Sacerdotium Et Imperium: The Constantinian Renovatio According to the Greek Fathers

Abstract

MUCH HAS has been written in recent years about the Byzantine Christocracy. Byzantine studies in the West date from the seventeenth century, but the theology of East Rome has not received the attention it deserves. Erik Peterson's Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum (1935) was probably the first serious attempt to understand the intellectual, religious, and political dimensions of the Byzantine political theology. Thereafter followed such works as K. M. Setton's Christian Attitude towards the Empire in the Fourth Century (1941) and H. Berkhof s Kirche und Kaiser: Eine Untersuchung der Entstehung der byzantinischen und theokratischen Staatsauffassung im vierten Jahrhundert (1947), and five years ago Francis Dvornik published his two-volume Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy (1966). Specialized journals also began to include scholarly analysis of the subject. The conclusion of these studies has consistently been that the Constantinian renovatio perpetuated Hellenistic kingship and its link between monarchy and monotheism. The task of translating that kingship into Christian terms, it is said, was accomplished by Eusebius of Caesarea, while the Greek Fathers, as his disciples, merely extended his thinking. It appears to me, however, that this conclusion is not justified by the evidence. First, modern scholarship prejudices the evidence by a restrictive and positivist method which elicits an interpretation of the facts, excluding thereby the genuine and Christological context of the patristic political theology. Moreover, the judgment of so many historians and patrologists has been biased by various undemonstrated but predetermining assumptions, such as the ostensible dependence of the Christian paideia in general upon pagan thought and the supposed effort of the Fathers to create a Christian philosophy a la Origen, that is, a Christian1 The attitude of many historians and patrologists that all prominent Christian writers of the first nine centuries of Christianity deserve the title Father is not shared by the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Yet, to apply Father only to those writers with the marks of orthodoxy, holiness, ecclesiastical sanction, and antiquity is to exclude some of the most distinguished theologians of the early Church, e.g., Origen, Clement of Alexan-