Symphonia: Church and Emperor

The classic statement comes from the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. In the preface to one of his laws he called the priesthood and the empire the two greatest gifts God has given to mankind: the one tending divine things, the other governing human affairs, both flowing from the same source and adorning human life together. The image behind the word is musical. Symphonia does not mean the two are the same, nor that one commands the other; it means two distinct voices sounding one harmony — the emperor guarding the outward peace in which the Church can live and preach, the Church tending the souls of the emperor and his people.

This was never a claim that the emperor was a priest. He could not consecrate the Eucharist or define a dogma; the faith was the bishops' charge, not his. Nor was it the later Western picture of two rival swords, pope and king, each trying to master the other. In the Christian empire of New Rome the ideal was cooperation, not competition: one Christian commonwealth with two hands, spiritual and temporal, working the same field.

For centuries the emperor did real service to the Church. He summoned and protected the great councils, from Nicaea in 325 onward; he defended the frontiers, built the churches, and endowed the monasteries; the emperors of Byzantium raised up Hagia Sophia and, under Justinian, codified Christian law. In turn the emperor was crowned and anointed by the patriarch and confessed the Orthodox faith as the ground of his rule. A ninth-century legal text pictured emperor and patriarch as the body and the soul of the one Christian people — each needed, neither sufficient alone.

At its height this partnership gave the Church a stability the persecuted early Christians could only have dreamed of. But it carried a permanent danger folded inside it, and the history of Byzantium is in part the history of that danger surfacing.

The temptation was for the emperor to overreach — to treat the faith itself as something the throne could adjust. Again and again emperors tried: backing Arianism against St. Athanasius in the fourth century, imposing iconoclasm by decree in the eighth and ninth, pressing the bishops toward union with Rome at Florence to buy political survival in the fifteenth. Historians sometimes call this over-reach "caesaropapism" — the emperor acting as though he were also the head of the Church.

The Church's answer, when it came to that, was to resist. St. Maximus the Confessor let his tongue and right hand be cut off rather than accept an emperor's compromise on the will of Christ; St. Theodore the Studite and St. John of Damascus defied emperors over the icons. Their witness drew the line that symphonia could never erase: truth is not the emperor's to define, and when the throne departs from the faith, the faithful — even a single confessor against the whole court — must depart from the throne. Symphonia was always a harmony under the Gospel, never the Gospel under the crown.

When Constantinople fell in 1453 the Byzantine model did not simply vanish; it was inherited and reshaped — in Moscow's vision of itself as a Christian empire, and later in the very different, state-controlled church of Peter the Great's Russia. In the modern world there are no Orthodox emperors, and the Churches live under every kind of government, from friendly to hostile. The old ideal survives less as a blueprint than as both a hope and a warning: a hope that rulers and Church might serve the same good, and a warning of what happens when the Church forgets that it belongs to Christ and to no state. What remains undisputed is the confessors' line — the Church can accept the friendship of the powers, but it can never accept their ownership.