Philosophies of Church and State in Christian Constantinople

By Mario Baghos

When Dr Andrew Mellas kindly invited me to write a blog post on the philosophy of Constantinople, it struck me that I had not quite thought of emperor Constantine the Great’s ‘New Rome,’ the capital of the Eastern Christian Roman Empire known as ‘Byzantium,’ in this way before. The challenge in writing this entry has been in applying the term ‘philosophy’—which can be understood as an overarching mentality or disposition with existential or practical outcomes—to the city’s rhythms. When applying it, one encounters a clear distinction between the organs of Church and state that characterised so much of the history of both the city and the empire; organs that sometimes worked in tandem, and at other times did not. What I intend to accomplish here is a nuanced assessment of Constantinople that takes into account some of the main ideological and spiritual trends that conditioned the city, which, we shall see, were not entirely homogeneous since the ‘philosophy of the state’ was not always in accord with the Christian philosophy—or theology—advocated by the Church, as represented by its exemplars, the saints. Thus, in what follows we will discern two main narratives within the city that are sometimes in tandem, and sometimes in tension, at least until Constantinople’s fall in 1453: that of the empire centred in the city—which was considered the symbolic centre of the world—and its imperial court, and that of the Church centred on belief in, and fidelity to, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In 325, Constantine the Great began construction on his new capital on the Bosphorus, named after himself, one that he intended to surpass the old Rome as a new centre of the world. At the same time, he held the first ecumenical council of the Christian Church at Nicaea, which condemned the heresy of Arianism for its subordination of the Son of God to the Father. Coming from the Greek word οἰκουμένη—meaning ‘inhabited world,’ in this context a synonym for the Roman Empire—the ecumenical council was a council of the empire, working in tandem with the Church, and likewise considered universally binding for all Christians both within the empire and without. Nothing like this had been done before, meaning that Constantine’s evocation of the council was a watershed: it established the parameters for the relationship between Church and state that would become a hallmark of Christendom in Eastern and Western Europe. But Constantine did not preside over the council—a bishop of the Church, St Ossius of Cordova, did that—meaning that Church and state retained their independence. In any case, at the founding of Constantinople in 330, on the feast day of St Mochius (a martyr under Diocletian in c. 295), the emperor incorporated aspects of the ruler cult into the city, such as when a statue of himself in the visage of the god Apollo was paraded through it and elevated in his Forum to acclamations of “O Lord, set [Constantinople] on a favourable course for boundless ages” (The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai 56). In his Hippodrome, the emperor placed tripods from Delphi—where the ancient Greek omphalos or navel of the world was situated—along with a statue of the wolf-mother nursing the mythical founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and other objects to demonstrate that his city was the new Rome, the new omphalos. His Milion at the final bend of the city’s main thoroughfare, the mese odos, was based on Augustus’ miliarium aureum in the Forum of the old Rome and marked out the distances to all the cities of the empire from that central point. Constantine’s Milion did the same, and it was topped with a statue of the emperor and his pious mother Helena on either side of a cross, which would become the basis for the icon of the two when they were canonised by the Orthodox Church. While he built many churches around the old Rome, Constantine only had time to build two in his new city: the first Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) and the mausoleum church of the Holy Apostles, where all subsequent Byzantine emperors and some empresses would be buried. Constantinople had been set on a certain path. Incorporating the ancient notion of the significance of the city as a central, stabilising point in the world—which was bound up with a watered-down version of the ancient ruler cult—along with the incipient Christian narrative, its trajectory as the ‘Queen of Cities’ in Christendom was set.

Figure 1. Colossal bust of the emperor Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori museum in Rome. 

Photo © M. Baghos (2016).

But disorder swept the new capital almost immediately after Constantine’s death in 337. His son Constantius II attempted to overturn the council of Nicaea and to promote Arian-inspired formulations of the relationship between the Son of God and the Father. The saints who adhered to Nicene belief that the Son of God is of one essence (ὁμοούσιος, homoousios) with the Father—including several popes in the West and renowned figures like Athanasius the Great in the East—resisted these innovations. Ossius of Cordova even remarked to Constantius:

Intrude not into the business of the Church and give no commandment to us regarding it but instead learn from us. God has placed in your hands the empire: to us he has committed the administration of the Church. (Quoted by Athanasius, Historia Arianorum 44)

A similar attitude would be reflected by St Theodore the Studite (d. 826) when he stood against the iconoclastic policies of emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries: the Church acknowledged the work of providence in the empire and collaborated with its ruler, but the ruler was not the head of the Church. Returning to the period immediately after the death of Constantine, it would take several more Arian emperors and a pagan, Julian, before a sympathetic ruler—in collaboration with the Church’s sages (St Gregory the Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa among them)—would establish Nicene orthodoxy once again in the capital. This was Theodosius I, who in 381 held in Constantinople the second ecumenical council that reinstated the homoousios doctrine and finalised what we today call the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

From Theodosius I onwards we can discern a rapid Christianisation of the empire according to orthodox parameters. Two more ecumenical councils, in Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, were held, this time debating the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures; both councils were presided by ecclesiastics and promoted by emperors. The definition of faith articulated at the latter, that the Church acknowledges “one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation” (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, p. 86) would leave a permanent imprint on Orthodox Christian theology, and would even influence artistic representations of Christ, as manifested in some of the earliest portable icons created during the reign of the emperor Justinian and preserved in St Catherine’s monastery on mount Sinai. In fact, monasticism in Byzantium —the dedication of one’s entire life to asceticism and prayer so as to participate in God’s grace—flourished in the desert and the city, and it was often the monks and nuns who would oppose the imperial court when the latter flirted with heresy or emphatically contradicted the Christian Gospel.

From the fourth century onwards, relics of various saints, considered as imbued with the grace of the God whom they participated in in life, flowed into Constantinople like a stream. This was due, for the most part, to imperial patronage. In the fifth century, the empress Pulcheria, granddaughter of Theodosius I, built three churches to the Virgin Mary—the Mother of God or Theotokos (Θεοτόκος), meaning ‘God-bearer’—in the city, those of the Blachernae, Chalkoprateia, and the Hodegon; all contained relics associated with her. In the sixth century still more churches were dedicated to the Virgin, and the feast of her Dormition on the 15th of August was instituted by the emperor Maurice. In this same century, the emperor Justinian initiated a reconquest of the territories that the Byzantines had lost when the Western empire finally fell to the barbarian invaders in 476. The exploits of his general Belisarius are famous, and so are Justinian’s building projects, recorded by the court historian Procopius (who also tried to sully the reputation of both the emperor and his wife, Theodora, in his Secret History). The most famous of these buildings was of course the third Holy Wisdom or Hagia Sophia, which was dedicated, not to a Christian saint, but to Christ as the Wisdom or Sophia of God.

Figure 2. Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, turned into a mosque (hence the minarets) after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and now functioning as a museum. Photo © M. Baghos (2011).

Here we can see that St Paul’s reference to Christ as God’s Wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:24 is expressed architectonically in the cathedral church of the city and the empire. The Church and state may be separate, and the latter may be involved in a worldly affairs that often contradict Christian virtue: nevertheless their symphonic relationship gave birth to this great place of worship, which, over time, would become filled with mosaics depicting Christ and the saints as exemplars of holiness (the latter owing this to the power and grace of the former); a church within which the great liturgy with its sonorous hymns would develop and condition the entire Orthodox Christian world, even leading to the conversion of the Rus’. In fact, the topography of the city reflected the theological priority given to Christ as God—here manifested in the cathedral dedicated to him at the symbolic centre of the city and the empire—and the Mother of God as the main intercessor to him in our behalf, as demonstrated by the numerous churches in the city built in her honour. Constantinople would in fact increasingly be considered as specifically under the protection of Christ’s holy Mother. In 626, when the Avars attacked the city while the emperor Heraclius was campaigning against the Persians, the patriarch Sergius each day made a circuit of the land walls with the icon of the Mother of God titled the Hodegitria—‘She who leads the way.’ After the destruction of the Avar fleet in a storm, a new proemium was added to the Akathist hymn, still chanted in the Orthodox Church, that extols her as the city’s protectress.

Figure 3. Ninth century mosaic of the enthroned Mother of God cradling the Christ-child in the apse of the Church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia). Photo © M. Baghos (2011).

The sense that the Byzantines had that their empire was permanently secure was shaken, however, when the Arabs invaded in the 630s. By the early 700s they had conquered Syria, North Africa, and southern Spain, and were only halted in Western Europe by the army of Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers in 732. The Eastern Romans (or just ‘Romans’ as they called themselves) would from now on be surrounded by a consecutive series of civilisations—most marked by a new religion, Islam—among other, hostile Christian powers, that they had to contend with repeatedly, sometimes through direct military engagement, other times through diplomacy. It is no wonder that in the late 600s, as Justinian’s program of renovatio imperii fell apart, many of the Christian inhabitants in former Byzantine territories believed that the end of the world was near; that a final Roman emperor would return to these lands to defeat their enemies before finally giving up his soul to God—an event that would precede the rise of antichrist and the second coming of Jesus. Another form of this teleological emperor motif would crop up when Constantinople was finally conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. The final Roman emperor, Constantine XI Dragaš Palaiologos, was said not to have died during the final siege, but to have been plucked from his defensive position near the St Romanus Gate by an angel, who turned him to marble and buried him in a cave beneath the Golden Gate, the main triumphal entry into the city since the reign of the emperor Theodosius II. (Why else, surmised the captive Romans, would the Ottomans have bricked it up?)

Figure 4. The bricked up Golden Gate in modern day Istanbul. Photo © M. Baghos (2011).

In any case, what can be discerned in the ‘last emperor’ motif is an imperial narrative bound up with the significance of the city at the world’s symbolic centre. Without depreciating just how significant Constantinople was from an Orthodox Christian point of view—it was, after all, a city filled with churches, relics, and images of saints (not to mention a place where many saints laboured)—the ecclesial narrative within the city was, on the other hand, anchored precisely on Jesus Christ and the Church as his mystical body. This much was made clear in both the Church’s sufferings at the hands of the imperial court centred in Constantinople—for one has to just look at how saints such as pope Martin and Maximus the Confessor were treated for their refutation of imperially sponsored heresy—and also both explicitly and tacitly in the Church’s teaching. In regards to a ‘tacit’ example of the latter, in Pseudo-Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and in Maximus Confessor’s Mystagogy, both of which give theological delineations of the organisational structure of the Church, the emperor is not ascribed any essential role. Moreover, the iconoclasm promoted by the emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries that was resisted by the Church, while leading to the triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 through the restoration of the icons, was nevertheless an opportunity for the Church to send a clear message that Christ is Lord, and not the emperor. Hence, while this triumph was celebrated by both Church and state alike, in the tenth century a mosaic was placed above the imperial gate of Hagia Sophia showing the emperor Leo the Wise in full obeisance to the enthroned Christ: the significance being that the imperial gate was reserved for the entrance of emperors alone into the nave of the empire’s most sacred cathedral.

Figure 5. The emperor Leo the Wise bowing before Christ Pantokrator (‘master of all’) in a mosaic above the imperial gate. Photo © M. Baghos (2011).

Christ was therefore considered the master of the Church, the emperor merely his appointed governor in the earthly sphere; and despite the existence of some saintly emperors in this later period—like St John Vatatzes the Merciful (d. 1254)—this point was somehow lost on rulers who tried to unite, or rather subordinate, the Orthodox Church to Roman Catholicism in order to solicit support against the Turkish forces that were increasingly surrounding the city. The Churches had split over doctrinal issues in 1054, and the tragedy of the fourth crusade in 1204 that involved Venetians and Franks sacking and conquering Constantinople left behind a terrible bitterness, even after the city was retaken from the Latins by the Byzantines in 1261. The so-called union councils of Lyons in 1274 and Ferarra-Florence in 1438-39 indicated to many Orthodox Christians—chief among them saints like Mark of Ephesus (d. 1444) who resisted union with Rome on such unilateral terms—as well as emperors such as Andronicus II (d. 1438), who overruled the council of Lyons, that the empire was not worth saving if it meant compromising Orthodoxy. The pensive, almost unavoidable, circumstances of Constantine Palaiologos’ pursuit of such a union in order to elicit aid at the city’s eleventh hour are made all the more tragic by the fact that, despite his efforts, no help was forthcoming.

Thus, and not surprisingly, the Church in the city continued after the empire fell. This is perhaps evidence enough that Church and state adhered to different ‘philosophies’: the latter anchored entirely in Jesus Christ, and the former—while embracing and promoting Christianity—nevertheless anchored in the reign of emperors from the capital they believed ruled over the earth. And yet, despite the Byzantine empire’s tragic end, it left a permanent mark on the Church through its collaboration with it: for the sponsoring of architecture and art that became characteristic of Orthodox Christian tradition, as well as the promotion of legislation influenced by Christian principles and the promulgation of the definitions of ecumenical councils. The empire, paradoxically, did more than that: its waning years gave impetus to many of its inhabitants to abandon worldly aspirations and to turn inwards, to the transcendent God’s presence in the heart through grace. It is with good reason that hesychasm (from the Greek, ἡσυχία), the cultivation of stillness that has always been part of the Church’s mystical tradition—and that asserts that through this stillness God, according to his initiative, may reveal himself, truly and palpably, to the hesychast—flourished in the empire’s last centuries. There is an interesting story of the father of St Gregory Palamas—the great proponent of hesychasm in the fourteenth century—as being ‘ecstatic’ while in the senate in Constantinople.

The formulations of the hesychasts such as St Gregory could be called ‘philosophical,’ but not in the same sense as the thinking of some of his intellectual peers, who, remarkably, would contribute much of the knowledge of the classical tradition, preserved in Byzantium, to the West; thereby sparking the Renaissance. While St Gregory used philosophical concepts, mainly drawn from Aristotelianism, to articulate his theology, his approach was nevertheless motivated by belief in participation in the God whose name is constantly repeated and evoked in the hesychastic prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This participation was considered the true philosophy, the love of Christ as God’s very Wisdom, and in the proliferation of hesychasm in the empire’s final decades we can discern the almost perennial strand of the Church’s love for Christ: for the same Christ who was believed to be experienced by the apostles and the saints in every generation; who was extolled by St Paul as God’s Wisdom and who appeared as Pantokrator (‘master of all’) on the underside of the dome in Constantinople’s cathedral named after his epithet as ‘Wisdom’ (i.e. Hagia Sophia); whose life was the subject of countless mosaics, frescos and icons; who was the subject of doctrinal debates at councils, who was (and is) participated in each and every divine liturgy in the Eucharist, this same Christ became the focus of so many at a time when the empire, centred in Constantinople, was all but dead. That he remains the focus of Orthodox Christians worldwide even now, is a testimony to the fact that there were two dominant philosophies in Constantinople, one centred in the state and one centred in the Church, and, in the final analysis, the latter continues to outlive the former.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor David Bradshaw, Professor Charles Matson Odahl and Dr Andrew Mellas for their insightful suggestions that led to the improvement of this blog entry.

Further Reading

Baghos, Mario. ‘Religious Symbolism and Well-being in Christian Constantinople and the Crisis of the Modern City.’ In Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw, and Jim Harrison, eds., Well-being, Personal Wholeness and the Social Fabric, 324-54. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

Cameron, Averil and Herrin, Judith et al., trans. Constantinople in the Early Eighth Century: The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984.

Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

Meyendorff, John. The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.

Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1989.