Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 21

All the urging of the preachers and theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries was mainly directed toward maintaining in the Church community an awareness of just these two planes in Christian life. Their efforts explain much about the growing complexity of liturgical ritual and the growing emphasis on the “awesome” nature of the Sacrament as the appearance in this world of a Reality that is absolutely other, heavenly, and incommensurable with it. Finally, monasticism by its withdrawal also bore witness to this. By preaching, services of worship, and asceticism, the Church struggled against the temptation to transform Christianity into a “natural” religion and merge it completely with the world.

Here lay the deepest of all the misunderstandings between the Church and the empire. The Roman state could accept the ecclesiastical doctrine of God and Christ comparatively easily as its official religious doctrine; it could render the Church great help in rooting out paganism and implanting Christianity; and finally, it could Christianize its own laws to a certain extent. But it could not really recognize that the Church was a community distinct from itself; it did not understand the Church’s ontological independence of the world. The religious absolutism of the Roman state and the emperor’s belief that he was the representative of God on earth prevented it. The trouble was that the conversion to Christianity not only did not weaken but actually strengthened this belief and brought it to its logical conclusion. We have seen that the unique feature of the conversion of Constantine, and its significance for the future, lay in the “directness” of his election by Christ — in the fact that he “accepted the call like Paul, not from men.” In the mind of Constantine himself, this had placed the empire in a special position in the sacred history of salvation and made it the completion and crown of the events that had led through the Old and New Testaments to the final victory of Christ over the world.

The more the Church coincided in scale with the empire — the more imperceptible became the outward difference in their boundaries — the stronger was the identity between them in the thinking of the state, under the authority of the autocrat installed by the power of God. Outwardly the structure of the Church remained untouched. With the destruction of paganism, the emperors unconditionally rejected the sacred or priestly functions they had performed in ancient Rome in consequence of the state’s theocratic nature. The sacramental, educational, and pastoral authority of the hierarchy was in no way limited, but on the contrary surrounded by unprecedented honor and privileges. Only the hierarchy, in theory at least, continued to be the all-powerful expression of Church faith, and the state recognized that it was obliged to protect, spread, and confirm the teaching of the Church as established by its councils.

But it is characteristic, and has been overlooked by many historians, that the problem of relations between Church and state in Byzantium was almost imperceptibly and unconsciously replaced by the problem of relations between the secular authority and the hierarchy. In the imperial conception, the Church had merged with the world, but because this was a Christian world it had two complementary sources for its existence, structure, and well-being: the emperor and the priest. In Byzantine literature the comparison of the relations of Church and state to those between body and soul gradually became classic. The state was conceived to be the body, which lived because of the presence within it of its soul, the Church. There is a radical distinction, however, between this pattern and the doctrine of the early Church, which it actually never rejected, since this would have meant rejecting its own life.

 

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