Alexander Schmemann

4. Byzantium (22 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 13

Several scholars have inferred from the Epanagoge a full and final blending of Church and empire into a single Church-state body, the crowning of the process begun by Justinian. Its text would appear to justify such an interpretation. But commentary usually goes no further than a simple statement of this fact, while the Epanagoge is equally concerned about overcoming the harmful aspect of the Justinian “harmony” of Church and state. In one sense a fusion really did occur: all members of the Church were subjects of the empire, the borders of Church and empire coincided. But does this mean that they constituted a single organism, headed by a diarchy of emperor and patriarch? It must not be forgotten that the Epanagoge was political law, and spoke of the state, not the Church. This state, because it was Christian, was organically linked with the Church, and the same bond was exemplified in the diarchy of emperor and patriarch. The meaning of this diarchy lay in the fact that, apart from his position in the Church as defined in the canons, the patriarch now had a special position in the governmental structure: his place was analogous to that of the emperor. He was in some sense the Church’s representative in the state, the guardian of its Orthodoxy and faithfulness to Christianity, a guarantee of the empire’s Orthodoxy. He alone, therefore, had a right to teach and interpret Church doctrine, and the state itself charged him with the defense of the Orthodox faith before the emperor himself.

Of the emperor the Epanagoge required only fidelity to Orthodoxy — to her doctrine concerning Christ and the Trinity.
One must emphasize that in the Byzantine vision of the ideal, Church and state were not connected by a juridical definition and delimitation of their spheres of action, but by the Orthodox faith: the faith and doctrine of the Church, which the empire had accepted as its own. And the fountainhead of this doctrine, its custodian and interpreter, was the Church and not the empire.

 

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