The Mystical as Political


An excerpt from Professor Aristotle Papanikolaou’s The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 13, 17, 20.

It is quite a remarkable fact that in the history of theology in the Christian East, there exists a core and guiding principle that is never challenged within the movement of the tradition: the principle of divine-human communion. This principle may sometimes be ignored, or often under-emphasized, but there are always trajectories within the tradition at any given moment in history that keeps its memory alive. Divine-human communion, or theosis, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians, and the influence of this principle is visible in writings related to questions of political theology […] The first signs of a distinctively “Orthodox” political theology, one that would wield considerable influence on what would become the Orthodox Church even beyond the definitive fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, are seen in the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea (260–340) […] for Eusebius, the Christian emperor is an image of the sovereignty of the Word insofar as this sovereignty is directed toward the collective, while the bishops image the Word insofar as their own influence is directed to the individual soul. This dual imagining of the Word was expressed liturgically in the Church of Agia Sophia, with the emperor’s throne given a prominent place in front and to the right of the altar. The emperor as image of the Word’s sovereignty depends on his commitment to the Christian truth because only then can the emperor hope to form “his soul to royal virtues according to the standard of that celestial kingdom.” In what reads like a response to Plato’s understanding of the philosopher king, Eusebius describes Constantine as a: 
Victor in truth, who has gained the victory over those passions which overmaster the rest of men, whose character is formed after the divine original of the supreme sovereign and whose mind reflects as in a mirror the radiance of his virtues. Hence is our emperor perfect in discretion, in goodness, in justice, in courage, in piety, in devotion to God; he truly and only is a philosopher, since he knows himself, and is fully aware that supplies of every blessing are showered on him from a course quite external to himself, even from heaven itself.
The fact that Constantine was not all that Eusebius made him out to be does not detract from Eusebius’s sacramental vision of the role of the emperor—the true philosopher king—since he is devoted to the truth of the divine Word, and only through the knowledge of such truth can the emperor embody the royal virtues that allow him to mediate the sovereignty of the Word to the empire. This particular role of the emperor, a kind of sacerdotal role that facilitates the presence of the divine Word throughout the empire—further guaranteeing the unity and peace of the empire—could be the reason why Eusebius rejects democracy as “anarchy and disorder,” and argues that “monarchy far transcends every other constitution and form of government.” Democracy reflects more the disorder of the pagan gods than the unity of truth of the Word of God.

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