Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 23

Symphony.

Justinian’s solution is known in history as the idea of “symphony,” best expressed in his famous Sixth Novella. “There are two great blessings,” he writes, “gifts of the mercy of the Almighty to men, the priesthood and the empire (sacerdotium et imperium). Each of these blessings granted to men was established by God and has its own appointed task.
But as they proceed from the same source they also are revealed in unity and co-operative action.” The priesthood controls divine and heavenly matters, while the empire directs what is human and earthly. But at the same time the empire takes full care of preserving Church dogmas and the honor of the priesthood. And the priesthood with the empire directs all public life along ways pleasing to God.

This doctrine might indeed have been “theoretically the best of all that exists,” as one Russian historian asserts, if the state, proclaimed to be as essential and as great a blessing as the Church, had really re-evaluated itself in the light of Christian teachings about the world. Christianity had never denied either the benefit of the state or the possibility that it could be enlightened by the Light of Christ. Yet the meaning of the Church’s appearance in the world as a community and a visible organism was that it revealed the limitations of the state, destroying its claim to absolutism forever, however “sacral” its nature might be; and it was just this sacral quality that had been the essence of the ancient pagan state. The Church revealed to the world that there are only two absolute, eternal, and sacred values: God and man, and that everything else, including the state, is first limited by its very nature — by belonging wholly only to this world; and secondly, is a blessing only to the extent that it serves God’s plan for man.
Therefore the “enlightenment” of the state means primarily its recognition of its own limitations, its refusal to regard itself as an absolute value. It was for this enlightenment that Christians had suffered and died in the era of persecutions, when they rejected the right of the state to subject the whole of man to itself. Hence the true postulate for a Christian world was not a merging of the Church with the state but, on the contrary, a distinction between them.
For the state is only Christian to the extent that it does not claim to be everything for man — to define his whole life — but enables him to be a member as well of another community, another reality, which is alien to the state although not hostile to it.

The whole drama of Byzantinism lay in the fact that historically this re-evaluation never took place, either under Constantine or after him. Justinian’s theory was rooted in the theocratic mind of pagan empires, for which the state was a sacred and absolute form for the world — its meaning and justification. One cannot speak of the subordination of the Church to the state, because for subordination there must be two distinct subjects.
But in the theocratic conception there is not and cannot be anything that is not related to the state, and religion is essentially a state function. It is even a higher function, which in a certain way subordinates everything else in state life to itself; but only because the state itself is religious by nature and is the recognized divine form for the human community. The state is subject to religion; but religion itself has the state as the goal of its functions, and in this sense is subject to it as the final value, for the sake of which it exists.

 

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