). It was a different matter in the following century. In proportion as the political and military position of the Empire grew weaker, the pressure on both emperors and patriarchs to compromise with the faith became stronger. Thus Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople told Emperor John VIII: “The Church must go in front of the power of the Emperor, or next to it, but in no way behind it.”[807] And yet this Patriarch meekly followed the same Emperor to the council of Florence-Ferrara in 1438-39, and died in Italy after signing the unia with Rome in exchange for the promise of military help from the West against the Turks…

Not everybody signed, however. St. Mark Evgenicos, Metropolitan of Ephesus, refused. 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 Evgenicos, St. Mark’s brother and the Despot Demetrius also left earlier without signing. And the signature of Methodius of Lacedaemon is nowhere to be found…[808]

Russia and the Council of Florence

Until the Council of Florence the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Russia remained unshaken.[809] 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 сertain decrease in that filial respect for the Emperor in Byzantium that 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.”[810]

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. 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 – an obvious possibility 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 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 and 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. Оne 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.”[811]

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 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."[812]

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…[813]

The Reasons for the Fall

The last emperor, Constantine XI, was a uniate[814], 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.[815] 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. One such Roman was 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.”[816] 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.”[817] Another was St. Mark’s disciple, St. Gennadius Scholarius, who repented of his previous uniate beliefs, and became the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the conquest. And then there were the 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.’”[818]

It is this capacity for repentance intrinsic to Orthodox Christianity which ensures that the ideals of Christian Rome 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 rich were divided against poor, Emperor against Emperor, and Emperor against Patriarch...

Rich against Poor. The very foundations of the autocracy were questioned 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”[819], 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.[820]

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 (out of 109 Byzantine reigns, in 74 cases the throne was seized by a coup[821]) 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.

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”[822] – although, as we have said, the organisation could not fail to be weakened by such persistent acts of violence. We can see that the Byzantines lost the consciousness that “rebellion is as the sin of divination” (I Kings (I Samuel) 15.23) in the fact that, as Nikolsky writes, “an anathema against those daring to undertake rebellion was pronounced in the 11^th to 14^th centuries… Thus, according to the Byzantine historian Kinnamas, Andronicus Manuel fell under anathema in the 12^th 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”.[823]

The failure to solve the question of legitimacy was not the only cause of the weakness of the Byzantine system. L.A. Tikhomirov points to another, still deeper one: the fact that imperial power was based on two 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. But, 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.”[824]

Emperor against Patriarch. Nor did the Empire respect the Priesthood. Although fewer Patriarchs were removed by the Emperors in this period, the Church’s subjection to the State was more evident than ever – in the almost idolatrous pomp of court ceremonial[825], 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 first emperor of the last period, Michael VIII, on reconquering Constantinople, had immediately reverted to the bad old ways of the pre-Nicaean Emperors, overriding the Church in his desire for a unia with Rome.

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.”[826]

The Byzantine Empire failed because, while 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. As an 8^th or 9th Greek prophecy found in St. Sabbas’ monastery says: "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."[827]

The “third God-chosen people”, the Russians, would carry the traditions of Byzantium into the modern period…

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.[828]

Only the Pope, it would seem, benefited. He 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.”[829]

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. 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.

The “one thing necessary” for the Orthodox Christian is the worship of God “in spirit and in truth”. So the ideal of Orthodox Statehood is the system which facilitates that worship to the maximum degree. As M.V. Zyzykin writes: “Christianity has revealed the highest purpose of human power, which is to help create the conditions making the salvation of men possible through the construction of a peaceful community (I Timothy 2.2). From the point of view of sanctification and salvation, political power is one of the benefactions of the Divine will; in protecting virtue and restraining the destructive passions, it eases the work of the Church in the salvation of human souls. Power preserves the social order of life, and without this order society is impossible. It was not chance that created the power of the head of the family, the right of the judge, the power of the king. These are fighters raised between good and evil so that the former might be given the opportunity to live peacefully amidst the latter. Before the creation of the Church of Christ the State fulfilled its purpose with less consciousness, but the Church herself, recognizing its Divine origin, is revered by the State itself as the living representative of God, as the governing ideal and principle pointing to the ultimate aim … – the salvation of the soul in the world to come.”[830]

Such an ideal of Christian statehood is, of course, unattainable if the People is 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.

The Two Kingdoms

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. Already in the Old Testament we read that “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes” (Proverbs 21.1). When the king is a Christian, his heart is still more closely held by the Lord.

That Christ rules in the State as well as in the Church was revealed by the Archangel, saying: “The Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His Kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1.32-33). St. Gregory Palamas comments on this: “He Whose Kingdom is eternal and without end is God. But the Child to be born also had David as His father, therefore He was also man. He was both God and man, Son of man and Son of God. As man He received the inalienable Kingdom from God the Father, as Daniel saw [Daniel 7.9, 7.13-14)… He was to sit upon the throne of David and reign over the house of Jacob. Jacob was the patriarch of all godfearing people, whereas David was the first to prefigure Christ by reigning in the fear of God and in a way pleasing to Him. Christ brought together patriarchate and kingdom into one heavenly and earthly dominion.”[831]

The Orthodox patriarchs and kings receive their power by delegation from Christ. They exercise their separate powers in symphony because they are one in Christ, the King of kings and Great High Priest. As for the People, it obeys the king 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 alone is a true Theocracy, Christ is already King in her, He has given her His 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 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.

Another way of understanding this is to see Church and State as two Kingdoms under a single King, with the Church as the “inner Kingdom” including only those who wish Christ to be their King and who therefore have been baptised and have promised to obey His commandments, and the State as the “outer Kingdom” including both those who wish Christ to be their King and those who do not. The Church, “the inner Kingdom”, is the Kingdom “not of this world”, which is ruled in an inner, mystical way through the grace communicated to the Church in the sacraments. The State, “the outer kingdom”, is the kingdom “of this world”, which may be extended to include the whole of this external world, over which Christ rules, not by His redemptive grace, but by His Providential power.

“One must distinguish two Kingdoms of Christ,” writes Zyzykin, “and consequently two of His powers. ‘The Son of God, having received human nature into the unity of His Divine Hypostasis, is called a king,’ says St. Gregory the Theologian, ‘but in one sense He is king as the Almighty and king of both the willing and the unwilling, and in the other, as leading to obedience and submitting to His kingdom those who have willingly recognised Him as king’ (quoted in Metropolitan Macarius, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, pp. 178-179). In the first case the kingdom of Christ is without end and all three Persons of the All-Holy Trinity participate in Providence. In the second it will end with the leading of all the true believers to salvation, when Jesus Christ hands over the Kingdom to God and the Father, when He will annul every authority and force, that God may be all in all (I Corinthians 14.18). The power of which it is said: ‘all power has been given to Me in heaven and on earth’ was handed over by Him to nobody. He remains the Highest Teacher (Matthew 23.8), the Highest Priest (Hebrews 7.24-25) and the highest ruler of His kingdom, the Pastor of pastors (I Peter 5.4).

“The Church is the visible form of the Kingdom of Christ, its realisation on earth, by which it is destined to embrace the world (Mark 16.15-16; Matthew 28.19-20; Luke 24.47; John 20.23); it is the kingdom that is not of this world (John 18.36). It is a special sphere in which the relationship of man with God is developed (Matthew 22.21; Luke 20.25); Church power by the spiritual character of its commission does not consist in mastery and lordship, which are characteristic of earthly power, but in service (Matthew 20.25-27; Mark 9.35).”[832]

Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria has a similar interpretation: “’All is delivered’ to the Son by the Father (Luke 10.22) in that all is to be subject to the Son. There are two ways in which God rules over all. First, He rules over all independently of their own will. And second, He rules over those who willingly subject themselves to Him. Hence I can say: God is my Master independently of my will, inasmuch as He is my Creator. But He is also my Master whenever I, as a grateful servant, fulfil His will by working to keep the commandments.”[833]

The two kingdoms have different functions. The inner kingdom of the Church ministers to the inner needs of man, his need for spiritual salvation. The State ministers to his external needs, his need for food and shelter and security from external enemies.

Very shortly after the founding of the Church, the apostles recognised that these needs were different and needed to be ministered to by different people. Thus they 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, throughout the Christian family of nations; and in recognition of this the Byzantine Church gave the Emperor a rank within the Church equivalent to that of the diaconate.

But this recognition did not take place until the Byzantine State had been fully “enchurched” (Russian: otserkovlenie) – that is, according to Zyzykin, by the beginning of the 10^th 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…”[834]

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.”[835]

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.

For, as Professor A.V. Kartashev writes: "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."[836]

“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.”[837]

“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.”[838]

“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….”[839]

“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.” [840]

Zyzykin summarise the Church-State relationship in New Rome 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 15^th 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…”[841]

The Rights of the Orthodox Autocrat

Whatever rights the emperor has in the Church are given to him by the Church, for the sake of the Church, and in view of the fact that he is 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.

The rights of the Emperor in the Church were limited by the fact that he could not perform sacraments, or ordain or defrock bishops and priests.

“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.”[842]

One of the rights entrusted to the Emperor by the Church was that of convening Ecumenical Councils and enforcing their decisions. This right 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.[843] Again, although the Emperor Marcian 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,”[844] 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].’”[845]

Another imperial right was that of handing the Patriarch his staff. This should not be interpreted as if the emperor 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.”[846]

“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].”[847]

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 intercession (Russian: pechalovanie). “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 75^th 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.”[848]

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.”[849]

“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…”[850]

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”. Another model consists in comparing the Emperor to a Bridegroom, and the Empire to his Bride; but the paternal metaphor is more common.

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 emphasised 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.[851]

Absolutism and Democracy

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 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, absolutist principles easier.

This absolutism took two forms: “caesaropapism” in the East and “papocaesarism” in the West. “Caesaropapism” signifies the intrusion of State power into the realm of the Church, and “papocaesarism” – the intrusion of the Church power into the realm of the State.

The decay of the symphonic principle began already with the Arian emperors in the mid-fourth century, revived with the the iconoclast emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries, and became firmly entrenched with the Angeli emperors before the Fall of Constantinople in 1204. If anything, the “Orthodox” absolutism of the Angeli, supported by Orthodox canonists such as Balsamon, proved to be a more dangerous temptation than the heretical absolutism of the Arians and iconoclasts. In any case, with its revival in a still more subtle form under the later Palaeologi in the fifteenth century, Byzantium was doomed.

The internal absolutism of the last Palaeologi emperors 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 they 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.”[852]

“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 – or kingliness - of all men. But this is a sign of God’s wrath. For “because of the transgression of a land, many are its princes” (Proverbs 28.2).

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 absolutism and 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, free from the restraint of any 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 justice, and if its will changes, then truth and justice must change with it…

The famed tolerance or freedom of religion in democratic states is only seeming. Or rather, it can be real only for a time, until the State works out its own ruling ideology and applies it consistently. For, as Tikhomirov writes, “if a state, as law and power, removes itself from being linked with a determinate confession, that is, from the influence of a religious confession on its own religious politics, it becomes the common judge of all confessions and subjects religion to itself. All relations between the various confessions and the rights of them all must, evidently, be decided by the state that is set outside them, which is governed exclusively by its own ideas on justice and the good of the state and society. In this situation it evidently has the complete right and opportunity to carry out repressions whenever, in its opinion, the interests of a confession contradict civil and political interests.”[853]

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 statue 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

Europe today is dominated by two absolutist democracies: the European Union and the Russian Federation. The European Union is the heir, spiritually and geographically, of Charlemagne’s empire. It pretends to be a democracy, and is in fact made up of genuine democracies. But the democratic element is swallowed up by an unelected Commission that gives directives to all the member-states in a socialist and atheist spirit. The Russian Federation, the heir of the anti-theist Soviet Union, while appearing to have adopted a more Christian, and even Orthodox Christian form, is returning to the absolutism of Soviet times, only in a less crude form, with a democratic façade and a nationalist, rather than internationalist ideology. Neither of these states can be the symphonic partner of the truly Orthodox Church. Both of them, separately or in union with each other, could wipe True Orthodoxy finally off its historic heartland, the European continent.[854]

The restoration of Romanity, whose central unifying element is the Orthodox Christian autocracy confessing the truly Orthodox Faith, 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 Orthodox Christian Emperor, 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 to Almighty God, for Whom all things are possible, that He 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…”[855]

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[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 (Conversations with My Own Heart), Jordanville, 1998, p. 159 (in Russian).

[3] Thomas Aquinas wrote: “Man is by nature a social animal. Hence in the state of innocence men would have lived in society. But a common social life of many individuals could not exist, unless there were someone in control, to attend to the common good” (Summa Theologica, Ia, 96, 4).

[4] Hieromonk Dionysius, Priest Timothy Alferov, O Tserkvi, Pravoslavnom Tsarstve i Poslednem Vremeni (On the Church, the Orthodox Kingdom and the Last Time), Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1998, p. 15 (in Russian).

[5] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1848 edition, volume 2, p. 169 (in Russian). Cf. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov: “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 (Collected Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 781).

[6] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 24 on I Corinthians, 5.

[7] Troitsky, Philosophia khristianskago braka (The Philosophy of Christian Marriage), 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”.

[8] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Lev Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tservki, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 24-25 (in Russian).

[9] 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.

[10] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 24; quoted in Fr. Michael Azkoul, Once Delivered to the Saints, Seattle: Saint Nectarios Press, 2000, p. 219.

[11] St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.

[12] St. Gregory, Morals on the Book of Job, XXI, 15, 22, 23; cf. Azkoul, op. cit., p. 221.

[13] St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 15.

[14] Bishop Barnabas, Pravoslavie (Orthodoxy), Kolomna: New Golutvin monastery, 1995, pp. 128, 129 (in Russian).

[15] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 3.

[16] Boshchansky, “Zhizn’ vo Khriste” (“Life in Christ”), in Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), №№ 3-4, May-August, 1998, p. 41 (in Russian).

[17] Morris, The Genesis Record, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1976, p. 224.

[18] E. Kholmogorov, “O Khristianskom tsarstve i ‘vooruzhennom narode’” (“On the Christian Kingdom and ‘the Armed People’”), Tserkovnost’ (Churchness), № 1, 2000, pp. 35-38 (in Russian).

[19] Tikhomirov, Religioznie-philosophskie osnovy istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, p. 268 (in Russian).

[20] Soloviev, “Tri Sily” (“Three Forces”), republished in Novij Mir (New World), № 1, 1989, pp. 198-199 (in Russian).

[21] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg: “Komplekt”, 1992, pp. 76-77 (in Russian).

[22] Smart, N. The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971, p. 299.

[23] Shafarevich, I.R. Sotzializm kak Iavlenie Mirovoj Istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of World History), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977 (in Russian); Smart, op. cit., p. 299.

[24] Morris, op. cit., p. 252.

[25] Smart, op. cit., p. 298.

[26] "Taina Apokalipticheskogo Vavilona" (“The Mystery of the Apocalyptic Babylon”), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 47, № 5 (545), May, 1995, pp. 14-16 (in Russian).

[27] 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.”

[28] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 78.

[29] "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)

[30] I. Shafarevich, “Sotzializm” (“Socialism”), in A. Solzhenitsyn (ed.), Iz-Pod Glyb (From under the Rubble), Paris: YMCA Press, 1974, pp. 36-37 (in Russian).

[31] 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).

[32] Quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, II, 1.

[33] 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).

[34] Phillips, op. cit., pp. 35-36.

[35] John Bright, A History of Israel, London: SCM Press, 1980, p. 39.

[36] Bright, op. cit., pp. 39, 40.

[37] Barbara Watterson, Ancient Egypt, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Company, 1998, pp. 18-19.

[38] David P. Silverman, Ancient Egypt, London: Piatkus, 1998, pp. 18-19.

.

39 Rohl, op. cit., pp. 415-416, 156, 398-399.

[41] Alexeyev, N.N. "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhia" (“Christianity and the Idea of the Monarchy), Put' (The Way), № 6, January, 1927, p. 660 (in Russian).

[42] John Bright, op. cit., pp. 353, 360.

[43] Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1995, 1998, pp. 40-41.

[44] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 33, 34.

[45] Quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw: Synodal Typography, 1931, part II, p. 36 (in Russian).

[46] Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Zapiski rukovodstvuiuschaia k osnovatel’nomu razumeniu Knigi Byti (Notes Leading to a Fundamental Understanding of the Book of Genesis), Moscow, 1817, p. 78 (in Russian). Some exceptions may be found in the history of the tiny kingdom of Montenegro in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the patriarchs of Constantinople after the Turkish conquest were called the “ethnarchs” of their people, while remaining subject politically to the Turkish sultans. However, these are exceptions that prove the rule.

[47] 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” (“On Monarchy and our Relationship to It”), Radonezh, N 2 (46), January, 1997, p. 4 (in Russian).

[48] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), op. cit., p. 126.

[49] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 17.

[50] That Saul became continued to disobey God is shown by his asking on the witch of Endor to summon the soul of Samuel from Hades, although he himself had passed laws condemning necromancy. See St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Witch of Endor: A Letter to Bishop Theodosius, in Living Orthodoxy, #124, vol. XXI, № 4, July-August, 2000, pp. 24-26.

[51] Metropolitan Philaret, Iz Slova v den’ koronatsia Imperatora Aleksandra Pavlovicha. Sbornik propovednicheskikh obraztsov (From the Sermon on the Day of the Coronation of the Emperor Alexander Pavlovich. A Collection of Model Sermons). Quoted in “O Meste i Znachenii Tainstva Pomazania na Tsarstvo” (“On the Place and Significance of the Mystery of Anointing to the Kingdom”), Svecha Pokaiania (Candle of Repentance) (Tsaritsyn), № 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] Tikhomirov, Religio-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, pp. 135-136 (in Russian).

[58] Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 139.

[59] Grant, The Classical Greeks, London: Phoenix, 1989, p. 130.

[60] “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] This relationship was noted by Alexis Khomiakov. See Alferov and Alferov, op. cit., p. 13.

[62] Herodotus, History, London: Penguin Books, III, 80.

[63] Herodotus, History, III, 81, 82.

[64] Roberts, op. cit., p. 157.

[65] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 37. London: Penguin books, V, 89, 91-97.

[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] See Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, part I, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

[77] McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.

[78] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, volume I, part II, p. 96.

[79] Aristotle, Politics, London: Penguin books, 1981, p. 362.

[80] Copleston, op. cit.., p. 97.

[81] Copleston, op. cit.., pp. 98-99

[82] Plato, The Republic, 544.

[83] 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).

[84] McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.

[85] McClelland, op. cit., p. 117.

[86] Aristotle, Politics, I, 2 1253a25; quoted in Azkoul, op. cit., p. 225.

[87] 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.”

[88] Bowden, “Greek Oracles and Greek Democracy”, The Historian, № 41, Spring, 1994, pp. 3,4,7,8.

[89] Held, op. cit., p. 21.

[90] Copleston, op. cit., p. 143.

[91] Johnson, op. cit, p. 101.

[92] 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.

[93] Roberts, op. cit., p. 173.

[94] Roberts, op. cit., p. 175.

[95] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

[96] McClelland, op. cit., p. 82.

[97] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, op. cit., p. 141.

[98] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, op. cit., pp. 141-142.

[99] Liberman, “Hanukkah”, Orthodox Christian Witness, vol. XXXIII, № 10 (1483), January 17/30, 2000, p. 5.

[100] Johnson, op. cit., p. 102.

[101] Liberman, op. cit., pp. 5-6.

[102] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 107-109.

[103] Paryaev, “Tsar Irod i ego Soobshchiki: Istoria i Sovremennost’” (“King Herod and his Associates: History and Modernity”), Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Suzdal Diocesan News), № 3, January-February, 1998, pp. 31-32 (in Russian).

[104] 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).

[105] 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 us: 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, № 5 (161), January, 2000, p. 12).

[106] 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).”

[107] Johnson, op. cit., p. 112.

[108] Paryaev, op. cit., p. 33.

[109] Paryaev, op. cit., p. 34.

[110] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in S. Fomin & T. Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, pp. 320-321 (in Russian).

[111] Alferov & Alferov, op. cit., pp. 61-62.

[112] 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, № 4, July-August, 1988, pp. 11-31.

[113] St. John Chrysostom, Homily 85 on John, P.G. 59:505, col. 461.

[114] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, op. cit., p. 142.

[115] Aristotle, Politics, 1252 b 28.

[116] Origen, Against Celsus II, 30.

[117] Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 67.

[118] St. Gregory, Sermon 4, P.G. 47, col. 564B.

[119] Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans; in Jenkyns, op. cit., pp. 72-74.

[120] St. Leo, Sermon 32, P.L. 54, col. 423.

[121] Festal Menaion, Great Vespers for the Nativity of Christ, "Lord, I have cried", Glory... Both now...

[122] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke, Homily 12, New York: Studion Publishers, 1983, p. 89.

[123] Glazkov, “Zashchita ot Liberalizma” (“A Defence from Liberalism”), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 15 (1636), August 1/14, 1999, p. 10 ®.

[124] Florovsky, “Antionomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 68- 69.

[125] Bl. Theophylact, On John 18.36.

[126] Bishop Nikolai, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, September 30, pp. 395-396.

[127] Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), "Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution", Orthodox Life, vol. 35, no. 4, July-August, 1988, pp. 11-31.

[128] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, July 22, p. 94.

[129] Professor Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, chapter 1.

[130] Encyclical Letter of the Council of Russian Bishops Abroad to the Russian Orthodox Flock, 23 March, 1933; translated in Living Orthodoxy, #131, vol. XXII, № 5, September-October, 2001, pp. 13-14.

[131] St. Justin the Martyr, First Apology, 17.

[132] The Works of St. Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome in Russian translation, vol. 1, p. 101. Quoted in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 56 (in Russian).

[133] St. Basil, The Morals, Rule 79 (Cap. 1).

[134] Blessed Theodoret, P.G. 66, col. 864, commenting on Romans 13.5; in Dagron, op. cit., pp. 308-309.

[135] St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.

[136] Quoted in Richard Betts and Vyacheslav Marchenko, Dukhovnik Tsarskoj Sem’i: Svyatitel’ Feofan Poltavskij (The Spiritual Father of the Royal Family: Holy Hierarch Theophan of Poltava), Моscow: Balaam Society of America, 1994, p. 213 (in Russian).

[137] 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.

[138] Hieromartyr Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse.

[139] 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?”

[140] 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 (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw, 1931, pt. I, pp. 37, 38, 42, 43) (V.M.)

[141] J.M. Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 203.

[142] Roberts, op. cit., p. 203.

[143] Dio Cassius, LI, 20, 6-8; translated by S. Ireland, Roman Britain: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 175.

[144] McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, pp. 84, 85.

[145] See Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Éditions Gallimard, 1996, pp. 142-143 (in French). 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).

[146] 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.

[147] Fr. Michael Azkoul, The Teachings of the Orthodox Church, Buena Vista, Co.: Dormition Skete publications, 1986, part I, p. 110.

[148] Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.

[149] Quoted in Sordi, op. cit., p. 169.

[150] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 189, 198.

[151] Charles Davis, op. cit., p. 68.

[152] Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1996, p. 128.

[153] Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, 5.2.

[154] Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.

[155] Sordi, op. cit., p. 148.

[156] Sordi, op. cit., p. 148.

[157] Kholmogorov, “Vybor Imperii” (“The Choice of Empire”), Epokha, № 11, 2001, pp. 15-16

[158] The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 93.

[159] Tertullian, Apologeticum 33.1.

[160] Sordi, op. cit., pp. 172-73.

[161] Roberts, op. cit., p. 359.

[162] Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp. 79-80.

[163] Roberts, op. cit., p. 111.

[164] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 22.

[165] I.R. Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak yavlenie mirovoj istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of World History), op. cit., pp. 223-228.

[166] Guisso and Pagani, R.W.L. Guisso, Catherine Pagani with David Miller, The First Emperor of China, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989, pp. 14, 16.

[167] It is not, therefore, surprising that the modern despot Mao Tse-tung – who, like Shihuang, seized control over the whole of China from a power-base in the north-west - should have looked to him as a role model. “In 1958 at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao remarked that Qin Shihuang was a ruler who advocated the extermination of those who ‘used the past to criticize the present.’ Mao went on to say, ‘What does he amount to anyway? He buried only 460 scholars, while we have buried 46,000 counter revolutionary scholars alive.’” (Guisso and Pagani, op. cit., p. 14).

Again, “Mao praised Lord Shang, a brutal minister in the ancient Qing dynasty, describing both the wisdom and necessity of Lord Shang’s decrees. These included enslaving the lazy, linking households into networks of mutual surveillance and responsibility, and punishing those who failed to report crimes by slicing them in two at the waist” (The Economist Review, March 18, 2000, p. 4).

[168] Gernet, op. cit., p. 97.

[169] Etienne Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste: Recherches sur l’économie et la société de la Chine traditionelle (The Heavenly Bureucracy : Research into the Economy and Society of Traditional China), Paris: Gallimard, 1968, pp. 22-23 (in French); quoted in Landes, op. cit., p. 36.

[170] Roberts, op. cit., p. 354.

[171] See Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999.

[172] Guisso and Pagani, op. cit., p. 134.

[173] Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 178.

[174] Roberts, op. cit., p. 355.

[175] Roberts, op. cit., p. 360. A contemporary parallel might be the transfer of power from one government to another as a result of parliamentary elections. The will of the people as expressed in the ballot box here corresponds to the Chinese mandate of heaven.

[176] Alexeyev, op. cit., p. 660.

[177] However, according to the modern Chinese philosopher Gi-ming Shien, as interpreted by Fr. Seraphim Rose, the distinctions between various Chinese philosophies and religions are illusory. “In fact, there is a very strong idea in the Chinese mind of orthodoxy: that there is a right teaching, and that the whole society depends on that right teaching. This orthodoxy is expressed in different forms. My teacher made it quite clear that Taoism is the esoteric side, and Confucianism is the more social side. Taoism has to do with spiritual life and Confucianism with social, public life” (in Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen, Father Seraphim Rose, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2003, p. 76).

[178] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 357-358.

[179] Lieven, Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, p. 30.

[180] Lieven, op. cit., p. 31.

[181] Sordi, op. cit., p. 173. “There is also a greater need for us to pray for the emperors as also for the whole state of the empire, and for Roman affairs since we know that by the provision [prosperity ?] of the Roman empire the mighty power impending on the whole world and threatening the very close of the age with frightful calamities shall be delated. And as we are loath to suffer these things, while we pray for their postponement we favour the stability of Rome” (Apologeticum 32). “The Christian is hostile to noboy, least of all to the emperor, whom… he wishes well, with the whole Roman empire, so long as the world shall last, for so long as it shall last (Ad Scapulum 2). Again Lactantius writes: “The Sibyls openly speak of Rome being destined to perish. Hystaspes also, who was a very ancient king of the Medes,… predicted long before that the empire and name of Rome should be effaced from the globe… But how this shall come to pass I shall explain… In the first place, the empire shall be parceled out, and the supreme authority being dissipated and broken up shall be lessened,… until ten kings exist all together;… these… shall squander everything and impair and consume… The very fact proclaims the fall and destruction to be near, except that so long as Rome is safe it seems that nothing of this need be feared. But when indeed that head of the world shall fall and the assault begin that the Sibyls speak of coming to pass, who can doubt that the end has already come?… That is the city that has hitherto upheld all things, and we should pray and beseech the God of heaven, if indeed his decrees and mandates can be postponed, that that detested tyrant may not come sooner than we think” (Institutes VII, 15, 16, 25). And pseudo-Ephraim writes: “When the kingdom of the Romans shall begin to be consumed by the sword, then the advent of the evil one is at hand… And already is the kingdom of the Romans swept away, and the empire of the Christians is delivered unto God and the Father, and when the kingdom of the Romans shall begin to be consumed then shall come the consummation” (1, 5). All quotations in W. Bousset, The Antichrist Legend, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 124-125).

[182] 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.). Сf. 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).

[183] St. Chrysostom, Homily 4 on II Thessalonians, quoted in The Orthodox New Testament, Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1999, vol. 2, p. 343.

[184] Archbishop Averky, Rukovodstvo k Izucheniu Svyaschennykh Pisanij Novago Zaveta (Guide to the Study of the Sacred Scriptures of the New Testament), Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, vol. II, 1956, pp. 307-308 (in Russian).

[185] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, vol. II, pp. 171-173 (in Russian).

[186] Florovsky, op. cit., pp. 69-72. For, as V.V. Bolotov writes, “That which, among the Christians, related to the sphere of Church activity, in Rome related to the sphere of activity of the state. The priests, pontifexes and flamens were state functionaries; therefore by dint of historical necessity that challenge which the Christian Church hurled at the pagan faith and to which the pagan church had to reply was accepted by the state.” (Lektsii po Istorii Drevnej Tserkvi (Lectures on the History of the Early Church), St. Petersburg, 1907, reprinted in Moscow, 1994, volume 2, pp. 14-15 (in Russian).

[187] Oration in Honour of Constantine.

[188] Deiania Vselenskikh Soborov (Acts of the Ecumenical Councils), vol. IV, part. 2, Каzan, 1908, p. 54 (in Russian).

[189] Quoted in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 155.

[190] 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.

[191] Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, 48. 2-12.

[192] Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Moscow, 1997, p. 27 (in Russian).

[193] Lactantius, Divine Institutions; quoted in Robert Garland, “Countdown to the Beginning of Time-Keeping”, History Today, vol. 49 (4), April, 1999, p. 42.

[194] Florovsky, “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 72, 74.

[195] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, p. 23 (in Russian).

[196] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, I, 28; quoted in John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 39. Much later, in the reign of Julian the Apostate, the Martyrs Eusignius and Artemius confirmed the truth of this vision, having been witnesses of it themselves.

[197] Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 43.

[198] 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).

[199] Menaion, May 21, Mattins for the feast of St. Constantine, sedalen.

[200] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 27-28.

[201] Quoted in Charles Freeman, “The Emperor’s State of Grace”, History Today, vol. 51 (1), January, 2001, p. 11.

[202] 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).

[203] L.A. Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, p. 340 (in Russian).

[204] Actually, the Donatists, having failed in their petition, began to express a similar sentiment: “What have Christians to do with kings? Or what have bishops to do with the palace?” (Optatus, Against the Donatists, I, 22).

[205] Khrapovitsky, “The First Ecumenical Council”, Orthodox Life, vol. 34, no. 6, November-December, 1984, p. 9.

[206] St. Constantine, in Аrchbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia (The Russian Ideology), St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 71 (in Russian).

[207] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, II, 28.

[208] Tuskarev, Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve (The Church on the State), Staritsa, 1992, p. 75 (in Russian).

[209] Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, I, 44; IV, 24.

[210] 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”.

[211] St. Athanasius, History of the Arians, 52; P.G. 25, 756C.

[212] Quoted (with some small changes) from F.W. Farrar, The Lives of the Fathers, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889, vol. I, p. 617.

[213] St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, April 17; S.V. Bulgakov, Nastol’naia Kniga dlia svyaschenno-tserkovno-sluzhitelej (Reference Book for Sacred Church Servers), Kharkov, 1900, p. 140 (in Russian).

[214] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, III, 19; V.A Konovalov, Otnoshenie Khristianstva k Sovetskoj Vlasti (The Relationship of Christianity to Soviet Power), Montreal, 1936, p. 35 (in Russian).

[215] St. Gregory, First and Second Words against Julian.

[216] St. Gregory, First Word against Julian, 35; Second Word against Julian, 26.

[217] St. Gregory, quoted in the Encyclical Letter of the Council of Russian Bishops Abroad to the Russian Orthodox Flock, 23 March, 1933; translated in Living Orthodoxy, #131, vol. XXII, № 5, September-October, 2001, p. 13.

[218] Сf. St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, October 20, the life of the Great Martyr Artemius who, significantly, had been a witness of the appearance of the Cross to St. Constantine at the Milvian bridge. 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.

[219] Paul Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines: the Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4^th-13^th Centuries, Aldershot: Variorum, 1994, pp. 2, 3.

[220] Magdalino, op. cit., pp. 3-4.

[221] 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

[222] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Éditions Gallimard, 1996, p. 167 (in French).

[223] St. Basil, Rule 79.

[224] St. Gregory, Sermon 17.

[225] St. Chrysostom, On the Priesthood.

[226] St. Chrysostom, quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw, 1931, part I, p. 68 (in Russian).

[227] Apostolic Constitutions, XI, 34.

[228] Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, VI, 18.

[229] St. Theodosius the Emperor, in Stevenson, J. (ed.), Creeds, Councils and Controversies, 1966, p. 160.

[230] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, V, 7, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume III, Oxford and New York, 1892, p. 135.

[231] Norwich, op. cit., pp. 112-113.

[232] St. Ambrose, Letter 40, quoted in Sergius Fomin and Tamara Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 69 (in Russian).

[233] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 164.

[234] Quoted in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1997, p. 156.

[235] St. Ambrose, Epistle 29, 18; quoted in Norwich, op. cit., p. 101.

[236] St. Chrysostom, Sixth Sermon on the Statues. Сf. 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” (“The Doctrine of the Christian Kingdom in St. Ephraim the Syrian”), Regnum Aeternum, Моscow: “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” (Interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans).

[237] Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, V, 17, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, op. cit., pp. 143-144.

[238] Aristotle, Politics, IV, 10.

[239] 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” (Festal Menaion, 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.

[240] St. Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns against Julian, I, 1. Translated in Samuel N.C. Lieu, The Emperor Julian: Panegyric and Polemic, Liverpool University Press, 1986, p. 105.

[241] St. Isidore, Letter 6 to Dionysius.

[242] Benveniste, Slovar’ Indoevropejskikh Sotsial’nikh Terminov (Dictionary of Indo-European Social Terms), Moscow: “Univers”, 1995, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 48, 49 (in Russian).

[243] Оstrogorsky, “Оtnoshenie Tserkvi i gosudarstva v Vizantii” (“The Relationship of the Church and the State in Byzantium”); 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.

[244] St. Cyril, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 72.

[245] Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.

[246] Eusebius; quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 56.

[247] Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.

[248] К.V. Glazkov, “Zaschita ot liberalizma” (“A Defence from Liberalism”), Pravoslavnaya Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), № 15 (1636), 1/14 August, 1999, pp. 10, 11 (in Russian); Sacred Monarchy and the Modern Secular State, Montreal, 1984, p. 4; St. Gregory, Sermon 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).

[249] St. Theodore, in The Philokalia, volume IV, p. 93; quoted in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), op. cit., pp. 46-47.

[250] Dagron, op. cit., p. 70.

[251] М.V. Zyzykin, op. cit., 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).

[252] The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Eerdmans edition, pp. 488, 489.

[253] Holy Transfiguration Monastery, “The Seat of Moses”, quoted in The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, Boston, 1982, p. 65.

[254] St. Isidore, Tvorenia (Works), Moscow, 1860, vol. 3, pp. 400, 410; in Alferov and Alferov, op. cit., p. 59.

[255] St. Isidore, quoted in Zyzykin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 244.

[256] St. Marcian, quoted in Sobolev, op. cit., p. 71.

[257] St. Leo, in Sobolev, op. cit., p. 72.

[258] J. Меyendorff, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, p. 11.

[259] 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.

[260] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 314-315.

[261] Quoted in Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 214.

[262] A. Gerostergios, Justinian the Great: the Emperor and Saint, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1982, p. 82.

[263] Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 291.

[264] L.A. Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg: “Komplekt”, 1992, p. 162 (in Russian).

[265] Dagron, op. cit., p. 313.

[266] Alferov, “Ob uderzhanii i symphonii” (“On Restraining and Symphony”), http://www/monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Dionisy-1./htm, pp. 9-10 (in Russian).

[267] Каrtashev, Vossozdanie Svyatoj Rusi (The Recreation of Holy Russia), Мoscow, 1991, p. 83.

[268] I.N. Andrushkevich, “Doktrina sv. Imperatora Iustiniana Velikago” (“The Teaching of the holy Emperor Justinian the Great”), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), № 4 (1529), February 15/28, 1995, pp. 4-12 (in Russian).

[269] Canon 12, Fourth Ecumenical Council; Canons 11 and 12 of Antioch; Canon 3 of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

[270] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 17.

[271] 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, № 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.

[272] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 32-33, 34.

[273] Alferov, “Monarkhia i Khristianskoe Soznanie” (“The Monarchy and Christian Consciousness”), http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr10/R10_11.htm, p. 7 (in Russian).

[274] Lieven, Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 9-10.

[275] “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)…” (in S. Fomin & T. Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 138-139).

[276] 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.)

[277] Metallinos, Fr. G. “Apo ti Romaiki oikoumenikotita ston Ethnistiko Patriotismo” (“From Roman Universalism to Ethnic Patriotism”), Exodos (Exodus), Athens, 1991, p. 38 (in Greek).

[278] Agobard, quoted in R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, 1988, p. 147.

[279] 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.)

[280] 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.

[281] Jones, op. cit., p. 295.

[282] According to Paul Johnson, there were about eight million Jews at the time of Christ, comprising 10 per cent of the Roman empire (A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 171).

[283] Quoted in Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, South Africa, 1978, p. 48. Or, as Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Birmingham Temple writes: “The whole concept of God is outdated; Judaism can function perfectly well without it” (in Eddie Kadach, “The Jews’ God”, http://www.stormfront.org/posterity/ci/tjg.html.

[284] Mango, Byzantium, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980, p. 91.

[285] See I. Antonopoulos, Agapi kai synomosia, Athens, 1979, pp. 36-37 (in Greek).

[286] Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, p. 156.

[287] Reed, op. cit., p. 93

[288] 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).

[289] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 201-202.

[290] Quoted in Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, The Talmud Unmasked, St. Petersburg, 1892, Bloomfield Books, Sudbury, Suffolk, pp. 43, 80, 81.

[291] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, op. cit., pp. 340-341, 350.

[292] 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 (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, chapters 41 and 42.

[293] Keys, Catastrophe, London: Arrow books, 2000, pp. 91-92.

[294] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 343. However, Graetz admits that the Jews took a greater part in the destruction of Christian churches and monasteries than the Persians themselves (Istoria Evreev (A History of the Jews), Odessa, 1908, vol. 1, pp. 28-32 (in Russian).

[295] Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem, London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 233.

[296] 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.)

[297] 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).

[298] Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, New York: Random House, 1976.

[299] Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 19.

[300] Troitsky, Khristianskaia Philosophia Braka (The Christian Philosophy of Marriage), Paris: YMCA Press, p. 207 (in Russian).

[301] Dagron, op. cit., p. 178.

[302] Dagron, op. cit., p. 181.

[303] The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., p. 12.

[304] The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., pp. 22-23.

[305] 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.

[306] 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 (Nicaea II), Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1978, p. 195).

[307] Quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 91.

[308] St. Gregory II, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 87

[309] Pope Gregory II, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 82.

[310] Menaion, May 12, Service to St. Germanus of Constantinople, Vespers, “Lord, I have cried”.

[311] Quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 88. In two hagiographical texts (Theosterict’s Life of Nicetas of Medicion and St. Methodius’ Life of Euthymius of Sardis, Leo is given the apocalyptic title of “beast” (D.E. Afinogenov, “Povest’ o proschenii imperatora Feofila” i Torzhestvo Pravoslavia (The “Tale” of the Forgiveness of the Emperor Theophilus and the Triumph of Orthodoxy), Moscow: Ilarik, 2004, pp. 26, 28 (in Russian).

The later iconoclast emperor, Constantine Copronymus, was also anathematised and denied the title of emperor: “the tyrant, аnd 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).

[312] J.M Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, pp. 252-253.

[313] Quoted in Charles Oman, The Dark Ages, AD 476-918, London, 1919, p. 207.

[314] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, London: Phoenix, 1995, pp. 140-141.

[315] T. P Miloslavskaia, G.V. Miloslavsky, “Kontseptsia ‘Islamskogo Edinstva’ i Integratsionnie Protsessy v ‘Musulmanskom Mire’” (“The Conception of ‘Islamic Unity’ and Integrational Processes in ‘the Muslim World’), in Islam i Problemy Natsionalizma (Islam and the Problems of Nationalism), Мoscow: Nauka, 1986, p. 12 (in Russian).

Many writers emphasise the indivisibility of the caliph’s secular and spiritual powers is emphasised by several other writers. Thus 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). Again, 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). Again, Bernard Lewis writes: “It is sometimes said that the caliph was head of State and Church, pope and emperor in one. 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. 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…” (op. cit., pp. 138-139).

[316] Lewis, op. cit., p. 72.

[317] John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000, London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 75.

[318] 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).

[319] Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 308-312.

[320] 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).

[321] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin, 1997, pp. 42, 55.

[322] Cragg, The Arab Christian, London: Mowbrays, 1992, pp. 57-58.

[323] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 296.

[324] This is an allusion to a chapter heading from Dagron, op. cit.

[325] Theosterictus, Life of St. Nicetas of Medicion; in Dagron, op. cit., p. 197.

[326] 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!

[327] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 198-199.

[328] St. Theodore, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 94.

[329] Оstrogorsky writes: “Мy 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).

[330] Dagron, op. cit., p. 234.

[331] “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).

[332] White, op. cit., p. 155.

[333] Quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 95.

[334] Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 41, 42.

[335] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 237-238.

[336] Dagron, op. cit., p. 236.

[337] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 240, 241.

[338] See Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, chapter 3.

[339] Dagron, op. cit., p. 239.

[340] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 102.

[341] 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.

[342] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 89-93.

[343] Dagron, op. cit., p. 36

[344] Wood, Leo VI’s Concept of Divine Monarchy, London: Monarchist Press Association, 1964, p. 15.

[345] P.G. 91.197.

[346] Life of Euthymius, quoted in Wood, op. cit., p. 11.

[347] Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 334.

[348] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 90.

[349] 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).

[350] Dagron, op. cit., chapter 1.

[351] “In the middle of the 9^th 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).

[352] Lemerle, in Rosemary Morris, “Succession and usurpation: politics and rhetoric in the late tenth century”, in Magdalino, op. cit., pp. 200-201.

[353] The Lives of the Spiritual Mothers, Buena Vista, CO; Holy Apostles’ Convent, 1991, p. 325.

[354] D.S. White, Patriarch Photios of Constantinople, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, p. 34.

[355] Leo the Deacon, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 99.

[356] Morris, in Magdalino, op. cit., p. 201.

[357] Morris, in Magdalino, op. cit., p. 205.

[358] 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).

[359] Morris, op. cit., p. 211.

[360] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 38, 39.

[361] 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.

[362] Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, p. 239.

[363] St. Nicholas the Mystic, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit. vol. I, p. 107.

[364] Archimandrite Doctor Seraphim, “The Life of King Boris-Michael, Converter of the Bulgarian People to Christianity”, Orthodox Life, vol. 35, № 3, May-June, 1985, p. 14.

[365] 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 (Collected Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 840 (in Russian).

[366] Аrchimandrite Nikon (Ivanov), Protopriest Nicholas (Likhomanov), Zhitia russkikh svyatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Tutaev, 2000, vol. 1, 15/28 July, pp. 817-818 (in Russian).

[367] See Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “Pervoe Kreschenie Rusi i Muchenicheskij Podvig Pervogo Russkogo Gosudaria-Khristianina Oskol’da-Nikolaia Kievskogo” (“The First Baptism of Rus’ and the Martyric Feat of the First Russian Christian Ruler, Askold-Nicholas of Kiev”), http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr12/R13_22.htm (in Russian).

[368] Karamzin, Predania Vekov (The Traditions of the Ages), Мoscow: Pravda, 1989, p. 65 (in Russian).

[369] I. Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk: Luchi Sophii, 1998, p. 214 (in Russian).

[370] Karamzin, op. cit., p. 65.

[371] St. Andronicus, O Tserkvi, Rossii (On the Church and Russia), Fryazino, 1997, p. 132 (in Russian).

[372] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii (The Origins of the Law of Succession in Russia), Podolsk, 1994, p. 3 (in Russian).

[373] Archbishop Nathanael (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (Epoch), № 10, 2000, pp. 37-38 (in Russian).

[374] 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. See Vestnik I.P.Ts. (Messenger of the True Orthodox Church), № 2 (12), April-June, 1998, p. 43 (in Russian)).

[375] St. Photius, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 123.

[376] St. Gregory the Theologian, quoted in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1997, p. 198.

[377] 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).

[378] Tertullian, Apologeticum, 32.

[379] Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, London: Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 584.

[380] St. Augustine, The City of God, I, 1.

[381] St. Augustine, The City of God, XVIII, 2.

[382] St. Augustine, The City of God, IV, 4.

[383] St. Augustine, The City of God, V, 17.

[384] 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.

[385] See Dirk Bennett, “Ecstasy in Late Imperial Rome”, History Today, vol. 48 (10), October, 1998, pp. 27-32.

[386] Grant, op. cit., p. 74.

[387] Grant, op. cit., pp. 75, 76, 78.

[388] Grant, op. cit., p. 60.

[389] Quoted in Grant, op. cit., p. 127.

[390] See Patrick Howarth, Attila, London: Robinson, 2001, p. 132.

[391] And not only churchmen. The senator and philosopher Themistius, writing in about 370, said that “it is the task of kings – those who have a right to that title – rather than rooting out completely this surfeit of human temperament whenever they restrain the insurgent barbarians, to safeguard and protect them as an integral part of the empire. For this is how things are: he who harries the barbarians to no good purpose sets himself up as king of the Romans alone, while he who shows compassion in his triumph knows himself to be king of all men, especially over those whom he protected and watched over when he had the chance to destroy them utterly” (Oration 10; in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 113).

[392] See J.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church to A.D.500, London: Methuen, 1982, pp. 181-184.

[393] Quoted in Grant, op. cit., p. 132.

[394] St. Leo, Sermon LXXXII, on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

[395] 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).

[396] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 515.

[397] 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.

[398] As when Leo I rejected the 28^th canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which gave the see of the new capital of Constantinople equal status with that of Old Rome.

[399] 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 (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 73).

[400] Metropolitan Philaret, Zapiski rukovodstvuiuschaia k osnovatel’nomu razumeniu Knigi Byti (Notes Leading to a Fundamental Understanding of the Book of Genesis), Moscow, 1867, part. 2, p. 80 (in Russian).

[401] Gelasius, Tractatus IV; translated from G. Dagron, Empéreur et Prêtre, Paris, 1996, pp. 190-191 (in French).

[402] Gelasius, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., volume I, p. 74.

[403] Dagron, op. cit., p. 191.

[404] Ranson and Motte, introduction to Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale (The Fatal Mystification), Lausanne: “L’Age d’Homme, 1987, p. 11 (in French).

[405] Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues, I (2, VI).

[406] Paulinus, Life of St. Ambrose, chapter 19, in the translation by E.R. Hoare.

[407] Zosimus, New History, 6.2.

[408] Procopius, The Vandal War, 3.2.38.

[409] St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 4.1, 5.1, 15.1.

[410] 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).

[411] See Christopher Snyder, An Age of Tyrants, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, chapters 2, 8 and 9.

[412] St. Patrick, Letter to Coroticus, 21, 19.

[413] St. Gildas On The Ruin of Britain, 25. Bede interprets this to mean that they were “of royal race”.

[414] Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (King Arthur: The True Story, London: Arrow, 1993) have made an excellent case for the historicity of King Arthur.

[415] St. Gildas On The Ruin of Britain, 27.

[416] 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 Works of St. Columbanus), The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970, p. 34).

[417] 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.

[418] 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.

[419] Quoted in Haddan & Stubbs, op. cit. p. 126.

[420] Peter Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages, London: Constable, 1996, pp. 23, 24.

[421] J.M. Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 239.

[422] St. Avitus, Letter 4; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 118.

[423] 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 (Imperial Coronations in Rus’), New York: Russian Orthodox Youth Committee, 1971, p. 22 (in Russian).

[424] 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).

[425] Tim Newark, Warlords, London: Brockhampton Press, 1996, p. 323.

[426] Quoted in A.A. Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 151.

[427] 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.

[428] David Keys, Catastrophe, London: Arrow Books, 2000, p. 204.

[429] They converted from Arianism to Orthodoxy in the 550s.

[430] 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”.

[431] 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.

[432] St. Gregory, History of the Franks, III, 30.

[433] 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.

[434] The Russian Slavophile Alexis Khomiakov 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.

[435] Ziegler, op. cit., p. 54.

[436] Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), The Christian Faith and War, Jordanville, 1973, p. 12.

[437] Graetz, Istoria Evreev (A History of the Jews), Odessa, 1908, vol. 6, pp. 133-134 (in Russian).

[438] Trefor Jones, The English Saints: East Anglia, Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1999, pp. 13-21.

[439] Roberts, op. cit., p. 237.

[440] Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 8.

[441] C.W. Jones, Saints’ Lives and Chronicles in Early England, Cornell, 1947.

[442] 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.”

[443] Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996, p. 15.

[444] Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester University Press, 1970, p. 259.

[445] “On the Saints of the Church of York”, in Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, York, 1974, p. 160.

[446] 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)

[447] 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).

[448] “The Life of the Holy Hierarch Gregory, Bishop of Homer”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, № 6, November-December, 1996, pp. 5-6. This life was published in Russian by Monastery Press, Montreal.

[449] St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 21.4.

[450] Lucy Menzies, Saint Columba of Iona, Felinfach: J.M.F. Books, 1920, 1992, p. 134; John Marsden, The Illustrated Columcille, London: Macmillan, 1991, p. 145.

[451] St. Adomnan of Iona, Life of Columba.

[452] 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.

[453] 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.

[454] Quoted in Collins, op cit., pp. 41-42.

[455] Nelson, J.L. “Inauguration Rituals”, in Nelson, J.L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, London: Hambledon Press, 1986, p. 59.

[456] 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).

[457] Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 55.

[458] 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.

[459] Canning, op. cit., p. 63.

[460] Canning, op. cit., p. 59.

[461] Archimandrite Pantaleimon, “On the Royal Martyrs”, Orthodox Life, vol. 31, № 4, July-August, 1981, p. 22.

[462] Janet Nelson, “Hincmar of Rheims: Kingship, Law and Liturgy”, in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, op. cit., pp. 169-170.

[463] Quoted by Janet Nelson, in “National Synods, Kingship and Royal Anointing”, in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, op. cit., p. 253.

[464] Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 62.

[465] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 329-330.

[466] Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 288-290.

[467] Herrin, op. cit., p. 47.

[468] Mary Garrison, “The Teacher and the King”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 2, № 7, July, 2001, p. 25.

[469] However, see the life of St. William of Toulouse (+812), for an example of a completely non-acquisitive warrior lord (Living Orthodoxy, vol. V, № 2, March-April, 1983, pp. 3-5).

[470] Tacitus, Germania.

[471] Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, p. 15.

[472] Translated by Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, York: Sessions Book Trust, 1974, p. 111.

[473] Canning, op. cit., p. 50.

[474] Canning, op. cit., p. 49.

[475] Romanides, op. cit., p. 31.

[476] Herrin, op. cit., pp. 117-118.

[477] Quoted in A.A. Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 268.

[478] Quoted in Richard Chamberlin, Charlemagne, Emperor of the Western World, London: Grafton books, 1986, p. 52.

[479] Chamberlin, “The Ideal of Unity”, History Today, vol. 53 (11), November, 2003, p. 57. And yet 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” (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).

[480] In Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 148.

[481] Romanides, op. cit., p. 18.

[482] 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, № 1, January-February, 1982.

[483] Adso, Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist.

[484] Leontiev, “Vizantinizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, pp. 94-95 (in Russian).

[485] A.W. Haddan & W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1864, 1971, vol. III, p. 524.

[486] Herrin, op. cit., pp. 124, 128.

[487] Quoted in Abbé Guettée, The Papacy, New York: Minos, 1966, p. 305, note.

[488] Quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 416.

[489] 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).

[490] Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 81.

[491] Geoffrey Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, chapter five.

[492] Ivan Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk: Luchi Sophii, 1998, pp. 270-272 (in Russian).

[493] Aristides Papadakis, The Orthodox East and the Rise of the Papacy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, pp. 18-19.

[494] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 19-20.

[495] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 21-22, 23.

[496] Roberts, op. cit., p. 336.

[497] Lavelle, Aethelred II: King of the English 978-1016, Stroud: Tempus, 1002, p. 29.

[498] 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”.

[499] Lavelle, op. cit., p. 31.

[500] 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.

[501] ‘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” (“Great Martyr King Edward of England”), Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Suzdal Diocesan News), № 7, March-May, 1999, pp. 9-12 (in Russian).

[502] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E, 979, 1014.

[503] In the second of his series of programmes entitled “Monarchy” and broadcast on October 25, 2004 on Channel 4 TV.

[504] Quoted in Chaney, op. cit., p. 14.

[505] We may recall that Cathwulf in his letter to Charlemagne had also compared the king to the Father and the bishop to the Son.

[506] Chaney, op. cit., epilogue.

[507] Barlow, The English Church, 1000-1066, London: Longmans, 1979, p. 5.

[508] 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).

[509] Barlow, The English Church, op. cit., p. 141.

[510] R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, 1988, pp. 212-213.

[511] R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 213.

[512] R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 217.

[513] Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 51.

[514] However, it was claimed that his warriors hailed him as imperator after the battle [of Lechfeld in 955]: inherently unlikely but testament to how he was seen (Chamberlin, “The Ideal of Unity”, op. cit., p. 61).

[515] See Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, op. cit., pp. 82-83. He instructed his sword-bearer to stand behind him as he kneeled at the tomb of the Apostle, “for I know only too well what my ancestors have experienced from these faithless Romans” (Chamberlin, op. cit., p. 62).

[516] Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

[517] 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).

[518] Jean-Paul Allard, “Byzance et le Saint Empire: Theopano, Otton III, Benzon d’Albe”, in Germain Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, Regards sur l’Orthodoxie (Points of View on Orthodoxy), Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1997, p. 39 (in French).

[519] Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), personal communication.

[520] Allard, op. cit., p. 40

[521] 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).

[522] R. Lacy & D. Danzinger, The Year 1000, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999, p. 190.

[523] 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).

[524] 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.).

[525] 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, № 2, December, 1997, p. 6.

[526] John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000, London: Penguin Books, 1999.

[527] 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).

[528] 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.

[529] Richards, op. cit., p. 369.

[530] Man, op. cit., p. 102.

[531] Man, op. cit., p. 75.

[532] 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.

[533] Man, op. cit., p. 98.

[534] Man, op. cit., p. 91.

[535] Man, op. cit., p. 40; Gwyn Jones, The Vikings, London: The Folio Society, 1997, pp. 266-270.

[536] 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, № 3, May-June, 1989, p. 34.

[537] 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).

[538] Translated by Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church, London, 1963, p. 52.

[539] 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 corrected 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).

[540] Chamberlin, “The Ideal of Unity”, op. cit., p. 62.

[541] 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).

[542] Ranson and Motte, introduction to Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale (The Fatal Mystification), Lausanne, 1987, p. 14 (in French).

[543] Lampryllos, op. cit., pp. 65-66.

[544] Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Oxford, 1955, p. 161.

[545] 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).

[546] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 34, 36-37. Peter de Rosa (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…”

[547] Ranson and Motte, op. cit., p. 14.

[548] Lebedev, “Vek odinnadtsatij – Okonchatelnoe razdelenie Tserkvej (1053-1054gg.)” (“The 11^th Century – the Final Division of the Churches”), http://portal-credo.ru/site/index.php?act=lib&id=378, pp. 23 (in Russian).

[549] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Éditions Gallimard, 1996, p. 247 (in French).

[550] Quoted from Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky), Khristianstva net bez Tserkvi, Moscow: “Pravoslavnaia Beseda”, 1991, p. 63 (in Russian).

[551] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 3-5.

[552] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 7.

[553] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

[554] Сf. А.Barmin, “Sovremennaia istoriografia o datirovke tserkovnoj skhizmy mezhdu Zapadom i Vostokom khristianskoj ekumeny” (“Contemporary Historiography on the Dating of the Church Schism between the West and the East of the Christian Oikumene”), in D.E. Afinogenov, A.V. Muraviev, Traditsii i nasledie Khristianskogo Vostoka (The Traditions and Heritage of the Christian East), Moscow: “Indrik”, 1996, pp. 117-126; V. Moss, Krushenie Pravoslavnoj Anglii (The Fall of Orthodox England), Tver, 1998; “Kogda upal Zapad ot Pravoslavia?” (“When did the West fall away from Orthodoxy?”, Pravoslavnaia Tver’ (Orthodox Tver), №№ 10-11 (47-48), October-November, 1997, pp. 4-5 (in Russian).

[555] Canning, A History of Western Political Thought, 300-1450, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 86-87.

[556] Canning, op. cit., p. 76.

[557] Quoted in David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050-1100, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969, p. 132.

[558] Douglas, op. cit., p. 155.

[559] Douglas, William the Conqueror, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964, p. 121.

[560] Jean-Paul Allard, “Byzance et le Saint Empire: Theopano, Otton III, Benzon d’Albe” (“Byzantium and the Holy Empire: Theophano, Otto II and Benzon of Alba”), in Germain Ivanovv-Trinadtsaty, Regards sur l’Órthodoxie (Points of View on Orthodoxy), Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1997, p. 55 (in French).

[561] Quoted in Papadakis, op. cit., p. 21.

[562] E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 174, 175.

[563] Canning, op. cit., p. 51. See the whole of chapter 2 for Carolingian ideas on kingship.

[564] Douglas, William the Conqueror, op. cit., p. 187.

[565] F. McLynn, 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998, pp. 182-183.

[566] Anonymous, Vita Aedwardi Regis (The Life of Edward the King), edited by Frank Barlow, Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1962.

[567] Howarth, 1066: The Year of the Conquest, Milton Keynes: Robin Clark, 1977, p. 164.

[568] Fr. Andrew Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996, p. 27.

[569] Moss, Krushenie Pravoslavnoj Anglii (The Fall of Orthodox England), op. cit.

[570] Douglas, Willian the Conqueror, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

[571] Hudson, “The Norman Conquest”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 4, № 1, January, 2003, p. 23.

[572] R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longman, pp. 284, 285.

[573] Quoted in Robinson, op. cit., p. 177.

[574] Edmer, Istoria Novorum in Anglia (A History of the New Things in England); translated by Geoffrey Bosanquet, London: Cresset Press.

[575] Quoted in Douglas & Greenway, English Historical Documents, Eyre & Spottiswoode, p. 647.

[576] David Allen Rivera, Final Warning, chapter 10. http://www.viewfromthewall.com/.

[577] De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 65, 66.

[578] Canning, op. cit., pp. 96, 97.

[579] Quoted in Azkoul, op. cit., p. 193, from Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 110.

[580] Quoted in Canning, op. cit., pp. 91-93.

[581] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 69.

[582] Peter Damian, Letter 8, 2, P.L. 144 436.

[583] I.S. Robinson, “Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ”, History, vol. 58, № 193, June, 1973, pp. 174-175.

[584] St. Ambrose, Liber de incarnationis Dominicae Sacramento (Book on the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Lord), 4, 32.

[585] Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1999, p. 113.

[586] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 114.

[587] Robinson, op. cit., p. 175.

[588] Quoted by R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 102.

[589] Robinson, op. cit., pp. `177, 178.

[590] Canning, op. cit., pp. 90, 91. .

[591] Bernard of Fontis Callidi, Liber adversus sectam Waldensium (Book against the Sect of the Waldenses); in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 199.

[592] Tiutchev, “Papstvo i Rimskij Vopros” (“The Papacy and the Roman Question”) , in Politicheskie Stat’i (Political Articles), Paris: YMCA Press, 1976, pp. 57-58 (in Russian).

[593] 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 (The Fall of Orthodox England), op. cit.

[594] Roberts, op. cit., p. 395.

[595] Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, London: Virago Press, 1998, pp. 171-172.

[596] Helmold of Bosau, in Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 484.

[597] Bernard, in Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 487-488.

[598] Papadakis, op. cit., 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).

[599] Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 125.

[600] Paterson, “Sonar ship homes in on Atlantis of North”, Sunday Telegraph (London), September 26, 1999, p. 39.

[601] 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.

[602] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 67.

[603] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 68.

[604] In 1152 the English Pope Adrian IV by his bull Laudabiliter had 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, № 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…

[605] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 71.

[606] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 72.

[607] Ehrenreich, op. cit., p. 172.

[608] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 147.

[609] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ii. Q. xi; in Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., pp. 147-148.

[610] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 164.

[611] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 171.

[612] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 60.

[613] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 177.

[614] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 73.

[615] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 52.

[616] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1995, chapter six.

[617] David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 32.

[618] Halevy is also considered a great medieval forerunner of twentieth-century Zionism (Cantor, op. cit., p. 143). (V.M.)

[619] In 1306 they were expelled from France, in 1349 from Saxony, in 1360 from Hungary, in 1370 from Belgium, in 1380 from Bohemia, in 1480 from Austria, in 1444 from the Netherlands; in 1492 from Spain, in 1495 from Lithuania, in 1497 from Portugal, in 1498 from Salzburg, Wurtemburg and Nuremburg, in 1540 from Sardinia and Naples, and in 1551 from Bavaria. (V.M.)

[620] Tikhomirov, Religioznie-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, pp. 348-353 (in Russian).

[621] See, for example, Piers Paul Read, The Templars, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002.

[622] Tikhomirov, op. cit., chapters 50, 51.

[623] Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow, 1998, p. 137 (in Russian).

[624] Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Christian Book Club of America, 1924, pp. 12-13. Further evidence for paganism in modern Judaism is the adoption of the Babylonian Fast of Tammuz as one of the two main fasts of the synagogue year, though condemned by the Prophet Ezekiel (Elizabeth Dilling, The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today, The Noontide Press, 1963).

[625] Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 196.

[626] Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp. 241-243.

[627] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 198-199.

[628] George, 500 Years of Revolution: European Radicals from Hus to Lenin, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998, p. 7.

[629] Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp. 33, 34-35. In support of this last thought, Richard Cavendish writes: “”Whether out of genuine feeling, or as a tactical device against Rome, [Roger] flirted with Greek Orthodoxy” (“The Death of Roger II of Sicily”, History Today, vol. 54 (2), February, 2003, p. 49).

[630] Charles Davis, op. cit. pp. 87-88, 88-89.

[631] Quoted in R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 310.

[632] Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, vol. 2, part II, pp. 135-136.

[633] Copleston, op. cit., p. 129.

[634] McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, p. 123..

[635] 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.

[636] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 118-119.

[637] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 138-139.

[638] 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.

[639] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 139-140.

[640] Canning, op. cit., p. 131.

[641] Alcuin of York, Letter to Charlemagne, M.G.H., 4, letter 132.

[642] Canning, op. cit., pp. 132, 133.

[643] Aquinas, On Kingship, VII.61.

[644] D.J.A. Matthew, “Reflections on the Medieval Roman Empire”, History, vol. 77, № 251, October, 1992, p. 382.

[645] For a detailed biography of Frederick, see Abulafia, op. cit.

[646] Chamberlin writes: “Looking down through the long perspective of the Holy Roman Empire is a melancholy experience of watching the dream fall apart. The Italians fought endless civil wars under the banner of Guelph or Ghibelline, Pope or Empire, but they were little more than pretexts for strife. Yet as the actual power of the emperor waned, the ideal of the universal monarch increased so that the imperial nadir coincided with its most able apologia, Dante’s De Monarchia. Henry VII (r. 1312-13) came in 1310 in answer to Dante’s summons to resolve the conflict, but became trapped in the complexities of Italian politics and died shamefully.

“Dante’s call for the risen majesty of empire became its requiem. Nevertheless, in 1354 a Germanic emperor was again summoned to Italy to take the crown and bring peace to a tortured land – but where Henry had come in majesty, the progress of his son Charles IV ‘was more as a merchant going to Mass than an emperor going to his throne’, as the Florentine merchant Villani observed sardonically. Petrarch, who had implored him to come, joined Villani in condemning him. ‘Emperor of the Romans but in name, thou are in truth no more than the king of Bohemia’. But Petrarch was looking back to a mythical Golden Age, while Charles accepted he was living in an Age of Iron. Shrugging off the criticism he returned home and promulgated his Golden Bull, which effectively turned the crown of empire into a German crown.” (“The Ideal of Unity”, op. cit., p. 63).

[647] Matthew, op. cit., p. 389.

[648] 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).

[649] Davis, op. cit., p. 369.

[650] Quoted in Canning, op. cit., p. 99.

[651] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi (History of the Russian Church), USA, 1993, p 140 (in Russian).

[652] Canning, op. cit., p. 109.

[653] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 79.

[654] Rose, in Monk Damascene Christensen, Not of this World: The Life and Teaching aof Fr. Seraphim Rose, Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993, p. 592.

[655] Richard Cavendish,  “Boniface VIII’s Bull Unam Sanctam”, History Today, vol. 52 (11), November, 2002, p. 63.

[656] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 79.

[657] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 358.

[658] This was most clearly evident in Pope Clement V’s full cooperation with – or rather, subjection to - King Philip in the affair of the trial and execution of the Templars.

[659] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 123.

[660] Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 179-180.

[661] Canning, op. cit., pp. 154, 155.

[662] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 141-142.

[663] Canning, op. cit., p. 156.

[664] McClelland, op. cit., p. 145.

[665] 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). (V.M.)

[666] Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, pp. 192-193, 195.

[667] George, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

[668] Froissart, in George, op. cit., pp. 15-16.

[669] N.N. Аlexeev, “Idea ‘Zemnago Grada’ v Khristianskom Verouchenii” (“The Idea of the ‘Earthly City’ in Christian Doctrine”), Put’ (The Way), № 5, October-November, 1926, p. 566 (in Russian).

[670] Frazier, A Second Look at the Second Coming, Ben Lomond: Conciliar Press, 1999, pp. 61-62.

[671] Thompson, J.W., Johnson, E.N., An Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938, p. 966.

[672] Thomson & Johnson, op. cit., p. 967.

[673] Thomson & Johnson, op. cit., pp. 976-977.

[674] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 149; Papadakis, op. cit., p. 375.

[675] Nicholas of Cusa, De concordantia catholica (1433).

[676] Wycliff, De Christo et Suo Adversario Antichristo (On Christ and His Adversary, the Antichrist), 8; in R. Buddensig (ed.), John Wicliff’s Polemical Works in Latin, London: The Wicliff Society, 1883, volume II, p. 672 (in Latin).

[677] De Rosa, op. cit., p. 100.

[678] He called 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.” (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 100).

[679] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 404.

[680] Bettenson and Maunder, op. cit., p. 460.

[681] Krivoshein, “Prepodobnij Simeon Novij Bogoslov i ego otnosheni k sotsial’no-politicheskoj dejstvitsel’nosti svoego vremeni” (“St. Symeon the New Theologian and his relationship to the social-political reality of his time”, in Bogoslovskie Trudy (Theological Works), Nizhni Novgorod, 1996, pp. 242-243 (in Russian).

[682] For a history of the terms “papocaesarism” and “caesaropapism”, see Gilbert Dagron, “Vostochnij tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii)” (“Eastern Caesaropapism (a history and critique of one conception)”, http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177 (in Russian).

[683] Emperor John Comnenus, in A.P. Lebedev, Istoricheskie Ocherki Sostoiania Vizantijsko-Vostochnoj Tserkvi (Historical Sketches of the Condition of the Byzantine Eastern Church), St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 101 (in Russian).

[684] The execution took place after Alexis’ death, in 1119 (Lebedev, op. cit., p. 105).

[685] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Éditions Gallimard, 1996, pp. 259-260 (in French).

[686] Dagron, op. cit., p. 261.

[687] Acropolites, Chronicle, ch. 53; in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 99.

[688] Gregoras, History of Byzantium, VIII, 2; in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 100.

[689] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 122-124.

[690] Balsamon, Interpretation of the 69th Canon of the Council in Trullo, in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 97.

[691] Dagron, op. cit., p. 267; Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 120.

[692] Chomatianos, in Ralley and Potlis, M. Syntagma ton theion kai ieron kanonon (Great Collection of the Divine and Sacred Canons), Athens, 1855, vol. V, p. 429; in Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 98-99.

[693] Оstrogorsky, “Оtnoshenie Tserkvi i gosudarstva v Vizantii” (“The Relationship of the Church and the State in Byzantium”), quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 104 (in Russian).

[694] Dagron, op. cit., p. 271.

[695] Balsamon, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 120.

[696] Balsamon, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 120.

[697] Nicetas Choniates, The Reign of Isaac, III, 7; quoted in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 95.

[698] Nicetas Choniates, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 109.

[699] Isaac, Novella de electionibus pontificum (Law on the Election of Bishops), P.G. 135: 440 ; in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 95.

[700] R.J. Macrides, “From the Komnenoi to the Palaiologoi: imperial models in decline and exile”, in Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines, op. cit., p. 278.

[701] Alferov, “Uroki Nikejskogo Tsarstva” (“Lessons of the Nicaean Empire”), http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr10/R10_05.htm.

[702] Nicetas Choniates, The Reign of Manuel, VI, 31; quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 120; Lebedev, op. cit., p. 95.

[703] Podskalsky, Khristianstvo iBogoslovskaia literatura v Kievskoj Rusi (988-1237 гг.) (Christianity and Theological Literature in Kievan Rus’ (988-1037), St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 68 (in Russian).

[704] Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 278.

[705] Alferov and Alferov, O Tserkvi, pravoslavnom Tsarstve i poslednem vremeni (On the Church, the Orthodox Kingdom and the Last Time), Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, p. 18 (in Russian).

[706] 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 оf 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 (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).

[707] St. Vladimir, quoted in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia (The Russian Ideology), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 83-84 (in Russian).

[708] Аlferov and Alferov, op. cit., p. 21.

[709] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

[710] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 63, 64-65.

[711] Podskalsky, op. cit., pp. 66-67, 71.

[712] Fedotov, op. cit., pp. 398-400.

[713] G. Podskalsky, op. cit., p. 62.

[714] Ivan Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Мinsk, 1998, p. 153 (in Russian).

[715] 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).

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.” (Russia under the Old Regime, London: Penguin Books, second edition, 1995, p. 38).

However, G. P. Fedotov believed 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…

“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...” (op. cit., volume II, pp. 188-190, 191).

[716] Lebedev, Velikorossia Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 13 (in Russian).

[717] N.M. Karamzin, Predania Vekov (The Traditions of the Ages), Моscow, 1989, p. 207 (in Russian). Lebedev sees in this trait the influence of the Finnish element of the population. For the Finns, according to Tacitus, “did not fear people, and were not frightened of enemies, but attained that which is difficult to attain – they wanted nothing”! So when the Russians emigrated to these areas from the south and absorbed the Finnish population, they “also wanted nothing in their earthly life”. Only, since they were Orthodox Christians, these Russians “wanted life in the Heavenly Kingdom, which is why sedentary Rus’ strove to construct her earthly Fatherland in the image of the Heavenly, eternal Fatherland!” (op. cit., pp. 12, 15).

[718] Kаramzin, op. cit., p. 214.

[719] In spite of the fact that it commemorated the miraculous deliverance of Constantinople by the Mother of God from the then still pagan Russians in 862! (V.M.)

[720] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

[721] V. Georgievsky, Svyatoj Blagovernij Velikij Knyaz’ Andrej Bogolyubskij (Holy Right-Believing Great Prince Andrew of Bogoliubovo), St. Petersburg, 1900, Моscow: “Preobrazhenie”, 1999, p. 4 (in Russian).

[722] Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304, Harlow: Longmans, 1983, p. 1.

[723] Litavrin, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., pp. 177-178.

[724] Kliuchevsky, quoted in Solonevich, op. cit., p. 296.

[725] “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).

[726] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 139, 140, 141, 143-144.

[727] Ioseliani, op. cit., p. 122.

[728] 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).

In Tamara’s reign there was an official debate between the Georgians and Armenians at which a great miracle took place: a dog fled in fear from the Orthodox Mysteries of the Georgians, but immediately devoured the sacrifice of the Armenians. As a result, the Armenian nobleman John Mkhargradzeli accepted Orthodoxy and was baptized by Patriarch John (The Life of St. Tamara).

[729] “Holy Righteous Queen Tamara of Georgia”, Orthodox Life, vol. 53, no. 2, March-April, 2003, p. 9.

[730] Eastwood, “Royal renewal in Georgia: the case of Queen Tamar”, in Paul Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines, op. cit., pp. 284, 285, 286.

[731] Eastwood, op. cit., p. 289.

[732] Alferov, “Uroki Nikejskogo Tsarstva” (“The Lessons of the Nicaean Empire”), op. cit.

[733] Оstrogorsky, G.A. “Evoliutsia vizantijskogo obriada koronovania” (“The Evolution of the Byzantine Rite of Coronation”), quoted by Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 117.

[734] Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 14.

[735] 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 М.V. Zyzykin (Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw, 1931, part 1, p. 133) – in the 10^th century, when Nicephorus was anointed by Patriarch Polyeuctus; according to Canning (op. cit., p. 15) – in the 12^th century; according to Dagron (op. cit., p. 282) and G. Podskalsky (op. cit., p. 70) – in the 13^th 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.)

[736] Dagron, op. cit., pp. 282-283.

[737] Zosimas, quoted in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 118.

[738] Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, University of Wisconsin Press, 1955, , p. 521.

[739] Vasilievsky, quoted in Vasiliev, op. cit., pp. 521-522.

[740] Patriarch Germanus, in F.I. Uspensky, Istoria Vizantiiskoj Imperii (A History of the Byzantine Empire), Moscow: “Mysl’”, 1997, p. 412 (in Russian).

[741] Archbishop Demetrius, in Uspensky, op. cit., p. 413.

[742] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 212.

[743] John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, London: Penguin books, 1996, pp. 188, 189.

[744] 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, № 6, November-December, 1982, p. 44).

[745] Uspensky, op. cit., pp. 463-464.

[746] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 486.

[747] Quoted in R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, Harlow: Longmans, 1988, p. 333.

[748] Speros Vryonis, Jr., Byzantium and Europe, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, p. 161.

[749] Frontier, “The Council of Lyons and the False Union of 1274”, The True Vine, vol. 2, № 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 5-6.

[750] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 496.

[751] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 494.

[752] Uspensky, op. cit., pp. 510, 511.

[753] 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” (“St. Theoliptus of Philadelphia and his Teaching on the Church”, Pravoslavnij Put' (The Orthodox Way), 1997, p. 16 (in Russian)).

[754] Dagron, op. cit., p. 262

[755] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 513.

[756] 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.

[757] Dagron, op. cit., p. 263.

[758] Monk Kallistos Vlastos, Dokimion istorikon peri tou skhismatos tis dutikis ekklesias apo tis Orthodoxou Anatolikis, Mount Athos, 1991, p. 109 (in Greek).

[759] Frontier, op. cit., pp. 11-12.

[760] Patriarch Isaiah, in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 102.

[761] R.J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 24.

[762] 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.)

[763] 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 12^th to the 13^th century), 1300 Years of Bulgarian Culture, Sofia Press Agency, p. 30). (V.M.).

[764] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 246-248.

[765] Rogich, Serbian Patericon, Forestville, CA: St. Paisius Abbey Press, volume I, 1994, p. 82.

[766] 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.)

[767] Rogich, op. cit., pp. 86-88. Manuel’s decree granting autonomy to the Serbian Church read as follows: “I, Manuel, the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Archbishop of the City of Constantinople, New Rome, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, have consecrated Sava, Archbishop of all the Serbian lands, and have given him in God’s name the authority to consecrate bishops, priests, and deacons within his country; to bind and loose sins of men, and to teach all and to baptize in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Therefore, all you Orthodox Christians, obey him as you have obeyed me (Rogich, op. cit., p. 90).

[768] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 255.

[769] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, The Life of St. Sava, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 103.

[770] Rogich, op. cit., pp. 92-93.

[771] 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).

[772] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 215-216.

[773] Uspensky, op. cit., p. 446.

[774] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 269.

[775] Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality, Grays lake, Ill.: Free Serbian Diocese, 1988, pp. 23-24.

[776] Аrchimandrite Nikon (Ivanov), Protopriest Nicholas (Likhomanov), Zhitia Russkikh Svyatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Тutaev, 2000, vol. 1, p. 675 (in Russian).

[777] Anonymous Chronicler, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 169.

[778] Quoted in Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 502.

[779] Ya.K. Begunov, A.P. Kirpichnikov, Knyaz’ Aleksandr Nevsky i ego epokha (Prince Alexander Nevsky and his Age), St. Petersburg, 1995, p. 200 (in Russian).

[780] Metropolitan Cyril, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 170.

[781] Fennell, op. cit., p. 121.

[782] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 332; Fennell, op. cit., p. 113.

[783] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 258-259.

[784] Milošević, in Tim Judah, The Serbs, London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 22.

[785] St. Gregory Palamas, Triads, III, 2, 27, in Défense des saints hésychastes (Defence of the Holy Hesychasts), edited by John Meyendorff, Louvain: Sacrilegium Sacrum Lovaninese, 1973, pp. 692, 693 (in French and Greek).

[786] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 259.

[787] Rogich, op. cit., p. 90.

[788] Rogich, Great Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2001, pp. 8-9.

[789] Rogich, Great Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia, pp. 11-12.

[790] Tim Judah, The Serbs, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 39.

[791] Nun Ioanna, “Taina kosovskoj bitvy – dukhovnoe zaveschanie tsaria Lazaria” (“The Mystery of the Battle of Kosovo – the Spiritual Will of Tsar Lazarus”), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), № 7 (583), July, 1998, pp. 15, 16, 19, 21, 22-23 (in Russian). See also James E. Held, “Legend of the Fall, 1389: the battle of Kosovo”, Medieval History, № 5, January, 2004, pp. 32-37.

[792] I. Marchevsky, Apokaliptichnata Perspektiva ot Kraia Vremenata v Svetootecheski Sintez (The Apocalyptic Perspective on the Last Times in a Patristic Synthesis), Sofia: “Monarkhichesko-Konservativen Seyuz”, 1994, p. 80 (in Bulgarian).

[793] 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” (G. Fedotov, op. cit., p. 336).

[794] A.E. Presniakov, “Na puti k edinoderzhaviu” (“On the Path to One-Man Rule”), Rodina (Homeland), № 11, 2003, pp. 15-16 (in Russian).

[795] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii (The Origin of the Law of Succession in Russia), Podolsk, 1994, p. 9 (in Russian).

[796] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 337.

[797] Sic. This should read: (1354-1378). (V.M.).

[798] Papadakis, op. cit., pp. 338-339.

[799] Boris Floria, “Tochka raspada” (“The Point of Dissolution”), Rodina (Homeland), № 11, 2003, p. 29 (in Russian).

[800] Papadakis, op. cit., p. 339

[801] For details of this struggle, see A. Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii russkoj tserkv (Sketches on the History of the Russian Church)i, Paris: YMCA Press, 1959, vol. I, pp. 326-334 (in Russian).

[802] Аrchimandrite Nikon, Zhitie i Pobedy Prepodobnago i Bogonosnago Otsa Nashego Sergia, Igumena Radonezhskago (The Life and Victories of our Holy and God-bearing Father Sergius, Abbot of Radonezh), Sergiev Posad, 1898, p. 149 (in Russian)..

[803] Аrchimandrite Nikon, op. cit., p. 169.

[804] St. John Maximovich, op. cit., p. 12.

[805] Lourié, commentary on J. Meyendorff, Zhizn’ i Trudy Svyatitelia Grigoria Palamy (The Life and Works of the Holy Hierarch Gregory Palamas), St. Petersburg: Byzantinorossika, 1997, pp. 396-397 (in Russian).

[806] Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964, p. 104.

[807] Patriarch Joseph, in A.P. Lebedev, op. cit., p. 102.

[808] The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1990, p. 466.

[809] Thus, as Ya.S. Lourie writes, “when in the 14^th 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.” (“Perepiska Groznogo s Kurbskim v obschestvennoj mysli Drevnej Rusi” (“The Correspondence of the Terrible one with Kurbsky in the Political Thought of Ancient Rus’”), in Ya.S. Lourie and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim (The Correspondence of Ivan the Terrible with Andrew Kurbsky), Моscow: Nauka, 1993, p. 229) (in Russian).

[810] Patriarch Anthony, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 188.

[811] Smirnov, Istoria Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (A History of the Orthodox Christian Church), Моscow: Кrutitskoe podvorye, 2000, pp. 159-160 (in Russian).

[812] Boyeikov, Tserkov', Rus' i Rim (The Church, Rus’ and Rome), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983 (in Russian). See Fr. John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

[813] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 193.

[814] 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. And Bishop Leonard of Chios wrote: “Through the diligence and honesty of the said Cardinal, Isidore of Kiev, and with the assent (if it was not insincere) of the emperor and the senate, the holy union was sanctioned and solemnly decreed on December 12^th, the feast of Saint Spirydon, the bishop” (quoted in Judith Herrin, “The Fall of Constantinople”, History Today, vol. 53, № 6, June, 2003, p. 15). 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. A.P. Lebedev writes: “Whatever might be said in his defence, nevertheless the last Orthodox Byzantine Emperor was a traitor to Orthodoxy. His betrayal is the more shameful the less it was sincere. Here are the words by which the Emperor and those who thought like him tried to pacify the crowd which did not want the unia; they said: ‘Be patient a little, wait until God has delivered the capital for the great dragon [the Turks], who wants to devour it. Then you will see whether our reconciliation with the azymites [the Latins] was sincere.’” (op. cit., p. 392).

[815] Constantine Tsipanlis, Mark Eugenicus and the Council of Florence, New York: Kentron Vyzantinon Erevnon, 1986, p. 74.

[816] 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).

[817] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 124. On the day of his death, St. Mark said: “Concerning the [uniate] Patriarch I shall say this, lest it should perhaps occur to him to show me a certain respect at the burial of this my humble body, or to send to my grave any of his hierarchs or clergy or in general any of those in communion with him in order to take part in prayer or to join the priests invited to it from amongst us, thinking that at some time, or perhaps secretly, I had allowed communion with him. And lest my silence give occasion to those who do not know my views well and fully to suspect some kind of conciliation, I hereby state and testify before the many worthy men here present that I do not desire, in any manner and absolutely, and do not accept communion with him or with those who are with him, not in this life nor after my death, just as (I accept) neither the Union nor Latin dogmas, which he and his adherents have accepted, and for the enforcement of which he has occupied this presiding place, with the aim of overturning the true dogmas of the Church. I am absolutely convinced that the farther I stand from him and those like him, the nearer I am to God and all the saints; and to the degree that I separate myself from them am I in union with the Truth and with the Holy Fathers, the Theologians of the Church; and I am likewise convinced that those who count themselves with them stand far away from the Truth and from the blessed Teachers of the Church. And for this reason I say: just as in the course of my whole life I was separated from them, so at the time of my departure, yea and after my death, I turn away from intercourse and communion with them and vow and command that none (of them) shall approach either my burial or my grave, and likewise anyone else from our side, with the aim of attempting to join and concelebrate in our Divine services; for this would be to mix what cannot be mixed. But it befits them to be absolutely separated from until such time as God shall grant correction and peace to His Church” (“[paradosis] ADDRESS OF ST. MARK OF EPHESUS ON THE DAY OF HIS DEATH” 21 August, 2001, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com).

[818] Quoted in Norwich, op. cit., p. 388.

[819] Quoted in Vasiliev, op. cit., p. 684.

[820] See Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, Saint Gregory Palamas as a Hagiorite, Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1997, pp. 247-257.

[821] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 77.

[822] Leontiev, “Vyzantinizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, p. 97 (in Russian).

[823] Nikolsky, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 122.

[824] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.163.

[825] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 104-112.

[826] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 122-123.

[827] Archbishop Seraphim, “Sud’by Rossii” (“The Destinies of Russia”), Pravoslavnij Vestnik (Orthodox Messenger), № 87, January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7 (in Russian). Translated in Fr. Andrew Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996.

[828] 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.

[829] The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, op. cit., pp. 476-477.

[830] M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw: Synodal Press, 1931, p. 231 (in Russian).

[831] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 14, on the Annunciation, 11, 12.

[832] Zyzykin, op. cit., pp. 300-301.

[833] Bl. Theophylact, The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, p. 114.

[834] 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).

[835] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 266.

[836] Kartashev, Sviataia Rus' i Puti Rossii (Holy Rus’ and the Ways of Russia), Paris, 1956 (in Russian); quoted in A. Tuskarev (Hieromonk Dionysius (Alferov)), Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve (The Church on the State), Staritsa, 1992, pp. 34, 35 (in Russian).

[837] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 294-295.

[838] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 303.

[839] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 304.

[840] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 305.

[841] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 123.

[842] The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, Buena Vista, Co.: Holy Apostles’ Convent, p. 125.

[843] Archbishop Averky of Syracuse, Sem’ Vselenskikh Soborov (The Seven Ecumenical Councils), Moscow, 1996, p. 11 (in Russian).

[844] Averky, op.cit., p. 71.

[845] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 116, 117.

[846] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 322-323.

[847] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 120-121.

[848] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 121.

[849] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 137.

[850] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 139.

[851] Quoted in Tsankov, Protopriest S. "Pokojnij Tsar Boris, kak religiozno-nravstvennaia lichnost'" (“The Reposed Tsar Boris as a religious-moral personality”, Pravoslavnaya Rus' (Orthodox Rus’), N 18 (1495), 15/28 September, 1993, p. 15 (in Russian).

[852] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 92 (in Russian).

[853] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-philosophskie osnovy istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, p. 269 (in Russian).

[854] This is proved by recent attempts of the “tolerant” European Union to invade the last sanctuary of True Orthodoxy and Orthodox Romanity on the European continent, the Holy Mount of Athos.

[855] Festal Menaion, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, Mattins, Canon, Canticle Eight, troparion.

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[v1]

[v2] Browning, The Byzantine Empire, New York, 1980, p. 209.