Evolution of the Byzantine System among the Slavs.

B ut in the Byzantine Empire, the head of the Church could scarcely presume to lay any claim to political and legal authority beyond his spiritual authority within the Imperium Christianum. The Christian emperor was on the spot keeping sharp watch over his rights and quick to curb any pretensions to ecclesiastical primacy. A symphonia had indeed been established, and friction arose only where the emperor himself violated the moral law or the doctrines of the Church. At that point the head of the Church could invoke his spiritual privileges to reprove the emperor and, should he remain obstinately impenitent or heretical, employ the Church's disciplinary methods against him. Open conflict between the emperor and the metropolitan or patriarch developed only in such a situation — for example, in the struggle between Ivan IV, the Terrible and Metropolitan Filipp (1507-69).

The special danger within the system lay not in a possible assumption of political power by the head of the Church, but vice versa — the emperor might abuse his position within this state-Church system to decrease the inner freedom of the Church and reduce the Church completely to a tool of the state. This took place at several periods in both Byzantine and Russian history.

The political ideology of Russian tsarism was rooted directly in the Byzantine conception of Church and state as this had been formulated by Emperor Constantine. The East Slavs took over the idea of the Christian state and the Christian Caesar in whom were merged the qualities of the Greek philosopher-king, the Christian monarch and the anointed of the Lord. Constantine had made himself the head of the Byzantine state Church and each of his successors was felt to be the vicar of God upon earth. From the very beginning this same conception was implicit in the Russian Empire.

However it was only after the fall of Byzantium that this Byzantine ideology was fully elaborated and merged into the awakening national consciousness of Muscovy. The Grand Duchy of Moscow henceforth claimed to the full the religious heritage of the shattered second Rome. The premise that Moscow was the third Rome became the basis for the Muscovite state Church (see p. 179).

The specifically Muscovite ideology known as Yosifinism grew out of the doctrines of Yosif Sanin (14391515), abbot of Volokalamsk Monastery. Dominion over state and Church, so the argument ran, lay in the hand of the tsar, the divinely anointed vicar of God. That part of Russian monasticism which resolutely guarded the spiritual freedom of the Church was strongly opposed to the doctrine and waged a tenacious struggle against it. Though Yosifinism was very much in keeping with the fundamental ideas of the Byzantine state Church it represented a further step in aggrandizement of the tsar. As the Christian autocrat, he was granted an increase in his spiritual as well as his temporal powers, with the result that the metropolitans, and later the patriarchs, were shorn of any authority over him.

T his special evolution may in part be explained by the difference in age between the two states. In the Byzantine Empire, Church and state had skirmished with one another for many centuries. Out of innumerable minor frays fought with spiritual and political weapons there had emerged a curious harmony. The two powers had adapted to one another and had created a certain tradition of respect for each other's limits and rights. There was no time for anything of the sort in Muscovy. Russia was a young nation, created by the dukes. From the first the secular rulers had usurped significant powers over ecclesiastical affairs.

Ivan the Terrible (1530-84) made it plain that the Church could not exercise even the last remnant of spiritual freedom: the right to reprove the tsar if he openly violated ecclesiastical morals and discipline. Yosifinism had so strengthened the hegemony of the tsar that the Church became helpless even in this last resort. Thus Byzantine “harmony” between state and Church was shattered. A form of national Russian Caesaropapism came into being, in what might be called a rightist deviation from the original status of the Orthodox Church.

The reform attempted by Patriarch Nikon from 1652 to 1667 looked to restoration of the original Byzantine relationship. But Nikon was also departing from the Byzantine model. In opposing tsarism's excessive authority over the Church, he demanded a number of secular rights in addition to his spiritual powers. Nikon's claim to complete independence of the Church as against the state represented, so to speak, the leftist deviation from the Byzantine tradition. Nikon failed and was deposed. His deposition was followed by stiff more rigorous repression and abridgment of the spiritual freedom of the Church, and the complete triumph of Yosifinism.

A fter all this it was an easy matter for Peter the Great in the Age of Enlightenment to apply the principles of absolutism to his relations with the Church. He regarded himself as sovereign lord of the Church with the right to reshape the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church to suit himself. He abolished the patriarchal organization and established the government of the Church on a synodal basis, along lines suggested by Samuel von Pufendorf, the German Lutheran. His qualms at tampering with time-honored institutions were all the fewer because he no longer felt any strong personal ties with Orthodoxy. His reign signalized the snuffing out the autonomy of the Russian Church. With the abolition of the patriarchal organization, the Church was placed under the supervision of a secular procurator.

The relationship of Byzantium and Rome has generally been regarded from the Western or Roman Catholic point of view. Seen thus, Byzantium appears as the metropolis of the Eastern Roman Empire which, intent on rivaling Rome, refused to be subordinate to her in doctrinal matters, struck out in new directions, and ultimately parted altogether from the Roman creed. This picture is a typically Western historical myth colored by dogma. It will be instructive for once to compare the relationship of Byzantium and Rome from the Byzantine point of view. Throughout the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople was proudly called New Rome, while Byzantine citizens were referred to as Rфmaioi -Romans. As the Byzantines themselves understood their historical role, Byzantium was the direct continuation, decreed in God's plan for the universe, of Roman history. In calling themselves Rфmaioi the Byzantines underlined their emperor's legal claim to Rome's onetime universal dominion. In speaking of New Rome they implied both the continuity and the difference. New Rome was entitled to all the powers of old Rome, but at the same time she was Christian Rome and exercised the might of the Roman Empire according to the law of Christ.

It cannot be determined with certainty whether Emperor Constantine himself used the term “New Rome” in referring to the city he was founding. We do know that he wished to build “the second Rome,” that is to say, a second capital of the Empire; that he established a Senate in Constantinople, transplanted a number of the leading families of Rome to the new capital, and that he laid out Constantinople as far as possible according to the city plan of Rome. In any case, “the second Rome” very rapidly became a “New Rome.” For old Rome was conquered by the Germans and thenceforth was drawn into the political maelstrom that produced such chaotic conditions throughout Italy and the whole of the West during the great migrations. Old Rome ceased to be a political and administrative center. Byzantium took its place. In 381 the Council of Constantinople officially confirmed New Rome as the name for Byzantium.

After the collapse of the western half of the Empire, a new ideology began to make rapid headway in Byzantium. It was no longer enough to say that the new Rome was the equal of the old; the feeling was that the new Rome took precedence over the old. The collapse of Rome was explained as the rightful vengeance of God upon the metropolis of the pagan Empire which for so many centuries had persecuted the Christian Church. From the sixth century onward, we can see the unfolding of the idea of renovatio in Byzantium. The idea reached its zenith in the heroic twelfth century of the Eastern Empire. Byzantium, according to this version of history, was a young and vital Rome in contrast to the aging and decrepit Rome of the West. The verse chronicle of Manasses, composed during the reign of Manuel Comnenus, describes the plundering of Rome by Genseric the Vandal in 455 and concludes: “This happened to old Rome; but our Rome flourishes, grows, is vigorous and young; may it grow forever, O Lord, Ruler of the world, since it has such an emperor.”

Two other important factors helped to precipitate the separation of New Rome from old Rome. 1) During the period of chaos that began with the invasions the Roman popes profited by the absence of the emperor to extend their ecclesiastical dominion and gain political leadership in the West. They more and more defied the overlordship of the Byzantine emperors by, for example, resisting the collection of imperial taxes and hindering the exercise of other imperial rights on Roman soil. Byzantium regarded this conduct as open rebellion and reproached the spiritual head of Rome for misusing the woes of the times to increase his own power at the expense of Empire. 2) It was a fresh affront to Byzantium when the Pope entered a political coalition with the enemies of the Empire, namely the rulers of the Frankish kingdom, and went so far as to confer the imperial title upon a barbarian German king — Charlemagne — while a legitimate Roman emperor still occupied the imperial throne in Byzantium. As Byzantium saw it, the Bishop of Rome and the Western barbarian kings were distributing powers and titles they had no legitimate right to. At this point the Byzantine idea of renovatio was carried further and merged into the idea of the translatio imperii, the transference of the Empire from old to New Rome. Even as the West began to comport itself as a new Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines asserted that Constantine had transferred the entire Senate and the entire official hierarchy of Rome to Constantinople and that nothing of the imperium was left to Rome after the foundation of Constantinople.

In keeping with this political conception, the Byzantine Church arrived at its own version of the translatio idea. Until the ninth century it held firm to its acknowledged equality with the Roman see. Patriarch Photius (858-67 and 877-86) was the first to put forth the claim of primacy for Constantinople. He defended his new pretensions on the ground that the Bishop of Rome had become an apostate; he had departed from the true faith, had proved unworthy of his honors, and had therefore lost his right to the see of Constantinople. As further support, Photius adduced the same forged document with which the Roman papacy had backed its own claim to primacy: the Donation of Constantine (see p. 169). Since the document spoke of Constantine's having taken with him to Constantinople the whole Senate and officialdom of Rome, the Byzantines could use it to corroborate their assertion that nothing pertaining to the imperium had been left behind in old Rome. And since the Bishop of Rome himself had meanwhile become a heretic, the Church of Constantinople, on the basis of the canon of the Council of Chalcedon, was the proper heir of the rights of the Roman Church. Princess Anna Comnena in the twelfth century expressed this theory in bold phraseology: “After the secular rule of Rome had been transferred to our imperial city, and the whole Senate and official hierarchy with it, the position of the bishops as archpresbyters was naturally transferred to this city also.”

There was still one logical stumbling block: the Roman boast that the Apostle Peter had founded the Church in Rome. To offset this historical argument, the Byzantine Church stessed the importance of the Apostle Andrew who preached in its lands. And since Andrew had been called by the Savior before Peter, it was clear that the Byzantine Church had an older lineage than the Roman.

By such avenues did old and new Rome arrive at a point where each of the partners was eager to deny the legality of the other's claims to ecclesiastical and political leadership, where each charged the other with defection from the true faith, where the sense of fraternity of the Christian churches was abolished and finally where each was pitted against the other in the field of war. In the course of those great adventures in foreign policy called the Crusades, the West was offered the chance to conquer and crush Byzantium. The opportunity was not renounced: in 1204 Constantinople was captured by the warriors of the Fourth Crusade, who linked it to the Latin Empire and tried to set up the Latin patriarchate of Constantinople. As we have already seen, this subjugation by the Latin West, and the subsequent persecution of the Orthodox Church, immeasurably deepened the existing schism and gave an almost traumatic character to Byzantine Orthodoxy's antagonism toward Rome.

In 1453 the new Rome on the Bosporus fell into the hands of the Turks. But the end of the Byzantine Empire did not extinguish the Byzantine tradition. Rather, its ideas and its claims were taken over by the Russian rulers of Moscow. The Russian historical and ecclesiastical mentality grew out of the conception of Moscow as the “third Rome.” The Muslim conquest of Constantinople had not only wiped out the last focus of power in the Byzantine Empire, it had also destroyed the real heart of the Eastern Church: Hagia Sophia, the holiest cathedral of the Church. This spiritual and liturgical center of the Eastern Orthodox Church was converted into a mosque. Henceforth the Grand Duchy of Moscow was the last remaining politically independent Orthodox power. The conquest of Constantinople affected Muscovy's conception of her historical and ecclesiastical mission in much the same way as the conquest of Rome by the Germanic tribes had affected Byzantium's view of herself. Russian national and ecclesiastical pride received an enormous impetus from the notion that Moscow had become the “third Rome.” After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and Church, the political claims of the Roman Imperium and the spiritual claims of the Byzantine Church were assumed by Muscovy and the Church of Moscow.

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