IMPERIALISM

IMPERIALISM. While the urge to dominate and build empires is universal among human beings and their societies, this term has a specific application to the history of the Orthodox Church. Inheriting the ideology of the Roman Empire as civilizer and pacifier of the world (see, for example, Virgil’s Aeneid), the newly Christian Empire under Constantine (q.v.) and his successors took over and promulgated a “baptized” version of this imperial theology. (See Church and State.) The oikoumene of Byzantium (qq.v.) theoretically embraced all Christians and sought-in theory, at least, and under Justinian (q.v.) in fact-to effect this dominion. Where possible, this was accomplished via the tools of diplomacy and armed force and, where impossible, through an elaborate hierarchy of titles bestowed by the imperial court on neighboring rulers. The latter, if only by a kind of fiction, preserved the theory of a family of nations presided over by the one emperor.

Following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire (qq.v.) in 1453, the universal claims of the Christian emperor found two claimants. Under the Sultans the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) was given effective rule over all the formers’ Christian subjects. Later, with the advent of the Phanariots (q.v.) to power within the patriarchate, this rule was translated into an active Greek imperialism in the modern sense, leading to the suppression of the native hierarchies of the Empire’s Slavic and Romanian Orthodox subjects. The second claimant, the Russian tsar with the Church of Russia, displayed much the same policy of narrowly nationalist political and ecclesiastical conquest. All Orthodox within the tsardom were subjected to Russian political and ecclesiastical rule. These included the peoples of Western Rus’ (modern Ukraine and Belarus), Russian Moldavia (Bessarabia), and Georgia.

One may note that the progress of the same imperial idea was different in the West. With the crowning of Charlemagne in 800, and the fabrication of the Donation of Constantine, the papacy laid claim to the presidency of the Christian oikoumene (qq.v.). It put these claims into effect during the Gregorian Reforms of the 11th-13th c. That the latter era was also the period which saw the definitive split between Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Church (q.v.) is not accidental. The two imperialisms in Orthodoxy (q.v.), Constantinopolitan and Muscovite, have come close to splitting the Church. The earlier competition between East and West succeeded in doing so.