The sin of the Orthodox today is that they remain stuck in the dream of restoring the glories of ancient Byzantium, for since the fall of the empire and its glories until today, their mad dream breaks them. Therefore you see the weakness of the ecclesiastical administrations in that they submit to the state and to authority, whether imperial, republican or other, and the dreaming Orthodox never cease to lean on whatever prophecies to commend their hopes of returning to the vanishing glory — the ancient glory of Orthodoxy — which they see only in the sultan, the great city, and the face of the Orthodox emperor as the seat of glory, and the emperor’s geography as the lost kingdom. Whatever this emperor may be, even if he were a monster.
But do the dreamers of the vanishing glory realize that they make the death of Christ on the cross nothing but the conversion of the king of Rome from paganism to Christianity, and the transfer of authority from the hand of the priests to the priests, and from the hand of the pagan emperor who set himself up as a god to the hand of the emperor whom God set up, as one thinker expressed it? There the priests burn incense before war, and here the priests consecrate the weapons — tanks and airplanes — with holy water.
If we want to compare the two eras of the empire, the pagan era and the Christian era, and return with history to before the Lord, we see that the emperor at first was raised to the rank of the gods, for in Ephesus a temple was built bearing this inscription: “To the gods of Rome and to the divine Julius”. With the transformation of the republic into an empire, governmental authority took on a divine character, and the emperor did not demand absolute worship but merely a comprehensive acknowledgment by all of his divine authority, with all the religious arbitrariness and subjugation that accompanies this matter(1), and from this came the term Supreme Pontiff.
And what gave the emperor a broad priestly character in the days of the Byzantine state, says Professor Troitsky: the theory of Balsamon, Patriarch of Antioch, was the “theory of anointing” (this theory that says that through it the emperor obtains all the rights of the highest ecclesiastical authority), which not only guaranteed the Byzantine emperor the graces of baptism but granted him the service of appointing bishops, and consequently the emperor became of a first priestly character – the Supreme Pontiff – entitled to appoint and judge the patriarchs and to abolish dioceses. His theory was nothing but the domination of the king over the Church(2). This theory went along with the inclinations and lusts of the emperors, and the Byzantine legislators referred to it and gave it a quasi-doctrinal character, and upon it the patriarchs relied in their letters to the Russian princes. Patriarch Anthony IV wrote to Grand Duke Basil Dimitrievich in 1393, saying” the holy emperor occupies a lofty office in the Church, and he is not like the rest of the princes…because he is the master of the whole world ”. And after the fall of the Byzantine empire, this theory — the theory of Balsamon — became applied in the Russian empire, and the Russian councils used to regard the tsar as the anointed of the Lord(3). And if we compare what the Senate did for Julius Caesar, is it not the very thing the ecclesiastical administration did for the emperor and made him the master of the world?, and it contributed to the formation of the state on the model of the Monophysitism of Eutyches: the glorification of the state.
So that we do not miss it: the theory of anointing was invented only as a result of Balsamon’s desire to move as patriarch from Antioch to Constantinople, but in the end, the emperor moved the Patriarch of Jerusalem to it. Then the desires of people of influence in history have often been the measure of truth, and unfortunately still are., Thus we understand Berdyaev’s following thought” the Christian faith was manipulated to serve the existing kingdom of Caesar and to defend the ruling class, the rich and the authorities, and the poor and marginalized were told to accept their pains and misery as their share in life, and to submit meekly to every social evil, …..since the time of the emperor Constantine, the kingdom of Caesar has not passed away as it was supposed to; the Church has failed in its duty and its pledge”(4).
This on one hand; on the other hand, the emperors saw in the Church a new hand through which to extend their authority. The Byzantine emperor who could not extend his influence over the Russian empire by his army extended it through the ecclesiastical administration, when Patriarch Anthony IV asked the Russian prince to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Byzantine emperor as the master of the world. This is what we see today in Africa: Russia, which could not extend its political influence in Africa, extends it through the ecclesiastical administration, so that the Russian Church has dioceses there, and through it the state gains a foothold.
The harm that the ecclesiastical administration inflicted on the Church because of its attempts to reconcile the state and the Church far exceeds what it benefited from its association with it. The flourishing of the Church became tied completely to the purity of the rulers and their rectitude of faith: if they were upright, the Church was upright with them, and if they fell into heresy, the Church was thrown into confusion (see the history of Asad Rustum, the war of the icons, and others). And in Russia, Peter the Great was influenced by Protestant thought, and the Church was subject to him.
And a new contemporary example: in the war of Russia and Ukraine, and during the meeting of Pope Francis with Patriarch Kirill on the 15th of this month on the Zoom platform, which lasted forty minutes — twenty of them the Patriarch Kirill justifying the war on Ukraine — the Pope said to his interlocutor: we are not servants of a state; we must not use the language of politics but the language of the Lord Jesus, and he told the Patriarch frankly: (you must not turn into a servant of the altar at Putin). And unfortunately, today the Church, in relation to the state, is nothing but a new face of communism through which it rules.
Christianity paid a dear price, shed blood, and fought against the worship of the emperor so as not to eat of his bread. Shall we return today to beg the bread of the Orthodox emperor’s table? This promised emperor will not liberate the slaves; rather, he offers them a luxurious slavery because he is of their religion (we are slaves of a king from our tribe). He will not break their chains; rather, he will adorn them in the name of Christ. So we do not err when we equate the one who demands a caliph with the one who demands a Caesar — they are two different faces of one coin, namely the domination of the tribe, and we have not yet become free. Patriarch Ignatius the Wise (IV Hazim) says: I dare to say that in many cases we drift with the world and betray our Lord and make someone other than Him a lord to us. Christianity is not an army nor a weapon nor glories as people understand them(6).
Today we must kill the idea of the Orthodox emperor, and let every trace and hope of the return of earthly glory depart, and let us acknowledge that we sinned against the face of Jesus when the emperor was a divine deputy, so that the Orthodox may return to the love of Jesus, the crucified Bridegroom, and preach in His name, and return to the first wilderness — Orthodox whose sole concern is building a homeland whose law elevates man, not building a kingdom that imposes God’s law. The bishops must be liberated in it from the domination of worldly glory, from the crown, the staff and the imperial sakkos, from the king’s garment and from his throne; we must stop searching for the emperor’s geography. Not only this, but the name of the emperor must be removed forever, and we must declare that every baptized Christian man becomes himself an anointed of the Lord; nay, more, we must apologize to all the peoples who were enslaved in the name of the Orthodox emperor. History has changed, Byzantium no longer exists, and we must be realistic lest we be isolated from existence, says the wise Patriarch(7).
The remaining question remains: can the ecclesiastical administrations today plunge into the task of liberating the Church from the glory and domination of the emperor and lament the emperor, which have in some way passed to the bishops, some of whom became a new Caesar and some a Supreme Pontiff? Can the Church abandon the idea that it is the heir of the Byzantine empire? Does it accept to strip off the emperor’s glory and return to the image of the Bridegroom Jesus?
References:
1. Archimandrite Elia Tohme, Biblical Studies in the Book of Revelation, Studies in the Holy Bible series, Dar al-Mashriq, p. 27.
2. Georges Khodr / S. Troitsky, Church and State, “Know Your Church” series, part 3, An-Nour Publications, 1982, p. 23.
3. Same reference, p. 24.
4. Orthodox Liberation Theology (the Russian model), Father Sami Hallaq the Jesuit, Theological Studies, Dar al-Mashriq, Lebanon, Beirut, first edition 2017
5. Ignatius IV, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Fragrances of Antioch, p. 33
6. Asad Rustum, The History of the Great City of Antioch, part one.
7. Ignatius IV, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Fragrances of Antioch, p. 212.