Empire Exorcised

Schmemann ( Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West ) admits that in the east the church “surrendered” its “juridical” and “administrative” independence to the empire. But he claims that this is not a betrayal of the church’s true independence. That independence, he insists, is not juridical anyway, but liturgical and sacramental: “the Church’s visible, institutional structure . . . is a structure not of power, but of presence .” And, so long as the empire submitted to the Truth, then the church saw no reason to carry on a power struggle.

As he puts it, “the one and absolute condition for [the church’s surrender] was the acceptance by the empire of the faith of the Church, i.e., of the same ultimate vision of God, world and history; and this we call Truth . . . . As long as the empire placed itself under Christ’s judgement and in the perspective, essential for the Church, of the Kingdom of God, the Church saw no reason to claim any ‘juridical’ independence from it and, in fact, gladly put the reigns of ecclesiastical government and policy in the hands of the emperor. In his care for the Church, in the empire’s function as the Church’s earthly ‘habitation,’ the Church indeed saw the essential vocation of the Christian empire, the very ‘note’ of it being Christian.”

Yet, paradoxically, the church’s surrender was also, in the long run, the church’s victory:

“From a purely legislative point of view Christian religion is given the place vacated by the old state paganism. In a way it is still Christ who is understood as ‘serving’ the empire. But in the ninth century, in a document like the Epanagoge , or in later imperial iconography, the situation is altogether changed. It is the emperor who, kneeling before the Christ-Pantocrator, offers and dedicates to Him the empire. It is the empire itself which, at least officially and symbolically, knows no other purpose, no other function but that of serving Christ and being His ‘habitation.’ This victory, is, beyond any doubt, the fruit of the long fight for Truth, of the Christian martyria , which cleared the initial ambiguities of pagan theocracy, ‘exorcised’ it from its impure elements.” The empire thus became Christian in the sense that “above everything else [it accepted] a certain ‘truth,’ a definite vision of the world and of history.”

He illustrates by referring to the role that monasticism played in the Byzantine system. Monatisticism was not world-renouncing, state-rejecting, or radical: “monasticism did not either condemn or reject the very principle of the ‘Christianiation’ of the world which began with Constantine’s conversion.” Rather, it represented “a way, for the sake of that Christian world, in order to keep alive the martyria , the testimony to the Kingdom of God by which the world is saved.” Monasticism was continuous with the “worldview that made St. Paul and the early Christians, while fighting the imperial ‘idol,’ pray for the emperor and the ‘established powers.’”

On the other hand, the Christianized world of the empire “placed the monastic ideal, the monastic ‘scale of values,’ at the very heart of its own life and consciousness.” It was “‘canonized’ by tee imperial-ecclesiastical organism as an integral part and expression of that Truth which, as we have seen already, formed the very basis of the Byzantine ‘symphony,” symbolized by the emperor’s monastic tonsure at the hour of death. Schmemann notes that iconoclastic emperors fought the monasteries as much as they fought icons, since the monastery’s “function within Christian society was precisely to affirm the transcendent freedom of many from the state, to preserve the eschatological world-view which alone makes this world Christian.”