CHURCH AND STATE

CHURCH AND STATE. Until the 19th-c. rise of nationalism and the consequent appearance of state churches, and with the notable exception of Russia and certain earlier local churches (e.g., Armenia, Georgia [qq.v.], etc.), the understanding of the state in the Orthodox Church had been governed by the latter’s relationship to the two great Empires, Roman and Ottoman (qq.v.), which dominated the eastern Mediterranean basin for two millennia. Early Christian attitudes to the Roman Empire oscillated, depending on persecutions, between seeing the emperor and his imperium as the providential guardians of law and order (e.g., Rom 12), or else as the agents of the devil and the antichrist (e.g., Rev). The imperial cult of the emperor’s spirit or genius was, of course, consistently resisted.

Radical change came with the accession to power of Constantine the Great (q.v.). Eusebius of Caesarea (q.v.), in numerous writings including his Church History and especially his oration In Praise of Constantine, sketched the outlines which would become the official, political theology of Byzantium (q.v.). This held that the Empire was a providential gift, intended by God to stretch across the oikoumene (q.v.; or “inhabited earth”) and to parallel the universal Church of Christ, to become in short the secular arm or reflection of the Church. The emperor, while no longer divine, was presented as the “image of Christ,” i.e., in Christ’s capacity as governor and ordering power of the universe (pantacrator). In a famous phrase, Constantine therefore called himself the “bishop” or overseer of the Church’s outer life-in effect, its chief executive officer-though he never claimed the right to define its faith. (See Caesaropapism.)

Some two centuries later, Justinian (q.v.) articulated the doctrine of “symphony”: imperium and sacerdotium coexist as the mutually complementary and supporting aspects of a single Christian polity, with the emperor seeing to its good order and defending its orthodoxy and the bishops retaining full authority (q.v.) for Christian teaching and discipline, and in particular the exclusive right to pronounce on the truth or falsity of doctrine. It was thus the emperor’s general duty to enforce the standards of the Church and, in times of doctrinal debate and imperial crisis, to convoke a universal synod of the episcopate, the Ecumenical Council (q.v.), for a decision on the disputed issues. While this was the theory, the practice depended on the relative strengths of the different emperors, patriarchs, and bishops, and, not least of all, the influence of the monks as a third and often very powerful element.

Imperial attempts to dominate the Church were formidable throughout the 4th c., in the late 5th c. under Zeno, in the reign of Justinian in the 6th c., and especially in the 8th-9th c. dynasty of the Isaurians (q.v.). The latter in particular laid claims precisely to a sacerdotal authority and came closest to realizing a genuine Byzantine caesaropapism (q.v.). Their defeat at the Seventh Ecumenical Council marked the end of any offical claims on the part of the state to the adjudication of doctrine, although later emperors such as Michael VIII (13th c.) and Joh n VIII (15th c.) exercised considerable pressure on the episcopate to accede to the decisions of the Reunion Councils held with the papacy (qq.v.), though it proved in vain.

Post-Byzantine developments until the 19th c. were dominated, on the one hand, by the Ottoman Empire and, on the other, by the Russian monarchy. The Turkish sultans governed their subjects by treating each religious group as a distinct nation (millet), with the rum millet (“Roman,” i.e., Orthodox nation) subject in all but capital cases to the rule of the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) as millet-bashi (see Ethnarch) and therefore as the religious and civil head of the Orthodox peoples under Ottoman rule. The Church, in short, was gifted with the powers of the state and the patriarch, in effect, with the ancient role of the emperor-although, obviously, he was to be emperor of a “second-class” people. The contemporary wardrobe of Orthodox bishops reflects this development, in particular the vestments (q.v.) of the sakkos and mitra, the imperial robes, first affected by the patriarchs during the Ottoman years and later copied by the rest of the episcopate. One could also, up until the death of the late Archbishop Macarius in the 20th c., see a survival of the Ottoman system still at work on the island of Cyprus.

In Russia the tsars succeeded to the role of the Byzantine emperors as the civil guardians and patrons of the Church. Their role, indeed, was seen by many as extending beyond the borders of Russia itself to include the entire Orthodox oikoumene. Hence the popular notion grew, sponsored by clerical and monastic circles and favored (though never officially adopted) by the crown, of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” i.e., the providential successor of the “Second Rome,” Constantinople, which had fallen to the infidel. In Muscovite Russia (q.v.), however, and in the later Petersburg Empire, relations between tsars and the Church were markedly less nuanced than in Byzantium. In the latter the emperors had always been limited by a web of convention and the force of public opinion as represented, in particular, by the monks. Russia was much less sophisticated a nation. Its government, from the reign of Ivan III in the mid-15th c., was influenced from quite early on by the impress of “statist” political philosophy coming to it from Renaissance Italy-a philosophy that was itself the product of reaction to the papal theocracy of the High Middle Ages.

Russian stress on the powers of the ruler reached an early high point under Ivan IV, but especially so during the reign of Peter I (d. 1723) whose regime obtained to the end of the tsardom in 1917. Peter’s Spiritual Regulation (q.v.), issued in 1721, was influenced by the example of the Prussian Staatskirche and sought to make the Russian Church a “department of state.” While it is fair to say this project did not completely reduce the Orthodox Church to a bureaucracy, it is also the case that it came very close to doing so, in particular under the ober-procurators of the Holy Synod (see Russian Orthodox Church) who ruled on behalf of the tsar. Moreover, this regime was not welcomed by the clergy, as the replies of the sixty-five diocesan bishops to the ober-procurator’s questionnaire in 1905 make evident. All but three of the bishops condemned the state’s role in the Church.

Nonetheless, the nationalist revival in the Balkans (q.v.) saw in the Russian Church a model to imitate. Peter I’s subordination of Church to state provided a template for the organization of the autocephalous church of Greece in 1831, and the newly independent states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and finally Albania (qq.v.) would follow suit. This is, indeed, the situation which obtains to the present day, less of course the seventy-year violent interruption of Marxist-Leninist governments wholly bent on the eradication of religious belief and institutions. Now that that episode has concluded, however, the Orthodox Church confronts a world where the old verities of empire no longer apply and the newer arrangements to accommodate nationalism appear increasingly problematical.