Haldon, Ideology: shades of meaning, valences of interpretation

Institute of National History - Skopje Ideology Proceedings оf the 9th International Symposium on Byzantine and Medieval Studies “Days of Justinian I”, Skopje, 12-14 November, 2021 Edited by Mitko B. Panov Skopje, 2022 Уредник Митко Б. Панов Меѓународен научен комитет Флорин Курта, Универзитет во Флорида Митко Б. Панов, Институт за национална историја, Скопје Донатела Бијаџи Маино, Универзитет во Болоња Елизабета Димитрова, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Драги Ѓорѓиев, Институт за национална историја, Скопје Хрвоје Грачанин, Универзитет во Загреб Ендрју Роуч, Универзитет во Глазгов Џузепе Маино, Универзитет во Болоња Георги Николов, Универзитет во Софија Витомир Митевски, Македонска академија за науки и уметности, Скопје Гордана Силјановска, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Каролин С. Снајвли, Гетисбург колеџ Виктор Лилчиќ, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Александар Спасеновски, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Иванка Василевска, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Мишо Докмановиќ, Универзитет Св. Кирил и Методиј, Скопје Рубин Земон, Центар за напредни студии, Скопје Edited by Mitko B. Panov International Scientific Committee Florin Curta, University of Florida Mitko B. Panov, Institute of National History, Skopje Donatella Biagi Maino, University of Bologna Elizabeta Dimitrova, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Dragi Gjorgiev, Institute of National History, Skopje Hrvoje Gračanin, University of Zagreb Andrew Roach, Glasgow University Giuseppe Maino, University of Bologna Georgi Nikolov, Sofia University Vitomir Mitevski, Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts, Skopje Gordana Siljanovska, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Carolyn S. Snively, Gettysburg College Viktor Lilčić, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Aleksandar Spasenovski, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Ivanka Vasilevska, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Mišo Dokmanović, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje Rubin Zemon, Center for Advanced Studies, Skopjе 1 Ideology: shades of meaning, valences of interpretation JOHN F. HALDON, Princeton University UDK 930.85:316.75”653” Abstract: Ideology is a term generally used very casually, with the dominant usage normally having a negative value – ideas or beliefs that are in some way either dogmatic or biased or founded on prejudice. In the study of the later Roman and Byzantine world the term usually refers both to the generality of what people believed about their world and/or to particular sets of ideas. But it is clear that ‘beliefs’ are different from ‘ideology’, so we need to decide how these various terms can be used analytically – using them simply to describe ideas held by some people at certain times is too vague and imprecise to have much critical value. It is important to understand how ideology might be tied into its cultural conditions of existence, in respect of the ways in which the social, economic, cultural and political context generated specific sets of ideas. This paper will set out some definitions that may be helpful in contributing to a more critical application of the various terms in questions and at the same time outline an approach to thinking about and understanding the ways in which people in the medieval world understood their surroundings, the society they inhabited, the physical and cultural environment that surrounded them, and how and why they responded to those surroundings in the ways that they did. The paper will begin by outlining some general issues, before illustrating the points with some historical examples from the late Roman-Byzantine world. 17 Ideology is one of those words that people in all walks of life use quite casually in all sorts of ways, but its dominant meaning tends to have a negative value – “ideology” is something other people have, a set of ideas or beliefs that are in some way either dogmatic or biased or founded on prejudice or some other set of moral or political-cultural motives. So we hear people talking about religious ideologies, about a political ideology, and so forth. Those who are concerned with the study of the later Roman and Byzantine world use the term to refer both to the generality of what people believed about their world and to particular sets of ideas. But it is clear that ‘beliefs’ are different from ‘ideology’, so the question of arises of how the latter it to be understood analytically – using it simply to describe sets of ideas held by some people at certain times is too vague and imprecise to have much critical value. For example it is important to understand how ideology might be tied into its cultural conditions of existence, in respect of the ways in which social, economic, cultural and political conditions generated specific sets of ideas. The first thing we have to do, if we are to use the term in any scientific discussion, is to attempt to define it – what do we want it to mean, and how do we want to use it, so that it retains some critical value? We will all have our own approach to this issue, and I am not suggesting by any means that we should all adopt a single vocabulary within a single interpretative framework – that might be desirable in one sense, and while we all share some values or hold some approaches to our historical subjects in common, we also all have our own particular views of how best to think about the pre-modern world and what sort of critical framework we want to deploy to do so. So what I propose to do in this talk is to outline my own approach to thinking about and understanding the ways in which people, and especially people in the medieval world, understood their surroundings, the society they inhabited, the physical and cultural environment that surrounded them, and how and why they responded to those surroundings in the ways that they did. Although our concern at this meeting is the east Roman empire in the 6th century and afterwards, the issues facing the historian of Byzantium are no different in this respect from those facing the historian of any other pre-modern culture, and so before I talk about the world of Byzantium I want to spend some time outlining some general issues that we all need to be aware of if we’re to deploy the concept of ideology in a critical and meaningful way. At the heart of understanding how any society functions, and in particular of how a given society or social-cultural system changes, is the question of the relationship between agency and structure: how do the ideas and beliefs about the world held by the people who make up that society affect their actions, in particular when they are faced with challenging situations or situations that threaten the way they believe their world works. The other side of the coin is the extent to which individuals are a product of the conditions into which they are born and the degree to which their circumstances and experience permit them to es18 cape or move away from or modify those conditions, thus increasing the limits of their own cultural and intellectual independence. Such aspects often get pushed into the background or taken for granted and generalized, and thus trivialized in terms of their causal importance. A case in point is that of the degree to which people in the east Roman or Byzantine world accepted the validity or reality of particular sorts of miracle, and it has been argued persuasively that historians have on the whole ignored or underestimated the amount of scepticism about such matters.1 One of the issues that confronts us historians when we are attempting to explain past human actions is the issue of how to understand or gain insight into the relationship between thinking and doing, between belief and praxis. Historical data cannot offer the same types of answer as that available to sociology and psychology, simply because we do not have living people to interrogate or to analyse. Nevertheless, general theories of mind and of cognition derived from these disciplines can be applied to the product of past human consciousness, as preserved in various types of historical document, for example. The agents themselves may no longer be with us, but the essentially cultural nature of human cognitive activity remains. In elaborating an approach to cognition and practice I draw substantively on both phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, as reflected in the work of Alfred Schütz and Thomas Berger and Thomas Luckmann on the one hand, or George Herbert Mead on the other. For the purposes of this collection I will use four ideas in particular to try to establish how beliefs have a material impact on social relations and social praxis. First, the notion of ‘symbolic universe’, a term that describes the totality of cultural knowledge and practice in a social formation, within which and through which regular everyday life is carried on. One can think of it as a vast lexicon of concepts and perceptions and accompanying social behaviours into which people are born and through which, as they grow up, they learn to express themselves and to interpret their world. Much of this lexicon remains implicit, tacit and unvoiced, but it determines what we might call the cultural logic of a society. From this perspective the relationship between consciousness (what people think) and practice (what they do) must be understood as perpetual feedback loop, through which individuals receive their subjective awareness of self and their personal environment. This symbolic universe also provides people with the conceptual apparatus through which they can in turn express what they know about the world and act back upon it. Importantly, though, it also sets limits to what they can know and how they can know it, limits within which what we can call ‘the culturally possible’ can be thought. Contingently, a symbolic universe is itself a product of social practice, through which it is continuously reproduced. Thus the activities carried on by individuals engaged in socially re1 A. Kaldellis, ‘The hagiography of doubt and scepticism’, in S. Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate research companion to Byzantine hagiography, 2: Genres and contexts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 453-477. 19 producing themselves, and hence in reproducing the social relationships they inhabit, along with the roles and social institutions of their society, have the material cultural effect of reproducing the structural forms within which the same individuals are inscribed. This seems to me to be a more useful way of thinking about the ways in which beliefs interpellate individuals in Althusser’s sense, because it retains a stronger emphasis on the individual’s active participation in constituting and maintaining cultural practices and social relationships.2 Mythologies, religious systems, political theories, ways of perceiving and apprehending the world, in differing degrees of internal consistency, coherence and sophistication, all are discourses constructed out of the innumerable elements that make up the symbolic universe a culture evolves. We might describe these as “world views” or Weltanschauungen, and this term constitutes my second category. The term seems first to have been used by Immanuel Kant, and has since acquired a set of often very highly technical definitions within the realms of social-psychology, sociology, anthropology and so forth. But all tend to agree on the basic idea, that it describes a disposition towards certain types of thinking, a way of viewing the world, a set of ideas and symbols that govern an individual’s approach, understanding, thinking, and feelings about the world in general. It is from this material that my third category is woven, ideology in the strict sense of the term. Ideologies are sets of beliefs focused around a particularly significant aspect of people’s lives and understanding of their world, reflecting beliefs and values that a person or group has for normative reasons, especially systems of ideas and ideals which form the basis of economic or political theories and resultant policies. Ideologies, in the sense that I want to use the term, are thus more-or-less systematic sets of concepts and symbolic relationships with their own internal rationale, grounded in the broader range of culturallyavailable ideas and concepts within the symbolic universe; they represent programmatic sets of values and assumptions, bundles of ideas that evolved in order to explain and thus legitimate and justify a particular order of things. [Slide 6] An ideology both describes and explains the world as it is perceived, on the one hand, and on the other, it prescribes the range of behaviours and attitudes and provides the vocabulary through which one’s choices and actions are guided and expressed. In this respect the term is value-neutral, it has neither negative nor positive significance, it simply refers to a specific bundle of ideas, concepts, assumptions, not necessarily always coherently linked. We might refer to a political ideology, again not as a good or bad thing, but rather to describe a specific outlook on the world and how it works, focused around relations between rulers and ruled, between the state and the law, between elites and non-elites, and so forth. As I said, the beliefs and assumptions from which an ideology develops are 2 For ‘symbolic universe’: Peterl L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The social construction of re­ ality (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), esp. 110-112 and Alfred Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1960); Tom W. Goff, Marx and Mead: contribution to a sociology of knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). built out of concepts available within the symbolic universe but they come to be focused through a particular world view or Weltanschauung. Ideologies also react back upon the world view and upon the fabric of a symbolic universe, adjusting and redirecting the relationships between the different strands of knowledge from which they are made up. This is precisely what happened across some five or six centuries with the evolution of Christianity within the framework of pre-Christian beliefs and rationalities, to the point where the symbolic universe and the various Weltanschauungen which held sway in the late Roman and Byzantine world came to be dominated by the syncretic soteriology of Christianity, subsuming older, now ‘sub-cultural’ systems, some of which simply withered away, some of which were actively eradicated, many of which were simply re-identified and repurposed to fit a Christian moral and theological framework. The specific processes through which this took place is, of course, another and equally complex story. A similar story can be told through the rise and expansion of Islam. It was out of the lexicon of concepts and beliefs that constituted the increasingly Christian symbolic universe of the late Roman world that what we can call the imperial ideology was refined. This was a specific discourse that legitimated the relationships between individuals and the whole network of symbols and concepts concentrated around the role of the emperor, the ruler’s relationship with God, their position as God’s deputies on earth, and the social fabric that was understood to depend from this hierarchy. It is, in the broadest sense, a political ideology, although we could also call it a political theology, since from the fourth century onwards Christian theological concepts were increasingly deployed in its support. The final concept I wish to draw upon is that of narrative, in its specifically socio-linguistic sense, to define a series of linked clauses or statements with an evaluative – and therefore structuring – element, arranged temporally. Both the originating function of the narrative – provided by the context which stimulates the narrative – and the personal nature of its content affect its general coherence. An evaluative aspect permeates the entire structure.3 The same basic definition can be extended to group or collective narratives, that is to say, to those narrative forms which express the experiences and perceptions of individuals in their aspect as members of a specific group. Although there is evidently a qualitative shift in the composition and effectivity of such collective narratives, their formal properties remain the same.4 Personal and collective narrative is a 3 4 See in particular William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, “Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience”, in Essays on the verbal and visual arts, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 12-44. I leave to one side the use of the term ‘narrative’ to refer to the imposition of form on the past, as argued by the ‘narrativist’ tradition, most clearly by Hayden White, Tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), even though the common element – evaluation through language and the construction of a specific ‘story’ – is apparent. See Jerzy Topolski, “Conditions of truth of historical narratives”, History and theory 20 (1981), 47-60; and Maurice Mandelbaum, “The presuppositions of Metahistory”, History and theory 19 (1980), 39-54. 21 crucial element in the construction of social realities – perceived relationships and structures – within which humans reproduce themselves. In this sense, in fact, narrative provides the link between consciousness and practice. Now in one sense narratives are fictions because they are reconstructions of experience. They manage or organise experience and memory, in time, through language, and in this process they elaborate a relationship between the narrator and the events narrated.5 So narratives work essentially as means of identifying the individual self within a social and cultural context, of providing a reality – they answer the question ‘who am I?’ or ‘who are we?’. As such, they also act as patterns for social action, future planning based on past experience. If the symbolic universe is the aggregate of social institutions and the beliefs and concepts associated with them, then narratives are the scripts and roles determining how people live out their relationships to the world around them. What is especially important to bear in mind is the point that narratives are always re­constructions of experience, they involve evaluation, and therefore within them is the potential for change, for shifts in understanding roles and relationships and thus, crucially, for shifts in social practice. Thus a change in the elements that make up a narrative will entail a change in evaluation, and consequently a change in perceptions of the relationship between self (or group) and the world. Depending upon the order of magnitude of change in these elements, such changes can take any form. They might lead to the re-assessment of one’s relationship to an individual or an activity –thus individualised and localized; or they might involve a re-assessment by a whole collectivity or group of their position in relation to other groups or individuals, or institutions, or beliefs, and so forth. We feel that things are in order and we can understand them when our narratives are stable, because the narrative representation of ‘what has happened’ is constructed within a cultural context which relies upon the stability of those key ideas – institutions, situations, assumptions, and so forth. If these are removed or shaken, the cohesion of the narrative is interrupted. It can no longer be constructed within the terms previously given, so these now need to be re-arranged to account for the dissonance or mismatch. Narratives exist and function at multiple levels. There are narratives of personal identity which situate an individual in their kin and family context, or professional life, or social life – they intersect in the individual but they are available as a means of identifying and reinforcing identity for each of the roles within the bundle of roles each individual represents. Collective narratives similarly function to provide members of a group, however identified (by social and economic situation, by job or function, by creed, by race or by language, for example, to 5 22 For narrative as organising experience and perceptions, see Harold Garfinkel, Studies in eth­ nomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Dan Sperber, Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge studies in social anthropology 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 85-149; Goff, Marx and Mead, 112-114. name but a few possibilities, usually a combination of some or all of these) with their own common markers in respect of behaviour and expected attitudes, in turn determined by a given social context.6 And there are metanarratives, political-ideological systems, for example, which offer larger-scale identities to those involved in them and which are given expression through an appropriate ideology. But each of these can be disrupted by shifts in their conditions of existence, and this brings with it the potential for an imbalance which challenges peoples’ assumptions and the predictable roles and patterns of their daily lives. What generally happens first when a narrative structure is disrupted is a search to re-establish equilibrium: in order to maintain a sense of self – a secure identity – based on older narratives, for example, in order to avoid a situation of social anomie, to use Durkheim’s concept,7 a re-ordering of the relevant narrative elements may be required, and such a re-ordering may take one of several forms. It might include action aimed at redressing the balance of elements considered affected, whether behavioural or conceptual; it might include a re-evaluation of the self – or the group – in the structure of the narrative as a whole; or it might simply entail a minor re-adjustment of certain elements, intended to preserve the same general order of things. We can apply this to past societies as well as contemporary ones, although we face many more difficulties with our different types of source. But in historicallyobservable terms, this sort of re-evaluation or adjustment might be reflected or represented by changes in patterns of behaviour of individuals or collectivities, expressed publicly through ‘political’ means or violence, for example, although other possibilities also exist. Social action in this model is thus construed as culturally available re-action, based on personal and group narrative reconstructions of observed or perceived events; it is the socially-determined and culturally-situated responses of individuals to shifts in any of the elements which make up their perceived or experienced world order. The emphasis on culturally-situated is important, since the potential for action is inscribed within a specific set of social relations of production and reproduction. The ability of an individual to evaluate and to re-evaluate, to act and to react, is thus understood as embedded within, and as a consequence limited or circumscribed by, these relationships, which represent at once both the social-economic and the cultural aspects of a society. What this means is that if we have ‘texts’ that indicate or include some sort of a narrative, it becomes possible to suggest some concrete connections between what people in the past perceived or thought, and the actions consequent upon those perceptions. It allows us to understand historical change as, at least in 6 Ayhan Aksu-Koç, “Frames of mind through narrative discourse”, in Social interaction, social con­ text and language, ed. Dan I. Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, Amy Kyratzis and Jiansheng Guo (Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), 309-328. 7 Émile Durkheim, The division of labour in society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933). 23 part, the sum of people’s responses to a given set of circumstances. This offers a very specific link between agency and structure, and between structure and change, which is, after all, what the historian seeks to elucidate. Now, this is not in any sense very radical – what I am describing is what historians do with texts most of the time. But I have tried to get into the mechanics of the process and establish a vocabulary to describe the different aspects of the thought-world of a cultural system through which we can make our reasoning both more explicit and the logic of our interpretations clearer. One closely-related concept that I have not addressed so far is that of ‘identity’ – important because identities make up a key element in many ideological systems, but also because narrative is again a very useful tool for approaching the question of how and why particular identities of sets of identities come into being and function. Identities are multi-dimensional, a product of the need to define oneself and others in contrast to those around one. Social-institutional roles and self-perceptions generally overlap or even contradict one another at different levels of social experience and practice – a point which immediately raises the question of whether individuals possess an ‘essential’ identity, a consciousness of themselves that exists beneath all other forms of context-determined identity and praxis.8 This is a problem I will avoid addressing here, but it has been a significant aspect of much of the discussion around the value of the term. Everyone in any society belongs to more than one group of mutually recognised ‘identity-sets’. Each ‘identity’ carries with it a reservoir of culturally-determined and -inflected ways of behaving in both public and private, determined and shaped by the specific context in which other people are encountered. People’s behaviour tends to conform to the need to fulfil key criteria of their social and institutional roles, such as ‘parent’ or ‘sibling’ or ‘relative’, ‘soldier’, ‘priest’ or ‘farmer’, for example.9 Perceptions and assumptions about one’s own and others’ social and economic status likewise directly affect patterns of behaviour and the ways in which identity is given expression – the poor behave differently in the presence of the rich or powerful than before their peers, and vice versa.10 8 Since the 1960s there has been a series of debates around the concept of identity as used in respect of the subject/self, focusing in particular on structuralist and post-structuralist challenges to traditional psychoanalysis, and represented especially in the work of Lacan and his later adherents. For useful surveys and discussion, see Stuart Hall, “Theories of Language and Ideology,” in Culture, media, language, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 157162; idem, ‘Some problems with the ideology/subject couplet’, Ideology and Consciousness 3 (Spring 1978), 113-121; John Ellis, ‘Ideology and subjectivity’, in Hall, ed., Culture, Media, Language, 186-194. 9 The best introduction to this approach to the question of social roles, identities and the institutionalisation of social practices according to context and self-image, is still, in our view – and in spite of flaws pointed out by later critics – Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, and Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau. There is a vast social-psychological and socialanthropological literature on these topics, to which we cannot begin to do justice here, although some of this material will be found in the notes to several of the volumes and articles cited. 10 Indeed, such degrees of differentness are also embodied in law: see, for example, Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance (Paris 1977), 25–27. 24 At the same time, social and cultural values are modified according to the context in order that the individual can give expression to their understanding of ‘self’ and present the version felt to be most appropriate (or necessary) to the social context. Not all of these different roles are necessarily compatible, and can cause embarrassment, for example, or social anxiety of some sort. If our soldier Theodoros is sitting at home with his family and a group of his loud and perhaps drunken soldier-friends knock on his door, he has to compromise between his membership of two quite different social identities, and this may cause him some problems. Identity is therefore processual and performative as well as functional. Social interaction embodies sets of power relations, so that not all individuals or groups are able to present the identity they would (or think they would) prefer in every situation. Feelings of inferiority or superiority, for example, affect such situations very markedly. Different sets of identities, based on appropriate patterns of socially-determined and culturally normative behaviour have different values according to the context in which they function: a hierarchy of interests informs most human social interaction. As a consequence, observable social praxis is often the result of clashes and contradictions generated by a specific context in which an individual or a group has to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour in order to preserve their identity for that particular context. Where the evidence is sufficient, historians can try to see how such contradictions evolve, how they present themselves and are ‘understood’, and how they are resolved – and this, of course, can offer some insight into the structure of causal relationships leading to historical change. One ‘identity’ that lies at the heart of our discussion about ideology and Worldview is, of course, East Roman identity. Clearly there existed a dominant narrative of identification through which the population of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire could be represented as an ‘orthodox’ and Roman community to itself and to the outsider. Situation and context determined which elements were invoked in which combinations, so that being an East Roman could entail many sub-sets of ‘Roman-ness’, some reflecting regional cultural, linguistic or ethnic traditions and lifeways, some heterodox beliefs, some social status and situation, some a mix of all of these. By way of an example, I looked some time ago at the reasons underlying some of the military revolts and interventions in imperial politics during the later part of the seventh century in particular and suggested that traditional explanations were inadequate – trying to account for these events through notions such as provincial competition between armies, or greed, or opposition based on demands for better conditions of service or pay or whatever really didn’t work when one takes all the evidence together. (Slide 14) Instead, it is far more plausible to take these interventions as attempts to restore things to the way they were by taking action that, it was believed, would achieve this – whether by getting rid of a particular emperor or 25 intervening in a religious dispute or whatever. In other words, trying to make the world fit the traditional narratives through which it had made sense. Of course, turning the clock back doesn’t work, so the inevitable outcome is that the narrative itself had to be altered, by selectively pushing to one side those elements that no longer matched perceived reality and bringing to the fore elements that allowed people to respond to their changed circumstances and, in the process, build new narratives that made sense of the changed world. We can understand a good deal of the military unrest of the period in this light. We can also suggest that imperial iconoclasm was exactly this, a response to a disrupted narrative, an attempt to restore what was believed to have been a more orthodox practice with regard to sacred images in order to restore God’s favour; just as the reaction to it, as reflected in the events of the later 780s, was likewise an effort to restore a situation believed to have existed. A good illustration of how narratives work to inform key aspects of how people understand their world is found in Byzantine attitudes to warfare and violence. Early Christian thinkers had evolved a number of objections to warfare and violence in general, and more especially to serving in the armies of the pagan Roman emperors, and many believers before the ‘conversion’ of Constantine felt that Christians could not serve two masters – Christ and the Roman state – especially when the latter was on occasion actively hostile to their beliefs or their very existence. Indeed, the liturgy of the period before the Peace of the Church and the Edict of toleration issued by Constantine I in 313 forbade soldiers who wished to become Christians to take life, whether under orders or not.11 The adoption of Christianity by the emperor Constantine I and the reformulation of imperial political ideology which followed radically altered this situation, and while the debate about the justness of waging war continued, soldiers now became, not servants of an oppressive pagan empire, but fighters for the faith and defenders of Orthodoxy, at least in theory. Soldiers were fully-accepted members of the Christian community, who had a recognised and indeed worthy role to play. Liturgical prayers evolved from the fourth and fifth centuries in which the military role of the emperors and the need for soldiers to defend the faith were specifically recognised: “Shelter their (the emperors’) heads on the day of battle, strengthen 11 The standard work on this topic is now Yannis Stouraitis, Krieg und Frieden in der politischen und ideologischen Wahrnehmung in Byzanz (7.­11. Jahrhundert) (Vienna: Fassbaender 2009). For the broader context, see Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi, eds., Noble ideals and bloody realities: warfare in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2006). See also Julian Chrysostomides, “Byzantine concepts of war and peace,” in War, Peace and World Orders in European History, eds. Anja Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 91-101; Robert F. Taft, SJ, “War and peace in the Byzantine divine liturgy,” in Peace and war in Byzantium, ed. Timothy S. Miller and John S. Nesbitt (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 17-32; Robert M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine: the thrust of the Christian movement into the Roman world (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); and esp. John Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman army A.D. 173-337,” Church History 43 (1974), 149-63; J. Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman army from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 23/1 (Berlin/New York 1979), 724-834; and Louis J. Swift, ‘War and the Christian conscience I: the early years’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 835-68. 26 their arm, ... subjugate to them all the barbarian peoples who desire war, confer upon them deep and lasting peace” is an illustrative example from a fifth-century liturgical text. But this did not, of course, mean that warfare and the killing of enemies were in themselves intrinsically to be praised or regarded as in some way deserving of a particular spiritual reward. Quite the reverse, for however much Christians were able to justify warfare, whether from a defensive need or in what we would see as an offensive context killing remained a necessary evil from the Christian standpoint. This is such a strong tradition within Christian culture, indeed, that even in the modern highly secularised world of advanced technological warfare, western strategists, military theorists and anthropologists or sociologists of war point to the need still felt to justify war-making in terms established by this pre-medieval moral-ethical context. And of course, matters became more compli12 cated when warfare between Christians also had to be taken into account. The view that warfare – however regrettable – in a just cause was acceptable became widespread, partly, of course, because from a pragmatic standpoint the Roman state, whatever faith it professed, had to defend its territorial integrity against aggression. So some rationalisation of the need to fight was inevitable. Eusebius of Caesarea, the Christian apologist for Constantine I whose intellectual influence in this respect played a key role in the compromise between pagan and Christian attitudes to the empire, the emperor, and the imperial cult, expressed a view which can indeed be understood to represent warfare with the aim of promoting the new imperial faith as a type of holy war. The symbol of the Cross appeared both in imperial propaganda and, more significantly, among the insignia of the imperial armies. The Christian labarum and the chi­rho symbol – seen in a vision by Constantine himself before his victory over Galerius in 312 – was carried by the standard-bearers of the legions, as well as appearing on imperial coins and in association with images or busts of the emperors. Warfare waged against the enemies of the empire was now warfare to defend or extend the religion favoured by the emperor. Enemies of the empire could now be portrayed as enemies of Christianity, against whom warfare was entirely justified, indeed, necessary if the True Faith were to fulfil the destiny inhering in divine providence. That this was a paradox within Christian attitudes to warfare is clear; but pragmatic considerations made a solution essential.13 12 For a summary of the debate with sources and literature: John F. Haldon, Warfare, state and society in the Byzantine world, 565­1204 (London: Routledge, 1999), 13-33. For the liturgical texts and their complex history, see Panagiōtēs N. Trempelas, The three liturgies according to the Athens codices (Texte und Forschungen zur byzantinisch-neugriechischen Philologie 15. Athens 1935) (in Greek). On attitudes to warfare within the Christian cultural world, see, for example, the discussion in the introductory chapter of John Keegan’s A History of warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knof, 1994); or the introduction by the editor of the volume, Thomas Gregor, to A natural history of peace (Nashville, Te.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996); with Stouraitis, Krieg und Frieden, 193-197; Yannis Stouraitis, “Byzantine war against Christians. An emphylios polemos?” Βυζαντινά Σύμμεικτα 20 (2010), 85-110. 13 See esp. T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA.-London 1981), and H.A. Drake, In praise of Constantine: a historical study and new translation of Eusebius’ Tricennial orations (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1976); Stouraitis, Krieg und Frieden, pp. 190-208; Stouraitis, ‘Jihād and 27 My point is that key narratives within a Christian world view always existed in tension, and that it was circumstances and the vested interests of specific elements in society that determined which of those narratives, and what elements of those narratives, were given prominence and deployed in terms of the imperial ideology and of ecclesiastical politics at any given moment. Another good example of such tensions within the Christian world view can be found in the theological disputes of the seventh century. We know that by the late sixth century if not earlier there had evolved a general assumption that the Roman state and the Christian church were now two aspects of a single enterprise, in which divinely-approved rulers defended orthodoxy and thus assured God’s support and protection, but where failure of the ruler or the Christian community, or part of it, to adhere to orthodox belief and practice could bring about divine punishment of some sort. This is what I referred to earlier as the imperial ideology, a systemic blending together of fundamentally Roman ideas about rulership with Christian notions of divine providence. Most texts, whether theological or not, appear to take this system for granted. Yet there existed below the level of this official ideological system alternatives, based within the same set of narratives that made up the Christian world view but drawing upon different threads, threads that permitted a questioning of the assumption of the identity of Christianity with the Roman empire. One such thread, for example, entailed senior representatives of the church – the bishops who were intimately involved with local government as well as with the spiritual welfare of their flocks – stepping in to fill the breach left by the absence, or failures of the secular authority. This might involve taking the lead in defending the interests of their communities following military defeat or the hostile occupation of territory, or on occasion by encouraging military leaders to take the appropriate action to confront an enemy, in other words, by representing the values and priorities of Christianity both in moral terms and in practical aspects. Here, the church could be seen both to govern and to guide outside the framework, and without, the Roman state. This occurred in Greater Syria and Egypt from the mid-630s and the 640s, where it became possible to envisage Christian Roman identity as separate from the existence of an imperial state. It was the bishop and the church that guaranteed the purity of soul and physical survival of the Christian Roman people. While the empire depended on Christianity, it would appear that the Christian church and people were not necessarily dependent on the empire. The idea that the church and the Christian community could be independent of the Roman state if the latter departed from the path of orthodox belief was reinforced in both theological discourse as well as at grass roots level once the political disasters of the 630s onwards could be ascribed to the failures of the secular state and its leaders to defend orthodox belief and practice. If salvation depended on strict and unwavering adherence to the established forms of orthocrusade: Byzantine positions towards the notions of ‘Holy War’’, Βυζαντινά Σύμμεικτα 21 (2011), 11-63. 28 dox belief and practice, then anything perceived as innovation had to be rejected outright.14 Such was the position argued by churchmen such as Sophronius of Jerusalem already in the 630s, refined by Maximus Confessor and adopted by the papacy in the 640s in opposition to the initially successful compromise formulae developed under the patriarch Sergios, aimed at bridging the divide between miaphysite and dyophysite doctrine.15 The emphasis on correct practice as a means of signifying and preserving orthodoxy thus encouraged an existing but alternative strand of thinking within the Chalcedonian community about the relationship between Roman empire and Christian faith. On this logic, if it was explicit and rigid adherence to the established forms of orthodox piety and practice that would bring salvation, then it was essential that the official church and the state also adhered to them. A church or a government that compromised those forms could be justifiably and logically condemned, as incurring God’s wrath. At the same time, the unity and integrity of the church and the Christian faith could be understood as resting not upon the compromised and struggling secular empire, nor even on the vagaries of patriarchal politics, but upon correct observance of the established orthodox tradition, which should be pursued independently of, even in opposition to, the secular state and its interests. Those who most clearly and vociferously represented this perspective – Sophronius in opposing the doctrine of the single operation, Maximus and Martin in their opposition to the doctrine of the single will – thus came into direct confrontation with the government.16 I mention these examples, which are known to you all, chiefly to illustrate my point about the way different narrative strands within a system depend upon context and conjuncture as to their relevance to people’s lives and way of seeing the world, their Weltanschauung. Locating the narratives that make up a Weltanschauung, and that inform the contents of a more structured ideological system such as the Roman imperial ideology, is one way of understanding the motivations behind the actions of both individuals and groups and, in particular, of understanding the rationale and logic of people’s actions, as they are revealed through the historical evidence. Historians are concerned to explain change, and to do this we need to try to understand why people acted in the ways that they did. But, as we all know, we 14 Phil Booth, Crisis of empire. Doctrine and dissent at the end of Late Antiquity (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2014), 329-342. 15 See Karl-Heinz Uthemann, “Der Neuchalkedonismus als Vorbereitung des Monotheletismus. Ein Beitrag zum eigentlichen Anliegen des Neuchalkedonismus,” Studia Patristica 29 (1997), 373-413; and esp. Christian Lange, Mia Energeia. Untersuchungen zur Einigungspolitik des Kaisers Heraclius und des Patriarchen Sergius von Konstantinopel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). A useful summary of these developments is to be found in Richard Price, Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt, The Acts of the Lateran synod of 649 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 17-27; see also Jack Tannous, “In search of monotheletism,” DOP 68 (2014), 29-67. 16 See esp. Heinz Ohme, “Oikonomia in monenergetisch-monotheletischen Streit,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 12 (2008), 308-343; Price, Booth and Cubitt, The Acts of the Lateran synod of 649, 1-58 for a good survey; and the detailed exposition and analysis of the key theological issues in Booth, Crisis of empire. 29 can only come close to finding out what people in the past thought and what motivated them by examining their own testimony, both in respect of texts and documents as well as in terms of their impact on their environment – art, buildings, the physical infrastructure they created. I have attempted to sketch in an approach to thinking about the relationship between thinking and doing, between belief and action, first by suggesting a possible framework within which to organize and interrogate our evidence and to model social interactions; and second by using narrative in the context of the wider symbolic universe as a way into how people used the cultural tools at their disposal to work upon their world. 30