Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 22

The early Church felt it was itself a body, a living organism, a new people, completely incompatible with any other people or any natural community. Only within this organism and only in relation to it is there meaning for the work of the hierarchy, whose purpose is to manifest this unity and transform the Church into the image of Christ Himself. Theoretically all men in the empire were called and could become members of this body, but even then the world would not become the Church, because in it and through it men commune with another world, another life, that which will come in glory only after the end of this one.

In official Byzantine doctrine, however, the state was compared to a body, not in this early Christian sense, nor because all subjects of the empire had become Church members. Actually the figure was derived wholly from pagan premises, which had not been replaced, according to which the state itself was conceived to be the only community established by God, and embraced the whole life of man. The visible representative of God within it, who performed His will and dispensed His blessings, was the emperor.
He was obliged to be concerned with both the religious and the material well-being of his subjects, and his power was not only from God but was divine in its own nature. The only distinction between this pattern and pagan theocracy was that the empire, by the choice of its emperor, had found its true God and true religion in Christianity. Christ had left his authority to forgive, heal, sanctify, and teach to the priests. Therefore they must be surrounded in the state with special honor, for on them, on their prayers and sacraments, would depend the prosperity of the empire.

In the early Byzantine way of thinking, what the Church consisted of was the hierarchy, the dogmas, the services, the Church buildings; all this was indeed the soul of the world, the soul of the empire.
But the idea of the Church as a body or community had dropped out of sight and was replaced by or exchanged for that of the state. There is no longer a problem of Church and state, but only one of the relationship between two authorities, the secular and the spiritual, within the state itself. This latter problem is what Justinian deals with in his legislation and religious policy, and this is the significance of his reign in the history of the Church.

 

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