THE AGE OF FAITH

(to 787)

Volume I
of
AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View

Vladimir Moss

© Copyright Vladimir Moss.

All Rights Reserved, 2021.
 Dedicated to the Memory of a good pastor,
Archbishop Nikodem of Richmond and Great Britain (Russian Church in Exile)
(+1976).
“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken
the word of God to you, whose faith follow.”

2
 Of mercy and judgement will I sing unto Thee, O Lord.
Psalm 100.1.

By Me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By Me princes rule, and nobles, even all the
judges of the earth.
Proverbs 8.15-17.

For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given: and the government shall be upon His
shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the
Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there
shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon His Kingdom, to order it, and to
establish it with judgement and with justice henceforth even for ever.
Isaiah 9.6-7.

It is he that shall build the Temple of the Lord, and shall bear royal honour, and shall sit
and rule upon his throne. And there shall be a priest by his throne, and peaceful
understanding shall be between them both.
Zechariah 6.13.

The Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will,
and setteth up over it the basest of men.
Daniel 4.17.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

Bhagavad Gita, ch. 17.

The rule of many is not good; let there be one king.

Homer, Iliad 2.204-5.

God has no better dwelling-place on earth than a pure soul.

Pythagoras.

And so far has our city [Athens] distanced the rest of mankind in thought and in speech that
her pupils have become the teachers of the rest of the world; and she has brought it about that
the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and that the title Hellenes is
applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood.
Isocrates, Panegyricus (c. 380 BC).

I would advise those who seek liberty and shun the yoke of servitude as evil, not to fall into
the plague of despotic rule, to which an insatiable passion of unseasonable freedom brought
their fathers. In excess, servitude and liberty are each wholly bad; in due measure, each are
wholly good. The due measure of servitude is to serve God; its excess is to serve man. Law is
the god of the right-minded man; pleasure is the god of the fool.
Plato, Letters, viii, 354.

Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
Sallust, Histories.

3
 After receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the
respublica from my own control to the will of the Senate and People of Rome.
Deeds of the Divine Augustus, 34.

Let the soldier carry arms only to repress arms.

Let the trumpet sound only for ceremony.
Let the ends of the earth stand in awe of the men of Rome:
If not fear, let there be love.
Ovid, Fasti, I, 715.

They [the Romans] make a desolation and they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola, 30.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
Matthew 22.21.

Since the day a popular assembly condemned Jesus Christ to death the Church has known
that the rule of the majority can lead to any crime.
Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet.

The Lord’s Resurrection has indeed remained to this day the most proven fact in human
history. What other fact from the distant past stands so comprehensively and carefully
proven as this?
Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič.

No other city has endured such horrors, and no generation in history has fathered such
wickedness.
Josephus, The Jewish War.

Christ is King of Israel, and Christians are the Israelite Race.

St. Justin the Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho.

Philosophers are as children until they become mature in Christ.

St. Clement of Alexandria.

For [the heretics’] behaviour is exactly like that of someone who, when an exquisite mosaic of
a king has been fashioned by a great artist out of rare stones, takes the mosaic completely to
pieces and rearranges the jewels, and puts them back together to make the image of a dog or a
fox – and a poorly executed one at that.
St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 1.8.1.

Democracy, indeed, has a fair sounding name… Monarchy… has an unpleasant sound, but
is a more practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent
man than many of them… for it does not belong to the majority of men to acquire virtue…
Indeed, if ever there has been a prosperous democracy, it has in any case been at its best for
only a brief period.
Dio Cassius, Roman History, 44.2 (early third century).

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 From Him and through Him the king who is dear to God receives an image of the
Kingdom that is above and so in imitation of that greater King himself guides and directs the
course of everything on earth… He looks up to see the archetypal pattern and guides those
whom he rules in accordance with that pattern… Monarchy is superior to every other
constitution and form of government. For polyarchy, where everyone competes on equal
terms, is really anarchy and discord.
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, Oration in Honour of Constantine, 1, 3.

It is true that it [the Faith] must be protected; but by dying for it, not by killing others; by
longsuffering, but not by violence; by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend religion by
bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult.
Lactantius, advisor to St. Constantine the Great.

Heretics bring sentence upon themselves since they by their own choice withdraw from the
Church, a withdrawal which, since they are aware of it, constitutes damnation. Between
heresy and schism there is this difference: that heresy involves perverse doctrine, while
schism separates one from the Church on account of disagreement with the bishop.
Nevertheless, there is no schism which does not trump up a heresy to justify its departure
from the Church
St. Jerome, Commentary on Titus 3:10–11 (386).

Our royalty is an imitation of yours, modelled on your good purpose, a copy of the only
Empire.
King Theodoric of Italy to Emperor Anastasius of New Rome.

The priest is the sanctification and strengthening of the Imperial power, while the Imperial
power is the strength and firmness of the priesthood.
Acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787).

In monarchy is incarnate the moral principle of power. In a republic – the financial principle.
In dictatorship – the principle of physical force. It is precisely for that reason that monarchy
is inevitably bound to the Church, the republic to banks, and dictatorship – to emergency
(chrezvychajkoj): God, the ruble or the Cheka.
Ivan Lukyanovich Solonevich.

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INTRODUCTION: THE MEANING OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY 9

I. PREHISTORY 22

1. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (1) FROM CAIN TO NOAH 23

2. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) NIMROD’S BABYLON 34

3. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (3) PHARAONIC EGYPT 39

II. ISRAEL AND THE GENTILES 42

4. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (1) ABRAHAM 43

5. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (2) JOSEPH 53

6. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (3) MOSES 57

7. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (4) SAUL AND DAVID 63

8. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (5) SOLOMON 71

9. THE DECLINE OF THE ISRAELITE AUTOCRACY 76

10. THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY 82

11. THE ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY 90

12. THE CLASSICAL GREEK WORLD-VIEW 96

13. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 106

14. PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON THE STATE 110

15. THE BUILDING OF THE SECOND TEMPLE 120

16. FROM POLIS TO COSMOPOLIS: ALEXANDER THE GREAT 122

17. THE HASMONEAN KINGDOM 127

18. THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 136

19. THE FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 147

20. PAX ROMANA 160

21. HEROD THE GREAT 168

22. THE END OF THE STATE 174

III. CHRIST, THE JEWS AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 176

23. THE KING OF KINGS, THE LORD JESUS CHRIST 177

24. THE FALL OF JERUSALEM 184

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25. ROME, THE CHURCH AND THE SYNAGOGUE 189

26. CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 204

27. WHY ROME? 220

28. ROME AND CHINA 228

29. THE CULT OF EMPEROR-WORSHIP 236

30. THE DIOCLETIAN PERSECUTION 244

III. NEW ROME 249

31. ST. CONSTANTINE AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS 250

32. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (1) THE HIERARCHICAL PRINCIPLE 264

33. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (2) THE EMPEROR IN THE CHURCH 268

34. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (3) THE STATE, CULTURE AND MONASTICISM 283

35. THE HERETICAL AND PAGAN REACTIONS 292

36. EMPEROR THEODOSIUS THE GREAT 301

37. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (4) RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 305

38. ST. AUGUSTINE ON THE DONATISTS AND PELAGIANS 313

39. THE FALL OF OLD ROME 326

40. THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 339

41. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT AND THE UNITY OF THE FAITH 346

42. JUSTINIAN AND THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS 351

43. ST. GREGORY, ST. BENEDICT AND THE ORTHODOX WEST 357

IV. THE NEW CHRISTIAN NATIONS 362

44. THE SYMPHONY OF NATIONS 363

45. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (1) VANDAL NORTH AFRICA 368

46. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (2) OSTROGOTHIC ITALY 374

47. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (3) FRANKISH GAUL 379

48. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (4) VISIGOTHIC SPAIN 388

49. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (5) CELTIC BRITAIN AND IRELAND 394

50. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (6) ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND 401

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51. THE WEST AND THE SACRAMENT OF ROYAL ANOINTING 409

52. ARMENIA AND GEORGIA 415

53. THE PERSIAN EMPIRE 420

54. BYZANTIUM, THE JEWS AND THE ARABS 425

55. THE BYZANTINE-PERSIAN WARS 429

56. MONOTHELITISM AND THE SIXTH ECUMENICAL COUNCIL 434

57. THE RISE OF ISLAM 440

58. ICONOCLASM AND THE SEVENTH ECUMENICAL COUNCIL 451

CONCLUSION. THE TRUTH IS ONE 456

8
 INTRODUCTION: THE MEANING OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY

History is the teaching of philosophy by example.

Thucydides.

What is the life of a man, if not interwoven with the life of former generations by a sense of
history?
Cicero.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour
to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9.11.

We know that the Race is not to the swift, nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an
Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?
John Page to Thomas Jefferson (1776).

The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.

Friedrich von Schiller (1786).

The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and
catch on to His coattails as He marches past.
Count Otto von Bismarck.

Religion is the Key of History.

Lord Acton.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1905).

Short-sighted is he who sees in history only fact; in it, as in the whole world, spirit rules over
matter.
I.P. Yakoby (1931).

In order to become the genius of the future, you have to be an academic of the past.
In order to sense the storm coming, you have to know quietness in yourself.
Andrei Platonov (1921)

The longer you look back [in history] the further you can see forward.
Sir Winston Churchill.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of
their history.
George Orwell.

Man does not live in a state of nature, but in history, and history as we know it began with
Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

9
 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1975), I, 5.

Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past, and you’ll lose both eyes.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973).

This book is written in the profound conviction that Nietzsche was wrong when he
wrote: “To view nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and providence of God,
to interpret history to the glory of a divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral
world order and moral intentions – that now seems to belong to the past…”1 But for
history to make sense, and to reveal its meaning, it has to be viewed as far as possible
as a whole, from the beginning to the end, that is, universally. And sub specie aeternitatis.

A universal history is not a summary of all the histories of all the nations, but an
attempt to discern a thread unifying and making sense of them all. As the great
Russian-Ukrainian novelist, Nikolai Gogol, put it: “Universal history, in the true
meaning of the term, is not a collection of particular histories of all the peoples and
states without a common link, plan or aim, a bunch of events without order, in the
lifeless and dry form in which it is often presented. Its subject is great: it must embrace
at once and in a complete picture the whole of humanity, how from its original, poor
childhood it developed and was perfected in various forms, and, finally, reached the
present age. To show the whole of this great process, which the free spirit of man
sustained through bloody labours, struggling from its very cradle with ignorance,
with nature and with gigantic obstacles – that is the aim of universal history! It must
gather into one all the peoples of the world scattered by time, chance, mountains and
seas, and unite them into one harmonious whole; it must compose out of them one
majestic, complete poem. The event having no influence on the world has no right to
enter here. All the events of the world must be so tightly linked amongst themselves
and joined one to another like the rings of a chain. If one ring were ripped out, the
chain would collapse. This link must not be understood in a literal sense: it is not that
visible, material link by which events are often forcibly joined, or the system created
in the head independently of facts, and to which the events of the world are later
arbitrarily attached. This link must be concluded in one common thought, in one
uninterrupted history of mankind, before which both states and events are but
temporary forms and images! They must be presented in the same colossal size as it
is in fact, penetrated by the same mysterious paths of Providence that are so
unattainably indicated in it. Interest must necessarily be elicited to the highest degree,
in such a way that the listener is tormented by the desire to know more, so that either
he cannot close the book, or, if it is impossible to do that, he starts his reading again,
so that it is evident how one event gives birth to another and how without the original
event the last event would not follow. Only in that way must history be created…”2

1 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 357.
2 Gogol, “O Prepodavanii Vseobschej Istorii” (On the Teaching of Universal History), in Polnoe Sobranie

Sochinenij (Complete Works), vol. 8, pp. 50-51. “I shall write a Universal History,” he wrote, “which, In
its proper form, does not unfortunately yet exist, either in Russia or even in Europe” (Letter of 23
December, 1833, vol. 15, 1000.

10
 If Gogol’s grandiose conception is far beyond the powers of this writer, he can
nevertheless agree with, and attempt to emulate, his basic aim: to discern in a very
general way how and why the world has developed to its present condition, to “the
end of history”, in Hegel’s phrase. Such an aim means that this book cannot be purely
historical (as if any history could be “purely” historical!). But neither is it historicist in
Hegel’s sense. There is nothing determined in history; in it the dominant roles are
played by the free will of God, men and demons. However, the future, and its meaning
in God’s eyes, is communicated by Him in part to His holy prophets. And this
knowledge, being from God, cannot err. For, as He Himself said: “Heaven and earth
shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away” (Luke 21.33).

Thus in trying to discern the footsteps of God on the paths of history, history is
necessarily theological. For “theology and history,” as Peter J. Leithart reminds us, “are
not ultimately divisible.”3 Again, as Archimandrite Lazarus Moore writes, “Christian
theology is essentially the knowledge of God and His will revealed to man through
God’s action in history, which is truly His story…”4

This being so, the history of the kingdoms of this world should be intertwined with
that of the kingdom that is not of this world – the Kingdom of God, which since the
Resurrection of Christ is the history of the Church. This is what I try to do in this series
of books. For the Church and the world are like soul and body, distinct yet united.

And so the historical flesh of this book is held up by a theological skeleton, as it

were, a “theology of politics”. According to this, there is no such thing as chance,
randomness. God holds in His almighty hands the threads of the destinies of every
individual human being, civilization and social and political institution. Without
violating free-will, but always honouring it, God invisibly steers the destinies of
nations towards one end: the salvation for eternity of as many people as He has chosen. If
we cannot see how certain events contribute to this end, this is because the
comprehension of such things is beyond our fallen human capacities, corrupted by
sin, and because we live in the middle, and not at the end of the historical process,
lacking the gift of prophecy that transcends these limitations.

Nevertheless, it is not wrong to attempt in fear and trembling to lift a little the veil
on God’s judgements in history, using those clues and guiding principles that He has
given us in the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition, and always calling on His help,
without which we can see nothing. For, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “The reading
of histories, my dear Sir, may dispose a man to satire; but the science of HISTORY -
History studied in the light of philosophy, as the great drama of an ever-unfolding
Providence - has a very different effect. It infuses hope and reverential thoughts of
man and his destination…”5

3 Leithart, Defending Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Press, 2010, p. 306.
4 Moore, The Orthodox Psalter, http://orthodoxyinfo.org/psalter.html, p. 5.
5 Coleridge, On the Condition of the Church and State, 1830.

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 This book attempts to study history from what Dominic Lieven calls “the God’s-
eye view. This looks at events in the round and in the long term. It is interested in the
impact of geopolitics, at shifts in… ideology and cultural values…, and in global
patterns of trade and finance.”6

Essentially this book represents a Dostoyevskyan view of history, an attempt to

justify in detail Dostoyevsky’s words: “The whole destiny of Russia lies in Orthodoxy,
in the light from the East, which will suddenly shine forth to the mankind of the West,
which has become blinded and has lost its faith in Christ. The cause of the whole
misfortune of Europe, all of its ills, everything without exception, hearkens back to its
loss of Christ with the establishment of the Roman Church, followed by its subsequent
decision that it could manage just fine without Christ at all.”7

Of course, there is much more to history than Russia’s relations with the West, and
the first two volumes in particular will study several other civilizations, Christian and
pre-Christian, going back to the very beginning of civilization in Nimrod’s Babylon.
And towards the end of the last volume, history will turn back on itself as we witness
Saddam Hussein’s attempt to restore the Babylonian empire in the late twentieth
century. However, the contest between Russia and the West from the eleventh century
onwards remains the heart of the series. I go back to the beginning precisely in order
to establish the basis of my (or rather, Dostoyevsky’s) that it was Russia, in God’s
Providence, that took the place of the fallen Roman Church from the eleventh century
onwards. In later volumes I go on to argue that Western Christianity, and western
civilization in general, which is now the global civilization, has been like the Prodigal
Son of the Gospel parable - only the son has not yet returned to his father’s embrace…

Thus this series of books can be viewed as an account of the struggle between two
civilizations: between, on the one hand, the civilization of Orthodox Christianity,
which was conceived at the time of Christ, was born under St. Constantine the Great
and his Byzantine successors, and was reborn under St. Vladimir the Great and his
Kievan, Muscovite and Petersburgian successors, and, on the other hand, the
civilization of apostate Western Christianity, which was conceived in the 9th-11th
centuries, reached its first peak under the late medieval papacy, and then evolved into
a bewildering series of mutants from the Renaissance to the present day. Other
civilizations are described only insofar as they impinge on, or have been drawn up
into, this titanic global struggle. At the time of writing, western civilization appears to
have conquered the world; but it is the faith and hope of the author that the civilization
of Orthodox Christianity, which we may call God’s civilization, will make a major
comeback before the end of the world.

History can be studied on three levels, which we may call, by analogy with
individual human psychology, the levels of the spirit, the soul and the body. The lower
levels of the soul and the body are the domain studied by 99% of historians, and 100%
of contemporary secular historians. It concerns the economic and the geographical
factors that appear to govern the rise and fall of nations, together with the passions

6 Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, London: Penguin, 2016, p. 17.
7 Dostoyevsky, Letter to A.N. Maikov, 1870.

12
and the desires, the ideas and the capacities of both the rulers and the ruled. The
higher level of the spirit is that of God’s Providence, His direction of history in certain
directions, not denying or overruling the lower levels but using them and influencing
them. This, of course, presupposes the old-fashioned view that God is an Actor in
history. “From Augustine till the eighteenth century,” writes Leslie Newbiggin,
“history in Europe was written in the belief that divine providence was the key to
understanding events.” Unfortunately, this attitude went out of fashion from the time
of Gibbon and Hume – the Enlightenment abolished belief in Divine Providence.
However, it Providence remains, writes Herbert Butterfield, “a living and active
agency both in ourselves and in its movement over the length and breadth of
history.”8

This book presupposes that, without violating human freedom, God acts in history
in order to give opportunities for repentance to all. In it He administers mercy and
justice, albeit only partially; for the fullness of both mercy and justice must await the
Day of the Last Judgement, which both brings history to an end and goes beyond
history into eternity. It also presupposes that we can see, albeit through a glass darkly,
whither we are going, that God lifts the veil, albeit partially, on His judgements.

It follows that the centre of history is multiple: the destiny of each and every human
being that has taken or will take part in it. The rise and fall of kingdoms and nations
and institutions, the movements of ideas and styles and arts and technologies - all
these are real and impinge to a greater or lesser degree on the destinies of individual
human souls. But they are not the heart of history, which is the movement of individual
souls to their final end in or outside God. We know for certain about the salvation (and
damnation) of only a fraction of men. These are the saints and the Judases. So
quintessential history is, as it were, biographical. For, as Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič
writes, “the person is all-important. Everything that is added to the essential person
is, from the eternal point of view, of no account; kingly rule and empires, riches and
crowns, mechanical devices and cultural refinements, honour and glory – all these are
secondary, being of some service but of no intrinsic value to the essential person. A
saintly person is a soul conformed to Christ, a renewal brought about to a greater or
lesser extent in multitudes of men…”9

The historian generalizes from the lives of saints and sinners to the more abstract
processes, structures and laws that work in their lives in the context of God’s
Providence. The story this book tells, therefore, following the terminology of the
historian Christopher Clark in Sleepwalkers, involves answering not only the hows and
the whys of history but also its whithers. Thus, for example, when considering the death
of Julius Caesar at the hands of Brutus, we can ask “Why did Brutus do it?”, which
can be answered in terms both of individual psychology and of the influence of
despotic and republican ideas, and “How did he do it?”, which can be answered in
terms of the details of the senatorial conspiracy.

8 Both quotations in John C. Lennox, Against the Flow. The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism,
Oxford: Monarch, 2015, p. 10.
9 Velimirovič, Preface to The Prologue from Ochrid, part one, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1985, p. 4.

13
 But there is third, higher question: “Why did God allow it?” or “Whither was God
leading mankind in allowing the murder?” And the answer to that might be along the
lines of: “God allowed it in order to bring down the republican system, and bring in
the imperial era of Roman history, in order, eventually, to create the Orthodox
Christian Autocracy, the New Rome of St. Constantine the Great, as the main protector
on earth of His Holy Church.”

Since the distance between the higher-level whither questions and the lower-level
how and why questions is great, and adequate answers to the higher-level questions
require a long exposition, this work will inevitably be controversial, even among those
who share the author’s Orthodox Christian world-view; for theodicy, like eschatology,
is among the most controversial branches of theological science. But the attempt is
worth making; for unless we believe that history is “a tale full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing”, we must try to make some sense of it in its broadest sweep. Only
in this way can we become fully conscious and responsible actors in history.

It is necessary to distinguish at the beginning between two ways in which God

works within history: through the outer kingdom of nature and the inner Kingdom of
Grace. When the Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, He declared: “All power
hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28.18). All power means
just that: power over both angels and men, both believers and unbelievers, both souls
and bodies, both galaxies and sub-atomic particles. Jesus Christ is the supreme King
of kings and Lord of lords, “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1.5): there
is nothing that is not both created and preserved in existence by Him.

Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers make a particular distinction between the
power that Christ wields in the spiritual realm, and in the secular or physical or natural
realm. His power is supreme in both, but is wielded in different ways, corresponding
to their different natures. The spiritual realm is the “inner Kingdom”, the Kingdom
that is “not of this world”. In it Christ rules in an inner, mystical way those who
through faith have voluntarily submitted to His dominion, receiving the grace of Holy
Baptism, declaring Him to be their King and their God, and promising to obey all His
commandments. The secular realm, on the other hand, is the “outer kingdom”, the
kingdom “of this world”, which Christ rules through His providential power.

As St. Theophylact of Bulgaria writes: “’All is delivered’ to the Son by the Father
(Luke 10.22) in that all is to be subject to the Son. There are two ways in which God
rules over all. First, He rules over all independently of their own will [the outer
kingdom]. And second, He rules over those who willingly subject themselves to Him
[the inner Kingdom]. Hence I can say: God is my Master independently of my will,
inasmuch as He is my Creator. But He is also my Master whenever I, as a grateful
servant, fulfill His will by working to keep the commandments.”10

10St. Theophylact, The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, House
Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, p. 114.

14
 Divine Providence uses the whole of nature, rational and irrational, to attain Its
ends. As St. John of Kronstadt says: “The Lord has full respect for nature, which He
has created, and for her laws, as the production of His own infinite, most perfect
wisdom; this is why He usually accomplishes His will through the medium of nature
and her laws; for instance, when He punishes men or blesses them.”11

So the kingdom of this world embraces the whole of nature, including the State,
which is that part of it that is organized by human beings to embrace the whole of
society. The Church, on the other hand, is God’s inner kingdom on earth. Although it
has a visible presence and organization on earth, its essence is not of this world, being
the Kingdom of Grace.12

The inner Kingdom of the Church ministers to the inner needs of man, his salvation
for eternity; for “the Kingdom of God is within you”. As such it is itself eternal, being
the Body of the Eternal Christ. The outer kingdom of the State ministers to man’s
external needs - food and shelter and security from external enemies. It has its origins
in time, and will die in time.

“One must distinguish two Kingdoms of Christ,” writes M.V. Zyzykin, “and
consequently two of His powers. ‘The Son of God, having received human nature into
the unity of His Divine Hypostasis, is called a king,’ says St. Gregory the Theologian,
‘but in one sense He is king as the Almighty and king of both the willing and the
unwilling, and in the other, as leading to obedience and submitting to His kingdom
those who have willingly recognised Him as king’ (quoted in Metropolitan Makary,
Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, pp. 178-179). In the first case the kingdom of Christ is
without end and all three Persons of the All-Holy Trinity participate in Providence. In
the second it will end with the leading of all the true believers to salvation, when Jesus
Christ hands over the Kingdom to God and the Father, when He will annul every
authority and force, that God may be all in all (I Corinthians 14.18). The power of
which it is said: ‘all power has been given to Me in heaven and on earth’ was handed
over by Him to nobody. He remains the Highest Teacher (Matthew 23.8), the Highest
Priest (Hebrews 7.24-25) and the highest Ruler of His kingdom, the Pastor of pastors
(I Peter 5.4).

“The Church is the visible form of the Kingdom of Christ, its realization on earth,
whereby it is destined to embrace the world (Mark 16.15-16; Matthew 28.19-20; Luke
24.47; John 20.23). It is the kingdom that is not of this world (John 18.36), the sphere in
which the relationship of man with God is developed (Matthew 22.21; Luke 20.25).
Church power by its spiritual character does not consist in the mastery and lordship
that are characteristic of earthly power, but in service (Matthew 20.25-27; Mark
9.35).”13

11 St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ.
12 New Hieromartyr Mark (Novoselov), Bishop of Sergievo, distinguished between the mystical and

spotless inner organism of the Church and her outer and flawed organization (Pis’ma k Druziam (Letters
to Friends), Moscow, 1994).
13 Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw: Synodal Press, 1931, p. 231.

15
 The relationship between the two kingdoms was highlighted during Christ’s trial
before Pilate. While recognizing Pilate’s power as lawful, the Lord at the same time
insists that both Pilate’s and Caesar’s power derived from God, the true King and
Lawgiver. For “you could have no power at all against Me,” He says, “unless it had
been given to you from above” (John 19.11). These words, paradoxically, both limit
Caesar’s power, as being subject to God’s, and strengthen it, by indicating that it has
God’s blessing in principle (but not in all its particular manifestations).

Nor is this conclusion contradicted by His words: “My Kingdom is not of this
world” (John 18.36), which refer to the inner Kingdom of Grace. For, as St.
Theophylact of Bulgaria writes: “He said: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’, and
again: ‘It is not from here’, but He did not say: ‘It is not in this world and not here.’ He
rules in this world, takes providential care for it and administers everything according
to His will. But His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, but from above and before the ages,
and ‘not from here’, that is, it is not composed from the earth, although it has power
here”.14 Again, Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič writes: “Let no-one imagine that Christ the
Lord does not have imperial power over this world because He says to Pilate: ‘My
Kingdom is not of this world.’ He who possesses the enduring has power also over
the transitory. The Lord speaks of His enduring Kingdom, independent of time and
of decay, unrighteousness, illusion and death. Some man might say: ‘My riches are
not on paper, but in gold.’ But does he who has gold not have paper also? Is not gold
as paper? The Lord, then, does not say to Pilate that He is not a king, but, on the
contrary, says that He is a higher king than all kings, and His Kingdom is greater and
stronger and more enduring than all earthly kingdoms. He refers to His pre-eminent
Kingdom, on which depend all kingdoms in time and in space…”15

Now God has created three instruments by means of which He steers us towards
salvation: nature, the State and the Church. Through nature, including our own
human nature, He sustains and protects, chastises and punishes us. Through the State
He enables the basic unit of human society, the family, to survive from one generation
to another. And through the Church He provides us with the Holy Spirit, Whose
acquisition is the aim of our life on earth.

Of these three instruments, the most essential is the Church. For the Church is the
vineyard of the Lord; “and the purpose of its husbandmen”, as St. Theophan the
Recluse says, “has been the same from the beginning of the world – to bring to the
Lord the fruit of the vine – saved souls”.16 The State is in essence an auxiliary
instrument designed, in the first place, to protect the Church, the only Ark of salvation,
from physical destruction, and facilitate her spread, and in the second place to ensure
the survival of those non-Christian societies that contain, or will contain, God’s elect.
As for nature, it certainly plays a very important part in history. Examples include the
Flood of Noah, the Black Death of 1348-49, the severe Russian winters of 1812 and
1941.

14 Blessed Theophylact, On John 18.36.
15 Velimirovič, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, September 30, pp.
395-396.
16 St. Theophan, Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2010,

p. 269.

16
 But it is not on such natural – albeit God-directed or God-permitted - catastrophes
that this work will concentrate, but on the central and vital relationship between the
Church and the State.

In addition to the two kingdoms, there are three major forms of State structure that
differ radically in their relation to God and man: autocracy, despotism and democracy. In
modern parlance, “autocracy” is virtually equivalent to “absolutism” or “despotism”.
But in Orthodox terminology it signifies something different: monarchy in union with
the Church, respectful of her independence and submitting to her in matters of faith.

Despotism is monarchy that attempts to control the people in all aspects of its life,
including the Church, thereby necessarily going against God’s will. For “there are
powerful figures,” writes St. Theophan, “who act apart from God’s will and even
against it. These can seem great - not in and of themselves, but only because of the
great opposition put forth by God’s Providence to efface the evil caused by them.”17

As for democracy, the dominant form of governance in modern times, it is the

despotism of public opinion, usually directed from behind the scenes by an oligarchy of
powerful actors acting in defiance of the teaching of the Church.

The alternation of despotism and democracy in politics parallels the alternation of

zealotry and ecumenism in religion. For the despot is likely to impose his own religion
on his subjects with fanatical zeal. As for the democratic leader, anxious as he is to be
popular with all his subjects and keep them in peace with each other if at all possible,
will allow them to believe what they want – and if what the people want is
antichristian, he will allow it and zealously support it.

Autocracy is neither despotic nor democratic. It is the only form of government that
is pleasing to God; for only the autocrats, writes St. Theophan, strives to fulfill God’s
will for the human race, and so only they “are truly great, for there is much that
happens only by God’s allowance.” The Orthodox autocracies guided multitudes of
men to the Church and salvation, in spite of the many sins of their rulers. Despotism
and democracy are two aspects of the same bipolar disease; in them Providence still
guides men to salvation, but in spite of rather than with the help of governments.

This is not an original thought. Essentially this same thesis was put forward in 1877
by the famous philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, a friend of Dostoyevsky. He identified
three basic forces incarnate in his time in Islam, the West and the Russian Autocracy.
The first force he defined as "the striving to subject humanity in all its spheres and at
every level of its life to one supreme principle which in its exclusive unity strives to
mix and confuse the whole variety of private forms, to suppress the independence of
the person and the freedom of private life." Democracy he characterized as being
under the dominating influence of the second force, which he defined as "the striving
to destroy the stronghold of dead unity, to give freedom everywhere to private forms
of life, freedom to the person and his activity; ... the extreme expression of this force is

17 St. Theophan, op. cit. p. 283.

17
general egoism and anarchy and a multitude of separate individuals without an inner
bond." The third force, Autocracy, which Soloviev believed was incarnate especially
in the Slavic world, is defined as "giving a positive content to the two other forces,
freeing them from their exclusivity, and reconciling the unity of the higher principle
with the free multiplicity of private forms and elements."18

Following Soloviev and Dostoyevsky, I contend that only autocracy – that is, a
monarchy in “symphony” with the True Church of Christ, the One, Holy, Orthodox-
Catholic Church - is truly pleasing to God; and that absolutism and democracy
represent two sides of a single coin, equal and opposite deviations from the ideal, both
of which reject the true God as the ultimate source of all true authority, replacing Him
with one man (despotism) or everyman (democracy), in each case divorced from
Christ and the Church.

This is not to say that some Orthodox autocrats like Ivan the Terrible may not have
been evil men who did harm to the Church, or that some despots and democrats may
not have helped the Church. But all this happens through the Providence of God; and
through His Providence “all things work together for good for those who love God”
(Romans 8.28). Even when the Church suffers terribly, and is severely reduced in
power and influence, God is working His justice and His mercy simultaneously, as
will be revealed in time: for there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. On the
one hand God the Vine-dresser is pruning His Vine, the Holy Church, purifying it
from all impurity through suffering, so that it may bring forth more fruit. And on the
other hand, He is working His justice on those who defy His will, casting them like
withered branches into the fire; for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12.29).

The meaning of universal history consists in the struggle between the Orthodox
Christian Autocracy, on the one hand, and “the revolution” on the other, a process of
apostasy extending over the last three millennia (since the reigns of David and
Solomon) that has progressively undermined autocracy through the bipolar sickness
of despotism-democracy. The three basic modes of politics have alternated
throughout history. Thus despotism alternated with democracy in the prehistoric
period before the rise of Israel, and has done so again in the most recent phase of
history, since the Russian revolution. In the intermediate period, from King David in
about 1000 BC to Tsar-Martyr Nicholas’ abdication in 1917 AD, despotism-democracy
alternated with autocracy.

However, although this is the basic “rhythm” of history, it never truly repeats
itself; for both unconscious memories and conscious invocations of previous
incarnations of autocracy, democracy and despotism interact with, and modify, their
reappearance in later ages in an increasingly complex series of combinations.

18Soloviev, “Tri Sily” (Three Forces), Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works), St. Petersburg, 1911-1914,
volume I, pp. 228-229.

18
 This alternating process culminated in what appeared to be the final fall of the
Orthodox Autocracy in the Russian revolution of 1917. This ushered in what Holy
Scripture calls “the last times”, a period of increasing anarchy that will lead in the end
to the reign of the most despotic of tyrants, the Antichrist. The only hope for the world
consists in the return of autocracy, which is called by St. Paul “that which restrains”
the appearance of the Antichrist (II Thessalonians 2.7)…

Since, as the historian Shlomo Sand rightly points out, “the best way to define a
concept is to follow its history”19, I have attempted to explicate the concepts of
autocracy, despotism and democracy in the context of a universal history spanning
twelve volumes and the whole sweep of history until the end of the Cold War and the
Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, when it looked as if the apparent victory of Democracy
and Free Trade had brought us to “the End of History”. Needless to say, it hasn’t…
But this history has to end somewhere, and this is as good a place to end it as any…

In this first volume, which covers the ancient and medieval periods from the
beginning to the Seventh Ecumenical Council, we see the origins and nature of
autocracy, despotism and democracy with particular clarity. This was the Age of
Faith, in which most men, even pagans and heretics, believed in God and the age to
come, and in the important role of the State - almost always a monarchy - in helping
to bring men to salvation through God’s Providence. In later volumes we shall see
how secular, humanist ideologies undermined this faith and more or less eliminated
the role of Providence. These ideologies include Papism, Humanism, Protestantism,
liberalism, socialism, democratism and nationalism, which since the French
revolution have come to be believed in more fervently than the traditional religions,
even in supposedly Christian countries. Nevertheless, underneath these modern
ideologies the basic forms of autocracy, despotism and democracy are still discernible.
It is my task to make these basic forms visible beneath the flux of history.

In the writing of this book I am indebted above all to the Holy Fathers. St.
Augustine’s massive and famous work, The City of God, written after Alaric’s sack of
Rome in 410, was probably the first major attempt to see the whole of history in the
light of God’s saving Providence, as the history of crime and punishment and
redemption. While accepting his basic schema, I have as it were tried to “fill in the
blanks” in his project, bringing the narrative up to date – or, at least, as far as 1991, the
year of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Among more recent Church writers, I have especially drawn on the works of the
Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič (+1956), and of the Russian Fathers: Patriarch
Nikon of Moscow, St. Philaret of Moscow (the supreme theologian of the Orthodox
autocracy), St. Ignaty Brianchaninov, St. Theophan the Recluse, St. Ambrose of
Optina, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, M.V.
Zyzykin, Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar, St. John Maximovich of
Shanghai and San Francisco, St. Theophan of Poltava and Archpriest Lev Lebedev.

19 Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2010, p. 25.

19
 But I have also drawn extensively on many other contemporary writers and
historians, both Orthodox and western, which in no way implies that I agree with all
their opinions.

Inevitably in a work of this scope I have had to rely to a large extent on sometimes
lengthy quotations from secondary sources; only a small minority of chapters (such
as those on the history of the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century) have
benefited from a detailed study of primary sources. In justification of a similar
approach, Francis Fukuyama writes: “While many of the individual chapters will not
pass muster with people whose job it is to study particular societies and historical
periods in depth, it does seem to me that there is a virtue in looking across time and
space in a comparative fashion. Some of the broader patterns of political development
are simply not visible to those who focus too narrowly on specific subjects…”20

Another justification of this approach is that this method of extensive quotation

was used by “the father of English history”, the Venerable Bede, and in the very first
history of the world from a Christian point of view: that of the Preparation for the Gospel
by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (early fourth century).

Aaron P. Johnson writes: “Since 71 per cent of the 15 books of the Preparation are
direct quotation it would have appeared to have reduced its stature as an intellectual
product to a mere anthology and its usefulness has seemed to many to be limited to
its preservation of sources that would otherwise be lost to us. Eusebius has thus been
seen as a second-rate thinker, whose display of erudition fails because of what are
alleged to be loosely connected and poorly ordered sequences of quotations, which
comprise inappropriately lengthy fragments from source texts.

“Such a reaction to the Preparation is, however, too severe and exhibits a failure to
appreciate the ways in which it participated to a broader cultural shift in aesthetic
sensibilities, which valued the juxtaposition of traditional units of previous art or
literature into new composite wholes evincing what has been called elsewhere a
‘cumulative aesthetic’… Beyond this aesthetic milieu, the Preparation placed itself
within other ancient discursive contexts that deepen our understanding of its
quotational prolixity. The work is a fascinating literary experiment of a character at
once creative, wide-ranging, judicious and thoughtful.”21

This book aims to be similarly “wide-ranging, judicious and thoughtful”; it will be

for the reader to judge whether it has attained that aim. But it must be admitted from
the beginning that none of its theses is original, and to that extent I willingly plead
guilty to a charge of a lack of creativity. So if this book is called “a mere anthology”, I
have no objection. I would only say that an anthology can be useful, even illuminating.
And I would contend that my anthology contains some of the finest and most
illuminating historical writing ever penned, drawing from the earliest to the most
recent historians…

20 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. xvi.
21 Johnson, Eusebius, London: Tauris, 2014, pp. 26, 27.

20
 Although I have tried to be accurate to the best of my ability, it goes without saying
that I, and I alone, am responsible for any errors that may have crept into this book,
for which I ask forgiveness of all my readers.

Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy
on us! Amen.

December 24 / January 6, 2021/2022.

The Forefeast of the Nativity of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
137 Woking Road, Guildford, GU1 1QX.

21
I. PREHISTORY

22
 1. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (1) FROM CAIN TO NOAH

Concerning the origins of all things, there is only one reliable authority and eye-
witness – God. For He is Himself “the Beginning’ (John 8.25), Who “in the beginning
made the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1.1). God communicated an account of the
creation to the holy Prophet and God-seer Moses, the world’s first historian; and all
subsequent historians and scientists who try to reconstruct the beginning without
heeding or trying to understand the witness of Moses , are bound to go wrong.

St. John Chrysostom, writes: “In the beginning, says Moses, God created heaven
and earth. Here we rightly ask why this holy prophet, who lived only several centuries
after the creation of the world, tells us the story. Certainly he does not [do it] at random
and without serious motives. It is true that in the early days the Lord, who created
man, spoke to man himself in the way that he could hear it. Thus he conversed with
Adam, then he took again Cain, then he gave his orders to Noah, and then he sat down
under the hospitable tent of Abraham. And even when mankind had rushed into the
abyss of all vices, God did not break any relationship with him, but he treated men
with less familiarity because they had become unworthy through their crimes... Now
Moses is the bearer of these letters, and this is the first line: In the beginning, God
created heaven and earth.

“But consider, my dear brothers, how great and admirable this holy prophet is…
Does he not seem to be saying to us loudly and intelligibly: ‘Have men taught me what
I am about to reveal to you? By no means, but He alone who has worked these
wonders, leads and directs my tongue to teach them to you.’ I adjure you therefore to
impose silence on all human reasoning, and not to listen to this narrative as if it were
only the word of Moses. For it is God Himself who speaks to us, and Moses is only
His interpreter. The reasoning of man, says the Scripture, is timid, and his thoughts
uncertain (Wisdom of Solomon, 9.14). Let us, then, accept the divine word with
humble deference, without exceeding the limits of our intelligence, nor curiously
seeking what it cannot attain. But the enemies of the truth do not know these rules,
and they want to appreciate all the works of the Lord according to the lights of reason
alone. Insane! they forget that the mind of man is too narrow to probe these mysteries.
And why speak here about the works of God, when we cannot even understand the
secrets of nature and the arts?”22

Thus pure rationalism is excluded when approaching the subject of the origins of
man and human society. We must think with humility, “without exceeding the limits
of our intelligence”. We must rely on the Word of God alone.

Since this book is a study of history, that is, of man in society, we shall leave the
details of the material and animal creations, and the creation of Adam and Eve, and
their fall, to the sciences of theology, anthropology and creationism…23

*

22 St. John Chrysostom, Homily 2 on Genesis.
23
See V. Moss, The Theology of Eros, lulu.com, 2021.

23
 In Paradise, before the Fall, there was no such thing as political authority, no
dominion of man over man. There was the mild and loving headship of Adam over
Eve; but this was hardly comparable to political power… It is only after the Fall, in the
words of the Lord to Eve after the fall: “He [Adam] will rule over you” (Genesis 3.16),
that we hear the first note of authority of man over man.24 As Metropolitan Anastasy
(Gribanovsky) writes: “Political power appeared on earth only after the fall of the first
people. In Paradise the overseer’s shout was not heard. Man can never forget that he
was once royally free, and that political power appeared as the quit-rent of
sin.”25Adam’s dominion over Eve, a symbol of God’s dominion over creation, and of
Christ’s over the Church, was only a mild and embryonic form of power relationship.
It was infused by love and involved no compulsion. Moreover, if the man was the
master, the woman was the mistress, sharing in his dominion over the rest of creation,
insofar as both man and woman were made in the image of God the Master.26

Thus St. John Chrysostom writes: “From the beginning He made one sovereignty
only, setting the man over the woman. But after that our race ran headlong into
extreme disorder, He appointed other sovereignties also, those of Masters, and those
of Governors, and this too for love’s sake.”27 Again, political inequality, according to
St. Maximus the Confessor, is the result of the fall. All men were initially created equal,
but the fall fragmented mankind into self-serving individuals who needed political
authority to stop them destroying each other. In response to the question why God
allows kings to rule over men, St. Maximus writes that kingship is a response to evil.
It is the king’s responsibility to maintain order and justice so that men would not
devour each other as large fish do small fish.28

The origins of the Church are in Paradise. For Paradise is a real place that was
located near the modern Iranian city of Tabriz, according to British archaeologist
David Rohl. But this real place is the real origin of another reality – the Church, of
which it is the symbol. For “this is our God, providing for and sustaining His beloved
inheritance, the Holy Church, comforting the forefathers who had fallen away
through sin with His unlying Word, laying the foundation for Her already in
Paradise.”29

The State’s foundation is also in Paradise – but after the Fall, which indicates its
inferiority to the Church.

24 As S.V. Troitsky writes, “according to the Bible the basis of every authority of man over man is to be
found in the words of God about the power of the husband over the wife: ‘he will rule over you’”
(Filosofia khristianskago Braka (The Philosophy of Christian Marriage), Paris: YMCA Press, p. 178).
25 Metropolitan Anastasy, Besedy s sobstvennym serdtsem (Conversations with My Own Heart),

Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1998, p. 159.

26 Compare the ancient Russian custom of calling bridegroom and bride “prince” and “princess”, and

the ancient Roman custom of calling married couples - only married couples – “dominus” and
“domina”, which is reflected in the modern Greek “kyrios” and “kyria”. See V. Moss, The Theology of
Eros, Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2010, pp. 9-16.
27 St. John Chrysostom, Homily 34 on I Corinthians.
28 St. Maximus, Epistle 10.449D, 452B. Cf. John Boojamra, “Original Sin According to St. Maximus the

Confessor”, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 20 (1976), p. 26.

29
The Order for the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

24
 The State is a product of the fall of man from the primeval Paradise-Church, and
would not have been necessary if Adam had not sinned. It is necessary because “the
wages of sin is death” (Romans 6.23), and the political order can, if not conquer death
(for, since the Fall, every man has been sentenced to death by God in that “dust thou
art, and unto death shalt thou return” (Genesis 3.19)), at any rate slow down its spread,
enabling man to survive, both as an individual and as a species. For to survive he needs
to unite in communities with other men, forming families, tribes and, eventually,
states.

The process of politicization is aided by the fact that man is social by nature, and
comes into the world already as a member of a family. So, contrary to the teaching of
some, it is not only out of fear that men unite into large groups, but out of the natural
bonds of family life. In this sense the state is simply the family writ large; for, as
Aristotle says, “the king is in the same relationship with his subjects as the head of a
family with his children”; just as the family has a father as its head, so the state has a
king as its head. So the king’s rule in the State is a reflection of the father’s rule in the
family, which in turn reflects the rule of God “the Father, from Whom every
fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3.15).

The family, writes St. Augustine, is “the beginning, or rather a small component
part, of the city, and every beginning is directed to some end of its own kind, and
every component part contributes to the completeness of the whole of which it forms
a part. The implication is that domestic peace contributes to the peace of the city, for
an ordered harmony of those who live together in a house contributes to the ordered
harmony concerning authority and obedience obtaining among citizens.”30

Again St. Philaret of Moscow says: “The family is older than the State. Man,
husband, wife, father, son, mother, daughter and the obligations and virtues inherent
in these names existed before the family grew into the nation and the State was
formed. That is why family life in relation to State life can be figuratively depicted as
the root of the tree. In order that the tree should bear leaves and flowers and fruit, it
is necessary that the root should be strong and bring pure juice to the tree. In order
that State life should develop strongly and correctly, flourish with education, and
bring forth the fruit of public prosperity, it is necessary that family life should be
strong with the blessed love of the spouses, the sacred authority of the parents, and
the reverence and obedience of the children, and that as a consequence of this, from
the pure elements of family there should arise similarly pure principles of State life,
so that with veneration for one’s father veneration for the tsar should be born and
grow, and that the love of children for their mother should be a preparation of love
for the fatherland, and the simple-hearted obedience of domestics should prepare and
direct the way to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the laws and
sacred authority of the autocrat…”31

30St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 16.
31 Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1848 edition, volume 2, p. 169. Cf. St. Ignaty
Brianchaninov: “In blessed Russia, in accordance with the spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the
fatherland constitute one whole, just as in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole.”
(Sobranie Pisem (Collected Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 781)

25
 Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes: “Both the familial and the monarchical systems
are established by God for the earthly existence of sinful, fallen man. The first-formed
man, abiding in living communion with God, was not subject to anyone except God,
and was lord over the irrational creatures. But when man sinned and destroyed the
Divine hierarchy of submission, having fallen away from God, he became the slave of
sin and the devil, and as a result of this became subject to a man like himself. The
sinful will of man demands submission for the limitation of his own destructive
activity. This Divine establishment has in mind only the good of man – the limitation
of the spread of sin. And history confirms that whatever the defects of monarchy, they
cannot compare with the evil brought upon men by revolution and anarchy.”32

St. Philaret writes: “The State is a union of free moral beings, united amongst
themselves with the sacrifice of part of their freedom for the preservation and
confirmation by the common forces of the law of morality, which constitutes the
necessity of their existence. The civil laws are nothing other than interpretations of
this law in application to particular cases and guards placed against its violation.”33
To the extent that the laws are good, that is, in accord with “the law of morality”, and
executed firmly and impartially, the people can live in peace and pursue the aim for
which God placed them on the earth – the salvation of their souls for eternity. To the
extent that they are bad, and/or badly executed, not only is it much more difficult for
men to pursue the supreme aim of their existence: the very existence of future
generations is put in jeopardy.

One of the main functions of the State is the punishment of crime. If the State did
not exist, crime would not be punished and society would swiftly degenerate into
anarchy. The difference between sin and crime is that sin is transgression of the Law
of God only, whereas crime is transgression both of God’s Law and of the law of the
State. Adam and Eve’s original transgression of the Law of God was a sin that was
punished by their expulsion from Paradise and from intimate communion with God,
which inevitably, since God is Life, – meant death. The second sin, Abel’s murder of
his brother Cain, was, in accordance with all legal codes, a crime as well as a sin. But
since there was as yet no State in the proper sense of the word, it was God Himself
Who imposed the punishment. Man had already been punished by expulsion from
Paradise and communion with God, so now the punishment was different: expulsion
from the society of men: “a fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth”
(Genesis 4.12). The first criminal became the first outlaw.

Although no man before Christ was able to receive again Divine grace and
innocence in the measure that Adam had enjoyed them, men were able to reverse the
Fall to this extent: that where Adam had shown unbelief in the word of God, they

32 Hieromonk Dionysius, Priest Timothy Alferov, O Tserkvi, Pravoslavnom Tsarstve i Poslednem Vremeni
(On the Church, the Orthodox Kingdom and the Last Time), Moscow, 1998, p. 15.
33 Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Lev Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tservki, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of

the Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 24-25.

26
showed faith. Faith in the Providence of God, and hope in His promises, was
characteristic of all the Patriarchs. The very first words of Eve after the expulsion from
Eden express this faith: "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare
Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord" (Genesis 4.1). Thus Eve saw the
hand of God in the birth of Cain. According to one interpretation of the Hebrew text,
what she actually said was: “I have gotten the God-man”, by which she expressed her
belief that Cain was that Redeemer, “the seed of the woman” (Genesis 3.15), whom
the Lord had promised while she was still in the Garden – a mistake, but one based
on faith. And in his murder of Abel she no doubt saw the fulfilment of His word that
she would bring forth in sorrow (Genesis 3.16).

The same faith was manifest in her immediate descendants, as the Apostle Paul
witnessed: "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by
which he obtained witnesses that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by
it he being dead yet speaketh. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see
death; and was not found, because God had translated him; for before his translation
he had this testimony, that he pleased God. But without faith it is impossible to please
Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of
them that diligently seek Him. By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen
as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by which he
condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith. By faith
Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for
an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he
sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with
Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which
hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God." (Hebrews 11.4-7)

The faith of the Patriarchs expressed itself in other ways that show their spiritual
kinship and prototypical relationship with the New Testament Church - for example,
in the offering of sacrifices well-pleasing to God. In this respect, the relationship
between Abel and Cain is typical of the relationship between the True Church and the
false; for while the sacrifice of the True Church, like Abel's, is accepted by God, the
sacrifice of the heretics and schismatics, like Cain's, is rejected. Indeed, according to
the Theodotion text of this Scripture, "the Lord kindled a fire over Abel and his
sacrifice, but did not kindle a fire over Cain and his sacrifice".

On which the Venerable Bede comments: "By fire sent down from heaven He
accepted Abel's victim, which we read is very often done when holy men offer. But he
held back from consuming Cain's sacrifice by fire. For the Apostle also seems to signify
this when he says, 'By faith Abel offered a greater sacrifice than Cain, by which he
obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying over his gifts' (Hebrews 11.4).
Therefore God 'testified to the gifts' of Abel through fire, receiving them from the
heavens, by which testimony of the Apostle we are also taught that the victim of Abel
was made acceptable to God through the devotion of his faith, and on the contrary we
should understand that Cain was condemned because he did not serve his Creator
with integral faith."34

34 The Venerable Bede, Homilies on Genesis.

27
 In his famous work The City of God, St. Augustine traced the beginning of The City
of God to Abel and his brother Seth. But the city of man takes its origin from Cain. The
Cainites are separated “from the Church in which God reveals His grace-filled
presence”.35 Thus Abel, according to Augustine, means 'Sorrow' and Seth -
'Resurrection', prefiguring the Death and Resurrection of Christ.36 And in the time of
Seth's son Enos it is said that "men began to call upon the name of the Lord" (Genesis
4.26 (Hebrew text)) because the sons of the resurrection live in hope, calling upon the
name of the Lord. The name Cain, on the other hand, means 'Possession', and that of
his son Enoch, the first city-builder - 'Dedication', indicating that the sons of perdition
aim to possess the cities of this earth, being completely dedicated to their pleasures,
like heavy metal (Jabal and Tubal-Cain invented metal instruments.)

So the State began with Cain. And since the first form of state is the city, polis in
Greek, we may say that Cain, as the first city-builder (Genesis 4.17), was the first
politician. 37 He was also the first murderer, for he murdered his brother Abel… The
fact that the first State was founded by the first murderer has cast a shadow over
Statehood ever since… On the one hand, the State exists in order to curb sin in its
crudest and most destructive aspects. To that extent state power is in principle of God
(Romans 13.1), that is, established by Him “Who rules in the kingdom of men, and
gives it to whomever He will” (Daniel 4.17). For, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “God
imposed upon mankind the fear of man as some do not fear God. It was necessary
that they be subject to the authority of men, and kept under restraint by their laws
whereby they might attain to some degree of justice and exercise mutual forbearance
through dread of the sword…”38

35
However, the City of God is not to be identified precisely with the Earthly Church because the Church
contains both good and bad. Nor is the City of Man to be identified precisely with the State because the
State contains both good and bad)….
36 St. Gregory Palamas writes: “The name Seth can be interpreted to mean “resurrection” , or rather “a

rising up from”, which actually refers to the Lord, who promises and gives everlasting life to those who
believe in Him. How appropriate a figure Seth was to represent Christ! Seth was born to Eve, as Eve
herself says, “instead of Abel” (Genesis 4:25), whom Cain envied and murdered, whereas the Virgin’s
son Christ, came to the human race instead of Adam, whom the prince and patron of evil killed out of
envy. Seth, however, did not raise up Abel, as he was merely a prefiguration of the resurrection, but
our Lord Jesus Christ resurrected Adam, for He is the true life and resurrection of mankind (cf. John
11:25), through whom Seth’s descendants were deemed worthy, in hope, of divine adoption, being
called sons of God (cf. Genesis 6:24)” (Homily 52).
37 What was this city? David Rohl (Legend: The Genesis of Civilization, London: Random House, 1998, pp.

198-200) suggests three alternatives from three neighbouring Mesopotamian cities: 1. Erech, known as
Uruk, Unuk or Unug in Sumerian. The latter may be the same name as Enoch, Cain’s son, after whom
the city was named according to the usual reading of Genesis 4.17. A later ruler of Erech-Uruk-Enoch
was Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. 2. Eridu, which may be the same name as Jared, Cain’s
grandson, after whom the city was named according to another reading of Genesis 4.17. 3. Ur, whose
original name may have been Uru-Unuki or ‘City of Enoch’. This was, of course, the “Ur of the
Chaldees” that Abraham was ordered to leave.
38 St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 24; quoted in Fr. Michael Azkoul, Once Delivered to the Saints, Seattle:

Saint Nectarios Press, 2000, p. 219.

28
 Again, St. John Chrysostom says: “Since equality of honour often leads to fighting,
He has made many governments and forms of subjection.”39

Again, St. Gregory the Great writes that, although men are created by nature equal,
God has ordained that “insofar as every man does not have the same manner of life,
one should be governed by another.”40

On the other hand, the greatest crimes known to man have been committed
precisely by the State, and to that extent it is an instrument of evil, permitted but not
blessed by God – for God sometimes “sets over it the lowest of men” (Daniel 4.17).
Moreover, from the time of Cain and at least until Saul and the kings of Israel, all states
known to man were not only the main agents of mass murder and of slavery, but also
of the worship of demons, to which they compelled their citizens.

St. Augustine could see the Providence and Justice of God working even in the
most antichristian states - including Rome. 41 This is why the history of Church-State
relations from Cain to Constantine is a history of almost perpetual conflict. Until
David and the foundation of the state of Israel, the people of God – that is, the Church
– was not associated with any state, but was constantly being persecuted by
contemporary pagan rulers, as Moses and the Israelites were by Pharaoh. And this
symbolises a deeper truth: that the people of God, spiritually speaking, have never
lived in states, but have always been stateless wanderers, desert people, as it were;
“for here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come" (Hebrews 13.14) - that
is, the City of God, the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22).

The people who reject God are spiritually speaking citizens of the kingdoms of this
earth, rooted in the earth of worldly cares and desires. That is why they like to build
huge urban civilizations that enable them to satisfy these desires to the maximum.
And that is why, as we have seen, Cain and his descendants were the creators not only
of cities, but also of all the cultural and technological inventions that make city life so
alluring.

For, as New Hieroconfessor Barnabas, Bishop of Pechersk, writes: "In its original
source culture is the fruit, not of the fallen human spirit in general, but a consequence
of its exceptional darkening in one of the primordial branches of the race of Adam...
The Cainites had only one aim - the construction of a secure, carnal, material life,
whatever the cost. They understood, of course, that the Seed of the Woman, the
Promised Deliverer from evil that was coming at the end of the ages, would never
appear in their descendants, so, instead of humbling themselves and repenting, the
Cainites did the opposite: in blasphemous despair and hatred towards God, they gave
themselves over irrevocably to bestial passions and the construction on earth of their
kingdom, which is continually fighting against the Kingdom of God."42

39 St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.
40 St. Gregory, Morals on the Book of Job, XXI, 15, 22, 23; cf. Azkoul, op. cit., p. 221.
41 St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 15.
42 Bishop Barnabas, Pravoslavie (Orthodoxy), Kolomna: New Golutvin monastery, 1995, pp. 128, 129.

29
 Cain’s descendant Lamech killed two men instead of one (and had two wives
instead of one). This illustrates the iron law of history: the sin that is not repented of
unfailingly multiplies, bringing in its wake a multiplication in suffering according to
the Justice of God. Lamech repented, and therefore stopped the onslaught of suffering
in his own person. But the race of man as a whole did not repent of their sins. Between
Adam and Noah only one man, Enoch, “walked with God” and was therefore found
worthy to be taken out of this vale of tears and even to escape death.

And so, just as sin multiplied, so did its punishment, and the Flood came and
destroyed the whole of humanity and animal life with the exception of Noah and his
sons and those who entered with them into the Ark. And Paradise, which before had
been at least visible from the earth, was taken completely away from it…

The Cainites eventually became the overwhelming majority of mankind, and the
first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes that they corrupted even most
of the Sethites: “This posterity of Seth continued to esteem God as the Lord of the
universe, and to have an entire regard to virtue, for seven generations; but in process
of time they were perverted… But Noah was very uneasy at what they did; and being
displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their disposition, and their
actions for the better: but seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to wicked
pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and
those they had married; so he departed out of the land.”43

Since cities were built soon after the fall of man, we must presume that there was
some kind of political organization in the antediluvial world. Archaeological research
carried out in the last few decades at Varna in Bulgaria and Tell-Hamoukar in Syria
has discovered remains of urban civilizations of the fifth and fourth millenia BC (i.e.
older than the Flood) with evidence of social stratification.44 In this period, the earth
was filled with sin and criminality, and the Holy Spirit departed from men (Genesis
6.3). So God decided to wipe out human civilization, the civilization of Cain, and even
the whole of the animal kingdom, and start again. Hence the Flood of Noah, a
universal catastrophe that destroyed all life except Noah and his family and the
animals that were with him in the Ark, who represent the Church that survives the
destruction of the world.

So Statehood in its first historical examples was antichristian and was destroyed by
the just judgement of God.

Archbishop Andrew of Rockland writes of Noah: "It was revealed to him by God
that there would be a world-wide flood which would destroy all those who remained
in ungodliness. But for the salvation of those who would remain in godliness, those
who still preserved all that is God's in honor, God commanded Noah to build an ark.
And Noah began to build an ark, and at the same time to call the people to repentance.

"But the sky was clear, not a cloud; the whole of nature, as if indifferent to the sins

43 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 3.
44 See Sky History’s documentary “Civilization Lost”.

30
of men, remained solemnly silent. Men heard Noah, but shrugged their shoulders and
went away. The building of the ark was finished, but only the family of Noah entered
it. They entered the ark, not yet to escape the flood, but to escape the ungodliness
which was everywhere... And finally the rain came; the water began to rise and
inundate everything. Now the frightened people hastened to the ark, but the doors
closed by themselves, and no one else was able to enter..."

The historicity of the Flood was witnessed by the Lord Himself and the Apostle
Peter (Matthew 28.38-39; II Peter 3.5-6), as well as by the folklore of almost all human
races.45 Recent archaeological research has discovered the Ark itself in the mountains
of eastern Turkey. After many false findings, this seems to be the genuine Ark, and is
now recognized as such officially by the Turkish government.46

According to the Greek Septuagint text of the Bible, the oldest Biblical text and the
only one officially recognized by the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church47, the
world was created in 5508 BC48, and the Flood took place in 3289 BC. It covered the
whole earth; only one part of the globe remained untouched – Paradise. For as St.
Ephraim the Syrian wrote:

With the eye of my mind

I gazed upon Paradise.
The summit of every mountain
Is lower than its summit;
The crest of the flood
Reached only its foothills,
These it kissed with reverence
Before turning back
To rise above and subdue the peak
Of every hill and mountain.
The foothills of Paradise it kisses,
While every summit it buffets.49

The Flood, combined with the volcanic eruptions that accompanied it, altered the
climate and geography of the earth, making fossils of the animals that were killed by
it. It also marked a new beginning for the human race. From Noah and his three sons,
Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives came all the nations of man. Spreading south
from the mountains of Ararat, where the ark came to rest, Noah’s descendants came
to Sumeria (Iraq), and built the world’s first postdiluvial civilization.

45 See Fr. Seraphim Holland, “Why I became a Creationist”, Orthodox Christianity, May 9, 2016.
46 See the film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_RXCEeWjo&feature=share.
47 Some of the reasons why the Greek Septuagint must be preferred to the Hebrew Masoretic text are

well explained in the video “Were the Pyramids Built before the Flood (Masoretic text vs. Original
Hebrew”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1yRTC6kGE&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0dQWdUTXt
CJS1h04JUQXeE_P-If9OTEI7la0lSsD94B4bIRruuwTvqmYo.
48 Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p.

236.
49 St. Ephraim, Hymns on Paradise, 1.4; in Andrew Louth (ed.), Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture

I. Genesis 1-11, Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, p. 141.

31
 *

Immediately after the flood, Noah offered a sacrifice to God of all the clean beasts
that entered with him into the ark. For God accepts as sacrifices in the Church only
those whose lives have been cleansed by repentance. "Then shalt Thou be pleased with
a sacrifice of righteousness, with oblation and whole-burnt offerings" (Psalm 50.19).

In return, God blessed Noah and his sons, and established a covenant with him
whereby He promised never to destroy the earth again by a flood. "And God said,
This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living
creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set My bow in the cloud, and
it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth..." (Genesis 9.12-13) St.
Victorinus of Petau wrote: "The rainbow is called a bow from what the Lord spoke to
Noah and to his sons, that they should not fear any further deluge in the generation
of God, but fire. For thus He says: ‘I will place my bow in the clouds, that you may
now no longer fear water, but fire.’"50

A judgement of fire came quite soon, with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
but the main reference here is to the judgement and cleansing by fire that will come
upon the whole world at the end of time (II Peter 3.10-12). This is the first of many Old
Testament covenants between God and the people of God, but the last that relates to
the whole of mankind, irrespective of their faith or lack of it. For the flood was a
judgement inflicted on the whole of mankind when it was not yet divided into
different nations and languages.

God then commanded Noah to establish a system of justice that is the embryo of
statehood as it should be: “The blood of your lives will I require: at the hand of every
beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will
I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed:
for in the image of God made He man” (Genesis 9.5-6).

Commenting on these words, Protopriest Basil Boshchansky writes that they “give
the blessing of God to that institution which appeared in defence of human life” – that
is, the State.51

“The word ‘require’ is a judicial term, God appearing as a judge who exacts a strict
and severe penalty for infraction of a sacred law. If a beast kills a man, the beast must
be put to death (note also Exodus 21.28). If a man kills another man (wilfully and
culpably, it is assumed), then he also must be put to death by ‘every man’s brother’.
This latter phrase is not intended to initiate family revenge slayings, of course, but
rather to stress that all men are responsible to see that this justice is executed. At the
time these words were first spoken, all men indeed were blood brothers; for only the
three sons of Noah were living at the time, other than Noah himself. Since all future

50 St. Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse.
51 Boshchansky, “Zhizn’ vo Khriste” (“Life in Christ”), in Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 3-4, May-

August, 1998, p. 41.

32
people would be descended from these three men and their wives, in a very real sense
all men are brothers, because all were once in the loins of these three brothers. This is
in essence a command to establish a formal system of human government, in order to
assure that justice is carried out, especially in the case of murder. The authority to
execute this judgement of God on a murderer was thus delegated to man.”52

But not to every man. The authority to judge can only be given to one whom God
has appointed to judge – that is, to rulers. We see this in the story of Moses, who went
out and saw two Hebrews quarrelling. He said to the one who did the wrong, “Why
are you striking your companion?”, who replied: “Who made you a prince and a judge
over us?” (Exodus 2.13-14). And indeed, Moses had not at that time received the
power to judge Israel. Only when he had fled into the wilderness and been given
power by the true King of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was he
accepted by the Israelites as having true authority. Only then was he able to deliver
his people from Pharaoh, who was imposing his despotic rule over then…53

As the revolutionary-turned-monarchist Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov writes,

the idea that “the state is ‘the monopoly of violence’ completely coincides with the
Christian attitude to the state. The complete removal of violence from private right
and its exclusive concentration in the hands of the state means that violence in
personal interests is unconditionally removed and forbidden. But it is allowed only in
those hands in which there is in principle no personal interest, but only the interest of
justice. With the monopolization of violence in the hands of the state violence is
released only to support justice.”54

That is why political authority as such and in principle is good and established by
God: “there is no authority that is not from God” (Romans 13.1). This is true especially
of the political leaders of the people of God, for whom the Lord established a special
sacrament, the anointing to the kingdom: “I have found David My servant, with My
holy oil have I anointed him” (Psalm 88.19). Even certain pagan kings were given an
invisible anointing to enable them to rule justly and help the people of God, such as
Cyrus of Persia (Isaiah 45.1).

52 Henry Morris, The Genesis Record, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1976, p. 224.
53 E. Kholmogorov, “O Khristianskom tsarstve i ‘vooruzhennom narode’” (“On the Christian Kingdom

and ‘the Armed People’”), Tserkovnost’ (Churchness), N 1, 2000, pp. 35-38.

54 Tikhomirov, Religioznie-philosophskie osnovy istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History),

Moscow, 1997, p. 268.

33
 2. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) NIMROD’S BABYLON

Moses writes: “Cush [the son of Ham] fathered Nimrod, who was the first potentate
on earth. He was a mighty hunter in opposition to Yahweh, hence the saying, ‘Like
Nimrod, a mighty hunter in opposition to Yahweh’. The mainstays of his empire were
Babel, Erech and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. From that country he went
forth to Assyria and built Nineveh, that vast city, and Caleb.” (Genesis 10.8-12). 55 The
British Egyptologist David Rohl identifies Nimrod with the Sumerian king Eamerukar
(“ea” means “god”, from which comes “Yah” and “Yahweh”, and “kar” means
“hunter”).56

The Jerusalem Targum explains: “He was powerful in hunting and in wickedness
before the Lord, for he was a hunter of the sons of men, and he said to them, ‘Depart
from the judgement of the Lord, and adhere to the judgement of Nimrod!’ Therefore
it is said: ‘As Nimrod is the strong one, strong in hunting, and in wickedness before
the Lord.’” The Targum of Jonathan tells us: “From the foundation of the world none
was ever found like Nimrod, powerful in hunting, and in rebellions against the Lord.”

According to St. Jerome, “Nimrod was the first to seize despotic rule over the
people, which men were not yet accustomed to.”57

For, as Josephus writes, “it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and
contempt of God; he was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of
great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were
through his means that they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage
that procured their happiness. He also gradually changed the government into
tyranny, seeing no other method of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring
them into a constant dependence on his own power.”58

One-man rule in antiquity was of two kinds: God-hating Despotism or Tyranny and
God-loving Autocracy. In the post-diluvial world, despotism appeared first – in
Nimrod’s Babylon, the mystical fount and root of all antichristian despotic power
down the ages.

55
The Chaldean paraphrase of I Chronicles 1.10 reads: "Cush begat Nimrod, who began to prevail in
wickedness, for he shed innocent blood, and rebelled against Jehovah."
56
Rohl, From Eden to Exile, London: Arrow Books, 2002, p. 59. In another work, Rohl writes: “Look at what
we have here. Nimrod was closely associated with Erech – the biblical name for Uruk – where Enmerkar
ruled. Enmerkar built a great sacred precinct at Uruk and constructed a temple at Eridu – that much
we know from the epic poem ‘Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta’. The Sumerian King List adds that
Enmerkar was ‘the one who built Uruk’. Nimrod was also a great builder, constructing the cities of
Uruk, Akkad and Babel. Both Nimrod and Enmerkar were renowned for their huntsmanship. Nimrod,
as the grandson of Ham, belongs to the second ‘generation’ after the flood (Noah-Ham-Flood-Cush-
Nimrod) and this is also true of Enmerkar who is recorded in the Sumerian King List as the second
ruler of Uruk after the flood (Ubartutu-(Utnapishtim)-Flood-Meskiagkasher-Enmerkar). Both ruled
over their empires in the land of Shinar/Sumer.” (Legend: The Genesis of Civilization, London: Random
House, 1998, p. 216).
57 St. Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis, 10.9.
58 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 1, chapter 4, paragraph 2.

34
 With the scattering of the peoples, God-hating despotism spread from Babylon to
all the developed pagan States throughout the world – to Egypt, the Indus valley,
Greece and Rome, China, Central and South America – before the rise of Athenian
democracy introduced a new kind of government. Despotic rulers recognize their
power as absolute, unlimited by any other power in heaven or on earth. Democratic
rulers recognized their power as limited by no power in heaven, but only the people
on earth, who thereby becoming the gods of democracy. Autocracy, on the other hand,
recognizes its power to be neither unlimited, as in Despotism, nor limited by the
people, as in Democracy, but as limited by the Law of God alone as interpreted by
God’s faithful priesthood in the Church. Autocracy first appeared in embryonic form
in the pilgrim Israelite State led by Moses and the Judges, and then more clearly in the
Israelite State founded by Samuel and Saul and David.59 Sometimes pagan despotic
rulers allowed themselves to be led by the True God. Such was the Pharaoh who
venerated Jacob and Joseph, and Cyrus the Persian when he ordered the Temple in
Jerusalem to be rebuilt, and Darius the Mede when he rejoiced in the salvation of
Daniel and ordered his slanderers to be cast into the lions’ den instead. In those
moments, we can say that despots behaved, albeit fleetingly, as autocrats.

Josephus continues: Nimrod “also said he would be revenged on God, if he should

have a mind to down the world again. For that he would build a tower too high for
the waters o be able to reach. And so (by that method) he would avenge himself on
God for destroying their forefathers.” As St. John the Romanian writes, “After the
flood, people again turned away from God’s ways; and having turned away, they
again began to expect a flood. Therefore they decided to build the Tower of Babel, that
is, the Babylonian fortress. They wanted to build it up higher than the clouds, so that
water would no longer be a threat to them. For this madness God confused their
tongues, and they weren’t able to do any of this.”60

Rohl believes that the Tower of Babel was dedicated to the god Ea, transcribed into
Hebrew as Jahweh; that is, to the true God. But perhaps he transferred his allegiance
from God to Satan. For according to other sources, Nimrod built the Tower to Marduk
(or Merodach, “brightness of the day”), with whom Nimrod and the later kings of
Babylon may have identified themselves.61 Thus N. Smart writes: “If you drop the
first consonant of Nimrod's name and take the others M, R, D you will have the basic
root of the god of Babylon, whose name was Marduk, and whom most scholars
identify with Nimrod. In the Babylonian religion, Nimrod (or Marduk) held a unique

59 Some monarchist authors – for example, Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), - identify the term
“autocracy” (samoderzhavie) with all forms of one-man, monarchical government (yedinoderzhavie).
However, I have found it useful to make a distinction between monarchy and autocracy for reasons
explained in the introduction. The Economist describes Putin’s Russia as “an autocracy, not a
dictatorship” (August 29 – September 11, 1010, p. 17) – that is, a not very severe despotism. But
autocracy in the sense used in this book is different in kind from despotism insofar as it implies a
knowledge of, and obedience to, God, that despotism does not possess (or want to possess).
60 St. John of Neamts, the new Chozebite, “Today’s Tower of Babel”, Orthodox Christianity, October 3,

2017, http://orthochristian.com/106787.html.
61 I.R. Shafarevich, Sotzializm kak Iavlenie Mirovoj Istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of World History),

Paris: YMCA Press, 1977.

35
place. His wife was Semiramis. (In Cairo, Egypt, the Semiramis Hotel is named after
this woman.) Marduk and Semiramis were the ancient god and goddess of Babylon.
They had a son whom Semiramis claimed was virgin-born, and they founded the
mother and child cult. This was the central cult of ancient Babylon, the worship of a
mother and child, supposedly virgin-born. You can see in this a clever attempt on the
part of Satan to anticipate the genuine Virgin Birth and thus to cast disrepute upon
the story when the Lord Jesus would later be born in history. This ancient Babylonian
cult of the mother and child spread to other parts of the earth. You will find it in the
Egyptian religion as Isis and Osiris. In Greece it is Venus and Adonis, and in the Hindu
religion it is Ushas and Vishnu. The same cult prevails in various other localities. It
appears in the Old Testament in Jeremiah where the Israelites are warned against
offering sacrifices to ‘the Queen of Heaven.’ This Queen of Heaven is Semiramis, the
wife of Nimrod.”62

We may presume that it was in this transfer of allegiance from the True God to a
false god – perhaps himself - that constituted Nimrod’s real rebellion against the true
God… Human self-deification is the root motive of despotism…

The Babylonian state religion was a mixture of nature-worship and ancestor-

worship introduced by Nimrod. Thus the Babylonians worshipped the stars and
planets, and practised astrology as a means of discovering the will of the gods. "They
believed," writes Smart, "that they could predict not merely by earthly methods of
divination, but also by a study of the stars and of planets and the moon".63 One of the
purposes of the temples or towers or ziggurats, whose remains can still be seen in the
Iraqi desert, may have been as platforms from which to observe the signs of the zodiac.
The great spring festival of the chief god, Marduk/Nimrod, took place at Babylon, at
the splendid temple with ascending steps called in the Bible the Tower of Babel.

Nimrod’s Babylon, like all the early urban civilisations, was characterised by, on
the one hand, a despotic, totalitarian state structure, and, on the other hand, a pagan
system of religion. Both the governmental and the priestly hierarchies culminated in
one man, the king-priest-god. Thus N.N. Alexeyev writes: "The cult of the god-king
was confessed by nations of completely different cultures. Nevertheless, at its base
there lies a specific religious-philosophical world-view that is the same despite the
differences of epochs, nations and cultural conditions of existence. The presupposition
of this world-view is an axiom that received perhaps its most distinct formulation in
the religion of the Assyro-Babylonians. The Assyro-Babylonians believed that the
whole of earthly existence corresponds to heavenly existence and that every
phenomenon of this world, beginning from the smallest and ending with the greatest,
must be considered to be a reflection of heavenly processes. The whole Babylonian
world-view, all their philosophy, astrology and magic rested on the recognition of this
axiom. The earthly king was as it were a copy of the heavenly king, an incarnation of
divinity, an earthly god."64

62
Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971, p. 299:
63 Smart, op. cit., p. 299.
64 Alexeyev, "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhii" (“Christianity and the Idea of Monarchy), Put' (The Way),

N 6, January, 1927, p. 660.

36
 *

According to Hebrew tradition, the word “Babylon” comes from the Hebrew word
meaning “confusion”, or “mixing up”. “Ironically,” writes Juan Luis Montero
Fenollos, “this interpretation was itself a confusing of languages. In Akkadian, the
root of the words Babylon and Babel does not mean to mix: it means ‘gateway of the
gods’.”65 In either case, the name is appropriate; for the Tower of Babel was begun as
a gateway of the gods, an ascent to heaven, in order to “quarrel” with heaven, but
ended up as the cause of the confusion of languages and the dispersal of the nations
around the world…

"If, before the flood,” write two Catacomb Church nuns, “the impious apostates
were the Cainites, the descendants of the brother-murderer, then after the flood they
became the sons of the lawless Ham. The Hamites founded Babylon, one of the five
cities of the powerful hunter Nimrod (Genesis 10.8). 'Nimrod, imitating his forefather,
chose another form of slavery...' (St. John Chrysostom, Word 29 on Genesis). Nimrod
invented a form of slavery at which 'those who boast of freedom in fact cringe' (ibid.).
He rebelled against God, against the Divine patriarchal order of governing families
and governing peoples. The times of Nimrod were characterized by the appearance
of the beginnings of godless monarchism and future imperialism...”66

“Now the multitude,” writes Josephus, “were very ready to follow the
determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and
they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about
the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high,
sooner than anyone could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so
strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it
really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of
bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so
madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by
the destruction of the former sinners [in the Flood]; but he caused a tumult among
them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the
multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The
place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of
that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the
word Babel, confusion...” 67

The date of the Flood according to the Septuagint text of the Bible is 3289 BC. This
is a little earlier than the earliest kingdoms of Babylonia and Egypt, and also, not
coincidentally, the approximate date of the origins and dispersal of the Indo-European
languages according to the latest linguistic research…68

65 Fenollos, “Envy of the World: Babylon”, National Geographic History, January/February, 2017, p. 43.
66 "Taina Apokalipticheskogo Vavilona" (The Mystery of the Apocalyptic Babylon), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’

(Orthodox Life), 47, N 5 (545), May, 1995, pp. 14-16.

67 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, 4.
68 Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett, “Ancestry-constrained
Phylogenetical Analysis Supports the Indo-European Steppe Hypothesis”, Language, vol. 91, no. 1, 2015.

37
 For, having destroyed the Tower of Babel and divided the languages, God scattered
them in different directions across the face of the earth, which explains both the
existence of different nations speaking different languages and the fact that all the
primitive nations were pagan, worshipping a multiplicity of gods that often displayed
a marked kinship with each other and the original Babylonian religion.

What was the meaning of the scattering of the nations? St. Paul provides the clue
in his sermon to the Areopagus in Athens: “He made of one blood every nation of
men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times
and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord in the hope
that they might grope for Him and find Him, although he is not far from each one of
us” (Acts 17.26-27). Thus on the one hand all nations have a single nature and origin,
being “of one blood”. On the other hand God has determined that they should live in
different groups or nations in different places all over the world, so that the one God
should be glorified in different ways and in different tongues throughout the world –
but also so that the evil that arises in one people should not quickly or easily be
communicated to the rest of the human race.

It was God’s plan that all the nations, though sunk in paganism and separated
geographically and linguistically through Nimrod’s folly, should seek for the One
True God and worship Him together “with one heart and lips”. Moreover, this aim
was in fact achieved with founding of the Church of all nations at Pentecost in 33 AD.
For then the division and scattering of the nations in the time of Nimrod was reversed:
“Once, when He descended and confounded the tongues, the Most High divided the
nations. But when He divided the tongues of fire, He called all men into unity. And
with one accord we glorify the All-Holy Spirit.”69

Nevertheless, for a time – more precisely, until the coming of Christ and the
preaching of the Apostles – God tolerated paganism; for “in bygone generations He
allowed all nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14.16). But even in those pre-
Christian times “He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave
us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness”
(Acts 14.17). Moreover, as St. Augustine says, there is “a God-shaped hole” in the soul
of every man, exactly fashioned to accommodate the One True God. And so now the
apostles “preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living
God, Who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and all things that are in them” (Acts
14.15)…

69 Pentecostarion, Pentecost, kontakion.

38
 3. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (3) PHARAONIC EGYPT

Babylon’s first “colony” in a cultural and religious sense was Egypt (Mizraim),
whose religion, governmental structure and architectural style in many ways recalled
those of Babylon. Indeed, Egypt presented pagan absolutism in a hardly less “pure”
form than Babylon. The first king of Egypt, or pharaoh, Menes, ruled in about 3100
BC. The earliest of the pyramids (which were burial places for the pharaohs), the step
pyramid of Saqqara, was built in about 2450 BC. Egypt therefore represents, with
Babylon, the oldest urban civilization in world history since the Flood. (As discussed
above, the Cainites built urban civilizations before the Flood.)

Now Egyptian religion was a very complicated mixture of creature-worship and

ancestor-worship. Thus Diodorus Siculus writes: “The gods, they say, had been
originally mortal men, but gained their immortality on account of wisdom and public
benefits to mankind, some of them having also become kings; and some have the same
names, when interpreted, with the heavenly deities… Helios [Re], they say, was the
first king of the Egyptians, having the same name with the celestial luminary [the
sun]…”70

“Although Egypt had a pantheon of gods,” writes Phillips, “the principal deity was
the sun god Re (also called Ra), for whose worship a massive religious centre had
grown up at Heliopolis, some fifty kilometres to the north of Memphis. It was believed
that Re had once ruled over Egypt personally but, wearied by the affairs of mankind,
had retired to the heavens, leaving the pharaohs to rule in his stead. Called ‘the son of
Re’, the pharaoh was considered a half-human, half-divine being, through whose
body Re himself could manifest. [Thus a typical letter to a pharaoh began: “To my
king, my lord, my sun-god”71] However, as the falcon god Horus was the protector of
Egypt, the king was also seen as his personification. By the Third Dynasty, therefore,
Re and Horus had been assimilated as one god: Re-Herakhte. Depicted as a human
male with a falcon’s head, this composite deity was considered both the god of the
sun and the god of Egypt, and his incarnation on earth was the pharaoh himself. Only
the king could expect an individual eternity with the gods, everyone else could only
hope to participate in this vicariously, through their contribution to his well-being.”72

The Egyptian Pharaoh was, according to John Bright, “no viceroy ruling by divine
election, nor was he a man who had been deified: he was god – Horus visible among
his people. In theory, all Egypt was his property, all her resources at the disposal of
his projects”73 – and these, of course, were on the most massive scale. “The system was
an absolutism under which no Egyptian was in theory free,… the lot of the peasant
must have been unbelievably hard.”74 Thus according to Herodotus, the largest of the
pyramids, that of Pharaoh Khufu, was built on the labour of 100,000 slaves. It is far
larger than any of the cathedrals or temples built by any other religion in any other

70 Quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, II, 1.
71 Bernhard W. Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament, London: Longman, 1967, p. 45, note.
72 Phillips, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
73 Bright, A History of Israel, London: SCM Press, 1980, p. 39.
74 Bright, op. cit., pp. 39, 40.

39
country, and it has recently been discovered to contain the largest boat found
anywhere in the world.75

Pharaoh was the mediator between heaven and earth. Without him, it was believed,
the world would descend into chaos; he guaranteed that the sun shone, the Nile
inundated the land and the crops grew. Hence the huge care the Egyptians devoted
to his burial and mummification after death: it was a matter of the life and death, not
only of the Pharaoh, but of his people.

As David Silverman writes: “The king’s identification with the supreme earthly
and solar deities of the Egyptian pantheon suggests that the king in death embodied
the duality that characterized the ancient Egyptian cosmos. The deified ruler
represented both continuous regeneration (Osiris) and the daily cycle of rebirth (as
Re). In their understanding of the cosmos, the ancient Egyptians were accustomed to
each of their deities possessing a multiplicity of associations and roles. It was a natural
extension of this concept for them to view the deified Pharaoh in a simìlar way.”76

All the dead Pharaohs, with the exception of the “disgraced” Hatshepsut and the
“heretic” Akhenaton (see below), were worshipped in rites involving food offerings
and prayers. Even some non-royal ancestors were worshipped; they were called “able
spirits of Re” because it was thought that they interceded for the living with the sun
god. The pyramids and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were all built, at colossal
cost and effort, with only one religious aim: to ensure the Pharaoh’s happiness in the
life after death.

Another important Egyptian god was Osiris. Osiris was at times considered the
eldest son of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, as well as being brother and
husband of Isis, with Horus being considered his posthumously begotten son. In the
Old Kingdom (2686 - 2181 BC) the pharaoh was considered a son of the sun god Ra
who, after his death, ascended to join Ra in the sky. Osiris was the judge of the dead
and the underworld, and the agency that granted all life, including sprouting
vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River. He was described as "He Who is
Permanently Benign and Youthful" and the "Lord of Silence". The kings of Egypt were
associated with Osiris in death – as Osiris rose from the dead so they would be in
union with him, and inherit eternal life through a process of imitative magic. “77

The history of ancient Egypt is a story of unparalleled stability and faithfulness to

tradition, even immobility. For, as E.H. Gombrich writes, it lasted “longer than any
empire the world has ever known: nearly three thousand years [from Menes to
Cleopatra]. And [the Egyptians] took just as much care as they did with their corpses,
when they preserved them from rotting away, in preserving all their ancient traditions
over the centuries. Their priests made quite sure that no son did anything his father
had not done before him. To them, everything old was sacred.

75 Barbara Watterson, Ancient Egypt, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Company, 1998, pp. 18-19.
76 Silverman, Ancient Egypt, London: Piatkus, 1998, pp. 18-19.
77 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris.

40
 “Only rarely in the course of all that time did people turn against this strict
conformity. Once was shortly after the reign of King Cheops, about 2100 BC, when the
people tried to change everything. They rose up in rebellion against the pharaoh,
killed his ministers and dragged the mummies from their tombs: ‘Those who formerly
didn’t even own sandals now hold treasures, and those who once wore precious robes
go about in rags,’ the ancient papyrus tells us. ‘The land is turning like a potter’s
wheel.’ But it did not last long, and soon everything was as strict as before. If not more
so.

“On another occasion it was the pharaoh himself who tried to change everything.
Akhenaton was a remarkable man who lived around 1370 BC. He had no time for the
Egyptian religion, with its many gods and mysterious rituals. ‘There is only one God,’
he taught his people, ‘and that is the Sun, through whose rays all is created and
sustained. To Him alone you must pray.’

“The ancient temples were shut down, and King Akhenaton and his wife moved
into a new palace. Since he was utterly opposed to tradition, and in favour of fine new
ideas, he also had the walls of his palace painted in an entirely new style. One that
was no longer severe, rigid and solemn, but freer and more natural. However, this
didn’t please the people at all. They wanted everything to look as it had always done
for thousands of years. As soon as Akhenaton was dead, they brought back all the old
customs and the old style of art. So everything stayed as it had been, for as long as the
Egyptian empire endured…”78

78 Gombrich, A Little History of the World, London: Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 15-16.

41
II. ISRAEL AND THE GENTILES

42
 4. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (1) ABRAHAM

The first state-like structure originating from God and blessed by Him was the
extended family of Abraham. It can be called a state, albeit in embryonic form, because
it was in obedience to a sovereign authority, the father of the family, Abraham, and
because under his leadership it fought wars against other states, notably the kings of
Babylon. It also had continuity, in that after Abraham’s death the sovereign authority
was passed on to his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob (or Israel).

Abraham’s family-state constituted a remnant, the remnant of saved humanity that

had survived three terrible moral falls with global consequences: that of Adam and
Eve, that of Cain and his descendants, and that of Nimrod and the tower-builders.
Each of these falls had been followed by a fitting and catastrophic punishment of the
guilty: that of Adam by the death both of him and all his descendants, that of Cain
and his descendants by the universal Flood, and that of Nimrod by the scattering of
the tower-builders around the world and their mutual incomprehension. And yet a
tiny but holy remnant was preserved in each case: that of Seth and his descendants,
that of Noah and his descendants, and that of Abraham and his descendants…

The deification of the ruler of the City of Man in the person of Nimrod, and the
building of the tower of Babel at his command, was, of course, a direct challenge to
the truly Divine Ruler of the City of God. ”However," writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev,
"not all of humanity agreed to take part in the building of the tower. Our Russian Tale
of Burning Years (The Chronicle of Nestor), relying on the chronicle of George
Armatoll, says that righteous Heber (‘from him came the Hebrews’) refused to take
part in the undertaking. And the Armenian and some other chronicles add that certain
Japhethites also refused, because of which a war took place between them and
Nimrod."79

It is from this tiny remnant, descendants of Shem and Japheth, that a new beginning
was made according to a new principle that was racial as well as religious - although,
as we shall see, this racial principle admitted of many exceptions and was always
intended to be only a preparation for the re-admittance of all nations into the Church.
This new beginning was made with Abraham, a descendant of Noah's first son Shem
and Shem's great-grandson Heber, who was the father of Peleg, which means
“division”, since it was in his time that the Tower of Babel was destroyed and the
peoples divided and scattered across the earth. Heber and Peleg survived that
catastrophe, and they alone preserved the original, pre-diluvial language.

Abraham was therefore the father of the Hebrews. And yet he was not the father of
the Hebrews only, even in a purely genetic sense. His first son Ishmael is traditionally
considered to be the father of the Arabs. And his grandson through Isaac, Esau, was
the father of the Edomites. In the Apostle Paul’s allegorical interpretation, Isaac
represents the Church, and Ishmael – the unbelieving Jews enslaved to the Law
(Galatians 3.16).

79 Lebedev, “The Universal Babylon”, Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, 53, N 5 (640), May, 2003, p. 16.

43
 God commanded Abraham to depart from «Ur of the Chaldees» (Genesis 11.34;
Acts 7.4)80 and go to an unknown country, where he would live “in tents, while he
looked forward to a city founded, designed and built by God” (Hebrews 11.10). For
the worshippers of God, who wish to be at peace with heaven, cannot co-exist in peace
with the worshippers of man, who seek to “quarrel with heaven”: better to be stateless
and homeless than citizens of such a state. They must build their own state that is not
founded on the worship of man, but of God.

Abraham built only the foundations of that state: its completion would be the work
of Moses, David and Solomon. But he did beget the nation that received the faith that
inspired that state - the kingdom of Israel. And that nation would be exceedingly
fertile: as the Lord said to him when he seemed condemned to infertility: «I will make
you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from
you» (Genesis 17.6).

Abraham’s story, recounted in chapters 12 to 22 of Genesis, is that of a man who

obeys no man or state or institution; his only king is God. Like every true son of God,
he is free of men, and obeys them “only lest we offend them” (Matthew 17.27). So truly
independent is he that we read of no priest or king to whom he defers. The only
exception to this was Melchizedek, the mysterious king-priest of Salem, who blessed
him on his return from the slaughter of the Babylonian kings. However, Melchizedek
was the exception that proved the rule; for he was more like God than man, being both
the first and the last man in the history of the People of God lawfully to combine the
roles of king and priest81. Indeed, he was the first recorded true king and “priest of
the Most High God”, who was called “Possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14.18).
This title shows, according to St. Paul (Hebrews 7.3), that he was the type, not of any
merely human king, but of Christ God, the Supreme King and Chief High Priest.82
Like Christ in His Divine generation, he was “without father, without mother, without
genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of
God, remaining a priest continually” (Hebrews 7.3). Again like Christ at the Last
Supper, Melchizedek offers Abraham bread and wine, which is why Christ is called
“a priest after the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 7.17). His offering is a figure of
Christ’s offering of His Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine.83

80 Or, according to Ian Wilson, it may have been Urfa in Turkey (The Bible Is History, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, pp. 22-23). However, St. Stephen’s witness that Abraham “came out of
the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran” (Acts 7.4, Genesis 11.31-12.4) appears to settle the
question in favour of the Ur in Iraq, while confirming that he went from there to Haran in what is now
Turkey.
81 Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Zapiski rukovodstvuiuschaia k osnovatel’nomu razumeniu Knigi Bytia

(Notes Leading to a Fundamental Understanding of the Book of Genesis), Moscow, 1817, p. 78. An
exception may be found in the history of the tiny kingdom of Montenegro in the Ottoman period.
82 Melchisedek’s combining the roles of king and priest may also signify the Divine origin of both

offices. See Protopriest Valentine Asmus, “O monarkhii i nashem k nej otnoshenii” (“On Monarchy and
our Relationship to It”), Radonezh, N 2 (46), January, 1997, p. 4.
83 In fact, Mar Jacob considered it to be no figure of the Eucharist but the Eucharist itself: "None, before

the Cross, entered this order of spiritual ministration, except this man alone. Beholding the just Abraham
worthy of communion with him, he separated part of his oblation and took it out to him to mingle him
therewith. He bore forward bread and wine, but Body and Blood went forth, to make the Father of the
nations a partaker of the Lord's Mysteries." ("A Homily on Melchizedek", The True Vine, Summer, 1989,
no. 2, p. 44)

44
 So in being blessed by Melchizedek, the “king of peace”, Abraham is blessed by
Christ Himself, the true King of Peace.84

The proverbial faith of Abraham, which merited for him the title "father of the
faithful", was manifested, first of all, in his leaving Ur and setting out unquestioningly
for an unknown Promised Land. Nor was this simply a physical departure from the
land of his fathers: it also involved breaking with their pagan beliefs. For even his
father “served other gods” (Joshua 24.2).

Secondly, it was manifested in his believing God's promise that he would be a

father of nations, in spite of the fact that he was very old and his wife was barren.

And thirdly and most strikingly, it was manifested in his continuing to believe in
this promise even after God ordered him to kill Isaac.

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow writes: “The journey of Abram from the land of
his birth to the promised land is an image of the journey of self-abnegation, by which
man must pass from the condition of damaged nature to the condition of Grace.

“Every believer has the same commandment from God as the father of the faithful
– to leave all and renounce himself. ‘He who loves father or mother more than Me is
not worthy of Me,’ says the Lord (Matthew 10.37).

“Every believer is also promised ‘the blessing of Abraham in Jesus Christ’

(Galatians 3.14). ‘There is no one who would leave home, or brothers, or sisters, or
father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake and the Gospel’s, who
would not receive now, in this time and with persecutions, one hundred times more:
houses and brothers and sisters (and fathers) and mothers and children, and in the
age to come eternal life'’ (Mark 10.29,30).

“The believer who leaves his own will does God’s will with the same unlimited
obedience with which Abram ‘went, as the Lord told him’. God speaks to us in nature,
in the Holy Scriptures, in the conscience, in the adventures of life ruled by His
Providence. ‘To go, as the Lord tells’ is the rule in which is included the whole path of
those seeking the coming heavenly city.

“Like Abram, the believer comes closer to God to the extent that he leaves himself
behind; and like Abram, he thanks Him for His gifts of Grace. He will receive them
only so as to return them to their origin with faithfulness: and wherever and whenever
he receives them, he offers them as a sacrifice to God.”85

Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is cited by the Apostle James as the paragon "work of

84 Basil Willow writes: “According to St Isaac the Syrian, after the flood, the bones of Adam were given
to young Melchizedek who took them to the place of the future Golgotha & there set up a shrine where
he performed the sacrifice with leavened bread & wine. Hence Melchizedek is a priest foreshadowing
Christ’s Communion.“ (Facebook)
85 St. Philaret, Zapiski.

45
faith", whereby "faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made manifest"
(James 2.22). It shows that true morality is based, not on humanitarian kindness, but
on absolute, unquestioning obedience to the word of God. Moreover, the sacrifice of
Isaac is the clearest Old Testament prefiguring of the central act of the New, in which
"God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3.16). And it
merited for Abraham the first clear foreshadowing of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity
- the visitation of the three angels speaking as one God at the oak of Mamre (Genesis
18).

St. Gregory Palamas writes: "Believing in God is different from believing God. To
believe God is to believe His promises to us as sure and true, but to believe in Him is
to have a right understanding of Him. Both are necessary for us and we must speak
correctly in both respects, in such a way that people with correct understanding can
be confident that we are faithful before the God in Whom our faith is directed and
that, being faithful, we shall be justified by Him. 'Abraham believed God,' it says, 'and
it was counted unto him for righteousness' (Romans 4.3; Genesis 15.6; cf. Galatians
3.6; James 2.23). He had received a promise from god that in his seed, that is, in Isaac,
all the tribes of Israel would be blessed (Genesis 17.16; cf. 26.3-5, 24). Then he was
commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22.1), through whom the promise could
be fulfilled (Genesis 17.21; 21.12), while he was still a child. Without contradicting he,
the father, was hastening on his way to become his son's murderer while at the same
time regarding the promise concerning his son as infallibly sure (Genesis 22.1-18).

"Do you see what sort of faith brings justification? But Christ also promised us that
we would inherit eternal life, pleasure, glory and the kingdom, while then He
commanded us to be poor, to fast, to live in lowliness and affliction, to be ready to die
and to crucify ourselves togethe with our passions and desires (cf. Galatians 5.24). If
therefore we eagerly do these things while at the same time believing God's promise
to us, then we shall have really believed God in the way Abraham did, and it will be
counted to our righteousness."86

St. Gregory takes Abraham's heroic work of faith as his main illustration of the
difference between philosophical or scientific knowledge and the super-rational
knowledge of faith: "I believe that our holy faith is, in a certain manner, a vision of our
heart which goes beyond all sensation and all thought, for it transcends the mental
powers of our soul. I mean by 'faith', not the Orthodox confession, but being
unshakably established upon it and upon the promises of God. For how through faith
do we see those things which are promised for that unending age which is to come?
By the senses? But faith is 'the basis of things hoped for' (Hebrews 11.1); and there is
no way in which that which is to come and is hoped for may be seen by the senses;
which is why the Apostle added: 'the proof of things not seen'. Is there, then, some
mental power which will see the things hoped for? But how could there be if they
'have not gone up into the heart of man' (I Corinthians 2.9)? What, then? Do we not

86 St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 8, "On Faith".

46
see through faith the things that have been promised by God, since they transcend all
sensual and mental activity? But all those who from the beginning of time sought the
heavenly fatherland through works died, according to the Apostle, 'without having
obtained the promises' (Hebrews 11.39), but saw and greeted them from afar. There
is, then, both a vision and an understanding of the heart beyond all mental activity...
Faith is this supra-mental vision, while the enjoyment of that which is believed in is a
vision surpassing that vision...

"But let us dwell a little longer on faith and on the Divine and joyous contemplation
which it procures for Christians: faith, the vehicle of the power of the Gospel, the life
of the Apostles, the justification of Abraham, from which all righteousness begins, in
which it ends, and by which 'every righteous man shall live' (Romans 1.7), while he
who withdraws from it falls away from the Divine goodwill, for 'without faith it is
impossible to please God' (Hebrews 11.6); faith, which ever frees our race from every
deception and establishes us in the truth and the truth in us, from which no-one will
separate us, even if he takes us for madmen, we who through the true faith have gone
out into an ecstasy beyond reasoning, witnessing both by word and deed that we are
not 'being carried away by every wind of doctrine' (Ephesians 4.14), but possess that
unique knowledge of the truth of the Christians and profess the most simple, most
Divine and truly unerring contemplation. Let us then leave the future for the time
being, let us consider the supra-mental contemplation which faith gives of those
things which have happened from the beginning: 'It is by faith that we recognize that
the ages were formed by the word of God, so that those things which are seen did not
come to be from those which appear' (Hebrews 11.3). What mind could take in that all
this which has come to be has come from that which is absolutely non-existent, and
that by a word alone? For that which is accessible to the mental powers does not at all
transcend them. Thus the wise men of the Greeks, understanding that no corruptible
thing passes into non-existence, and no existent thing comes out of non-existence,
believed that the world was without beginning or end. But the faith, surpassing the
conceptions which come from a contemplation of created things, united us to the
Word Who is above all and to the simple, unfabricated truth; and we have understood
better than by a proof that all things were created, not only out of non-existence, but
also by the word of God alone. What is this faith? Is it a natural or supernatural power?
Supernatural, certainly. For 'no-one can come unto the Father except through the Son'
(Matthew 11.27; John 10.9), Who has placed us above ourselves and turned us to unity
with the Father Who gathers us together. Thus Paul 'received grace for obedience to
the Faith' (Romans 1.5). Thus 'if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved'
(Romans 10.9). Thus those who have no seen and believed are more blessed than those
who have seen and believed in Him Who lives after death and is the Leader of eternal
life (John 20.29; Acts 3.15). For through the super-cosmic eyes of faith they have seen
and venerated that which the eye has not believed it can see and which reason cannot
conceive.

"'This is the victory which has conquered the world, even our faith' (I John 5.4).
Paradoxical though it may be to say so, this faith is that which, in different ways and
at different times, re-established the world which had previously fallen. Then it
transformed it into a more Divine state, placing it above the heavens, and making a

47
heaven out of the earth. What preserved the seeds of the second world? Was it not the
faith of Noah? What made Abram Abraham and the father of many nations, like the
sand and the stars in number? Was it not faith in the promises which at that time were
incomprehensible? For he held his only-begotten heir ready for slaughter and, O
wonder!, never ceased to believe that through him he would have many children.
What, then? Did not the old man appear to be a fool to those who see things by reason?
But the final issue showed, through the grace of God, that his faith was not folly but a
knowledge surpassing all reasoning."87

Thus the new beginning for the Church which God created in Abraham He created
in the faith of Abraham, which is the faith in Christ. For the Lord Himself said:
"Abraham rejoiced to see My Day: he saw it, and was glad" (John 8.56). And
Abraham’s vision of Christ is precisely the vision of Christ as the pre-eternal God:
“Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8.58).

Indeed, Abraham’s whole life is a model of the Christian life of faith demonstrated
by works performed for God’s sake. Purified and strengthened through a series of
trials, in each of which he is called to obey God by performing a work of faith, in
Abraham we see “faith working together with his works, and by works faith being
made perfect” (James 2.22). These works of faith include: exile from his native land
(Chaldea), separation from his relatives (Lot), struggle against the enemies of the faith (the
four kings headed by the king of Babylon), struggle against his fallen desires (Pharaoh,
Hagar), reception of the sacraments (circumcision as a figure of baptism, and bread and
wine as a figure of the Eucharist), charity (rescuing his brother Lot and his household,
the hospitality given to the Angels at the Oak of Mamre) and, finally, the complete
sacrifice of the heart to God (the sacrifice of Isaac). The supreme demonstration of
Abraham’s faith was his belief that “God was able to raise [Isaac] from the dead”
(Hebrews 11.19), which was a type of the Resurrection of Christ.

Since the foundation of the Church is the faith of Abraham, for Isaac his God is "the
God of Abraham", while for Jacob He is "the God of Abraham and Isaac", and for all
succeeding generations He is "the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob", or, more
simply, "the God of our fathers". Thus our faith is an historical faith; we distinguish it
from other faiths as being the faith of our fathers, and our God is distinguished from
other gods as being the God of our fathers, and in particular the God of our father
Abraham. And that is why we preserve the faith of our fathers in all things; for as the
Scripture says: "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set"
(Proverbs 22.28).

As we have seen, Abraham believed in God’s promise that from his seed would
come the Seed, in Whom all the nations of the world would be blessed (Genesis 12.3).
St. Paul explains that this Seed is Christ the Messiah and Saviour of the world, Jesus
Christ (Galatians 3.16). In other words, as St. Theophan the Recluse writes, “the
blessing given to him for his faith would be spread to all peoples, but not because of
Abraham himself or all of his descendants, but because of One of his descendants –
his Seed, Who is Christ; through Him all the tribes of the earth would receive the

87 St. Gregory, Triads.

48
blessing.”88 Thus while Abraham is the father of the Jewish race, the chosen people of
the Old Testament, the new beginning that God made in Abraham related not only to
the Jews but to all peoples of all ages. In fact, the nation which Abraham founded was
not defined genetically, but by faith; it was a nation of believers, of those who believe
in Christ; for, as St. Paul says, "they which are of the faith, they are the children of
Abraham" (Galatians 3.7) - which faith the majority of the Jews of Christ's time did not
share (John 8.33-58).

God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants, known as the Abrahamic Covenant,
prefigure the whole future history of the relationship between the City of God and the
City of Man. They are so important that they are proclaimed in at least eight different
versions, or “drafts” (Genesis 12.1-3, 12.7, 12.13,14-17, 14.18-20, 15.1-19, 16.10-12, 17.1-
22, 22.17-18), not to speak of their repetition to his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob.
Each successive draft makes the Covenant a little more precise and far-reaching, in
response to Abraham’s gradual increase in spiritual stature.

The promises relate to the two peoples who descend from the two sons of
Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac is the true heir of Abraham, the freeborn son of
Sarah, who inherits the promises and blessings given to Abraham in full measure,
being also a man of faith of whom it is also said that in his Seed, Christ, all the nations
of the earth shall be blessed (Genesis 26.3-4). Ishmael is the son of a slave, Hagar, and
does not inherit those blessings, although he does receive the promise that his heirs
will be strong and numerous.

Now according to the popular conception, Isaac is the ancestor of the Jews, and
Ishmael – of the Arab peoples. Certainly, the description of Ishmael’s race as “wild”
and warlike that is given by the Angel to Hagar (Genesis 16.10-12) appears to
correspond closely, as St. Philaret of Moscow points out, to the character and life-style
of the Arabs until Mohammed, who were constantly fighting and lived “in the
presence of their brethren” – that is, near, or to the east of, the descendants of Abraham
from his other concubine, Hetturah – the Ammonites, Moabites and Idumeans.89

A similar interpretation appears to stand true for the next generation, to Isaac’s
sons Jacob and Esau, who are said to correspond to the Jews (Jacob), on the one hand,
and the Idumeans (Esau), on the other. This fits very well with the Lord’s words to
Isaac’s wife Rebecca, that “two nations are in thy womb…, and the one people shall
be stronger than the other people, and the elder [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob]”
(Genesis 25.23); for the Jews, from Jacob to David to the Hasmonean kings, almost
always showed themselves to be stronger than the Idumeans and often held them in
bondage. It was only towards the Coming of Christ that an Idumean, Herod the Great,
reversed the relationship by killing the Hasmoneans and becoming the first non-
Jewish king of Israel – the event which, according to the prophecy of Jacob, would
usher in the reign of the Messiah (Genesis 49.10).

88 St. Theophan, Tolkovanie na Poslanie k Galatam (Interpretation of the Epistle to the Galatians), 3.16.
89 St. Philaret, Zapiski, part 2, p. 98.

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 But to return to the spiritual interpretation of the Apostle Paul: the two peoples –
or two covenants, as he calls them - represent, not racial, but spiritual categories:
“Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman. But he
who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman
through promise, which things are symbolic. For these are the two covenants: the one
from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar – for this Hagar is
Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage
with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.”
(Galatians 4.22-26).

In other words, Isaac stands for the Christians, both Jewish and Gentile, while
Ishmael stands for the Jews who reject Christ. For the Christians, - and this includes the
Jews before Christ who believed in His Coming, - become through faith in Christ the
freeborn heirs of the promises made to Abraham and Isaac, whereas the Jews who
remain slaves to the Law of Moses and refuse to believe in Christ, show themselves to
be the children of the bondwoman, and therefore cannot inherit the promises together
with the Christians.

Moreover, it can be said of the Jews, as of the men of Ishmael’s race, that ever since
they rejected Christ they have become “wild”, with their hands against all, and the
hands of all against them. They are always striving for “freedom” but remaining
voluntarily in slavery to their Talmudic Law.90 It may therefore be that the age-old
phenomenon of mutual enmity between the Jews and the Gentiles, of anti-semitism
and anti-Gentilism, is prophesied in these verses.

That Isaac is the ancestor of Christ and the Christians is indicated also by his choice
of wife, Rebecca, who signifies the Bride of Christ, the Church. Rebecca is freeborn,
being of the family of Abraham, and is an even closer image of the Church than Sarah;
for she is Isaac's only wife as the Church is Christ's only Bride. Moreover, the Holy
Fathers see in the story of the wooing of Rebecca a parable of Christ's wooing of the
Church, in which Eleazar, signifying the Holy Spirit, conveyed Isaac's proposal to her
at the well, which signifies Baptism, and gave her gifts of precious jewels, signifying
the gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed at Chrismation.91 Ishmael, on the other hand,
receives a wife from outside the holy family – from Egypt. And she is chosen for him,
not by a trusted member of the family, but by his mother, the slave-woman Hagar.

The relationship between Isaac and Ishmael is almost exactly mirrored in the
relationship between Isaac’s two sons, Jacob and Esau. Thus St. Philaret comments on
the verse: “The Lord hath chosen Jacob unto Himself, Israel for His own possession”
(Psalm 134.4), as follows: “This election refers in the first place to the person of Jacob,
and then to his descendants, and finally and most of all to his spirit of faith: for ‘not
all [coming from Israel] are of Israel’ (Romans 9.6). The two latter elections, that is, the
election of the race of Israel, and the election of the spiritual Israel, are included in the
first, that is, in the personal election of Jacob: the one prophetically, and the other
figuratively.

90 St. Philaret, Zapiski, p. 100.
91 St. Ambrose of Milan, On Isaac, or the Soul.

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 “The reality of this prefigurement in Holy Scripture is revealed from the fact that
the Apostle Paul, while reasoning about the rejection of the carnal, and the election of
the spiritual Israel, produces in explanation the example of Jacob and Esau (Romans
9), and also from the fact that the same Apostle, in warning the believing Jews against
the works of the flesh, threatens them with the rejection of Esau (Hebrews 12.16, 17).

“And so Jacob is an image, in the first place, of the spiritual Israel, or the Christian
Church in general, and consequently Esau, on the contrary, is an image of the carnal
Israel.

“Esau and Jacob are twins, of whom the smaller overcomes the larger: in the same
day the spiritual Israel was born together with the carnal, but, growing up in secret,
is finally revealed and acquires ascendancy over him.

“Isaac destines his blessing first of all to Esau, but then gives it to Jacob: in the same
way the carnal Israel is given the promises from the Heavenly Father, but they are
fulfilled in the spiritual [Israel].

“While Esau looks for a hunting catch in order to merit his father’s blessing, Jacob,
on the instructions of his mother, to whom God has revealed his destinies, puts on the
garments of the first-born and seizes it before him. While the carnal Israel supposes
that by the external works of the law it will acquire the earthly blessing of God, the
spiritual Israel, with Grace leading it, having put on the garments of the merits and
righteousness of the First-Born of all creation, ‘is blessed with every spiritual blessing
in the heavenly places in Christ’ (Ephesians 1.3).

“The sword of battle and continuing slavery is given to the rejected Esau as his
inheritance. And for the carnal Israel, from the time of its rejection, there remained
only the sword of rebellion, inner enslavement and external humiliation.

“The rejected Esau seeks the death of Jacob; but he withdraws and is saved. The
rejected old Israel rises up to destroy the new; but God hides it in the secret of His
habitation, and then exalts it in strength and glory…”92

The wives of Jacob have the same signification. Thus Leah, whom Jacob married
first, signifies with her weak eyes and fertile womb the weak faith of the carnal Israel
and its abundant offspring. It is precisely blindness that “shall befall Israel until the
fullness of the Gentiles shall come in” (Romans 11.25). But Rachel, whom he married
later but loved first and most strongly, signifies the New Testament Church, which
the Lord loved first but married later. For the Church of the Gentiles, that of Enoch
and Noah and Abraham before his circumcision, existed before that of Moses and
David and the Prophets. Moreover, Rachel brought forth her children in pain because
the New Testament Church brought forth her first children in the blood of martyrdom,
and is destined to inherit spiritual blessedness only through suffering – “we must
through many tribulations enter the Kingdom of God” (Acts 14.22).

92 St. Philaret, Zapiski, part 3, pp. 27-28.

51
 Christ recognized that the unbelieving Jews were from a genetic, physical point of
view, the children of Abraham, saying: “I know that you are Abraham’s seed” (John
8.37). And yet only a few moments later He denied them the honour of being his
spiritual offspring, saying: “If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of
Abraham. But now ye seek to kill Me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have
heard of God. This did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father… Ye are of your
father, the devil” (John 8.39-41, 44).

Ultimately, therefore, it is not physical, genetic descent that constitutes sonship

from Abraham, but faith, the faith of Christ, and the good works that demonstrate that
faith. Thus only the Christians constitute the chosen people. As St. Justin the Martyr
writes in the second century A.D.: “The seed is divided after Jacob and comes down
through Judah and Phares and Jesse to David. Now this is surely a sign that some of
you Jews are surely the children of Abraham, and that you will share in the inheritance
of Christ; but… a greater part of your people… drink of bitter and godless doctrine
while you spurn the word of God.”93

93 St. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 34.

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 5. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (2) JOSEPH

Compelled by famine, the Israelites or Hebrews, 75 people under the leadership of

Jacob, arrived in Egypt in about 1665 BC, where they remained for 215 years.94

The distinguishing mark of the Hebrew nation (and, later, of the Israeli state) was
its claim that its origin lay outside itself, in the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
in the direct call by God to Abraham to leave his homeland, the Sumerian city of Ur,
and go into a land which God had promised him.

The God of Abraham was different from the false gods of polytheism in several
ways.

First, He revealed Himself as completely transcendent to the material world, being

worshipped neither in idols nor in men nor in the material world as a whole, but rather
as the spiritual, immaterial Creator of all things, visible and invisible. Secondly, He
did not reveal Himself to all, nor could anyone acquire faith in Him by his own efforts,
but He revealed Himself only to those with whom He chose to enter into communion
- Abraham, first of all. Thirdly, He was a jealous God Who required that His followers
worship Him alone, as being the only true God. This was contrary to the custom in the
pagan world, where ecumenism was the vogue - that is, all the gods, whoever they
were and wherever they were worshipped, were considered true.

The nation of the Hebrews, therefore, was founded on an exclusively religious -

and religiously exclusive - principle. In Ur, on the other hand, and in the other proto-
communist states of the ancient world, the governing principle of life was not religion,
still less the nation, but the state. Or rather, its governing principle was a religion of the
state as incarnate in its ruler; for everything, including religious worship, was
subordinated to the needs of the state, and to the will of the leader of the state, the
god-king.

But Israel was founded upon a rejection of this idolatry of the state and its leader,
and an exclusive subordination to the will of the God of Abraham, Who could in no
way be identified with any man or state or material thing whatsoever. It followed that
the criterion for membership of the nation of the Hebrews was neither race (for the
Hebrews were not clearly distinguished racially from the other Semitic tribes of the
Fertile Crescent, at any rate at the beginning, and God promised not only to multiply
Abraham’s seed, but also that “in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed”
(Genesis 22.18)), nor citizenship of a certain state (for they had no such citizenship at
the beginning), nor residence in a particular geographical region (for it was not until
500 years after Abraham that the Hebrews conquered Palestine). The foundation of
the nation, and criterion of its membership, was faith alone, faith in the God Who
revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - and acceptance of the rite of

94According to the Septuagint. The corrupted Masoretic text used today by the Jews and the West
asserts wrongly that they were there for 430 years. See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1yRTC6kGE&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0dQWdUTXt
CJS1h04JUQXeE_P-If9OTEI7la0lSsD94B4bIRruuwTvqmYo.

53
circumcision. At the same time, the very exclusivity of this faith meant that Israel was
chosen above all other nations to be the Lord’s: “in the division of the nations of the
whole earth, He set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord’s portion.”
(Wisdom of Sirach 17.17).

All the major States of antiquity were absolutist monarchies, or despotisms. The
defining characteristic of such a State is the concentration of all power, secular and
religious, in the hands of one man. In pagan societies this is combined with worship
of the ruler as a god. Insofar as the worship of a created being is a blasphemous lie
and places the state under the control of “the father of lies”, Satan, such a state can be
called a satanocracy. Israel was the opposite of this State system insofar as it
worshipped no man, and had no ruler but God; and as such it can be called a theocracy.
However, pure theocracy is an extreme rarity and cannot in practice be sustained for
long: the only true theocracy in history has been the Church of Christ – which is not,
and cannot be, a State like other States, since its essence and heart is not of this world,
being in essence the kingdom that is not of this world. If, therefore, the people of God
are to have a State organization, a system of government that comes as close as
possible to rule by God must be devised. The form of government that is closest to
theocracy is what Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov called “delegated theocracy”95 –
that is, autocracy, whose essence consists in a division of powers between a king having
control over all secular matters and a high priest having control over all religious
matters, with both recognizing the supreme lordship of the One True God.

The very first, embryonic example of autocracy is to be found, paradoxically, in

Egypt – the Egypt of the time of Joseph. For the formal ruler of Egypt, Pharaoh, after
incarcerating Joseph for a time on the basis of a false witness, placed virtually all
power in his hands – that is, in the hands of a servant of the True God. As Joseph
himself, said: “God has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and
ruler throughout all the land of Egypt” (Genesis 45.8; Acts 7.10). Pharaoh “sent and
loosed him, even the ruler of the people, and released him. He made him lord of his
house, and ruler over all his substance, to instruct his princes as himself, and to teach
his elders wisdom” (Psalm 104.19-21). The Egyptians also, following Joseph’s
example, showed great honour to his father, Jacob. This honour was particularly
manifest at the burial of Jacob, when “all Pharaoh’s servants and the palace
dignitaries, joined by all the dignitaries of the land of Egypt” (Genesis 50.7), went up
with Joseph and his family to bury the patriarch in Canaan. It was surely
unprecedented that the whole elite of a great state should travel to a foreign and
insignificant land to honour the father of a native of that land…

The relationship between father and son in Egypt was similar to that of the
“symphony of powers” in Byzantium; for just as Joseph recognized the spiritual
leadership of his father Jacob, so Jacob recognized the royal dignity of his son in his
bowing down to his cross-like staff. As the Church says: “Israel, foreseeing the future,
did reverence to the top of Joseph’s staff [Genesis 47.31], revealing how in times to
come the most glorious Cross should be the safeguard of royal power.”96

95 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), Buenos Aires, 1992.
96 Menaion, September 14, Exaltation of the Cross, Mattins, Canon, Canticle 7, troparion.

54
 It follows, according to St. Ignaty Brianchaninov, that it was the Hebrew Joseph,
and not any of the pagan Pharaohs, who was “the founder of autocratic (or
monarchical) rule in Egypt”97, transforming it from patriarchal simplicity to a fully
organized state with permanent citizenship and a land tax, which Joseph instituted to
prepare for the years of famine, and which lasted, essentially, for hundreds of years.
Records show that there were dramatic fluctuations in the level of Nile flooding, and
therefore of the harvest yield, during the reigns of the 19th- and early 18th-century BC
Pharaohs. One of those Pharaohs was Senwosret III, in whose time, as Ian Wilson
writes, “uniquely in all Egyptian history, the great estates formerly owned by Egypt’s
nobles passed to the monarchy. They did so in circumstances that are far from clear,
unless the Biblical Joseph story might just happen to hold the key: ‘So Joseph gained
possession of all the farmland in Egypt for Pharaoh, every Egyptian having sold his
field because the famine was too much for them; thus the land passed over to Pharaoh’
(Genesis 47.20). So could Senwosret III or Amenemhet III, or both, have had an Asiatic
chancellor called Joseph, who manipulated the circumstances of a prolonged national
famine to centralise power in the monarchy’s favour?”98

Of course, Egypt remained a pagan country, and on Jacob’s and Joseph’s deaths
their embryonic “symphony of powers” disappeared, being replaced by the absolutist
despotism of the Pharaoh “who knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1.8) and hated Israel. It
was in the fire of conflict with this absolutist ruler that the first real autocracy based
on a symphony with the One True God, Israel, came into being.

The wonderful story of Joseph perfectly illustrates one of the great themes of
history: the intertwining of God’s justice and His mercy. St. Nikolai Velimirovich
writes: “The innocent and chaste Joseph endured two great and difficult temptations
and overcame them: the temptation of wicked envy on the part of his blood brothers,
and the temptation of adulterous passion from the Egyptian temptress. Jealousy sold
him as a slave, and the passion of adultery drove the innocent one to prison. In both
cases he returned good for evil: he gave food to his hungry brothers and preserved
the life, throne and people of frightened Pharaoh. His brothers thought to slay him,
but God saved him; the adulterous woman thought to destroy him, but God saved
him. Out of slavery and imprisonment, God crowned him with glory and unlimited
authority. And him whom his evil brothers could have killed with one stroke and
whom Potiphar's powerful wife could have crushed in an instant, God made the
unlimited master over the lives of millions of people and the only nourisher of his
starving brothers. Such is the wondrous mercy of God toward the righteous. Thus
does the Lord know how to save and glorify the innocent and the chaste. In the
greatness of the destiny of Joseph, we see the greatness of God's mercy. There is one
eye that never sleeps, my brethren. Let us cling to God and not fear anyone. Let us be
innocent and chaste and not fear evil, or slander, or prison, or ridicule, or misfortune.
On the contrary, let us rejoice when all of this befalls us because of our innocence and

97 St. Ignaty, “Iosif. Sviaschennaia povest’ iz knigi Bytia” (Joseph. A Holy Tale from the Book of
Genesis), Polnoe Sobranie Tvorenij (Complete Collection of Works), volume II, Moscow, 2001, p. 37.
98 Wilson, The Bible is History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 37.

55
chastity; let us rejoice and await with faith the revelation of God's wonders toward us.
Let us, in every storm, await the thunder of God's justice - and afterward the calm.

O mysterious Lord, Who secretly but vigilantly accompanies the righteous in

slavery and in prison, and manifests Thy mercy in Thine own time, help us to be
innocent and chaste.

To Thee be glory and praise forever. Amen.”99

99 Velimirovich, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part IV, pp. 330-331.

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 6. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (3) MOSES

Taken as a whole, the life of Moses is the clearest prefiguring of the Life of Christ
in the Old Testament. His pre-eminence among the Old Testament saints is
indisputable; the religion of the Jews is the religion of Moses and the following of
God’s commandments as dictated (literally) by Moses. So who was he?

After Joseph, the Hebrews lived as slaves of the Egyptian pharaohs. Then in about
1450 BC, God called the Hebrews out of the Egyptian despotism as he had called them
out of the despotism of Babylon in the time of Abraham. The first battle between
Church and State in history had been Abraham’s battle with the Babylonian kings.
The second took place between Moses and the Egyptian Pharaoh.100 This was the first
“war of national liberation” in history. The Hebrews won. However, the Egyptians
did not record the fact of Pharaoh’s defeat in their monuments, since gods, according
to the Egyptian conception, could not fail. 101

Moses had been brought up in Pharaoh’s family in a near-miraculous manner, by

being found as a baby among the rushes and given to the daughter of Pharaoh to be
raised as her son. And so he acquired an Egyptian education – an ideal preparation
for war against Pharaoh. The story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt under
Moses’ leadership is the foundation story of the Hebrew people. But, as the Church
sings, Moses was as much a religious as a political leader: “Thou, O Moses, didst
preserve the order of sacrifice precious to God, and the kingdom and the
priesthood.”102 After wandering for forty years in the desert, the Israelites’ embryonic
state-cum-religion finally acquired a territorial base in Israel under Kings Saul and
David…

Moses added a fifth element, besides faith, sacrifices, the kingdom and
circumcision (which Abraham had practised), to the life of Israel: the law. Josephus
says that Moses “invented the very word ‘law’, then unknown in Greek, and was the
first legislator in world history. Philo accused both philosophers and lawgivers of
copying his ideas, Heraclius and Plato being the chief culprits.” The law was necessary
for several reasons. First, by the time of Moses, the Israelites were no longer an
extended family of a few hundred people, as in the time of Abraham and the
Patriarchs, which could be governed by the father of the family without the need of
any written instructions or governmental bureaucracy. Since their migration to Egypt
in the time of Joseph, they had multiplied and become a nation of four hundred
thousand people, which no one man could rule unaided. Secondly, the sojourn of the
Israelites in Egypt had introduced them again to the lures of the pagan world, and a
law was required to protect them from these lures. And thirdly, in order to escape
from Egypt, pass through the desert and conquer the Promised Land in the face of
many enemies, a quasi-military organization and discipline was required.

100 According to Daniel Rohl, this Pharaoh was called Djedneferre Dudimose (in other sources,
Thutmose), who “was crowned in the temple of Amun at Karnak in 1450 BC” (From Eden to Exile,
London: Arrow Books, 2002, p. 178).
101 Nevertheless, Josephus records in Contra Apionem that in the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose, according

to an Egyptian priest called Manetho, “for what cause I know not, a blast of God smote us…”
102 Menaion, September 4.

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 Written Scriptures had also become necessary because the spiritual condition of
men had deteriorated, as St. John Chrysostom explains: "Those ancient men of God
who lived before the Law were not taught by words or writings; being pure in heart,
they were enlightened by spiritual illumination, and thus they learned and were
assured of the will of God. God Himself spoke with them, giving them information
and commandments with His own lips. Such men were Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
and their descendants Job and Moses. But because men grew weaker and became
unworthy of receiving assurance and instruction (directly) from the Holy Spirit, God,
in His love for mankind, bestowed the Scriptures, that at least through them men
might remember (Him) and learn His will. Likewise, Christ also spoke to His disciples
personally and sent them His grace as a teacher. But because heresies were later to
spring up and spread, and because our morals were to become corrupt, He designed
to have the Gospels written down, that from them we might learn the truth, that we
might not be led astray by the falsehoods of heresy, and that our morals might not be
utterly corrupted."103

But the law was useless without knowledge of the lawgiver, God; so even before
the beginning of the Exodus, God revealed His name for the first time to Moses in the
vision of the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb (the bush can still be seen at the
monastery of St. Catherine). The bush that burned without being consumed was a
type, or forefiguring, of the Incarnation of Christ from the Mother of God, whose flesh
was not consumed by the fire of the Divinity that was in her. God sent Moses to the
people of Israel to announce to them their coming deliverance from slavery through
the Exodus, and when Moses asked for God’s name so that he could identify Who it
was that was sending him, “God said unto Moses, ‘I AM THAT I AM’, and He said:
‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, “I AM hath sent me unto you’.’’
(Exodus 3.13).

Up to that point, God had referred to Himself only as “God Almighty” or “the God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” – that is, without a specific
allusion to the Second Person of the Trinity or His role in the salvation of mankind.
But now that salvation was being brought to the Hebrews it was necessary to point to
the Saviour, that is, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, by the name by
which He is known in the Old Testament - Jehovah, “I AM THAT I AM”, or “He Who
Exists” (in the Greek translation of the Septuagint). For it is the unanimous witness of
the Holy Fathers that Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, is indeed
Jehovah, “He Who Exists” from all eternity, Who saved the Israelites from Egypt and
later the whole of humanity from sin, death and the devil on the Cross. This is
confirmed a little later, when “God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, ‘And I
appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty;
but by the name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. And I have established My
covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage,
wherein they were strangers.’” (Exodus 3.2-3).

103 St. John Chrysostom, Homily for the Sunday of the Forefathers.

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 The name “He Who Exists” points to the complete independence of God from
everything created. For He does not exist in dependence on any other existing thing,
which is the case with every other being, but is absolute being, being itself. This was in
sharp distinction from pagan religion – of which Egyptian religion was the most
developed kind in that period – which could never conceive of God as wholly
independent of created beings, but always identified God or the gods with a part or
the whole of created being.

The name also points, according to Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, to the fullness
of life, which cannot be identified with any created condition, but only with the life of
God Himself.104 Being absolute being and the fullness of life, God wishes to save
mankind from the false life that identifies itself with created being, as did Egypt. Thus
it is in the Exodus from Egypt that God manifests Himself as the Saviour for the first
time.

First, as we read in the Book of Exodus, when Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites
flee their servitude in Egypt and go back to their homeland, God struck the whole of
Egypt with ten plagues. Then He opened a path for the Israelites through the Red Sea
(usually identified with “the Sea of Reeds” near what is now the Suez Canal), so that
they could pass through on dry land. Then He brought the waters back to drown the
Egyptian charioteers. Then He led them through the desert to the southern end of the
peninsula dominated by Mount Sinai.

The law was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Its God-givenness was vital.
It meant, as Paul Johnson points out, that “the Israelites were creating a new kind of
society. Josephus later used the word ‘theocracy’. This he defined as ‘placing all
sovereignty in the hands of God’… The Israelites might have magistrates of one kind
or another but their rule was vicarious since God made the law and constantly
intervened to ensure it was obeyed. The fact that God ruled meant that in practice his
law ruled. And since all were equally subject to the law, the system was the first to
embody the double merits of the rule of law and equality before the law. Philo called
it ‘democracy’, which he described as ‘the most law-abiding and best of constitutions’.
But by democracy he did not mean rule by all the people; he defined it as a form of
government which ‘honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers’. He might
have called the Jewish system, more accurately, ‘democratic theocracy’, because in
essence that is what it was.”105

But this was no democracy in the modern sense. Although every man in Israel was
equal under the law of God, there were no elections, every attempt to rebel against
Moses’ leadership was fiercely punished by God (Numbers 16), and there was no way
in which the people could alter the law to suit themselves, which is surely the essence
of democracy in the modern sense. Even when, at Jethro’s suggestion, lower-level
magistrates and leaders were appointed, they were appointed by Moses, not by any
kind of popular vote (Deuteronomy 1).

104 Theophan, Tetragramma, St. Petersburg, 1905, p. 61.
105 Johnson, History of the Jews, pp. 40-41.

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 One of the major characteristics of the Mosaic law, notes Johnson, is that “there is
no distinction between the religious and the secular – all are one – or between civil,
criminal and moral law. This indivisibility had important practical consequences. In
Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend God. All crimes are sins, just as all
sins are crimes. Offences are absolute wrongs, beyond the power of man unaided to
pardon or expunge. Making restitution to the offended mortal is not enough; God
requires expiation, too, and this may involve drastic punishment. Most law-codes of
the ancient Near East are property-orientated, people themselves being forms of
property whose value can be assessed. The Mosaic code is God-oriented. For instance,
in other codes, a husband may pardon an adulterous wife and her lover. The Mosaic
code, by contrast, insists both must be put to death…

“In Mosaic theology, man is made in God’s image, and so his life is not just
valuable, it is sacred. To kill a man is an offence against God so grievous that the
ultimate punishment, the forfeiture of life, must follow; money is not enough. The
horrific fact of execution thus underscores the sanctity of human life. Under Mosaic
law, then, many men and women met their deaths whom the secular codes of
surrounding societies would have simply permitted to compensate their victims or
their victims’ families.

“But the converse is also true, as a result of the same axiom. Whereas other codes
provided the death penalty for offences against property, such as looting during a fire,
breaking into a house, serious trespass by night, or theft of a wife, in the Mosaic law
no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property
alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment: the offences of parents
must not be punished by the execution of sons or daughters, or the husband’s crime
by the surrender of the wife to prostitution… Moreover, not only is human life sacred,
the human person (being in God’s image) is precious… Physical cruelty [in
punishment] is kept to the minimum.”106

Now the Holy Church in her service to Moses makes what at first sight looks like
an extraordinary claim: that he was the very first “God-seer”, who saw God face-to-
face: As the Church sings: “Let Moses, the first among the prophets, be praised, for he
was the first to converse openly with God, face to face, not in indistinct images, but
beholding Him as in the guise of the flesh.”107 “Not in indistinct images”, and “in the
guise of the flesh”. So he must have had a clear vision of the God-man, the Lord Jesus
Christ, in His Humanity.

Now after his death Moses saw Christ clearly at the Transfiguration (Matthew
17).108 But was it possible that he had seen Christ earlier and less distinctly on Sinai,
when He was not yet incarnate? The answer is: only by seeing Him in an image, or icon
– but one not made with hands.

106 Johnson, op. cit., pp. 33, 34.
107
Menaion, September 4, Mattins canon, Ode 1, troparion.
108
“Even after thy death, thou didst see the Lord, O God-seer, and not in dim images as before thou
didst in the rock; but thou didst behold Him as Christ in a human body, illumining all with His
Divinity” (Menaion, September 4, Mattins canon, Ode 9, troparion).

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 And yet, one will argue, was it not precisely to Moses that God emphasized the
complete unknowability of God? And did He not, in His Ten commandments
inscribed on tablets of stone for Moses, forbid the making of images and say: “Thou
shalt have no other gods beside Me. Thou shalt not make thyself an idol (ειδωλον),
nor likeness (οµοιωµα) of anything, whatever things are in the heaven above, and
whatever are in the earth beneath, and whatever are in the waters under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down (προσκυνησεις) to them, nor worship (λατρευσεις) them”
(Exodus 20:2-5 (LXX))? True, but Moses did not make any idols, nor did he bow down
in order to worship anything created. However, on Sinai, as St. Gregory of Nyssa writes
in his Life of Moses, “he sees that tabernacle not made with hands, which he shows to
those below by means of a material likeness”. So it is not too bold to suggest that it is
precisely Moses who lays a beginning to the contemplation of visible icons of God
incarnate, and even to the creation of material icons of heavenly things. The tabernacle,
the ark, and later the Temple, were such icons, visible channels of the invisible Deity.

Indeed, so holy were these icons that God struck down those who treated them
disrespectfully, as Patriarch Nikon of Moscow pointed out in his polemic against the
attempts of the tsar to confiscate church lands: “Have you not heard that God said
that any outsider who comes close to the sacred things will be given up to death? By
outsider here is understood not only he who is a stranger to Israel from the pagans,
but everyone who is not of the tribe of Levi, like Kore, Dathan and Abiram, whom
God did not choose, and whom, the impious ones, a flame devoured; and King Uzziah
laid his hand on the ark to support it, and God struck him and he died (II Kings
6.6,7).”109

In this commandment, moreover, a distinction is made between veneration

(προσκυνησις) and worship (λατρεια) that was to become very important in the
iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. Icons are to be venerated, but
not worshipped; they are holy, but they are not idols. Thus an icon of Christ God,
though holy and worthy of veneration, is not the same as Christ Himself, although we
do truly see Him through the icon. For an icon, according to St. Stephen the Younger,
is a “door” into heaven. A door is not part of a room, but it makes possible access to
the room. In the same way an icon of Christ is not Christ Himself, but it facilitates our
access to Him. Therefore insofar as, in the words of St. Basil the Great, the honour
given to an icon is ascribed to its Prototype, when we bow down and venerate an icon
of Christ, we are offering honour and worship to Christ Himself. Thus the
commandment asserts both the essential difference between the Creator and creation,
between spirit and matter, and the possibility of matter becoming a bridge to spirit, of
the Creator becoming accessible through His creation.

In another passage, Moses was told that He could not see God face-to-face, but had
to hide behind a cleft in the rock, from behind which He could see, not His face, but
only His back parts. Does this contradict what has just been said? No, it clarifies it; for
it explains to us that Moses was able to see God face-to-face, not in the sense that He
saw His essence, which is unknowable, but in the sense that He recognized Him in

109 Nikon, in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nikon), Warsaw: Synodal Typography, 1931, part
II, p. 36.

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His incarnation, in His visible Humanity. “Sheltered by the stone, thou didst not see
the face of God, for it was hidden, O God-seer, but didst recognize the incarnation of
the Word in His back parts.” Or, to be more precise, since Christ was not yet incarnate,
Moses saw Him in an icon of His humanity, an icon not made with hands.

A major part of the Mosaic law concerned a priesthood and what we would now
call the Church with its rites and festivals. The priesthood was entrusted to Moses'
brother Aaron and one of the twelve tribes of Israel, that of the Levites. As St. Cyril of
Alexandria writes: “Moses and Aaron… were for the ancients a fine forefigure of
Christ… Emmanuel, Who, by a most wise dispensation, is in one and the same Person
both Law-Giver and First Priest… In Moses we should see Christ as Law-Giver, and
in Aaron – as First Priest.”110

Thus already in the time of Moses we have the beginnings of a separation between
Church and State, and of what the Byzantines called the "symphony" between the two
powers, as represented by Moses and Aaron.

As Moses lay dying on Mount Pisgah in Moab (modern-day Jordan) he stretched

out his eyes over the Promised Land on the other side of the Jordan (which not he, but
his successor Joshua (Jesus) was destined to enter and occupy), and prophesied to
Israel: “When thou shalt beget children, and children’s children, and ye shall have
been long in the land, and shall do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord thy God,
to provoke Him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that
ye shall soon perish from off the land whereunto you go over Jordan to possess it; ye
shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall be utterly destroyed. And the Lord shall
scatter you among the peoples, and ye shall be left few in number among the nations,
whither the Lord shall lead you away. And from thence ye shall seek the Lord thy
God, and thou shalt find Him, because thou shalt search after Him with all thy heart
and soul when thou are in tribulation and all these things are come upon thee. In the
latter days thou shalt return to the Lord thy God, and hearken unto His voice: for the
Lord thy God is a merciful God, He will not fail thee, neither destroy thee, not forget
the covenant of thy fathers which He sware unto them” (Deuteronomy 4.25-31).

Here the great prophet and God-seer lays out in summary form the whole history
of the Jews after they would have been “long in the land”: their falling away from
God, followed by their expulsion from the land (first in the exile to Babylon, then more
terribly and long-lastingly in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the
dispersal of the Jews all over the world), and finally their conversion to God “in the
last days”. The last part of the prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, but it is confirmed by
several Old and New Testament prophets and apostles (see especially Romans 11).
But the first two parts have been confirmed with exactitude, providing yet another
testimony that the central thread of human history, that illumines all the rest of it,
consists in the history of Israel. But by “Israel” we mean not only the Old Testament
Jews but also, especially, the “new” Jews, “the Israel of God, the Church of Christ”
(Galatians 6.16).

St. Cyril, in Vyacheslav Manyagin, Apologia Groznogo Tsaria (Apology for the Awesome Tsar),
110

Moscow, 2004, p. 167.

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 7. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (4) SAUL AND DAVID

We have seen that under Moses there was the beginning of a separation of Church
and State in Israel. However, there was no radical separation of powers in the modern
sense. Israel was a theocratic state ruled directly by God, Who revealed His will
through His chosen servants Moses and Aaron.

Early Israel after Moses but before the kings had rulers, called “Judges”. But these
rulers were neither hereditary monarchs nor were they elected to serve the will of the
people. They were charismatic leaders, who were elected because they served the will
of God alone. They were elected by God, not the people, who simply had to follow the
man God had elected, as when He said to Gideon: “Go in this thy might, and thou
shalt save Israel from the Midianites: have I not sent thee?” (Judges 6.14). That is why,
when the people offered to make Gideon and his descendants kings in a kind of
hereditary dynasty, he refused, saying: "I shall not rule over you, neither shall my son
rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you" (Judges 8.23).

Thus the Judges were truly God-fearing, charismatic leaders, like Joshua, Jephtha
and Gideon. But they refused the honour of kingship because they knew that Israel
was a theocracy, ruled by God alone. Moreover, when each of them died, his authority
died with him; for there was no hereditary succession of judges.

The unity and continuity of Israel was therefore religious, not political - or rather,
it was religio-political. It was created by the history of deliverance from the
satanocracy of Egypt and maintained by a continuing allegiance and obedience to God
- the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God Who appeared to Moses and Joshua
and the Judges. He was their only King. Neither Abraham nor Moses was a king.
Rather it was said to Abraham by God: "Kings will come from you" (Genesis 17.6; cf.
17.16, 35.2). Moses was a lawgiver, a priest from the tribe of Levi and prophet, rather
than a king. Early Israel was therefore not a kingdom - or rather, it was a kingdom
whose king was God alone. As Tikhomirov writes: “According to the law of Moses,
no State was established at that time, but the nation was just organized on tribal
principles, with a common worship of God. The Lord was recognized as the Master
of Israel in a moral sense, as of a spiritual union, that is, as a Church.”111 Or rather, as
indissoluble union of Church and State, the religious and the political principles.
Ancient Israel, in other words, was a Theocracy, ruled not by a king or priest, but by
God Himself. And strictly speaking the People of God remained a Theocracy, without
a formal State structure, until the time of the Prophet Samuel, who anointed the first
King of Israel, Saul. In Israel, the Church, the State and the People were not three
different entities or organizations, but three different aspects of a single organism, the
whole of which was subject to God alone. That is why it was so important that the
leader should be chosen by God.

In the time of the Judges, this seems always to have been the case; for when an
emergency arose God sent His Spirit upon a man chosen by Him (cf. Judges 6.34), and
the people, recognizing this, then elected him as their Judge (cf. Judges 11.11). And if

111 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), Moscow, 1997, p. 126.

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there was no emergency, or if the people were not worthy of a God-chosen leader,
then God did not send His Spirit and no Judge was elected. In those circumstances,
since “there was no king in Israel, everyone did what seemed right to him” (Judges
21.25) - in other words, there was anarchy.

The lesson was clear: if theocracy is removed, then sooner or later there will be
anarchy - that is, no government at all.

Not only was there was no king of Israel: there was also no land of Israel. And this
was important; for "a king is an advantage to a land with cultivated fields" (Ecclesiastes
5.8). Therefore Israelite kingship did not emerge until the Israelites had permanently
settled in a land – that is, until the conquest of Canaan.

By the end of the period of the Judges, the need for a king was evident. For barbaric
acts, such as that which almost led to the extermination of the tribe of Benjamin, are
recorded. In their desperation at the mounting anarchy, the people called on God
through the Prophet Samuel to give them a king. God fulfilled their request, but to
ensure that the Israelite king would be a true autocrat, and not a pagan-style despot,
He laid down certain conditions to the people through Moses: “When thou shalt come
unto the land which the Lord thy God shall choose, and shalt possess it, and shalt
dwell therein, and shalt say, ‘I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are
about me’, thou shalt surely set a king over thee whom the Lord thy God shall choose:
one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a
stranger over thee, which is not thy brother... And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the
throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that
which is before the priests, the Levites. And it shall be with him, and he shall read
therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all
the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up
above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right
hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and
his children, in the midst of Israel” (Deuteronomy 17.14-15,18-20).

Thus God blessed the institution of the monarchy, but stipulated three conditions
if His blessing was to rest on it. First, the people must itself desire to have a king placed
over it. Secondly, the king must be someone “whom the Lord thy God shall choose”;
a true king is chosen by God, not by man. Such a man will always be a “brother”, that
is a member of the People of God, of the Church: if he is not, then God has not chosen
him. Thirdly, he will govern in accordance with the Law of God, which he will strive
to fulfil in all its parts.

Some democrats have argued that the Holy Scriptures do not approve of kingship.
This is not true: kingship as such is never condemned in Holy Scripture. Rather, it is
considered the norm of political leadership, as we see in the following passages:
“Blessed are thou, O land, when thou hast a king from a noble family” (Ecclesiastes
10.17); "The heart of the king is in the hand of God: He turns it wherever He wills
(Proverbs 21.1); "He sends kings upon thrones, and girds their loins with a girdle" (Job
12.18); "He appoints kings and removes them" (Daniel 2.21); "Thou, O king, art a king
of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given a powerful and honourable and strong

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kingdom in every place where the children of men dwell" (Daniel 2.37-38); "Listen,
therefore, O kings, and understand...; for your dominion was given you from the Lord,
and your sovereignty from the Most High" (Wisdom 6.1,3). “By Me kings reign, and
princes write of righteousness. By Me noblemen become great, and by Me monarchs
have power in the land” (Proverbs 8.15-16).

The tragedy of the story of the first Israelite king, Saul, did not consist in the fact
that the Israelites sought a king for themselves - as we have seen, God did not
condemn kingship as such. After all, the sacrament of kingly anointing, which was
performed for the first time by the Prophet Samuel on Saul, gave the earthly king the
grace to serve the Heavenly King as his true Sovereign. The tragedy consisted in the
fact that the Israelites sought a king "like [those of] the other nations around" them
(Deuteronomy 17.14), - in other words, a pagan-style despot who would satisfy the
people’s will and notions of kingship rather than God’s., especially in terms of
territorial aggrandizement, power and glory. For in fallen human nature there exists
a desire to submit to a despot, sharing vicariously in his power and glory – there are
many examples in human history – until, of course, submission to the despot brings
intolerable suffering…

This fallen desire for a pagan-style despot amounted to apostasy in the eyes of God,
the only true King of Israel. So the Lord said to Samuel: "Listen to the voice of the
people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected
Me, that I should rule over them... Now therefore listen to their voice. However,
protest solemnly to them, and show them the manner of the king that shall reign over
them" (I Kings (I Samuel) 8.4-9). And then Samuel painted for them the image of a
harsh, totalitarian ruler of the kind that was common in the Ancient World. These
kings, as well as having total political control over their subjects, were often
worshipped by them as gods; so that "kingship" as understood in the Ancient World
meant both the loss of political freedom and alienation from the true and living God.

God allowed the introduction of this despotic kind of kingship into Israel because
the religious principle had grown weak. For the history of the kings begins with the
corruption of the priests, the sons of Eli, who were in possession of the ark at the time
of its capture. “Look,” said the elders to Eli, “you are old, and your sons do not walk
in your ways. `Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations” (I Kings (I Samuel
8.5). Thus for the kings' subsequent oppression of the people both the priests and the
people bore responsibility.

Since the people’s motivation in seeking a king was not pure, God gave them at
first a king who brought them more harm than good. For while Saul was a mighty
man of war and temporarily expanded the frontiers of Israel, he persecuted true piety,
as represented by the future King David and the prophet Gad, and he disobeyed the
Church, as represented by the Judge and Prophet Samuel and the high priests
Abiathar and Ahimelech, and even killed Ahimelech and other priests who helped
David.

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 God in His mercy did not always send such despotic rulers upon His people, and
the best of the kings, such as David, Josiah and Hezekiah, were in obedience to the
King of kings and Lord of lords. Nevertheless, since kingship was introduced into
Israel from a desire to imitate the pagans, it was a retrograde step. It represented the
introduction of a second, worldly principle of allegiance into what had been a society
bound together by religious bonds alone, a schism in the soul of the nation which,
although seemingly inevitable in the context of the times, meant the loss for ever of
that pristine simplicity which had characterised Israel up to then.

And yet everything seemed to go well at first. Samuel anointed Saul, saying: “The
Lord anoints thee as ruler of His inheritance of Israel, and you will rule over the people
of the Lord and save them from out of the hand of their enemies” (I Kings 10.1). Filled
with the Spirit of the Lord, Saul defeated the enemies of Israel, the Ammonites and
the Philistines. But the schism which had been introduced into the life of the nation
began to express itself also in the life of their king, with tragic consequences.

First, before a battle with the Philistines, the king grew impatient when Samuel the
priest delayed his coming to perform a sacrifice. So he performed the sacrifice himself.
For this sin, the sin of the invasion of the Church's sphere by the State, Samuel
prophesied that the kingdom would be taken away from Saul. “The Lord would have
established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not
continue. The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart” (I Kings 13.13-
14). That man was David…

The example of Saul was quoted by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow: “Listen to what
happened to Saul, the first king of Israel. The Word of God said to Samuel: ‘I have
repented that I sent Saul to the kingdom, for he has ceased to follow Me.’ What did
Saul do that God should reject him? He, it is said, ‘did not follow My counsels’ (I Kings
15.10-28)…This is the Word of God, and not the word of man: ‘I made you ruler over
the tribes of Israel and anointed you to the kingdom of Israel, and not to offer sacrifices
and whole-burnt offerings,’ teaching for all future times that the priesthood is higher
than the kingdom, and that he who wishes for more loses that which is his own.”112

Saul’s second sin was to spare Agag, the king of the Amalekites, instead of killing
them all, as God had commanded. His excuse was: "because I listened to the voice of
the people" (I Kings 15.20). In other words, he abdicated his God-given authority and
became, spiritually speaking, a democrat, listening to the people rather than to God. And
so Samuel said: "Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, the Lord also shall
reject thee from being king over Israel" (I Kings 15.23)…

It was no accident therefore, that it was an Amalekite who killed Saul at Mount
Gilboa and brought his crown to David, who immediately killed him for murdering
the Anointed of the Lord… God’s justice is exact. Saul offended God by sparing the
Amalekites. So he was killed by an Amalekite.

112 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 17.

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 To modern readers Saul's sin might seem small, even non-existent. However, it
must be understood in the context of the previous history of Israel, in which neither
Moses nor any of the judges (except, perhaps, Samson) had disobeyed the Lord. That
is why Samuel said to Saul: "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the
fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as iniquity and
idolatry" (I Kings 15.22-23). For even a king can rebel, in that even a king is in
obedience – to the King of kings. Only the absolutist despot feels that there is nobody
above him, that there is no law that he, too, must obey. His power is absolute; whereas
the power of the autocrat is limited, if not by man and the laws of men, at any rate by
the law of God, whose independent guardian and teacher is the priesthood of the
Church.

To emphasize the truth that disobedience to God “is as the sin of witchcraft”, Saul
then falls into the most serious sin of consulting a witch on the eve of his last battle
against the Philistines. Thus he asked the witch of Endor to summon the soul of
Samuel from Hades, although he himself had passed laws condemning necromancy.
It did him no good: the next day, at Gilboa, he lost the battle and his life…113 “So Saul
died,” according to the chronicler, “because of his transgression which he committed
against the Lord… by seeking advice from a ghost… Therefore He slew him and gave
the kingdom to David…” (I Chronicles 10.13, 14).

The falling away of Saul led directly to the first major schism in the history of the
State of Israel. For after Saul's death, the northern tribes (Ephraim, first of all)
supported the claim of Saul's surviving son to the throne, while the southern tribes
(Judah and Benjamin) supported David. Although David suppressed this rebellion,
and although, for David's sake, the Lord did not allow a schism during the reign of
his son Solomon, it erupted again and became permanent after Solomon's death...

David was anointed for the first time at the command of the Lord by the Prophet
Samuel when he was still a young man: “Then Samuel took the horn of oil and
anointed him in the midst of his brothers and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David
from that day forward” (I Samuel 16.13). Immediately after this, “the Spirit of the Lord
departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him” (I Samuel
16.14). For there cannot be two true kings over a kingdom, but the false king or tyrant
or usurper will persecute the true one, as Saul persecuted David…

David had to prove himself as a warrior and faithful to God over many years in
disgrace and exile before the people finally saw in him God’s choice: “Then came all
the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron and spake, saying, Behold, we are thy bones
and thy flesh. Also in time past, when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that leddest
out the brightest in Israel, and the Lord said to thee, ‘Thou shalt feed My people Israel,
and thou shalt be a captain over Israel. So all the elders of Israel came to the king to
Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel” (II Samuel 5.1-3).

113See St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Witch of Endor: A Letter to Bishop Theodosius, translated in Living
Orthodoxy, #124, vol. XXI, N 4, July-August, 2000, pp. 24-26.

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 The phrase “we are thy bones and thy flesh” remind us of Adam’s first words on
seeing Eve (Genesis 2.23). In the same way, writes New Martyr and Protopriest John
Vostorgov, “the king and the people merge into one powerful spiritual-moral union
like the ideal Christian family, which does not think of division, does not allow
mistrust and does not admit of any other relationship other than that of mutual love,
devotion, self-sacrifice and care.”114

The greatness of David lay in the fact that he was the first true autocrat. Saul was
true in the sense that he was called by God and anointed by the Church; but he did
not live worthy of his calling, rejecting the advice of Samuel, and was rejected by God.
David, however, both closed the political schism that had opened up between north
and south, and closed the schism that was just beginning to open up between the
sacred and the profane, the Church and the State.

Indeed, according to the author of the two books of Chronicles, it was David’s
solicitude for the Church and her liturgical worship that was the most important fact
about him. As Patrick Henry Reardon points out, nineteen chapters are devoted to
David, and of these nineteen “the Chronicler allotted no fewer than 11 – over half – to
describe the king’s solicitude for Israel’s proper worship (I Chronicles 13; 15-16 and
22-29). This material includes the transfer of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, the
organization of the priestly and Levitical ministries, preparations for the sacred music,
and David’s lengthy instructions to Solomon with respect to the temple.

“According to the Chronicler, David not only made all the arrangements for the
consecration of the temple and the organization of the worship (I Chronicles 28.19),
he did so by the Lord’s own command (II Chronicles 29.15). Even the musical
instruments used in the worship are credited to David (II Chronicles 29.17; cf.
Nehemiah 12.36).”115 Thus when the Lord tells David to “feed My people Israel”, this
feeding is spiritual as well as material – a responsibility accepted by all later Christian
autocrats.

“Like Gideon,” notes Paul Johnson, David “grasped that [Israel] was indeed a
theocracy and not a normal state. Hence the king could never be an absolute ruler on
the usual oriental pattern. Nor, indeed, could the state, however governed, be absolute
either…”116

The central act of David’s reign was his conquest of Jerusalem and establishment
of the city of David on Zion as the capital and heart of the Israelite kingdom.

114 Vostorgov, in S. Fomin and T. Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishesrviem (Russia before the Second
Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 362.
115 Reardon, Chronicles of History and Worship, Ben Lomond, Ca.: Conciliar Press, 2006, p. 12.
116 Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, t995, 1998, p. 57.

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 This was, on the one hand, an important political act, strengthening the centralizing
power of the State; for as the last part of the Holy Land to be conquered by the
Israelites, Jerusalem did not belong to any of the twelve tribes, which meant that its
ruler, David, was elevated above all the tribes, and above all earthly and factional
interests. But, on the other hand, it was also an important religious act; for by
establishing his capital in Jerusalem, David linked his kingship with the mysterious
figure of Melchizedek, both priest and king, who had blessed Abraham at Salem, that
is, Jerusalem.

Thus David could be seen as following in the footsteps of Abraham in receiving the
blessing of the priest-king, a forerunner of Christ Himself, in his own city.

Moreover, by bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the chief sanctum of the
priesthood, to a permanent resting-place in Zion, David showed that the Church and
the priesthood would find rest and protection on earth only under the aegis of the
Israelite Autocracy.

As John Bright writes: “The significance of this action cannot be overestimated. It

was David’s aim to make Jerusalem the religious as well as the political capital of the
realm. Through the Ark he sought to link the newly created state to Israel’s ancient
order as its legitimate successor, and to advertise the state as the patron and protector
of the sacral institutions of the past. David showed himself far wiser than Saul. Where
Saul had neglected the Ark and driven its priesthood from him, David established
both Ark and priesthood in the official national shrine.” 117

The Ark was a symbol of the Church (and of the Mother of God, the Mother of the
Church); and it is significant that the birth of the Church, at Pentecost, took place on
Zion, beside David’s tomb (Acts 2). For David prefigured Christ not only in His role
as anointed King of the Jews, Who inherited “the throne of His father David” and
made it eternal (Luke 1.32-33), but also as Sender of the Spirit and establisher of the
New Testament Church. For just as David brought the wanderings of the Ark to an
end by giving it a permanent resting-place in Zion, so Christ sent the Spirit into the
upper room in Zion, giving the Church a firm, visible beginning on earth.

The reign of David proved that State and Church could not only coexist, but also
strengthen each other. In a certain sense, the anointed king in the Israelite kingdom
could even be said to have had the primacy over the priesthood – although he never
carried out the priestly rites. Thus David appears to have ordered the building of the
temple without any prompting from a priest, and Solomon removed the High Priest
Abiathar for political rebellion (I Kings 2.26-27).

So there were two spheres, “the king’s matters” and “the Lord’s matters”. If the
king ventured to enter “the Lord’s matters”, that is, the sphere of Divine
templeworship, he would be punished. Thus King Uzziah was punished with leprosy
for presuming to burn incense before the Lord… Nevertheless, the king was central
to, and pre-eminent in, the life of the nation in a way that even the high priest could

117 Bright, A History of Israel, London: SCM Press, 1980, pp. 200-201.

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not be. Thus Moses was higher than his brother Aaron, even though Aaron was the
head of the priesthood; and David was higher than the high-priests Zadok and
Ahimelech. The autocrat must not encroach on the priesthood – that was the sin of
Saul and Uzziah; he cannot carry out the sacramental functions of the priest. But the
organization of the priesthood is the task of the autocrat. He is a shepherd of souls just
as the priest is; for “Thou leddest Thy people as sheep by the hand of Moses [the
autocrat] and Aaron [the high priest]” (Psalm 76.20). And he is a teacher of the people,
as is the priest; for “I was established as king by Him, upon Sion His holy mountain,
proclaiming the commandment of the Lord” (Psalm 2.6). Here we see a
foreshadowing of the leading role of the Orthodox autocrats of New Testament times,
whose pre-eminence in the life of the nation is commonly mistaken for
“caesaopapism”. The autocrat who does not attempt to change the dogmas of the
Church or carry out any sacramental functions is not a “caesaropapist”. But he can
and must serve as the focus of unity and organizational hub of the whole life of the
nation.

The uniqueness of David’s dynasty was that, whatever the sins of its members, it
was to be eternal, in accordance with God’s promise: “I have raised up one chosen out
of My people. I have found David My servant, with My holy oil have I anointed him…
And as for Me, I shall make him higher than the kings of the earth. For ever shall I
keep for him My mercy, and My covenant shall be faithful unto him. And I will
establish his seed unto ages of ages, and his throne shall be as the days of heaven. If
his sons forsake My law, and if they walk not in My judgements, If my statutes they
profane and keep not My commandments, I will visit their iniquities with a rod, and
their injustices with scourges. But My mercy will I not disperse away from them, nor
will I wrong them in My truth. Nor will I profane My covenant, nor the things that
proceed from My lips will I make void. Once have I sworn by My holiness that to
David I will not lie; his seed for ever shall abide. And his throne shall be as the sun
before Me, and as the moon that is established for ever” (Psalm 88. 18-19, 26-35, cf.
Isaiah 9.6). For "thine house and thy kingdom," said the Lord to David, "shall be
established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever" (II Samuel
7.16; cf. Luke 1.32-33). “Once have I sworn by My holiness: that to David I will not lie;
his seed forever shall abide. And his throne shall be as the sun before Me, and as the
moon that is established for ever” (Psalm 88. 34-35).

The eternity of David’s dynasty consisted in the fact that the last king of his line
would be Jesus Christ, the eternal King and God, Whose Kingdom lasts forever…
When the Kingdom of God came down in tongues of fire upon the apostles on the
Day of Pentecost, St. Peter preached his first sermon beside King David’s tomb (Acts
2.29); for he was the ancestor of Christ, about whom his prophecies in the Psalms were
now being fulfilled. And he witnessed that David, “being a prophet, knew that God
had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He
would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne…” (Acts 2.30).

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 8. FROM THEOCRACY TO AUTOCRACY: (5) SOLOMON

The reigns of David and Solomon are especially important for the history of the
people of God for three main reasons.118

First, in them the Israelite kingdom attained its greatest strength, subduing its
enemies and almost reaching its geographical integrity as that had been promised to
Abraham: "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates" (Genesis
15.18). Secondly, the covenant which the Lord had sworn to the Family Church in the
persons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to the Pilgrim Church in the persons of
Moses and Joshua, He now renewed with the State Church in the persons of David
and Solomon. The unconditional element of this covenant - the part which the Lord
promised to fulfil whatever happened - was the promise of the Coming of Christ, ”the
Son of David”. And thirdly, the worship of the Old Testament Church reached its
maturity and most magnificent development in the building of the Temple and the
establishment of all the Temple services.

Only this task was not entrusted to David in spite of his great zeal for the worship
of God, because he was “a man of blood”, having fought many wars and killed many
men (sometimes unjustly), but to his son Solomon, who consecrated the Temple on
the feast of Tabernacles, the feast signifying the end of the wanderings of the children
of Israel in the desert and the ingathering of the harvest fruits. “When this massive
project was finished,” – it took twenty years – “a new citadel of white and gold had
risen over Jerusalem…”119

The importance of Solomon's Temple as a figure of the New Testament Church can
be seen in the many resemblances between the two, from the details of the priests'
vestments and the use of the Psalter to the offering of incense and the frescoes on the
walls. Even the structure of the Temple building, with its sanctuary, nave and narthex
and two aisles, recalls the structure of the Christian basilica.

But there is this very important difference, that whereas the nave of the Temple
was entered only by the priests, and the sanctuary only by the high-priest once a year,
while all the services were conducted in the courtyard, the New Testament Church
allows all Christians to enter the Church, inasmuch as they are "a chosen generation,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people" (I Peter 2.9), for whom Christ the
Great High-Priest has made "a new and living way" into the holy of holies (Hebrews
10.19-22) – not the earthly sanctuary built by Solomon, but the Kingdom of Heaven.

118 The archaeological remains from David’s and Solomon’s reigns have been meagre, which has led to
a school of “Biblical minimalists” led by scholars from the University of Copenhagen considering them
to be fictitious characters. However, writes Robert Draper, “the credibility of that position was undercut
in 1993, when an excavation team in the northern Israel site of Tel Dan dug up a black basalt stela
inscribed with the phrase ‘House of David’.” (“Kings of Controversy”, National Geographic, December,
2010, p. 79).
119 Jean-Pierre Isbouts, “Kings of the Bible”, National Geographic, December, 2010, p. 39.

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 The consecration of the Temple by Solomon may be seen as the high point of the
Old Testament, from which the rest of the Old Testament is a long and uneven, but
inexorable fall until the Coming of Christ at its lowest point.

After completing the construction of the Temple, Solomon summoned all the elders
and priests of Israel to take up the ark and the tabernacle from the City of David in
Zion and bring into the newly-built Temple. At that point, the Holy Spirit, or
Shekinah, descended into the Temple, as it had descended into the tabernacle, the
forerunner of the Temple, in Moses’ time. For “when the priests came out of the holy
place, the cloud filled the house, so the priests could not stand there ministering
because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house” (III Kings 8.10-11).

Solomon’s Temple was the only place on earth where the true worship of God
could be offered; its rites were the only true rites; and its priests were the only true
priests. The people had to come to worship in the Temple three times in the years: on
the feasts of Pascha, Pentecost and Tabernacles. In this way the unity and uniqueness
of the true worship of the one true God was emphasized.

At the same time, this unique centre of the one and only true religion was to be
open for all, “that all peoples of the earth may know Thy name and fear Thee, as do
Thy people Israel” (III Kings 8.43). Christ Himself confirmed this: “Is it not written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples’? But you have made it a
den of thieves” (Mark 11.17). Only this did not mean any importing of foreign, pagan
beliefs or ries into the purity of the one true faith. The Temple would truly become a
house of prayer for all peoples if and when they abandoned their paganism and
accepted the faith of Abraham…

The union of the kingship with the priesthood in the one Temple in the only major
city of Israel not belonging to any of the tribes - for Jerusalem had been a Jebusite city
until David and his men conquered it, - represented that ideal symphony of Church
and State which was not to be recovered in its full glory until the Emperor Justinian
consecrated the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople
over 1500 years later, declaring: “Solomon, I have outdone thee!”

In response to Solomon’s request for “an understanding mind to govern Thy

people, able to discern between good and evil”, “God said: ‘I give you a wise and
discerning mind; no one like has been before you and no one like you shall arise after
you’” (I Kings 3.9, 11-12).

But in spite of his God-given wisdom, there lay within Solomon the seeds of that
corruption which was to bring his kingdom down in ruins. For this great man whom
God loved was not wise enough to heed the words inscribed in the Mosaic law about
what a true king of Israel could not do: "He shall not multiply horses to himself, nor
cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses:
forasmuch as the Lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that
way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away; neither
shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." (Deuteronomy 17.14-17).

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 But Solomon did all these forbidden thing. Thus he "multiplied horses to himself",
as has been discovered by archaeologists in the remains of his huge stables at Megiddo
and Hazor. Moreover, he "multiplied wives to himself", pagan wives, who "turned his
heart away" from the living God to idolatry. Finally, he "multiplied to himself silver
and gold" on a vast scale. Thus with uncanny precision did the prophecy pinpoint the
weaknesses of Solomon.

It may be objected that David, too, had many of these faults. After all, he, too, had
many wives - some, like Solomon's mother Bathsheba, acquired by unlawful means.
And by the end of his reign he had amassed fabulous wealth. But David's wives,
unlike Solomon's, did not draw him away from the True Faith; and his wealth was not
amassed to be spent on his own pleasures, but was handed over en masse towards the
building of the Temple. Therefore for his sake God promised that the kingdom would
not be divided in the reign of his son (I Kings 11.12).

When the Jews looked forward to the Messiah-King who was to restore their
fortunes and usher in the Kingdom of God on earth, the image they conceived was
compounded of the warlike prowess and courage of David and the peaceful
splendour and wisdom of Solomon, ruling a kingdom as powerful and materially rich
as was Solomon’s.

Whereas David prefigures Christ as the Founder of the Church in Zion, Solomon,
through his relationship with foreign rulers in Egypt, Tyre and Sheba, and his
expansion of Israel to its greatest extent and splendour, prefigures the Lord’s sending
out of the apostles to spread the faith throughout the Greco-Roman world, the
oikoumene. Thus David sang of his son as the type of Him Whom “all the kings of the
earth shall worship, and all the nations shall serve” (Psalm 71.11). Moreover, at the
very moment of the consecration of the Temple, the wise Solomon prays that foreign
worshippers will also have their prayers heard (I Kings 8.41-43), looking forward to
that time when the Jewish Temple-worship will be abrogated and the true worship of
God will not be concentrated in Jerusalem or any single place, but the true
worshippers will worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4. 21-23). “For will God
indeed dwell on earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain
Thee: how much less this house that I have built” (I Kings 8.27). And yet God, without
diminishing His infinity, would indeed dwell on earth, and in a temple – the temple
of His human Body…

As St. Philaret of Moscow demonstrates, the Israelite Autocracy is a model of God-

given government for all nations in all times: “It is in the family that we must seek the
beginnings and first model of authority and submission, which are later opened out
in the large family which is the State. The father is… the first master… but since the
authority of the father was not created by the father himself and was not given to him
by the son, but came into being with man from Him Who created man, it is revealed
that the deepest source and the highest principle of the first power, and consequently
of every later power among men, is in God – the Creator of man. From Him ‘every
family in heaven and on earth is named’ (Ephesians 3.15). Later, when sons of sons

73
became a people and peoples, and from the family there grew the State, which was
too vast for the natural authority of a father, God gave this authority a new artificial
image and a new name in the person of the King, and thus by His wisdom kings rule
(Proverbs 8.15). In the times of ignorance, when people had forgotten their Creator…
God, together with His other mysteries, also presented the mystery of the origin of the
powers that be before the eyes of the world, even in a sensory image, in the form of
the Hebrew people whom He had chosen for Himself; that is: in the Patriarch
Abraham He miraculously renewed the ability to be a father and gradually produced
from him a tribe, a people and a kingdom; He Himself guided the patriarchs of this
tribe; He Himself raised judges and leaders for this people; He Himself ruled over this
kingdom (I Kings 8.7). Finally, He Himself enthroned kings over them, continuing to
work miraculous signs over the kings, too. The Highest rules over the kingdom of
men and gives it to whom He wills. ‘The Kingdom is the Lord’s and He Himself is
sovereign of the nations’ (Psalm 21.29). ‘The power of the earth is in the hand of the
Lord, and in due time He will set over it one that is profitable’ (Sirach 10.4).

“A non-Russian would perhaps ask me now: why do I look on that which was
established by God for one people (the Hebrews) and promised to one King (David)
as on a general law for Kings and peoples? I would have no difficulty in replying:
because the law proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of God is without doubt
the perfect law; and why not suggest the perfect law for all? Or are you thinking of
inventing a law which would be more perfect than the law proceeding from the
goodness and wisdom of God?”

“As heaven is indisputably better than the earth, and the heavenly than the earthly,
it is similarly indisputable that the best on earth must be recognized to be that which
was built on it in the image of the heavenly, as was said to the God-seer Moses: ‘Look
thou that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount’
(Exodus 25.40). Accordingly God established a King on earth in accordance with the
image of His single rule in the heavens; He arranged for an autocratic King on earth
in the image of His heavenly omnipotence; and ... He placed an hereditary King on
earth in the image of His royal immutability. Let us not go into the sphere of the
speculations and controversies in which certain people – who trust in their own
wisdom more than others – work on the invention… of better, as they suppose,
principles for the transfiguration of human societies… But so far they have not in any
place or time created such a quiet and peaceful life… They can shake ancient States,
but they cannot create anything firm… They languish under the fatherly and
reasonable authority of the King and introduce the blind and cruel power of the mob
and the interminable disputes of those who seek power. They deceive people in
affirming that they will lead them to liberty; in actual fact they are drawing them from
lawful freedom to self-will, so as later to subject them to oppression with full right.
Rather than their self-made theorizing they should study the royal truth from the
history of the peoples and kingdoms… which was written, not out of human passion,
but by the holy prophets of God, that is – from the history of the people of God which
was from of old chosen and ruled by God. This history shows that the best and most
useful for human societies is done not by people, but by a person, not by many, but
by one. Thus: What government gave the Hebrew people statehood and the law? One
man – Moses. What government dealt with the conquest of the promised land and the

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distribution of the tribes of the Hebrew people on it? One man – Joshua the son of
Nun. During the time of the Judges one man saved the whole people from enemies
and evils. But since the power was not uninterrupted, but was cut off with the death
of each judge, with each cutting off of one-man rule the people descended into chaos,
piety diminished, and idol-worship and immorality spread; then there followed woes
and enslavement to other peoples. And in explanation of these disorders and woes in
the people the sacred chronicler says that ‘in those days there was no king in Israel;
every man did what was pleasing in his own eyes’ (Judges 21.25). Again there
appeared one man, Samuel, who was fully empowered by the strength of prayer and
the prophetic gift; and the people was protected from enemies, the disorders ceased,
and piety triumphed. Then, to establish uninterrupted one-man rule, God established
a King in His people. And such kings as David, Joshaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah
present images of how successfully an autocratic Majesty can and must serve for the
glorification of the Heavenly King in the earthly kingdom of men, and together with
that – for the strengthening and preservation of true prosperity in his people… And
during the times of the new grace the All-seeing Providence of God deigned to call
the one man Constantine, and in Russia the one man Vladimir, who in apostolic
manner enlightened their pagan kingdoms with the light of the faith of Christ and
thereby established unshakeable foundations for their might. Blessed is that people
and State in which, in a single, universal, all-moving focus there stands, as the sun in
the universe, a King, who freely limits his unlimited autocracy by the will of the
Heavenly King, and by the wisdom that comes from God.”120

St. Philaret, in S. Fomin & T. Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second
120

Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, pp. 320-321.

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 9. THE DECLINE OF THE ISRAELITE AUTOCRACY

After King Solomon’s death, the schism between Church and State that had begun
to open in Saul’s reign, but had then been closed by David, began to reopen. The
immediate cause was his son Rehoboam's arrogant refusal to lighten the burden of
heavy labour imposed upon the tribes by his father: "My father made your yoke
heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father also chastized you with whips, but I will
chastize you with scorpions." (I Kings 12.14) Therefore the ten northern tribes broke
away and chose as their king a renegade former servant of Solomon's who had taken
refuge in Egypt - Jeroboam. Thus did Rehoboam reject the Lord's warning that the
king's heart should "not be lifted up above his brethren" (Deuteronomy 17.20). And
thus was fulfilled Samuel's warning about the despotic nature of ordinary - that is,
non-theocratic - kingship. For autocracy was beginning to descend into despotism…

The political schism immediately engendered a religious schism. For Jeroboam

reasoned that if the people of his kingdom continued to go up to the Temple in
Jerusalem to pray, as the Law commanded, they would soon kill him and go over to
Rehoboam. So he set up two golden calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan, and
said: "behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt" (I
Kings 12.28). Aaron had unwillingly submitted to the people’s demand for a golden
calf to worship at the foot of Mount Sinai, for which Moses had shattered the tablet of
the Ten Commandments. Now Jeroboam did the same – and there was no opposition
to him in his kingdom. "And this thing became a sin: for the people went to worship
before the one, even unto Dan.” Consequently, the quality of the priesthood
deteriorated sharply; for “he made priests of the lowest of the people, which were not
of the sons of Levi" (I Kings 12.30-31).

With astonishing speed, therefore, the glorious kingdom of Solomon, the

forerunner of the Kingdom of Christ, became the apostate kingdom of Jeroboam, the
forerunner of the kingdom of the Antichrist - even to the extent that Jeroboam set up
his false god in territory of the tribe of Dan, which, according to the patristic
interpretation of Jacob’s prophecy (Genesis 49.16-17), will be the tribe of the
Antichrist.

Archaeology has revealed that the northern kingdom of Jeroboam was powerful,
more powerful than the southern kingdom of Rehoboam. The reason for the relative
weakness of the southern kingdom was its tendency to idolatry. The pattern, which
repeated itself many times before the exile to Babylon was as follows: relative peace
and prosperity, followed by religious apostasy, followed by war and impoverishment.
We see this pattern even in the reign of the first king, Rehoboam. Thus the Chronicler
writes: “When Rehoboam had consolidated the kingdom, and become strong, he and
all Israel with him abandoned the law of Yahweh. And thus it happened that in the
fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt121 marched on Jerusalem – because

121“According to the New Chronology,” writes David Rohl, “the real historical figure behind Shishak
is none other than Ramesses II, whose hypocoristicon – Sysa (Semiticised as Shysha) – was common
currency both in Egypt amongst the general population and in Canaan” (From Eden to Exile, p. 361).
(V.M.)

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they had been unfaithful to Yahweh – with twelve hundred chariots and sixty thousand
cavalry and countless hordes of Libyans, Sukkiim and Kushites, who came from Egypt
with him. They captured the fortified towns of Judah and reached Jerusalem,” (II
Chronicles 12.1-4), taking with him back to Egypt all the Temple treasures except the
Ark of the Covenant, which was hidden away by the priests…

Rehoboam’s son Abijah and grandson Asa were good kings, and a short-lived
recovery now took place. For, as Rohl writes, “Asa was a devout Yahweh worshipper.
He dismantled all the shrines dedicated to other gods which had proliferated in Judah
during Rehoboam’s reign. The Asherah poles (symbols of sacred trees), representing
the female consort of Baal, were torn down. In later years Asherah would be
associated with Yahweh in the popular religion of Judah. The ordinary people (as
opposed to the elite priesthood) felt it only natural that their god should have a spouse
just like all the other male deities in the ancient world. Asherah, however, was
synonymous with Astarte/Ashtaroth and hence the Mesopotamian Ishtar – and, as
such, was an abomination to the priestly hierarchy of Yahweh’s monotheistic cult.

“Baal (‘Lord’) was the most popular god in the ancient Middle East. He was both
storm-god and warrior, regarded as a legendary hero-king of the past. Baal was an
abomination to the Israelite priests precisely because he was a human elevated to
divine status [something normal among the Greeks and Romans, as we shall see]. In
my view this universal god known as ‘Lord’, son of El, was none other than the mighty
hunter and warrior, Nimrod, the first potentate on Earth… the celebrated king of the
1st Dynasty of Uruk built the Tower of Babel and founded the cities of Ashur and
Nineveh. To the Assyrians he was known as Ninuria; to the Babylonians, Marduk. His
divine consort was Inanna, also known as Ishtar, who in Canaan took the name
Astarte – the Ashtaroth and Asherah of the Bible.

“For ten years (912-903 BC) Asa enjoyed a peaceful reign with no conflicts. In this
time he was able to rebuild the fortified towns destroyed by Ramesses/Shysha and
build the army of Judah back up to full strength. Ramesses, now in his late fifties and
in his forty-second year on the throne, was advise of the new threat. He despatched a
large force of Kushite and Libyan mercenaries, under the command of General Zerah
(himself a Kushite), to crush Judah’s military ambitions. However,… Judah routed its
enemy -… at Mareshah – and pursued the fleeing Kushites back to the city of Gerar
on the coastal plain, plundering towns under the Egyptian protectorate as they went.
Ramesses the Great and mighty Egypt had been humbled. Pharaoh would not trouble
Jerusalem and its kings again…”122

In the eyes of the prophets, the northern kingdom was less legitimate than the
southern, for its origin was rebellion against God and the God-appointed kingship
and priesthood in Jerusalem. They were political schismatics who were on the way to
becoming religious apostates. But God had not abandoned them completely.

122 Rohl, From Eden to Exile, pp. 368-369.

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 For when the northern King Ahab’s wife Jezabel began to make Baalism the official
religion of the State and to persecute those who resisted her, the holy Prophet Elijah
rose up in defense of the true faith, slaughtering the priests of Baal and the soldiers
whom Ahab sent against him. Moreover, in the northern kingdom, as in the southern,
there were many faithful worshippers left; for as the Lord said to Elijah: "Yet I have
left Me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and
every mouth which hath not kissed him" (I Kings 19.18). However, the believers (like
the Prophet Obadiah) were forced to live in hiding; and the great miracles of Elijah,
whereby he stopped the heavens from raining for three and a half years, and showed
Baal to be powerless at the sacrifice on Mount Carmel, and resurrected the son of the
widow of Zarephath, and sent down fire on the messengers of King Ahaziah, did not
bring about a lasting religious reformation.

The three-and-a-half years of drought brought about by the prayers of Elijah - is

regarded as an image of the period of the three-and-a-half years of the Antichrist's
rule, when the Prophet Elijah will again come to earth to rebuke the evil ruler and
"turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their
fathers, lest I [the Lord] come and smite the earth with a curse" (Malachi 4.5).

This, the last verse of the Old Testament in the Massoretic text, is simultaneously a
prophecy of the conversion of the Gentiles to the faith of the Christian Jews and of the
conversion of the last generation of Jews to the faith of the Christians. For as St. Jerome
writes, Elijah "'will turn the heart of the fathers to the sons', that is, Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob, and all the patriarchs, that their descendants should believe in the Lord
and Saviour, in Whom they also believed: 'for Abraham saw My day, and was glad'
(John 8.56): or the heart of the father to the son, that is, the heart of God to everyone
who receives the Spirit of adoption. 'And the heart of the sons to the fathers', so that
Jews and Christians, who now disagree amongst themselves, may agree by an equal
faith in Christ. Whence it is said to the apostles, who passed on the teaching of the
Gospel throughout the world: 'Instead of your fathers sons were born unto you'
(Psalm 44.17)."

After Elijah’s ascension his disciple Elisha continued the struggle. Although, like
Elijah, he lived and worked mainly in the northern kingdom, he made clear his loyalty
to the right-believing King Josaphat, son Asa, of the southern kingdom of Judah, over
the usurping king of Israel. Once it happened that the two kings formed an alliance
and approached the prophet for his advice. He said to the king of Israel: “What have
I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and the prophets of your mother…
As the Lord of hosts lives, Whom I serve, were it not that I have regard for Jehoshaphat
the king of Judah, I would neither look at you, nor see you.” (II Kings 3.13,14)…

Josaphat was not only more legitimate than the northern king: he was more pious
altogether. Like David and Solomon, he ruled over the whole life of the nation,
allowing no schism between the life of the State and the religion of the Church – but
without confusing the two spheres. Fo he carefully distinguished the secular and
ecclesiastical spheres, saying: “Take notice: Amariah the chief priest is over you in all
matters of the Lord, and Zebediah the son of Ismael, the ruler of the house of Judah,
for all the king’s matters” (II Chronicles 19.11).

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 In 842, Elisha sent a priest to Ramoth-Gilead to anoint Jehu, a tough general. He
was ordered to destroy the House of Ahab, while his sons were “to occupy the throne
of Israel down to the fourth generation” (II King [IV Kings] 10.30). And they did:
Jehu’s dynasty lasted another four generations in the persons of Jehoahaz, Jehoash,
Jeroboam II and Zechariah, for a total of seventy years.

However, the sickness of the northern kingdom was never healed. Ruled by kings
of whom the Lord said: "They have made kings for themselves, but not by Me" (Hosea
8.4), the people went from bad to worse. Finally, in 722 BC, in the reign of King
Hoshea, after a vain attempt to win Egyptian support, the kingdom was conquered
by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser, its people were deported and it lost its religious
and national identity for ever (II Kings [IV Kings] 17).

While the northern kingdom of Israel perished, the southern kingdom of Judah
continued to exist, though it was little better from a moral point of view. Isaiah's words
are typical of the exhortations of the prophets in these years: "Hear, O heavens, and
give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children,
and they have rebelled against Me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's
crib: but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider. Ah sinful nation, a people
laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have
forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are
gone away backward. Why should they be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and
more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even
unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying
sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour
it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter
of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a
besieged city. Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we
should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah" (Isaiah
1.2-9).

The idea of "the remnant", a faithful core in an age of apostasy, now becomes more
and more important in the writings of the prophets. Just as the Lord in Abraham's
time was prepared to spare Sodom and Gomorrah as long as righteous Lot remained
in it, so He was prepared to spare Judah as long as a faithful remnant was preserved
in it. Thus King Hezekiah, though a vassal of Assyria, reversed the syncretistic policies
of Ahaz. This attracted God’s protection, and in one famous incident the angel of the
Lord struck down 185,000 of the warriors of Sennacherib in one night.

This showed what could be done if faith was placed, not in chariots and horses, but
in the name of the Lord God (Psalm 19.7). Moreover, Judah even survived her
tormentor. Assyria, having been used to punish the sins of the Jews, was cast away by
God (Isaiah 10.15), and in accordance with the words of the Prophet Nahum, was
conquered by the Babylonians to the south.

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 In this period, as the people and priesthood became weaker in faith, the kingship
became stronger. The strength and piety of the kings might have compensated for the
weakness of the Church, at least in part. But if the king worshipped idols, then, like
Ahaz, he might reign during his lifetime, but after his death “they did not bring him
into the sepulchres of the kings of Israel” (II Chronicles 28.27). And if he did not
understand his role, and was not kept in his place by a good high priest, then the
results could be catastrophic. Thus in the reign of King Ozias (Uzziah) the kingship
began to encroach on the altar. St. Jerome explains: “As long as Zacharias the priest,
surnamed the Understanding, was alive, Ozias pleased God and entered His
sanctuary with all reverence. But after Zacharias died, desiring to make the religious
offerings himself, he infringed upon the priestly office, not so much piously as rashly.
And when the Levites and the other priests exclaimed against him: ‘Are you not Ozias,
a king and not a priest?’ he would not heed them, and straightway was smitten with
leprosy in his forehead, in accordance with the word of the priest, who said, ‘Lord, fill
their faces with shame’ (Psalm 82.17)… Now Ozias reigned fifty-two years… After his
death the prophet Isaias saw the vision [Isaiah 6.1]… While the leprous king lived,
and, so far as was in his power, was destroying the priesthood, Isaias could not see
the vision. As long as he reigned in Judea, the prophet did not lift his eyes to heaven;
celestial matters were not revealed to him.”123

The prominent role played by the kings in restoring religious purity foreshadowed
the similarly prominent role that the Orthodox autocrats would play in defence of the
faith in New Testament times. Thus when the Emperor Justinian pressed for the
anathematization of the works of three dead heretics, his supporters pointed to the
fact that King Josiah had repressed the living idolatrous priests, and burned the bones
of the dead ones upon the altar (II Kings 23.16).124

Often, however, it was the kings who led the people in apostasy. Such was King
Manasseh (698-644 BC), who ordered the execution of Isaiah and many others. “He
rebuilt the high places destroyed by Hezekiah, established new altars dedicated to
Ball in the courtyard of Yahweh’s temple and re-erected the Asherah pole in
Jerusalem. The king even sacrificed his own son as a human offering to Moloch, the
god of fire.”125 He introduced the worship of Astarte, the goddess of love and war,
whose cult was accompanied by temple prostitution.

Child-sacrifice was a sin particularly abhorrent to the Lord. The Israelites learned
it from the Canaanites, - “They poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and
daughters, whom they sacrificed to the graven things of Canaan” (Psalm 105.36). That
is one of the main reasons why the Lord ordered the extermination of that people and
the related peoples of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians. The representations of
Baal and Astarte are very often accompanied by the six-pointed hexagram, which is
now, by a bitter irony, called the Star of David – although it had nothing to do with

123 St. Jerome, Letter to Pope Damasus, in Johanna Manley (ed.), The Bible and the Holy Fathers, Menlo Park,
Ca.: Monastery Books, 1990, p. 412.
124 A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952, p. 152.
125 Rohl, From Eden to Exile, p. 423.

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King David or the true Israel.126 After two years in Assyrian exile, Manasseh repented
of his sins in a moving prayer that forms part of Great Compline in the Orthodox
Church to this day. But his son Amon returned to his father’s idolatrous ways, only to
be assassinated by his courtiers in 642.

However, the people rose up and assassinated Amon’s assassinators, bringing the
eight-year-old Josiah to the throne. After his priest Huldah found a lost book of the
Law in the Temple, Josiah instituted a thorough reformation of the people's religious
life. He “removed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to
burn incense on the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places all around
Jerusalem, and those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the
constellations, and to all the hosts of heaven” (II Kings 23.5) – that is, the angels. Josiah’
reinstitution of the feast of Pascha on a grand scale was perhaps his most memorable
achievement: “No Passover like this one had ever been celebrated in Israel since the
days of the Prophet Samuel” (II Chronicles 35.18).

However, Josiah made a fatal mistake in his relations with the contemporary super-
power of Egypt. When Pharaoh Necho marched north to fight the Assyrians, Josiah
went out to fight him. But Pharaoh sent messengers to him, saying, “What have I to
do with you, king of Judah? I have not come against you this day, but against the
house with which I have war; for God commanded me to make haste. Refrain from
meddling with God, Who is with me, lest He destroy you”. However, continues the
chronicler, “Josiah would not turn his face from him, but disguised himself so that he
might fight with him, and did not heed the words of Necho from the mouth of God.
So he came to fight in the Valley of Megiddo.” (II Chronicles 36.21-22) And there he
was killed… The mourning over the death of King Josiah was unprecedented in its
length and depth of feeling.

The priests were also guilty. They "said not, Where is the Lord? and they that
handle the law knew Me not: the pastors also transgressed against Me, and the
prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit" (Jeremiah
2.8). Betrayal reached even the highpriesthood. Thus Jewish tradition relates that
Somnas, the high priest and temple treasurer in the time of King Hezekiah, wished to
betray the people of God and flee to the Assyrian King Sennacherib. St. Cyril of
Alexandria says of him: "On receiving the dignity of the high-priesthood, he abused
it, going to the extent of imprisoning everybody who contradicted him."127

The kings refused to obey Jeremiah’s warning not to enter into alliance with either
Egypt of Babylon; and he was thrown into pit by other priests, who said that “the law
shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the
prophet" (18.18). But all this took place: the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar
captured Jerusalem with great slaughter, destroyed the Temple, and deported most
of the remaining people and priests with the Temple treasures to pagan Babylon...

126 See Elena Samborskaya, “Otkrovenie o zvezde. Tajna geksagrammy” (Revelation about the star. The
mystery of the hexagram), Sviashchennoe Pisanie (Holy Scripture), October 11, 2015,
http://holyscripture.ru/creative/?t=helena_samborskaya&b=hexagram.
127 St. Cyril, P.G. 70, 516B.

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 10. THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY

As we have seen, God punished the northern kingdom of Israel for its impiety by
sending the Assyrians to destroy it before Himself destroying the instrument of His
wrath (Isaiah 10.15) – a pattern that we find throughout history. Thus in 612 Assyria
was conquered by Babylon, never to rise again. And in 605, and again in 586, the Lord
punished the southern kingdom of Judah for its apostasy by sending
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, to destroy the Temple and exile the people to
Babylon. For “the Lord, the God of their fathers, constantly sent to them by His
messengers, because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place.
But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising His words, and scoffing at
His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against His people, until there was no
remedy. Therefore He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who slew
their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no
compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged: He gave them all into his hand”
(II Chronicles 36.15-16).

The Jews had hoped to rebel against the Babylonians by appealing to the other
despotic kingdom of Egypt. But the Prophet Jeremiah rebuked them for their lack of
faith. If God wills it, he said, He can deliver the people on His own, without any
human helpers, as He delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrians in the time of Hezekiah.
However, national independence had become a higher priority for the Jews than the
true faith. The only remedy, therefore, was to humble their pride by removing even
their last remaining vestige of independence. Therefore, said the Prophet, “bring your
necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and live! Why will you
die, you and your people, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence, as the
Lord has spoken against the nation that will not serve the king of Babylon… And seek
the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to
the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace…” (Jeremiah 27.12-13, 29.7).

John Barton writes: “We learn from the Murashu tablets (found in what is now
southern Iraq) that the Jewish community had established businesses and even a bank,
following Jeremiah’s advice to settle down and acclimatize to the Babylonian
environment (Jeremiah 29).”128

Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem and carrying away of the Jews to

Babylon, writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “was understood by the Jews as a punishment of
God for their apostasy and corruption. In Babylonia, therefore, there began a process
of repentance and regeneration. But on the other hand a powerful spiritual temptation
awaited the Jews. Chaldea at that time had become an advanced country of pagan
culture. In respect of religion it preserved all the charms of the magic of ancient
Sumeria and Akkad, adding to it the astronomical and astrological science of Assyrian
star-gazing, which, as we have seen, were already practised in Judah in the reign of
King Josiah. The three main branches of ‘Chaldean wisdom’ combined a considerable
fund of real scientific knowledge with the higher philosophy worked out through the
ages by the mind of the Assyrio-Babylonians, combined with the teaching of Zoroaster

128 Barton, A History of the Bible, London: Allen Lane, 2019, p. 31.

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and offshoots of Hinduism. Paganism presented itself before the captives from
Jerusalem as a huge intellectual power armed with everything that men could learn
and assimilate at that time.

“To this we must add that Babylon had attained the highest level of political might
and represented a remarkable system of state structure which was hardly excelled by
all the ancient states. A profoundly worked out law guaranteed the inhabitants’ rights,
and the Babylonian citizens of other tribes here came upon such perfect civil
conditions as they could not even imagine in their native countries. The agriculture,
industry and trade of Babylon were at a high level of development. As captives of
another tribe, crushed materially and morally, recognizing that they had betrayed
their Lord, the Jews came into a country that was striking by its might, glitter, wealth,
knowledge, developed philosophical thought – everything by which one nation could
influence another. If they ‘sat by the waters of Babylon and wept’, dreaming of
revenge on the destroyers of their fatherland, they also could not help being subjected
to the influences of Chaldean wisdom.

“They had grown up in the thousand-year conviction of the loftiness of their chosen
people, of which there was no equal upon the earth. They remembered amazing
examples of the help of the Lord in the past, when He had crushed the enemies of
Israel, including the Assyrians themselves. They were filled with determination to
raise themselves to the full height of their spirit and their providential mission. On the
other hand, they did not have the strength not to submit to the intellectual influence
of Babylon. In general, the age of the Babylonian captivity was the source of very
complex changes in Israel. In the higher sphere of the spirit prophetic inspirations
finally matured to the vision of the nearness of the Messiah. In the conservative layer
of teachers of the law there arose a striving to realize that ‘piety of the law’, the falling
away from which, as it seemed to all, had elicited the terrible punishments of God.
There began the establishment of the text of the law and the collection of tradition; an
embryonic form of Talmudic scholarship was born. Beside it, the masses of the people
involuntarily imbibed the local pagan beliefs, and the teachings of ‘Chaldean wisdom’
were reflected in the minds of the intelligentsia; there was born the movement that
later expressed itself in the form of the Cabbala, which under the shell of supposedly
Mosaic tradition developed eastern mysticism of a pantheistic character…”129

In His parable of the good figs and the bad figs, the Lord indicated that the
Babylonian captivity was for the good of those exiled but for the punishment of those
who remained behind: “Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge those who are
carried away captive from Judah, whom I have sent out of this place for their own
good, into the land of the Chaldeans. For I will set my eyes on them for good, and I
will bring them back to this land. I will build them and not pull them down and not
pluck them up. Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord, and they
shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole
heart.

Tikhomirov, Religio-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History),
129

Moscow, 1997, pp. 135-136.

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 “And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad – surely thus says the
Lord – so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of
Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt.”
(Jeremiah 24.5-8).

This is a vivid image of how God acts through all the great events of history,
demonstrating mercy to some and justice to others. For the good, for those who love
God, these events are for their good, however unpleasant they may seem to be
(Romans 8.28). But for the evil, they come as wrath and punishment…

From the early chapters of Daniel, and in particular in the story of the Three Holy
Youths and their refusal to worship the idol set up by Nebuchadnezzar, we see that
this king was a despot who tried to renew the pagan traditions of the founder of
Babylon, Nimrod. In fact, we may speculate that he tried to renew Nimrod’s project
of building the Tower of Babel. Thus two Catacomb Church nuns write: “Herodotus
writes in his History that they built small ziggurats in Babylon (evidently in memory
of the first failure) consisting of towers placed on top of each other. On the top of the
small ziggurat E-temen-anki was raised a statue of the idol Marduk weighing 23.5
tons. Many centuries later the notable tyrant Nebuchadnezzar said: 'I laid my hand to
finishing the construction of the top of E-temen-anki, so that it might quarrel with
heaven.’”130

130 "Taina Apokalipticheskogo Vavilona" (The Mystery of the Apocalyptic Babylon), Pravoslavnaia
Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 47, N 5 (545), May, 1995, pp. 14-16. Grant Jeffrey writes: “[In the nineteenth
century] the French government sent Professor Oppert to report on the cuneiform inscriptions
discovered in the ruins of Babylon. Oppert translated a long inscription by King Nebuchadnezzar in
which the king referred to the tower in the Chaldean language as Borzippa, which means Tongue-tower.
The Greeks used the word Borsippa, with the same meaning of tongue-tower, to describe the ruins of the
Tower of Babel. This inscription of Nebuchadnezzar clearly identified the original tower of Borsippa
with the Tower of Babel described by Moses in Genesis. King Nebuchadnezzar decided to rebuild the
base of the ancient Tower of Babel, built over sixteen centuries earlier by Nimrod, the first King of
Babylon. He also called it the Temple of the Spheres. During the millenium since God destroyed it, the
tower was reduced from its original height and magnificence until only the huge base of the tower (four
hundred and sixty feet by six hundred and ninety feet) standing some two hundred and seventy-five
feet high remained within the outskirts of the city of Babylon. Today the ruins have been reduced to
about one hundred and fifty feet above the plain with a circumference of 2,300 feet. Nebuchadnezzar
rebuilt the city of Babylon in great magnificence with gold and silver, and then decided to rebuild the
lowest platform of the Tower of Babel in honor of the Chaldean gods. King Nebuchadnezzar resurfaced
the base of the Tower of Babel with gold, silver, cedar, and fir, at great cost on top of a hard surface of
baked clay bricks. These bricks were engraved with the seal of Nebuchadnezzar… In this inscription
found on the base of the ruins of the Tower of Babel, King Nebuchadnezzar speaks in his own words
from thousands of years ago confirming one of the most interesting events of the ancient past....: ‘The
tower, the eternal house, which I founded and built. I have completed its magnificence with silver,
gold, other metals, stone, enamelled bricks, fir and pine. The first which is the house of the earth’s base,
the most ancient monument of Babylon; I built it. I have highly exalted its head with bricks covered
with copper. We say for the other, that is, this edifice, the house of the seven lights of the earth, the
most ancient monument of Borsippa. A former king built it, (they reckon 42 ages) but he did not
complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their
words…’” (The Signature of God, Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale Publishers, pp. 40-41)

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 *

“The Babylonian captivity,” writes Deacon Pavel Serzhantov, “was permitted as a

means of punishing the people, as a penance. The time of destruction and punishment
came to an end, and the time of creation and repentance began, the time of the mercy
of God. The Lord leads His people through severe testing—such trials that it seems to
some that God abandoned His people and forgot about them, not sympathizing with
their suffering, not paying heed to the lawless invaders. Is this really how we should
understand it? No. ‘For he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye’ (Zechariah
2:8).”131

Zechariah was not the only prophet sent by God to comfort the suffering Jews.
“There was no limit to the grief and despondency of the ancient Jews,” says St. John
Maximovich. “Jerusalem was destroyed and they themselves were led away into the
Babylonian captivity… ‘Where are Thine ancient mercies, O Lord, which
Thou swarest to David?’ (Psalm 88:50), they cried out. ‘But now Thou, hast cast
off and put us to shame... They that hated us made us spoil for themselves and Thou
scatterest us among the nations’ (Psalm 43:10-12).

“But when it seemed that there was no hope for deliverance, the Prophet
Ezekiel, who was likewise in captivity, was made worthy of a wondrous vision. And
the hand of the Lord came upon me, he says of this. The invisible right hand of the
Lord placed him in the midst of a field full of human bones. And the Lord asked him:
Son of man, will these bones live? And the Prophet replied: ‘O Lord God, Thou
knowest this.’ Then the voice of the Lord commanded the Prophet to say to the bones
that the Lord will give to them the spirit of life, clothing them with sinews, flesh, and
skin. The Prophet uttered the word of the Lord, a voice resounded, the earth shook,
and the bones began to come together, bone to bone, each to its own joint; sinews
appeared on them, the flesh grew and became covered with skin, so that the whole
field became filled with the bodies of men; only there were no souls in them. And
again the Prophet heard the Lord, and at His command he prophesied the word of the
Lord, and from the four directions souls flew to them, the spirit of life entered into the
bodies, they stood up, and the field was filled with an assembly of a multitude of
people.

“And the Lord said, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; and they
say, Our hope has been lost, we have perished... Behold, I will open your
tombs and will bring you up out of your tombs, My people, and I wilt put
My spirit within you and ye shalt live, and I will place you upon
your own land (Ezekiel 37:1-14).

“Thus the Lord God revealed to Ezekiel that His promises are steadfast, and that
what seems impossible to the human mind is performed by the power of God.

131 Serzhantov, “The Apple of the Almighty’s Eye”, Orthodox Christianity, February 21, 2017,
http://orthochristian.com/101230.html.

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 “This vision signified that Israel, after being delivered from captivity, would return
to its own land. In a higher sense, it indicated the settlement of the spiritual Israel in
the eternal heavenly Kingdom of Christ. At the same time there is prefigured also the
future General Resurrection of all the dead.”132

Jeremiah prophesied that the Jews would serve the king of Babylon for seventy
years, but that then the Lord would punish the king of Babylon and his people for
their iniquity (Jeremiah 25.11-12). Everything took place as the prophet had foretold…
Thus one night in 539 BC, Belshazzar (Nabonidus) the son of Nebuchadnezzar, was
feasting with his lords, wives and concubines, drinking in the very same holy cups
that had been taken by his father from the Temple in Jerusalem. At that point a
mysterious hand appeared, writing on the wall. The Prophet Daniel was summoned
and said: “This is the interpretation of each word. MENE: God has numbered your
kingdom and finish it; TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found
wanting. PERES: Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and
Persians.” (Daniel 5.26-29)

That very night Babylon was conquered, and Belshazzar killed, by Cyrus II, “the
Great”, King of the Medes and Persians, one of the greatest rulers of history, whom
the Lord even called “My anointed” (Isaiah 45.1), although he was a pagan.

What does this anointing signify? Saul, David and Solomon had been given a
visible anointing that bestowed on them the Holy Spirit. But Cyrus was neither a king
of Israel (although he was its overlord), nor did he receive a visible anointing. His case
shows that in addition to the visible anointing given in the sacrament of coronation,
there is also an invisible anointing.

Thus St. Philaret of Moscow writes: “The name ‘anointed’ is often given by the
word of God to kings in relation to the sacred and triumphant anointing which they
receive, in accordance with the Divine establishment, on their entering into possession
of their kingdom… But it is worthy of especial note that the word of God also calls
anointed some earthly masters who were never sanctified with a visible anointing. Thus
Isaiah, announcing the will of God concerning the king of the Persians, says: ‘Thus
says the Lord to His anointed one, Cyrus’ (Isaiah 45.1); whereas this pagan king had
not yet been born, and, on being born, did not know the God of Israel, for which he
was previously rebuked by God: ‘I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me’
(Isaiah 45.5). But how then could this same Cyrus at the same time be called the
anointed of God? God Himself explains this, when He prophesies about him through
the same prophet: ‘I have raised him up…: he shall build My city, and He shall let go
My captives’ (Isaiah 45.13). Penetrate, O Christian, into the deep mystery of the
powers that be! Cyrus is a pagan king; Cyrus does not know the true God; however
Cyrus is the anointed of the true God. Why? Because God, Who ‘creates the future’
(Isaiah 45.11), has appointed him to carry out His destiny concerning the re-
establishment of the chosen people of Israel; by this Divine thought, so to speak, the
Spirit anointed him before bringing him into the world: and Cyrus, although he does not
know by whom and for what he has been anointed, is moved by a hidden anointing,

132 Maximovich, “Will these Human Bones Come to Life?” The Orthodox Word, No. 50, May-June, 1973.

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and carries out the work of the Kingdom of God in a pagan kingdom. How powerful
is the anointing of God! How majestic is the anointed one of God! He is the living
weapon of God, the power of God proceeds through him into the inhabited world and
moves a greater or lesser part of the human race to the great end of its general
completion.”133

Cyrus extended the Persian empire to the east and the west134, and practised a
remarkable degree of national and religious toleration for his time.135

“Within twenty years,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, he “had assembled the
greatest empire the world had ever seen. He realized that keeping his vast new
domain together would require peaceful diplomacy, rather than oppression and
violence. So instead of forcing Persian customs and laws on the newly conquered
peoples, he set about creating a new concept of world empire, selecting the best
elements from different areas to create a better whole. He employed Median advisers,
mimicked the dress and cultural influence of the Edamites, and tolerated religious
freedom everywhere in return for total political submission. He governed from three
capitals: Ecbatana, the Persian capital Pasargadae, and Babylon.

“His reputation was further enhanced by the discovery in the 19th century of the
‘Cyrus Cylinder’, an artefact inscribed with details of Cyrus’ conquests and his
overthrow of tyranny, and declaring his belief in religious toleration and his
opposition to slavery.”136

And yet, as we read in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, even among the exiles, many did
not repent and did not return to Jerusalem, staying among the pagans and learning
their ways. At the same time, the books of Daniel, Esther and Tobit show how many
pious people remained among the Jews in exiled.

133 St. Philaret, Iz Slova v den’ koronatsia Imperatora Aleksandra Pavlovicha. Sbornik propovednicheskikh
obraztsov (From the Sermon on the Day of the Coronation of the Emperor Alexander Pavlovich. A
Collection of Model Sermons). Quoted in “O Meste i Znachenii Tainstva Pomazania na Tsarstvo” (“On
the Place and Significance of the Mystery of Anointing to the Kingdom”), Svecha Pokaiania (Candle of
Repentance) (Tsaritsyn), N 4, February, 2000, p. 15.
134 Cyrus was one of the great conquerors in history. He began as king of Anshan in southern Iran,

ruling over the house of the Achaemenians. “By 550 Cyrus had seized Ecbatana, dethroned Astyages,
and taken over the vast Median empire. Scarcely had he done this when he launched upon a series of
brilliant campaigns which struck terror far and wide…In 547/6 Cyrus marched against Lydia.
Apparently he swept across Upper Mesopotamia en route, removing that area, and probably northern
Syria and Cilicia, from Babylonian control. Then, hurdling the Halys in the dead of winter, he attacked
the Lydian capital, Sardis by surprise, took it, and incorporated Lydia into his realm. With most of Asia
Minor to the Aegean Sea in Cyrus’ control”, he campaigned “across Hyrcania and Parthia into what is
today Afghanistan, and across the steppes beyond the Oxus as far as the Jaxartes. With a few rapid
strokes he had created a gigantic empire, far larger than [any] known before” (John Bright, A History of
Israel, London: SCM Press, 1980, p. 354).
135 Jaime Alvar Ezquerra, “Dawn of Persia”, National Geographic Magazine, September/October, 2016,

34.
136 Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, p. 17.

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 Cyrus immediately freed the Jews and allowed them to return to Jerusalem and
rebuild the Temple, declaring: “Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord God of
heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build
Him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all His
people? His God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and
build the house of the Lord God of Israel (he is the God) which is in Jerusalem” (Ezra
1.1-3).

A pious remnant of Jews in Babylon, stirred up by the Prophets Haggai and

Zechariah and in accordance with the prophecy of Jeremiah (24.6), returned to
Jerusalem under the Davidic Prince Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple. Work began in
536 BC, with financial help from Cyrus. So the Lord saved the religion and worship of
Israel through His anointed king, Cyrus…

Cyrus had such respect for the God of Israel, and in particular for the holy Prophet
Daniel, that the Babylonians accused him of “becoming a Jew” (Daniel 12.28 (LXX)),
and on witnessing Daniel’s deliverance from the lions’ den, he cried out: “Great art
Thou, O Lord God of Daniel, and there is no other beside Thee” (Daniel 12.41).

According to Yuval Noah Harari, it was Cyrus who introduced one of the most
important political ideas in history: the idea that an empire can exist for the benefit of
all its subject peoples, not just the dominant nation. “For the kings of Assyria always
remained the kings of Assyria. Even when they claimed to rule the entire world, it
was obvious that they were doing it for the greater glory of Assyria, and they were
not apologetic about it. Cyrus, on the other hand, claimed not merely to rule the whole
world, but to do so for the sake of all people. ‘We are conquering you for your own
benefit,’ said the Persians. Cyrus wanted the peoples he subjected to love him and to
count themselves lucky to be Persian vassals. The most famous example of Cyrus’
innovative efforts to gain the approbation of a nation living under the thumb of his
empire was his command that the Jewish exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to
their Judaean homeland and rebuild their temple. He even offered them financial
assistance. Cyrus did not see himself as a Persian king ruling over Jews – he was also
the king of the Jews, and thus responsible for their welfare…

“In contrast with ethnic exclusiveness, imperial ideology from Cyrus onward has
tended to be inclusive and all-encompassing. Even though it has often emphasized
racial and cultural differences between rulers and ruled, it has still recognized the
basic unity of the entire world, the existence of a single set of principles governing all
places and times, and the mutual responsibilities of all human beings. Humankind is
seen as a large family: the privileges of the parents go hand in hand with responsibility
for the children.”137

For all their bad reputation in modern times, multi-national empires have in
general been more universalist in their ideology than smaller groupings centred on
the power and glory of a single nation. And this remains the abiding glory of Cyrus
the Great, the first non-Jewish “anointed of the Lord”.

137 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Mankind, London: Vintage, 2011, pp. 218, 219.

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 *

The greatest prophet of the Babylonian captivity was Daniel, who won the respect
of Nebuchadnezzar by correctly divining and then interpreting the dreams he
received from God, for which he was promoted to the post of “chief of magicians” of
the Babylonian empire. The interpretations he gave were not flattering to
Nebuchadnezzar, for they revealed that God would destroy his kingdom of gold
(Babylon), which would be succeeded by the pagan empires of Media-Persia,
Macedon and Rome, before Rome would be destroyed by the “stone cut from the
mountain”, Christ. One of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams that for his pride, and for his
refusal to recognize he absolute dominion of God over all earthly kingdoms, he would
go mad and live like an ox under the open air, but would eventually recover his sanity
when he recognized the dominion of the one true God. As he himself confessed: “At
the end of the days, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my eyes to heaven, and my reason
returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honoured Him Who
lives forever, for His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His Kingdom endures
from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as
nothing, and He does according to His will among the hose of heaven, and among the
inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand, or say to Him, ‘What hast Thou
done?’ At the same time, my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom,
my majesty and splendour returned to me. My counselors and my lords sought me,
and I was established in my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. Now
I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, for all His works
are right and His ways are just, and those who walk in pride He is able to humble.”
(4.34-47).

A remarkable confession, by perhaps the purest example of despotism after

Nimrod, to the fact that there is a King over all earthly kings, and that even the most
powerful and evil of tyrants can repent before God, and God will have mercy on
them…

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 11. THE ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY

Although all the peoples of the ancient world were religious, and many of them
identified their rulers with gods, they were not averse to overthrowing them and even
killing them when it seemed to them that “the mandate of heaven”, to use the Chinese
expression, had changed. In the sixth century BC, both the Greeks and Romans
overthrew their kings. Only, unlike all the other ancient pagan peoples, they did not
replace one king with another, but introduced the novel concept that the real king of
the people was the people itself: democracy was born.

The introduction of democracy did not prevent them from remaining intensely
religious. In Greece, as in Rome, no serious steps in public life were taken without
determining the will of the gods through religious rites and sacrifices, or through
consulting oracles, such as the one at Delphi.138 In time, however, religious concepts
of legitimacy became mixed up with rational, philosophical ones more consistent with
democracy; and the legitimate king became not only he who is appointed by the will
of the gods, but also, and indeed primarily, he who is appointed by the will of men.

A religious understanding could cope with regime change by positing that God or
the gods had changed their minds. Thus King Saul, though originally legitimate and
chosen by God, was rejected by Him in favour of the true king, David, “a man after
Mine own heart”. Here the will of God is all: legitimacy has nothing to do with men’s
choice, but only with God’s; men’s choice is involved only in accepting or rejecting
the choice of God. The human element enters only in the king himself. By disobeying
the will of God, he ceases to be a true king, and becomes instead a tyrant.

The word “tyrant” is Greek; in the original understanding of the word tyrants were
not necessarily cruel despots, but “opportunistic noblemen who had taken power on
behalf of sectional interests”.139 Athenian democracy began in 593/4, when Solon was
elected archon, or chief magistrate of the city, and was given dictatorial powers
because of his wisdom. He introduced several reforms, which included removing the
death penalty for all crimes except homicide – a previous ruler, Draco, had imposed
the penalty on many minor offences, which was considered unacceptably harsh
(hence the word “Draconian”). As Melissa Lane writes, he established “a moderate
regime including rich and poor” and “was succeeded by two generations of turannoi.
The first, Peisistratus, is described as having been a supporter of the people…
Peisistratus gained and lost power several times, using every trick in the book…

“… He is described… as ruling ‘constitutionally rather than tyrannically’… This

later judgement shows that even the paradigmatic tyrant of Athenian history could
no longer be described as such. This is because that tyrant had at the time been seen
as ruling moderately and benevolently, establishing local magistrates and even
advancing money to the bankrupt. More than a few Athenians seem to have tolerated
and even enjoyed his rule at the time.

138 Hugh Bowden, “Greek Oracles and Greek Democracy”, The Historian, Spring, 1994; Jean-Pierre
Isbouts, “Secret Societies”, National Geographic, pp. 13-14..
139 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon.

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 “In contrast, the excoriation of tyranny would, in the memory of later Athenians,
attach indelibly to one of the sons of Peisistratus, Hippias. Hippias initially ruled
jointly with his brother Hipparchus, who became embroiled in an unrequited love
affair leading to a violent insult and quarrel. The erstwhile beloved, who had scorned
Hipparchus’ advances, conspired with his lover and other citizens to overthrow the
Peisistratids. In the midst of a civic procession they thought themselves betrayed,
panicked and struck too soon, killing Hipparchus but being killed themselves (one
immediately, one after torture) as a result. Hippias began to rule much more harshly,
becoming a paradigm of tyranny in the modern pejorative sense, and the Spartans
were induced by manipulated oracles to overthrow him and his family, allowing them
safe conduct out of Athens once they had handed over the Acropolis, on which the
meeting and sacred places of the city were concentrated. A further struggle between
supporters of the tyrants and those of a previously powerful aristocratic family
ensued, the Spartan force changing sides to expel the anti-tyrannical faction. But at
that point, the people besieged the tyrannical forces on the Acropolis, recalled the
exiles and gave power to one of them, Cleisthenes, who had ‘befriended the people’
(Hdt. 5.66).

“It is with this assertion of popular power and the subsequent legal innovations
promoted by Cleisthenes that ‘democracy’ proper in Athens is widely acknowledged
to have begun. The democracy would immortalize the two tyrannicides who had
killed Hipparchus – putting up statues of them in the agora and commissioning new
ones after the first lot were stolen (ironically, by the Persian Xerxes, a tyrant par
excellence in many Greek imaginations). This inscribed an opposition to tyranny at
the heart of the democracy, even as the demos (the people) began to act abroad – and
perhaps at home – as a tyrant itself, taking power to act unaccountably while
demanding accountability of its officers and allies.”140

Democracy received a further major stimulus when a Greek revolt against Persian
rule in Asia Minor led to the Persian Emperor Darius invading Greece in 493. He was
defeated in the famous battles of Thermopylae and Marathon. Then his successor
Xerxes was defeated on the sea at Salamis and on land at Plataea (479). The victory
over Persia gave a massive impulse to that Greek obsession with freedom as against
tyranny, democracy as against despotism. This obsession with freedom and
democracy had a decisive impact on Republican Rome and became the leitmotif of
western civilization in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment up to the present day.

However, before going on to discuss the achievements of Athenian democracy, we

should remind ourselves that Athens was not the whole of Greece, nor was democracy
the only form of government to be observed among the Greek city-states. In Sicily and
on the coast of Asia Minor monarchy still flourished. And on mainland Europe mixed
constitutions including elements of all three forms of government were also to be

140 Lane, Greek and Roman Political Ideas, London: Pelican, 2014, pp. 77, 78-79.

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found, notably in Sparta, one of the earliest models of socialism in the western
world.141

This diversity of state forms naturally led to a debate on which was the best; and
we find one such debate recorded by the “Father of History”, Herodotus.

He placed it, surprisingly, in the court of the Persian King Darius. Was this merely
a literary device (although Herodotus, who had already encountered this objection,
insisted that he was telling the truth)? Or did this indicate that the Despotism of Persia
tolerated a freer spirit of inquiry and debate than is generally supposed? We do not
know.

In any case the debate – the first of its kind in western literature - is worth quoting
at length:- “The first speaker was Otanes, and his theme was to recommend the
establishment in Persia of popular government. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the time has
passed for any one man amongst us to have absolute power. Monarchy is neither
pleasant nor good. You know to what lengths the pride of power carried Cambyses,
and you have personal experience of the effect of the same thing in the conduct of the
Magus [who had rebelled against Cambyses]. How can one fit monarchy into any
sound system of ethics, when it allows a man to do whatever he likes without any
responsibility or control? Even the best of men raised to such a position would be
bound to change for the worse – he could not possibly see things as he used to do. The
typical vices of a monarch are envy and pride; envy, because it is a natural human
weakness, and pride, because excessive wealth and power lead to the delusion that he
is something more than a man. These two vices are the root cause of all wickedness:
both lead to acts of savage and unnatural violence. Absolute power ought, by rights,
to preclude envy on the principle that the man who possesses it has also at command
everything he could wish for; but in fact it is not so, as the behaviour of kings to their
subjects proves: they are jealous of the best of them merely for continuing to live, and
take pleasure in the worst; and no one is readier than a king to listen to tale-bearers.
A king, again, is the most inconsistent of men; show him reasonably respect, and he
is angry because you do not abase yourself before his majesty; abase yourself, and he
hates you for being a toady. But the worst of all remains to be said – he breaks up the
structure of ancient tradition and law, forces women to serve his pleasure, and puts
men to death without trial. Contrast this with the rule of the people: first, it has the
finest of all names to describe it – equality under the law; and, secondly, the people in
power do none of the things that monarchs do. Under a government of the people a
magistrate is appointed by lot and is held responsible for his conduct in office, and all
questions are put up for open debate. For these reasons I propose that we do away
with the monarchy, and raise the people to power; for the state and the people are
synonymous terms.’”

141 See Lev Karpinsky, “S ‘Sotsializmom’ napereves’” (With “Socialism” in a Horizontal Position),
Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News), N 21, May 27, 1990; Vladimir Rusak, Svidetel’stvo obvinenia (Witness
for the Prosecution), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1989, part III, p. 102; Montefiore, Titans,
pp. 27-31.

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 “Otanes was followed by Megabyzus, who recommended the principle of
oligarchy in the following words: ‘Insofar as Otanes spoke in favour of abolishing
monarchy, I agree with him; but he is wrong in asking us to transfer political power
to the people. The masses are a feckless lot – nowhere will you find more ignorance
or irresponsibility or violence. It would be an intolerable thing to escape the
murderous caprice of a king, only to be caught by the equally wanton brutality of the
rabble. A king does at least act consciously and deliberately; but the mob does not.
Indeed how should it, when it has never been taught what is right and proper, and
has no knowledge of its own about such things? The masses handle affairs without
thought; all they can do is to rush blindly into politics like a river in flood. As for the
people, then, let them govern Persia's enemies; but let us ourselves choose a certain
number of the best men in the country, and give them political power. We personally
shall be amongst them, and it is only natural to suppose that the best men will produce
the best policy.’

“Darius was the third to speak. ‘I support,’ he said, ‘all Megabyzus’ remarks about
the masses but I do not agree with what he said of oligarchy. Take the three forms of
government we are considering – democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy – and suppose
each of them to be the best of its kind; I maintain that the third is greatly preferable to
the other two. One ruler: it is impossible to improve upon that – provided he is the
best. His judgement will be in keeping with his character; his control of the people
will be beyond reproach; his measures against enemies and traitors will be kept secret
more easily than under other forms of government. In an oligarchy, the fact that a
number of men are competing for distinction in the public service cannot but lead to
violent personal feuds; each of them wants to get to the top, and to see his own
proposals carried; so they quarrel. Personal quarrels lead to civil wars, and then to
bloodshed; and from that state of affairs the only way out is a return to monarchy – a
clear proof that monarchy is best. Again, in a democracy, malpractices are bound to
occur; in this case, however, corrupt dealings in government services lead not to
private feuds, but to close personal associations, the men responsible for them putting
their heads together and mutually supporting one another. And so it goes on, until
somebody or other comes forward as the people’s champion and breaks up the cliques
which are out for their own interests. This wins him the admiration of the mob, and
as a result he soon finds himself entrusted with absolute power – all of which is
another proof that the best form of government is monarchy. To sum up: where did
we get our freedom from, and who gave it us? Is it the result of democracy, or of
oligarchy, or of monarchy? We were set free by one man, and therefore I propose that
we should preserve that form of government, and, further, that we should refrain from
changing ancient ways, which have served as well in the past. To do so would not
profit us.’”142

This to a western ear paradoxical argument that monarchy actually delivers

freedom actually has strong historical evidence in its favour. Several of the Greek
kings were summoned to power by the people in order to deliver them from
oppressive aristocratic rule. Darius himself freed the Jews from their captivity in
Babylon. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, freed the Romans from civil war. So did

142 Herodotus, History, III, 80, 81, 82.

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St. Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, who also granted them religious
freedom. Riurik, the first Russian king, was summoned from abroad to deliver the
Russians from the misery and oppression that their anarchical “freedom” had
subjected them to. Tsar Nicolas II died trying to save his people from the worst of all
despotisms, Communism…

Of course, these men were exceptional: it is easy to find monarchs who enslaved or
oppressed their subjects rather than liberating them. So the problem of finding the
good monarch – or, at any rate, of finding a monarchical type of government which is
good for the people even if the monarch himself is bad – remains. As Darius puts it,
one-man rule is the best “provided he is the best”. But the argument in favour of
monarchy as put into the mouth of an oriental despot by a Greek democratic historian
– that it prevents civil war - also remains valid. It should remind us that Greek
historical and philosophical thought was more often critical of democracy than in
favour of it.

The victories over Persia were accomplished by the Delian League of Greek city-
states, led by Athens. “In 461,” writes Simon Jenkins, “the city came under the
leadership of a popular orator, Pericles (461-429), who secured the ostracism of his
conservative opponent, Cimon. He presided over Athens through a third of a century
of its so-called Golden Age. A cultured, ascetic, innovative man, he is said to have
been susceptible only to his mistress, Aspasia. He sought peace with Persia in 449, but
was constantly in conflict with the cities of the Delian League.

“Pericles saw government as a web of interlocking civil and personal obligations,

underpinned by an emerging rule of law. Periclean Athens blazed over the Aegean, a
comet of intellectual and creative energy. The Acropolis was crowned with marble
buildings. Its Parthenon temple to Athene was to become the most celebrated
structure in the world, a template for (good) architects to this day. Round it were set
temples to other gods, with beneath it the agora and theatre of Dionysus. These
projects were financed from the Delian League, and as such were bitterly resented by
its members.

“To Pericles civic life was fused with art. His friend, the sculptor Phidias, brought
a new realism to the previously stylized portrayal of the human form. The playwrights
Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus analysed the emotions of love, ambition and
revenge. The historian Thucydides reminded Athenians of their greatest deeds and
greatest mistakes. Hippocrates analysed disease as a natural not divine phenomenon.

“The city also found room for Socrates (469-399), prophet of the concept of
deliberative reasoning. To Socrates humans were free agents with wills of their own,
unbounded by Promethean myths of gods and creatures. To find wisdom they needed
only to open their minds to the world around them… Socrates championed reason

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against superstition, inquiry against authority. Above all, he said, humans owed it to
their nature to be curious, to inquire without inhibition.”143

“Thucydides,” continues Jenkins, “recorded Pericles’ last three speeches as

masterpieces of Greek oratory. In them (or as Thucydides recalled them) the great
leader declared that the root of Athens’ genius lay in tolerance. Its laws ‘afford equal
justice to all in their private differences… If a man can serve the state, he is not
hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom we enjoy in our government
extends to our ordinary life…’”144

Fine words, but they did not pass the test of reality. Athens’ subjects in the Delian
League rebelled and united with non-democratic Sparta against supposedly
democratic and tolerant, but in fact tyrannical Athens in the Peloponnesian War. In
404 the Athenians finally lost that war, having disposed of the Melians with great
cruelty...

The “glorious” age of fifth-century Athenian democracy came to an end in 399 with
what Plato considered to be the greatest of all acts of injustice: the condemnation and
execution of his teacher, Socrates. The critical charge against Socrates was a false,
religious one: “They say that Socrates does wrong by corrupting the young, and not
respecting the gods whom the city respects, but other, new ones.” So there were limits,
in Plato’s eyes, to the tolerance – and justice - of Athenian democracy…

143 Jenkins, A Short History of Europe, London: Viking, 2018, pp. 14-15.
144 Jenkins, op. cit., p. 16.

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 12. THE CLASSICAL GREEK WORLD-VIEW AND JUSTICE

The broadening of the membership of the citizen body, and the gradual
democratization of public life had profound consequences, both religious and social,
for the Greek city-states. With regard to religion, it is hard to determine whether
increased democratization brought a weakening of religious faith, or vice-versa. But
two major differences from the religion and culture of the East can be distinguished.

The first was the dynamism or relative anti-traditionalism of Greek culture. Thus E.H.
Gombrich writes: “Whereas the great empires of the East bound themselves so tightly
to the traditions and teachings of their ancestors that they could scarcely move, the
Greeks – and the Athenians in particular – did the opposite. Almost every year they
came up with something new. Everything was always changing…”145

A second distinguishing feature of Greek classical culture was its particularly

human view of God or the gods, suggesting that, for all their power, the gods were
only relatively superior to human beings. Gods and men were not equal in power, but
equal – or at any rate, not radically unequal – under a higher law of cosmic justice.
Thus J.M. Roberts writes: “Greek gods and goddesses, for all their supernatural
standing and power, are remarkably human. They express the man-centred quality of
later Greek civilization. Much as it owed to Egypt and the East, Greek mythology and
art usually presents its gods as (recognizably fallen) men and women, a world away
from the monsters of Assyria and Babylonia, or from Shiva the many-armed. If the
implication of this religious revolution was that the gods were no better than men, its
converse was that men could be like the gods. This is already apparent in Homer;
perhaps he did as much as anyone to order the Greek supernatural in this way and he
does not give much space to popular cults. He presents gods taking sides in the Trojan
war in postures all too human. They compete with one another; while Poseidon
harries the hero of The Odyssey, Athena takes his part. A later Greek critic grumbled
that Homer ‘attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy
among men: theft, adultery and deceit’. It was a world which operated much like the
actual world.”146

That men could be like the gods showed the intensely competitive nature of the
Greek. “This spirit, this ferocious commitment to being the best, was one in which all
aspired to share. In Homer’s poetry, the word for ‘pray’, euchomai, was also a word for
‘boast’.”147 Thus the whole tendency of Classical Greek religion was to exalt men and
debase the gods.

As often as not, the Greek gods were in fact deified heroes, even criminals. Thus
the Ten Martyrs of Crete during their confession of the Christian Faith during the
reign of the Emperor Decius (third century) said: “There is no point in speaking about
Zeus or his mother Hera, O ruler. Our fathers told us everything we need to know
about Zeus’ ancestry, birth, and character. If you would like to see his grave, we will

145 Gombrich, A Little History of the World, London: Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 42-43.
146 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 139.
147 Tom Holland, Dominion, London: Abacus, 2019, p. 14.

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gladly show it to you. He was born here in Crete, and brought much unhappiness to
the people of our island. Such a fornicator was he, that he corrupted both men and
women. By sorcery he frequently changed his appearance, so that he might work vile
deeds more readily. Because evil easily makes a captive of those into whom it sinks
its talons, he became a hero to certain knaves whom he introduced to a life of
depravity, and they made him their god, building him temples and offering him
oblations. Such was the depth of perversion they reached, that they wanted a deity as
degenerate as themselves, who would bestow approbation upon vice…”148

If the gods were such uninspiring figures, against whom men could compete in
virue, it was hardly surprising that the kings should cease to inspire awe. Hence the
trend, apparent from Homeric times, to desacralise kingship. For if in religion the
universe was seen as “one great City of gods and men”, differing from each other not
in nature but in power, why should there be any greater differences in the city of man?
Just as gods can be punished by other gods, and men like Heracles can become gods
themselves, so in the politics of the city-state rulers can be removed from power. There
is no “divine right” of kings because even the gods do not have such unambiguous
rights over men.

As we pass from Homer to the fifth-century poets and dramatists, the same
religious humanism, tending to place men on a par with the gods, is evident. Thus the
conservative poet Pindar writes:

Single is the race, single

Of men and gods:
From a single mother we both draw breath.
But a difference of power in everything
Keeps us apart.

Over all, however, is cosmic justice, the real ruler of both gods and men. Thus for
Aeschylus the whole of history is shaped by the divine hand of Justice. Cosmic justice
must always be satisfied, and the men who defy the laws of the gods are always
punished for their pride (hubris).

Nevertheless, in the plays of Aeschylus, for example, the men who rebel (e.g.
Prometheus), are sometimes treated with greater sympathy than the gods against
whom they rebel. Even the conservative Sophocles puts a man-centred view of the
universe into the mouth of his characters, as in the chorus in Antigone:

Many wonders there are, but none more wonderful

Than man, who rules the ocean…
He is master of the ageless earth, to his own will bending
The immortal mother of gods.

148St. Demetrius of Rostov, Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom
Press, 2000, vol. 4: December, p. 435.

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 In about 415 BC the Sicilian writer Euhemerus developed the theory that the gods
originated from the elaboration of actual historical persons.149

This humanist tendency led, in Euripides, to open scepticism about the gods. Thus
Queen Hecabe in The Trojan Women expresses scepticism about Zeus in very modern,
almost Freudian tones:

O Zeus, be thou Natural Necessity

Or the Mind of Man, to thee do I pray.

Euripides’ gods and goddesses, writes Michael Grant, “emerge as demonic

psychological forces – which the application of human reason cannot possibly
overcome – or as nasty seducers, or as figures of fun. Not surprisingly, the playwright
was denounced as impious and atheistic, and it was true that under his scrutiny the
plain man’s religion crumbled to pieces.”150

If the dramatists could take such liberties, in spite of their dramas being staged in
the context of a religious festival, it is not to be wondered at that the philosophers
went still further. Thus Protagoras, the earliest of the so-called sophists, – travelling
teachers or professional rhetors - wrote: “I know nothing about the gods, whether they
are or are not, or what their shapes are. For many things make certain knowledge
impossible – the obscurity of the theme and the shortness of human life.” And again:
“Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; and of things that are
not, that they are not.”

Protagoras did not question the moral foundations of society in a thorough-going

way, preferring to think that men should obey the institutions of society, which had
been given them by the gods.151 Thus he did not cut the bond connecting human
institutions (noµoV) with the Divine order of things (jusiV), – a step that was not taken
unequivocally until the French revolution. Nevertheless, his thought shows that
Athenian democratism tended to go hand in hand with religious scepticism or
humanism.

The distinction between human institutions (noµoV) and the Divine order of things
(jusiV) is a very important one for the history of western civilization.”Man-made
nomoi,” writes Lane, “were human conventions. ‘Law’ in that sense, born of the
happenstance of human contrivance, whether a tyrant’s whim or an assembly’s close-
run vote, was presented as contrasting with the real nature of things – a nature that

149 C.S. Lewis, “Religion without Dogma?” in Faith, Christianity and the Church, London: HarperCollins,
1002, p. 165, footnote.
150 Grant, The Classical Greeks, London: Phoenix, 1989, p. 130.
151 J.S. McClelland writes: “The Greeks did understand that one of the ways of getting round the

problem of the vulnerability of a constitution on account of its age and its political bias was to pretend
that it was very ancient indeed. That meant mystifying the origins of a constitution to the point where
it had no origins at all. The way to do that was to make the constitution immortal by the simple
expedient of making it the product of an immortal mind, and the only immortal minds were possessed
by gods, or, as second-best, by supremely god-like men” (A History of Western Political Thought, London
and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 11).

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might be governed by a justice or law that is altogether different from the laws passed
by humans. To contrast nomos and physis was to call attention to the conventions of
human contrivance, in comparison with the unalterable nature of reality – and, for the
most part, nomos came off worse.” 152

The Divine order of things (jusiV) was manifested above all, as we have said, in a
certain cosmic justice. As the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander put it: “All things
pay retribution to each other for their injustice according to the judgement of Time”.153
Cosmic justice was a major theme of Greek philosophy from Anaximander to Plato. It
was also the principal obsession of the great fifth-century Greek tragedians Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles. Most of their plots concern crime and punishment, hubris
and nemesis. Tragedy was born as an inquiry into the nature of justice.

Thus at the dawn of tragedy, we find Aeschylus’ archetypal tragic hero,

Prometheus, “bound in adamantine chains unbreakable” and defiantly challenging
the power of Zeus, the king of the gods:

Let him hurl at me the curlèd lightning’s prongs;

Let him rouse the air with spasms of saddened winds
And thunder; let hurricane convulse the earth
To her very roots; let the seas’ savage roar
Confound the courses of the heavenly stars;
Let him lift me high and hurl to Tartarus’ gloom
On whirling floods of inescapable doom -
He cannot kill me.154

Zeus cannot kill Prometheus, because Prometheus is a god and immortal. But he is
also the son of Earth, so he feels a bond with the mortal race of man. He belongs,
therefore, to both the kingdom of heaven and the society of men, which involves him
in a conflict of obligations. In bringing fire from heaven to earth, Prometheus fulfilled
his obligations to men but broke his obligations to heaven. Zeus therefore bound him
in chains to a rock.

Prometheus protests that this is unjust –

O sky divine, and swift-winged winds,

And river springs, and ocean waves’
Multitudinous laughter – see!
See, O Earth, mother of all!
And you, all-seeing circle
Of the sun, on you I call!
See what on me, a god, the gods let fall!155

152 Lane, op. cit., pp. 49-51, 52.
153 Anaximander, in Simplicius, Physics, 24, 17.
154 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 1043.
155 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 88.

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For according to the justice of equality a god should not be coerced by another god.
On the other hand, Zeus can invoke the justice of hierarchy – Prometheus has usurped
a higher place than is his by right in the hierarchy of the gods.

In Aeschylus the conflict between different criteria of justice can only be resolved
by the goddess Justice herself:

Justice lights up smoke-dimmed

Halls of the righteous, and honours
Those who walk with God.
She passes by, with eyes
Averted, gilded splendours
Stained by filthy hands.
For she disdains the power
Of avarice falsely stamped
With praise. And all things are steered
To their appointed end.156

For Justice is in league with Fate:

Justice plants the anvil:

The sword is forged by Fate.157

However, Sir Roger Scruton sees both in Aeschylus and his successor-tragedian
Sophocles a distinction between Divine and human justice, which is the embryo of the
characteristically western distinction between religion and politics. “The action of
Sophocles’ Antigone hinges on the conflict between political order, represented and
upheld by Creon, and religious duty, represented in the person of Antigone. The first
is public, involving the whole community; the second is private, involving Antigone
alone. Hence the conflict cannot be resolved. Public interest has no bearing on
Antigone’s decision to bury her dead brother, while the duty laid by divine command
on Antigone cannot possibly be a reason for Creon to jeopardize the state.

“A similar conflict informs the Oresteia of Aeschylus, in which a succession of

religious murders, beginning with Agamemnon’s ritual sacrifice of his daughter, lead
at last to the terrifying persecution of Orestes by the furies. The gods demand the
murders; the gods also punish them. Religion binds the house of Atreus, but in
dilemmas that it does not resolve. Resolution comes at last when judgement is handed
over to the city, personified in Athena. In the political order, we are led to understand,
justice replaces vengeance, and negotiated solutions abolish absolute commands. The
message of the Oresteia resounds down the centuries of Western civilization: it is
through politics, not religion, that peace is secured. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,
but justice, says the city, is mine.”158

156 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 773.
157 Aeschylus, The Libation-Bearers, 646.
158 Scruton, The West and the Rest, London: Continuum, 2002, pp. 2-3.

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 This is an interesting thesis, but it makes too strong a contrast between religion and
politics at this stage of Greek thought. After all, the court of the Areopagus, as Lane
writes, “served religious as well as judicial functions”, so its decisions, like all
decisions in the Age of Faith, are not purely secular. Moreover, Athena is a goddess, and
although “she sets up the court and serves in the first case as one of the twelve jurors,
sitting alongside eleven Athenian mortals,” she remains a goddess who is higher than
the human jurors she sits with. It is she who casts the deciding vote to acquit Orestes
and thereby break the cycle of vengeful justice, which makes it in the end a decision
of the gods, not of men. And so “the image of a goddess deliberating as one member
of an otherwise human jury underscored the divine nimbus attached to the idea of
justice, the awe with which it had to be surrounded if social ties were to withstand the
many breakdowns and violations of justice that everyday life inevitably entailed.”159

The same is true in Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Creon, while upholding the
justice of the state in refusing to bury the traitor Polyneides, is clearly wrong in
upholding the justice of the state against the higher justice of the gods by condemning
Antigone to death. Human justice is clearly subordinate to Divine justice here.

What is new in Sophocles’ play is the psychological analysis, the idea that religious
motives can be polluted by all-too-human passions. Thus when Antigone decides to
defy Creon’s edict by performing this service for her brother’s unsettled ghost:

I will bury him –

What glory to die for that! I will lie with him
Loving and beloved; for piety
Condemned. For I have more time to serve those below
Than those up here; there I shall lie forever.160

we detect a hint of a certain Pharisaism, even sensuality, corrupting the purity of her
undoubtedly correct championship of a higher justice and morality.

Antigone dies for her brother; but death to her is what chastity is to Shakespeare’s
Isabella.

Nothing can rob me of my honourable death,161

She says to her sister Ismene; and

Take heart – you live: my heart is long since dead

To serve the dead.162

Creon’s hints that her religious passion is a kind of Manichaean love of death:

159 Lane, op. cit., pp. 44-45.
160 Antigone, 71.
161 Antigone, 96.
162 Antigone, 559.

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 There let her pray to Death – of all the gods
She worships him alone – to spare her death.
Then at length she will learn what pain unimag-
inable is it to worship Death when dead.163

There follows an ode to “unconquerable Eros”. But what kind of Eros is meant? If it is
Antigone’s almost Isoldean passion for death, then it may be unconquerable, but it is
also destructive. Her betrothed Haimon (haima is the Greek for “blood”) kills himself
when he finds her dead – his eros has been crushed to death. The tragic irony is that
she who said:

To join in love, not hatred, was I born,164

has left in her heroic wake only hatred and suffering. She championed the justice of
the gods against the justice of the state, and in this the gods supported her – Creon
loses not only his son Haimon, but also his wife Eurydice in punishment for his “self-
will”. But the chorus describes Antigone, too, as self-willed. Self-will infects both
Creon and Antigone.

This psychologism is imitated in later western drama – for example, in the very
similar dynamic between Angelo and Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,
and also in Hamlet, where the hero’s quest for justice leads to a pile of dead bodies,
including those of several innocents.

The moral is that to fight for Divine justice is great and commendable, but that even
the greatest feats of heroism can be corrupted by pride and therefore lead to the
suffering of the innocent.

Sophocles’ last play, Oedipus at Colonus, performed in 406 as Athens faced defeat
by Sparta, takes the analysis of justice one step further. In this work, Time is, as in
Anaximander, the ultimate judge of all things. But there is no joy in the triumph of
this Divine justice, which destroys even the best that is human:

Only the gods escape old age and death:

The rest are victims all of ruinous Time.
Earth’s strength decays, and health departs; faith dies,
And falsehood blooms; the breath of friendship fails
‘Twixt man and man, and state and state. Whether soon
Or late, sweet turns to sour, and fair to foul.
If now ‘twixt you and Thebes the day is fine,
Time will bring forth a thousand days and nights
In which the most harmonious, close-bound friends
Will part at spear’s point for the merest nothing.165

163 Antigone, 777.
164 Antigone, 523.
165 Oedipus at Colonus, 607.

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 Oedipus’ son Polyneices enters, and appeals to his father in the name of “Mercy,
who sits beside the throne of God”, to help him against his brother Eteocles. This is a
new note in tragedy: mercy also has its claims, for it, too, is divine. However, it is not
given to Sophocles to develop this new theme. For Oedipus, in the name of “old,
eternal Justice”, brings curses on both his sons. Then he is borne away through the
midst of thunder and lightning to “unseen fields of night”. He could say, as did
Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,

My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things…(V, 1)

The third of the great Athenian dramatists, Euripides, did not share his older
colleagues’ faith in justice. It wasn’t only that the justice of the state was often unjust,
and the justice of the gods brought only suffering. The more fundamental question
was: did justice really exist? Thus when Medea is betrayed by Jason and murders their
children in revenge, the gods aid and abet her to the last. When Hippolytus ignores
Aphrodite, he is destroyed together with Phaedra, the instrument of the goddess’
revenge. And when Pentheus persecutes the followers of Dionysius, he is torn apart
limb from limb. Euripides did not try to justify the ways of God to men; “justice
strain’d with mercy” is to be found neither in heaven nor on earth.

The historian Herodotus believed in justice. For Herodotus, writes Simon Sebag
Montefiore, “pride always comes before a fall, but he emphasizes that such failures
are not the punishment of the gods, but rather result from human mistakes. This
rational approach, in which the gods did not intervene in the affairs of men, was a
major innovaion and formed the basis for the tradition of Western history.”166 But a
harmful innovation. For if God does intervene in the affairs of men, denying it can
only distort our understanding of the reality…

Justice is also an important theme in the greatest of the Greek philosophers, Plato.
The whole of his best-known dialogue, The Republic, is devoted to the nature of justice.
Moreover, in Timaeus and Critias he uses the story of the Fall of Atlantis, a mythical
mercantile empire that was overwhelmed by volcanoes and floods, as an allegorical
illustration of how the gods visit nemesis on the pride of nations – with a possible
reference to the contemporary mercantile empire of Athens.167

The early Christian writer Origen believed that the source of the wisdom of the
Greeks lay in the wisdom that God gave to the Hebrew King Solomon: of moral
philosophy – in Solomon’s Proverbs, of natural philosophy - in Ecclesiastes, and of
Divine contemplation – in The Song of Songs.168

166 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 33.
167 In recent years, many historians, geologists and archaeologists have come to believe that Plato’s

account is based on real historical memories of the Minoan civilization of the second millennium BC,
and on the great volcanic eruption that took place on the Minoan trading outpost of Thera (modern
Santorini) in 1620 BC, which created a vast tsunami that destroyed the centre of Minoan civilization on
Crete and whose effects were felt as far east as Egypt and as far west as Ireland.
168 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, Prologue, 3.

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 Even if we do not accept that the wisdom of the Greeks derived from the Hebrews,
it is instructive to contrast the great advance made by the Greeks in probing the nature
of justice, with the great prophets of Israel, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who
were praising the justice of God and denouncing the injustices of men at about the
same time.

“The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”: this is from the Old Testament, but
it could also serve as the motto of the great Greek tragedians. The Hebrew and the
Greco-Roman worlds agreed that the world is governed in accordance with Divine
justice. Wisdom therefore begins in acknowledging this ineluctable fact, and
managing one’s life in accordance with it. To do otherwise is foolish – and will bring
down upon oneself the wrath of Cosmic Justice.

Beyond that acknowledgement, of course, the Jews and the Greeks diverged in
their thinking. The Jewish prophets, having a direct knowledge of the One True God,
and a deeper and more accurate knowledge of His laws, entertained no Euripidean
doubts about His justice. And, having a much higher estimate of the God of Abraham
than the Greeks had of Zeus and his often wayward family, they were much less
patient with the idea that God was in any way unjust. Thus “The house of Israel saith,
‘The way of the Lord is not equal.’ ‘O house of Israel, are not My ways equal? Are not
your ways unequal? Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according
to his ways’” (Ezekiel 18.29-30.). Again, the last of the Prophets, Malachi (fifth-century
BC), says: “Ye have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet ye say, ‘Wherein have we
wearied Him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord,
and He delighteth in them.’ Or, ‘Where is the God of judgement?’” (Malachi 2.17). But
God, for the Jewish prophets, is never unequal – that is, unjust - in His ways; He is
always the God of judgement.

The Jewish prophets are no less stern than the Greek tragedians in seeing an
inexorable link between crime and punishment, hubris and nemesis. But they have
none of the black pessimism of Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus. The God of justice does
not only punish: He also comes to save His people from their oppressors, “to heal the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to
those who are bound; to proclaim the acceptable years of the Lord, and the day of
vengeance of our Go; to comfort all who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion,
to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for
the spirit of heaviness; that they may be alled trees of righteousness, the planting of
the Lord, that He may be glorified” (Isaiah 61.1-3).

Of course, this joyful outcome for the just and the justified would come only with
the Saviour, Jesus Christ, of whom the Greeks had no conception and the Jews only a
dim one as yet. However, in this obsession with justice in both the Jewish and the
Greco-Roman world we may see a preparation for Christ, and an anticipation of the
time when both Jews and Greeks would be one in Christ, worshipping the God both
of justice and of mercy. If the Law and the Prophets were “a schoolmaster to Christ”
for the Jews (Galatians 3.24), then the great works of the Greek tragedians and
philosophers provided that cultural and intellectual earth in which the new Christian

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civilization could grow and prosper. For Greek philosophy, according to Clement of
Alexandria, “was given to them for a time and in the first instance for the same reason
as the Scriptures were given to the Jews. It was for the Greeks the same nurse towards
Christ as the law was for the Jews…”

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 13. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

The unlikely victory of Sparta over Athens in the Peloponnesian war (429-404 BC)
is a parable of the superiority of deeds over words; for the Athenians were renowned
for their oratory and glorious literary culture, but in the end they succumbed to the
determination and disciple of the laconic Spartans. “At a certain gathering of
Athenians, at which envoys from Sparta were sen, one old man was going from bench
to bench, trying to find somewhere to sit down. The Athenians mocked him, and no-
one gave his his seat. When the old man drew near to the Spartans, they all leapt to
their feet and offered him their places. Seeing this, the Athenians expressed their
gratitude to the Spartans in well-rounded phrases. To this the Spartans replied: ‘The
Athenians know what is good, but do not do it.’”169

The reputation of democracy began to suffer after the defeat of Athens, and the
many negative phenomena that the war threw up, which led not only to a slackening
in the creative impulse that had created Periclean Athens, but also, eventually, to a
questioning of the superiority of democracy over other forms of government.

The first and most obvious defect that the war revealed was that democracy tends
to divide rather than unite men – at any rate so long as there are no stronger bonds
uniting them than were to be found in Athens. Remembering their racial and cultural
bonds, the Greeks had united to defeat Persia early in the fifth century B.C., and this
had provided the stimulus for the cultural efflorescence of Periclean Athens. But this
was both the first and the last instance of such unity. “Herodotus notes how the
Persian empire, although made up of diverse people divided by religion, geography
and language, nevertheless acts with a remarkable unity. The Greeks, by contrast,
drawn from a relatively small pool of culturally homogeneous city-states, are prone
to faction and infighting…”170 For the next one hundred and fifty years, until
Alexander the Great imposed despotism on the city-states, the Greek city-states were
almost continually at war with each other.

Nor was this disunity manifest only between city-states: within them traitors were
also frequent. Thus Athens’ greatest general, Alcibiades, betrayed his city in the war
with Sparta. And after the Athenians had been defeated by Sparta they suffered a
bloody oligarchical coup in 394: the so-called Thirty Tyrants “killed, exiled and
expropriated thousands until democratic loyalists succeeded in reconquering the city
and re-establishing its democratic regime”.171

Evidently, attachment to democracy does not necessarily go together with

attachment to the nation, with patriotism and civic loyalty. This fact elicited Aristotle’s
famous distinction between behaviour that is characteristic of democracy and
behaviour that is conducive to the survival of democracy. The same dilemma was to
confront democracy in its struggle with communism in the twentieth century, when

169
Velimirovich, The Prologue of Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1985, part one, January 5, pp.. 28-
29.
170 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 32.
171 Melissa Lane, “Was Socrates a Democrat?”, History Today, vol. 52 (01), January, 2002, p. 43.

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large numbers of citizens of the western democracies were prepared to work secretly
(and not so secretly) for the triumph of a foreign power and the most evil despotism
yet seen in history.

This element of destructive individualism is described by Roberts: “Greek

democracy… cheerfully paid a larger price in destructiveness than would be
welcomed today. There was a blatant competitiveness in Greek life apparent from the
Homeric poems onwards. Greeks admired men who won and thought men should
strive to win. The consequent release of human power was colossal, but also
dangerous. The ideal expressed in the much-used word [areth] which we
inadequately translate as ‘virtue’ illustrates this. When Greeks used it, they meant that
people were able, strong, quick-witted, just as much as just, principled, or virtuous in
a modern sense. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, frequently behaved like a rogue, but he is
brave and clever and he succeeds; he is therefore admirable. To show such quality was
good; it did not matter that the social cost might sometimes be high. The Greek was
concerned with ‘face’; his culture taught him to avoid shame rather than guilt and the
fear of shame was never far from the fear of public evidence of guilt. Some of the
explanation of the bitterness of faction in Greek politics lies here; it was a price
willingly paid.”172

Another defect of Athenian democracy was its tendency to identify the state with
the assembly of free male citizens in separation from the family173, whereas Aristotle
saw the state as an organic outgrowth from the family - the family writ large. This led
to the emphasis on individualism and competitiveness we have already noted, and
undermined the relations of hierarchy and obedience within society. Perhaps,
therefore, it is not by chance that the first feminist work of literature was Aristophanes’
comedy, Lysistrata.

“Those who most benefited from the ‘empire’ were, Aristotle said, the Athenian
poor. Why? Because Athens was a direct democracy: the poor dominated the
Assembly and made sure that it worked in their interest. So it was they who were
granted the land that Athens confiscated from rebellious states or took over in their
‘colonies’ in the Aegean; they who were paid for public service, for example, on juries
(a radical innovation); they who held down the jobs working in Athens’ navy and
dockyards, which kept the ‘empire’ going.”174

Athenian democracy was not notably humane… Athenian democracy could be as

cruel as any despotism. Thus they slaughtered the inhabitants of the little island of
Melos simply because they did not want to become part of the Athenian empire. The
Athenians said: “You know as well as we do that when these matters are discussed by
practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel
and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept
what they have to accept… It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule wherever
one can. This is not a law made by ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when

172 Roberts, op. cit., p. 157.
173 Jean Bethke Elshtein, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. 8.
174 Peter Jones, BBC World Histories, N 3, April/May, 2017, p. 34.

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it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever
among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we
know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in
precisely the same way…”175

All the Melian males of military age were slaughtered, and all the women and
children were driven into slavery. Thus in the end the ideal of freedom that had given
birth to Athenian Democracy proved weaker than Realpolitik and the concrete
examples provided by the Olympian gods and the Dionysian frenzies. The Melian
episode demonstrates that even the most just and democratic of constitutions are
powerless to prevent their citizens from descending to the depths of barbarism unless
the egoism of human nature itself is overcome, which in turn depends on the truth of
the religion that the citizens profess…

And there was another event that famously illustrated this point: the trial and
execution of Socrates in 399. According to Socrates’ most famous pupil, Plato,
democracy had destroyed justice and truth when it executed the finest flower of Greek
civilization. Indeed, the words that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates during his
trial make it clear that, for him, the democracy that condemned him was not only
unjust but also impious, that is, opposed to God and the search for the truth to which
he devoted his life: “If you say to me, ‘Socrates, we let you go on condition that you
no longer spend your life in this search, and that you give up philosophy, but if you
are caught at it again you must die’ – my reply is: ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love
you, but I shall obey God rather than men, and while I breathe, and have the strength,
I shall never turn from philosophy, nor from warning and admonishing any of you I
come across not to disgrace your citizenship of a great city renowned for its wisdom
and strength, by giving your thought to reaping the largest possible harvest of wealth
and honour and glory, and giving neither thought nor care that you may reach the
best in judgement, truth, and the soul…’”176

Socrates himself was not an enemy of Athenian democracy, but he did reject two
of its basic assumptions: that every citizen was equally capable of ruling, and that
dissent should be repressed.177 On the contrary, he believed in the free expression of
opinion, and in this respect he may be called the world’s first liberal. Moreover, on the
basis of his method of rationally dissecting arguments, and his implicit placing of
human reason above received authoriy, he may be called the world’s first rationalist.
His trial demonstrates, among other things, that the disinterested and free pursuit of
truth is not always compatible with democracy, in which the opinion of the majority
can become a tyranny, as Alexis de Tocqueville was to argue in his famous Democracy
in America.

175 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, London: Penguin books, V, 89, 91-97. Paradoxically, the
Spartans were more merciful to fallen enemies, as Thucydides writes: “[The Spartans] fought long and
stubbornly until the rout of their enemy, but, that achieved, pursuing them only for a short time, and
not far” (in Antonio Penades, “Sparta’s Military Machine”, National Geographic History,
November/December, 2016, p. 37).
176 Brian Macarthur, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, London: Penguin, 1995, p. 9. See also Melissa

Lane, “Was Socrates a Democrat?” History Today, vol. 52 (01), January, 2002, pp. 42-47.
177 Lane, op. cit., p. 47.

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 The nobility of Socrates’ character, and his determination to put the truth above all
things, was a clear premonition of the Christianity of the Apostles. It is no wonder that
Church writers such as St. Justin the Philosopher saw in him a “seed” of the Divine
Word. The tragedy of Socrates’ death, combined with the fact of the defeat of
democratic Athens at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian war, decisively
influenced Plato against democracy and in favour of that ideal state which would
place the most just of its citizens, not in the place of execution and dishonour, but at
the head of the corner of the whole state system.

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 14. PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON THE STATE

Karl Popper contrasted the world-view of Socrates, “a modest, rational

individualist” with that of Plato, “a totalitarian demi-god”178… Plato was a religious
man who sought to build the first systematic theory of the relationship of politics to
religion. In The Republic he asserts that the end of the state is happiness, which is
achieved if it produces justice, since justice is the condition of happiness. Democracy
was not only not the ideal form of government according to this criterion: it was a long
way from the ideal, being the penultimate stage in the degeneration of the state from
the ideal to a meritocracy to an oligarchy to a democracy, and finally to a tyranny.

The process of degradation is approximately as follows. A meritocracy – the highest

form of government yet found in Greece, and located, if anywhere, in Sparta - tends
to be corrupted, not so much by power, as by money (Spartan discipline collapsed
when exposed to luxury).

This leads to a sharp division between the rich and the poor, as a result of which
the poor rise up against the rich and bring in democracy, which is “feeble in every
respect, and unable to do either any great good or any great evil.”179 For democracy’s
great weakness is its lack of discipline: “You are not obliged to be in authority,
however competent you may be, or to submit to authority, if you do not like it; you
need not fight when your fellow-citizens are at war, nor remain at peace when they
do, unless you want peace… A wonderfully pleasant life, surely – for the moment.”180
“For the moment” only, because a State founded on such indiscipline is inherently
unstable. Indiscipline leads to excess, which in turn leads to the need to reimpose
discipline through despotism, the worst of all evils.

For Plato, in short, democracy is bad is because it is unstable, and paves the way
for the worst, which is despotism or tyranny. He compares democracy to a ship in
which: “The captain is larger and stronger than any of the crew, but a bit deaf and
short-sighted, and similarly limited in seamanship. The crew are all quarrelling with
each other about how to navigate the ship, each thinking he ought to be at the helm;
they have never learned the art of navigation and cannot say that anyone ever taught
it them, or that they spent any time studying it; indeed they say it can’t be taught and
are ready to murder anyone who says it can [i.e. Socrates, who recommended the
study of wisdom]. They spend all their time milling round the captain and doing all
they can to get him to give them the helm. If one faction is more successful than
another, their rivals may kill them and throw them overboard, lay out the honest
captain with drugs or drink or in some other way, take control of the ship, help
themselves to what’s on board, and turn the voyage into the sort of drunken pleasure-
cruise you would expect. Finally, they reserve their admiration for the man who
knows how to lend a hand in controlling the captain by force or fraud; they praise his
seamanship and navigation and knowledge of the sea and condemn everyone else as
useless. They have no idea that the true navigator must study the seasons of the year,

178 Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, part I, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
179 Plato, The Republic, London: Penguin books, 1974, 488.
180 Plato, The Republic, 557.

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the sky, the stars, the winds and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if
he is to be really fit to control a ship; and they think that it’s quite impossible to acquire
the professional skill needed for such control (whether or not they want it exercised)
and that there’s no such thing as an art of navigation. With all this going on aboard
aren’t the sailors on any such ship bound to regard the true navigator as a word-
spinner and a star-gazer, of no use to them at all?”181

David Held comments on this metaphor, and summarises Plato’s views on

democracy, as follows: “The ‘true navigator’ denotes the minority who, equipped with
the necessary skill and expertise, has the strongest claim to rule legitimately. For the
people… conduct their affairs on impulse, sentiment and prejudice. They have neither
the experience nor the knowledge for sound navigation, that is, political judgement.
In addition, the only leaders they are capable of admiring are sycophants:
‘politicians… are duly honoured.. [if] they profess themselves the people’s friends’
(The Republic, p. 376). All who ‘mix with the crowd and want to be popular with it’ can
be directly ‘compared… to the sailors’ (p. 283). There can be no proper leadership in
a democracy; leaders depend on popular favour and they will, accordingly, act to
sustain their own popularity and their own positions. Political leadership is enfeebled
by acquiescence to popular demands and by the basing of political strategy on what
can be ‘sold’. Careful judgements, difficult decisions, uncomfortable options,
unpleasant truths will of necessity be generally avoided. Democracy marginalises the
wise.

“The claims of liberty and political equality are, furthermore, inconsistent with the
maintenance of authority, order and stability. When individuals are free to do as they
like and demand equal rights irrespective of their capacities and contributions, the
result in the short run will be the creation of an attractively diverse society. However,
in the long run the effect is an indulgence of desire and a permissiveness that erodes
respect for political and moral authority. The younger no longer fear and respect their
teachers; they constantly challenge their elders and the latter ‘ape the young’ (The
Republic, p. 383). In short, ‘the minds of citizens become so sensitive that the least
vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable, till finally… in their determination to
have no master they disregard all laws…’ (p. 384). ‘Insolence’ is called ‘good breeding,
licence liberty, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage’ (p. 380). A false
‘equality of pleasures’ leads ‘democratic man’ to live from day to day. Accordingly,
social cohesion is threatened, political life becomes more and more fragmented and
politics becomes riddled with factional disputes. Intensive conflict between sectional
interests inevitably follows as each faction presses for its own advantage rather than
that of the state as a whole. A comprehensive commitment to the good of the
community and social justice becomes impossible.

“This state of affairs inevitably leads to endless intrigue, manoeuvring and political
instability: a politics of unbridled desire and ambition. All involved claim to represent
the interests of the community, but all in fact represent themselves and a selfish lust
for power. Those with resources, whether from wealth or a position of authority, will,
Plato thought, inevitably find themselves under attack; and the conflict between rich

181 Plato, The Republic, p. 282.

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and poor will become particularly acute. In these circumstances, the disintegration of
democracy is, he contended, likely. ‘Any extreme is likely to produce a violent
reaction… so from an extreme of liberty one is likely to get an extreme of subjection’
(The Republic, p. 385). In the struggle between factions, leaders are put forward to
advance particular causes, and it is relatively easy for these popular leaders to demand
‘a personal bodyguard’ to preserve themselves against attack. With such assistance
the popular champion is a short step from grasping ‘the reins of state’. As democracy
plunges into dissension and conflict, popular champions can be seen to offer clarity of
vision, firm directions and the promise to quell all opposition. It becomes a tempting
option to support the tyrant of one’s own choice. But, of course, once possessed of
state power tyrants have a habit of attending solely to themselves.”182

Plato’s solution to the problem of statecraft was the elevation to leadership in the
state of a philosopher-king, who would neither be dominated by personal ambitions,
like the conventional tyrant, nor swayed by demagogues and short-term, factional
interests, like the Athenian democracy. This king would have to be a philosopher,
since he would frame the laws in accordance, not with passion or factional interest,
but with the idea of the eternal Good. His “executive branch” would be highly
educated and disciplined guardians, who would not make bad mistakes since they
would carry out the supremely wise intentions of the king and would be carefully
screened from many of the temptations of life.

Plato saw that society could be held together in justice only by aiming at a goal
higher than itself, the contemplation of the Good. He saw, in other words, that the
problem of politics is soluble only in the religious domain. And while he was realistic
enough to understand that the majority of men could not be religious in this sense, he
hoped that at any rate one man could be trained to reach that level, and, having
attained a position of supreme power in the state, spread that religious ideal
downwards. Thus he wrote: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes
of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and
wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion
of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils, -
no, nor the human race, as I believe, - and then only will this our State have a
possibility of life and behold the light of day.”183

This represents a major advance on all previous pagan political systems or

philosophies. For while all the states of pagan antiquity were religious, they located
the object of their worship within the political system, deifying the state itself, or, more
usually, its ruler. But Plato rejected every form of man-worship, since it inevitably led
to despotism. Contrary to what many of his critics who see him as the godfather of
totalitarianism imply, he was fully aware of the fact that, as Lord Acton put it much
later, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.184

182 David Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press, 1987, pp. 29-31
183 Plato, The Republic, 473.
184 Thus he wrote in The Laws (691): “If one ignores the law of proportion and gives too great power to

anything, too large a sail to a vessel, too much food to the body, too much authority to the mind,
everything is shipwrecked. The excess breaks out in the one case in disease, and in the other in injustice,
the child of pride. I mean to say, my dear friends, that no human soul, in its youth and irresponsibility,

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 Another related fact, which endeared Plato to later Christian thinkers, was his
belief that the end of human society must transcend human society.

Plato’s system presupposed either that existing kings could be educated in the
Good (which Plato tried, but failed to do in Syracuse) or that there was a rational
method of detecting the true lovers of wisdom and then promoting them to the height
of power. However, as Bertrand Russell noted, this is easier said than done: “Even if
we supposed that there is such a thing as ‘wisdom,’ is there any form of constitution
which will give the government to the wise? It is clear that majorities, like general
councils, may err, and in fact have erred. Aristocracies are not always wise; kings are
often foolish; Popes, in spite of infallibility, have committed grievous errors. Would
anybody advocate entrusting the government to university graduates, or even to
doctors of divinity? Or to men who, having been born poor, have made great
fortunes?… It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a
suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this
would turn out to be a party question. The problem of finding a collection of ‘wise’
men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one…”185

As Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) writes: “Society is always more willing

to run after the fanatic or decisive opportunist than after a great-souled dreamer who
is unable to convert words into deeds. The philosophers to whom Plato wished to
entrust the rule of his ideal state would more likely be very pitiful in this situation and
would inexorably lead the ship of state to shipwreck. Political power that is firm, but
at the same time enlightened, rational and conscious of its responsibility, must be the
object of desire of every country, but such happiness rarely falls to the lot of peoples
and states.”186

To be fair to Plato, he was quite aware of the difficulty of finding a man fit to be
philosopher-king. He emphasised training in character as well as intellect, and
acknowledged, as we have seen, that such a man, if found and elevated to power,
could still be corrupted by his position. What his philosophy lacked was the idea that
the Good Itself could come down to the human level and inspire Its chosen one with
wisdom and justice. The problem here was that the scepticism engendered by the all-
too-human antics of the Olympian gods revealed its corrosive effect on Plato, as on all
subsequent Greek philosophers. Greek religion recognised that the gods could come
down to men and inspire them, but the gods who did this, like Dionysius, were hardly
the wise, sober and rational beings who alone could inspire wise and sober statecraft.
As for the enthusiasms of the Orphic rites, these took place only in a condition that
was the exact opposite of sobriety and rationality. So Wisdom could not come from
the lechers and buffoons that the Greeks called gods.

will be able to sustain the temptation of arbitrary power – there is no one who will not, under such
circumstances, become filled with folly, that worst of diseases, and be hated by his nearest and dearest
friends.”
185 Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, pp. 127-128.
186 Gribanovsky, op. cit., p. 40.

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 But what if there was another divinity higher than they, a divinity that would
incarnate the eternal ideas of the Good, the True and the Beautiful? Now Plato did
indeed come to some such conception of the One God. But this was an impersonal
God who did not interfere in the affairs of men. Man may attempt to reach the eternal
ideas and God through a rigorous programme of intellectual training and ascetic
endeavour. But that Divine Wisdom should Himself bow down the heavens and
manifest Himself to men was an idea that had to await the coming of Christianity…
So Plato turned to the most successful State known to him, Sparta, and constructed
his utopia at least partly in its likeness. Thus society was to be divided into the
common people, the soldiers and the guardians. All life, including personal and
religious life, was to be subordinated to the needs of the State. In economics there was
to be a thoroughgoing communism, with no private property, women and children
were to be held in common, marriages arranged on eugenic lines with compulsory
abortion and infanticide of the unfit. There was to be a rigorous censorship of
literature and the arts, and the equivalent of the modern inquisition and concentration
camps. Lying was to be the prerogative of the government, which would invent a
religious myth according to which, as J.S. McClelland writes, “all men are children of
the same mother who has produced men of gold, silver and bronze corresponding to
the three different classes into which Plato divides his ideal community.”187 This myth
would reconcile each class to its place in society.

It is here that that the charge that Plato is an intellectual ancestor of the totalitarian
philosophies of the twentieth century is seen to have some weight. For truly, in trying
to avert the failings of democracy, he veered strongly towards the despotism that he
feared above all. Plato’s path to heaven – the ideal state of the philosopher-king - was
paved with good intentions. Nor was this ideal just a pipedream – he tried to
introduce it into Syracuse. But it led just as surely to hell in the form of the despotism
that all Greeks despised.

Plato’s political ideal was put forward for the sake of “justice” – that is, each man
doing what he is best fitted to do, for the sake of the common good. But, being based
on human reasoning and human efforts alone, it failed, like all such rationalist
systems, fully to take into account the reality of sin, and therefore became the model
for that supremely utopian and unjust system that we see in Soviet and Chinese
communism. Moreover, it anticipated communism in its subordination of truth and
religion to expediency, and in its approval of the lie for the sake of the survival of the
State.

Justice is indeed the ideal of statecraft. But political justice must be understood in a
religious context, as the nearest approximation on earth to Divine Justice. Thus St.
Dionysius the Areopagite, who came from Athens and could be called a truly
Christian Platonist, writes: “God is named Justice because He satisfies the needs of all
things, dispensing due proportion, beauty and order, and defines the bounds of all
orders and places each thing under its appropriate laws and orders according to that
rule which is most truly just, and because he is the Cause of the independent activity
of each. For the Divine Justice orders and assigns limits to all things and keeps all

187 McClelland, op. cit., p. 39.

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things distinct from and unmixed with one another and give to all beings that which
belongs to each according to the dignity of each. And, to speak truly, all who censure
the Divine Justice unknowingly confess themselves to be manifestly unjust. For they
say that immortality should be in mortal creatures and perfection in the imperfect and
self-motivation in the alter-motivated and sameness in the changeable and perfect
power in the weak, and that the temporal should be eternal, things which naturally
move immutable, temporal pleasures eternal, and to sum up, they assign the
properties of one thing to another. They should know, however, that the Divine justice
is essentially true Justice in that it gives to all things that which befits the particular
dignity of each and preserves the nature of each in its own proper order and
power.”188

The religious flavour of Plato’s political philosophy – as of his philosophy in

general – reminds us that while, as we have seen, the introduction of democracy in
Greece went together with a decline in religiosity, - a phenomenon that we see
recurring in later periods of history, - Classical Greek democracy was still not as
irreligious or individualistic as modern democracy, which, as Hugh Bowden writes,
“is seen as a secular form of government and is an alternative to religious
fundamentalism, taking its authority from the will of the human majority, not the
word of god or gods. In Ancient Greece matters were very different… Within the city-
state religious rituals entered into all areas of life… There was no emphasis in the
Greek world on the freedom of the individual, if that conflicted with obligations to
larger groups… Religion was bound up with the political process. High political
offices carried religious as well as civic and military duties. Thus the two kings of
Sparta were generals and also priests of Zeus...

“Plato was no supporter of democracy, because he thought it allowed the wrong

sort of people to have access to office. However, in the Laws he advocates the use of
the lot as a means of selecting candidates for some offices, specifically because it is a
method that puts the decision in the hands of the gods. Furthermore, where there are
issues which Plato considers beyond his powers to legislate for, he suggests that these
should be referred to Delphi. For Plato, then, the use of apparently random selection,
and the consultation of oracles was a preferable alternative to popular decision-
making, because the gods were more to be trusted than the people. This view was not
limited to anti-democratic philosophers…

“Greek city-states took oracles seriously, and saw them as the mouthpieces of the
gods who supported order and civilisation. Although it was the citizen assemblies
that made decisions, they accepted the authority of the gods, and saw the working of
the divine hand where we might see the action of chance…”189

Plato’s disciple Aristotle avoided the extremes of his teacher, dismissing his
communism on the grounds that it would lead to disputes and inefficiency. He agreed
with him that the best constitution would be a monarchy ruled by the wisest of men.
But since such men are rare at best, other alternatives had to be considered.

188 St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, VIII.
189 Bowden, “Greek Oracles and Greek Democracy”, The Historian, N 41, Spring, 1994, pp. 3,4,7,8.

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 Aristotle divided political systems into three pairs of opposites: the three “good”
forms of monarchy, aristocracy and politeia, and the three “bad” forms of tyranny,
oligarchy and democracy (which Polybius later called “ochlocracy”, “rule by the
mob”).190

Aristotle appears to have favoured aristocracy at first, but at the age of forty-two
he returned from Athens to his Macedonian homeland to teach King Philip’s thirteen-
year-old son, Alexander. That Aristotle became Alexander’s tutor is one of the great
ironies of history, in that the flower of Greek democratic philosophy became the
teacher of the destroyer of Greek democracy and the most powerful despot of the
ancient world before the Roman empire. Observing Macedonian politics may have
influenced him to believe that there could be a good kind of monarchy, for King Philip
had taken advantage of the perennial disunity of the Greek city-states to assume a de
facto dominion over them. So monarchy at least had the advantage of creating a certain
unity out of chaos…

“Monarchy, as the word implies,” wrote Aristotle, “is the constitution in which one
man has authority over all. There are two forms of monarchy: kingship, which is
limited by prescribed conditions, and tyranny, which is not limited by anything.”191

This important distinction is similar to the later Christian distinction between

autocracy that submits to God and His laws and despotism that submits to nobody and
nothing…

Like Plato, Aristotle was highly critical of democracy. He defined it in terms of two
basic principles.

The first of these was liberty. “People constantly make this statement, implying that
only in this constitution do men share in liberty; for every democracy, they say, has
liberty for its aim. ‘Ruling and being ruled in turn,’ is one element in liberty, and the
democratic idea of justice is in fact numerical liberty, not equality based on merit; and
when this idea of what is just prevails, the multitude must be sovereign, and whatever
the majority decides is final and constitutes justice. For, they say, there must be
equality for each of the citizens. The result is that in democracies the poor have more
sovereign power than the rich; for they are more numerous, and the decisions of the
majority are sovereign. So this is one mark of liberty, one which all democrats make a
definitive principle of their constitution.”

The second principle was licence, “to live as you like. For this, they say, is a function
of being free, since its opposite, living not as you like, is the function of one
enslaved.”192 The basic problem here, Aristotle argued, following Plato, was that the
first principle conflicted with the second. For licence must be restrained if liberty is to
survive. Once again, history was the teacher: licence had led to Athens’ defeat at the

190 McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.
191 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1366a.
192 Aristotle, Politics, London: Penguin books, 1981, p. 362.

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hands of the more disciplined Spartans. Not only must restraints be placed upon
individual citizens so that they do not restrict each other’s liberty. The people as a
whole must give up some of its “rights” to a higher authority if the state is to acquire
a consistent, rational direction. Not only liberty, but equality, too, must be curtailed –
for the greater benefit of all. Aristotle pointed out that “the revolutionary state of mind
is largely brought about by one-sided notions of justice – democrats thinking that men
who are equally free should be equal in everything, oligarchs thinking that because
men are unequal in wealth they should be unequal in everything.”193

Nevertheless, Aristotle did value the good kind of freedom that was to be found in
politeia, for which the Greeks at their best were distinguished.

What is most valuable in Aristotle’s politics is that “in his eyes the end of the State
and the end of the individual coincide, not in the sense that the individual should be
entirely absorbed in the State but in the sense that the State will prosper when the
individual citizens are good, when they attain their own proper ideal. The only real
guarantee of the stability and prosperity of the State is the moral goodness and
integrity of the citizens, while conversely, unless the State is good, the citizens will not
become good.”194

In this respect Aristotle was faithful to the thought of his teacher, Plato, who wrote:
“Governments vary as the dispositions of men vary. Or do you suppose that political
constitutions are made out of rocks or trees, and not out of the dispositions of their
citizens which turn the scale and draw everything in their own direction?195

This attitude was inherited by the Romans, who attributed the rise of the Roman
republic to the virtues of the Romans, and its fall to their corruption. They knew “that
good laws make good men and good men make good laws. The good laws which
were Rome’s internal security, and the good arms which made her neighbours fear
her, were the Roman character writ large. The Greeks might be very good at talking
about the connection between good character and good government, but the Romans
did not have to bother much about talking about it because they were its living
proof.”196

However, the close link that Aristotle postulated to exist between the kinds of
government and the character of people led him to some dubious conclusions. Thus

193 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, volume I,
part II, p. 97.
194 Copleston, op. cit., pp. 98-99.
195 Plato, The Republic, 544.
196 McClelland, op. cit., p. 84. Again, we find this characteristically Greek connection between good

government and good character drawn by the French historian and Prime Minister, François Guizot,
who wrote in his History of France (1822): “Instead of looking to the system or forms of government in
order to understand the state of the people, it is the state of the people that must be examined first in
order to know what must have been, what could have been its government… Society, its composition,
the manner of life of individuals according to their social position, the relations of the different classes,
the condition [l’état] of persons especially – that is the first question which demands attention from…
the inquirer who seeks to understand how a people are governed.” (quoted in Siedentop’s introduction
to Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997).

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politeia existed in Greece, according to him, because the Greeks were a superior breed
of men, capable of reason. Barbarians were inferior – which is why they were ruled by
despots. Similarly, women could not take part in democratic government because the
directive faculty of reason, while existing in them, was “inoperative”. And slaves also
could not participate because they did not have the faculty of reason.197

(However, he adduces an interesting alternative, environmental argument for his

compatriots’ pre-eminence: “The peoples who live in cold climates and in European
areas are full of enercy, but rather lacking in intelligence and skill; they therefore in
general retain their freedom but lack political organization and the ability to control
their neighbours. The peoples of Asia on the other hand [like the despotic Persians]
are better endowed with intelligence and skill but lack energy and so remain in
political subjection. But the people of Greece occupy a middle geographical position
and correspondingly have a share of both characteristics, both energy and intelligence.
They therefore retain their freedom and have the best of political institutions; indeed
if they could achieve political unity they could control the rest of the world…”198)

A more fundamental criticism of Aristotle’s politics, voiced by later Christian

theorists, was his view that “the state is teleologically autonomous: the polis has no
ends outside itself. A polis ought to be self-sufficiently rule-bound for it to need no law
except its own.”199 For Aristotle it was only in political life that man achieved the
fulfilment of his potentialities – the good life was inconceivable outside the Greek city-
state. Thus “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is
sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god; he is no part of a polis.”200 In a
sense this is true: the hermit in the desert can hardly be called a citizen of the polis.
But St. Anthony the Great did achieve the fulfilment of his potentialities, becoming a
god by grace…

This highlights perhaps the fundamental difference between almost all pagan
theorising on politics (with the partial exception of Plato’s) and the Christian attitude.
For the pagans the life of the well-ordered state, together with the happiness of its
citizens understood in a purely secular sense, was the ultimate aim; it did not exist for
any higher purpose. For the Christian, on the other hand, political life is simply a
means to an end that is other-worldly and transcends politics completely; the
kingdoms of this world are only stepping-stones, as it were, to the Kingdom of God.

This is not to say that Aristotle’s politics was irreligious in a general sense. As M.V.
Zyzykin points out, when Aristotle wrote that “the first duty of the State is concern
over the gods”, he recognised that politics cannot be divorced from religion.201 But

197 McClelland, op. cit., p. 57.
198 Aristotle, Politics, VII, 7; in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004,

p. 52.
199 McClelland, op. cit., p. 117.
200 Aristotle, Politics, I. “A tyrant must put on the appearance of religion,” he said. “Subjects are less

apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider God-fearing and pious.”
201 Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, part I, p. 7. Other ancient writers said the same, for example

Lactantius in his work On the Wrath of God: “Only the fear of God keeps men together in society… With

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Greek religion, as we have seen, was a very this-worldly affair, in which the gods were
seen as simply particularly powerful players in human affairs. The gods had to be
placated, otherwise humans would suffer; but the accent was always on happiness,
eudaimonia, in this life. And Aristotle, for all his philosophical belief in an “unmoved
Mover”, was a less other-worldly thinker than Plato. Which is why Christian
Orthodox (as opposed to Catholic or Protestant) political thought was closer to Plato
than to Aristotle…

the removal of religion and justice we descend to the level of mute cattle deprived of reason, or to the
savagery of wild beasts.”

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 15. THE BUILDING OF THE SECOND TEMPLE

The Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylon with King Cyrus’ blessing in several
waves. The first, in 538, under Shenazar, the son of King Jehoiakin, was a failure
because of local opposition. The second, of 42,360 exiles under Zerubbabel, during the
reign of Cyrus’ son Darius in 520, laid the foundations of the Second Temple. The third
wave, under Ezra, took place in 458. And the fourth, in 445 under Nehemiah, rebuilt
the city walls and the city itself.

Zerubbabel was called “governor of Judah” rather than king, because he was still
under the suzerainty of Persia. However, he was of the line of David, so it was through
his line that the promises of God concerning the continuance of the autocracy were
passed. Moreover, he carried out the functions of an autocrat on a small scale; that is,
he saw as his primary task the restoration of the Temple for the true worship of God.
And in his relationship with the chief priest, Joshua, he mirrored the “symphony”
between Church and State that we find in all true autocracies. Thus in the prophetic
vision of Zechariah chapter 4, Joshua and Zerubbabel are seen as two olive trees, the
two anointed ones through whom God’s grace is given to the people.

Chapter 6 provides a striking messianic prophecy. For as crowns are placed on the
head of Joshua, the Lord says: “Behold the Man whose name is the Branch; and He
shall grow up out of His place; and He shall build the Temple of Jehovah; even He
shall build the Temple of Jehovah; and He shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule
upon His throne; and He shall be a priest upon His throne; and the counsel of peace
shall be between them both.” That this refers to Jesus the Messiah rather than Joshua
the high priest is evident from several facts. First, the phrase “Behold the man” was
later to be used by Pilate of Christ, and the name “Jesus” is in fact the same as
“Joshua”. Secondly, the “Branch” is a name for the Messiah in several Old Testament
prophecies (cf. Isaiah 4.2, 11.1; Jeremiah 23.5, 33.15). Earlier, the Lord had said to
Joshua that He would bring forth His servant, the Branch (3.8), so Joshua and the
Branch are not in fact the same person. It is the Branch, not Joshua, Who will build the
Temple, meaning the New Testament Church, the Body of Christ. He will “sit upon
His throne”, which is not a normal thing for a priest to do, because He is not only a
priest but also a king. In fact, He is both the King of the Jews, and the High Priest of
the Temple of His Body, offering the Sacrifice of His Body and Blood. He is the only
Person (except for Melchizedek) ever rightfully to combine the two roles in one
Person. Normally, the attempt to combine the two roles leads to war between God
and man; but Christ, being the rightful King and Priest, brings “the counsel of peace”
between them…

The rebuilding of the Second Temple under Zerubbabel was a very small-scale,
inglorious affair by comparison with the building of the First Temple under Solomon
(Haggai 2.3). David Baron writes that “Rabbi Samuel Bar Juni, in the Talmud (Yoma,
f.21, c.2), and Rabbis Solomon and Kinchi, in their comment on Haggai 1.8, all agree
that five things that were in the first Temple were wanting in the second – i.e., the ark,
wherein were the tables of the Covenant, and the cherubim that covered it; the fire that
used to come down from heaven to devour the sacrifices; the Shekinah Glory; the gift of

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prophecy, or the Holy Ghost; and the miraculous Urim and Thummim.”202

But in fact its glory would be greater than that of Solomon’s Temple (Haggai 2.8)
because the great King and High Priest, of whom all kings and high priests were only
forerunners and types, would Himself enter into it. That is perhaps why, from the
time of the building of the Second Temple to the Coming of Christ over five hundred
years later, there was no real restoration of the Autocracy. All eyes were now to be
trained not on the shadows of the True Autocracy, but on its substance, not on the
forerunners of the true Autocrat and King of the Jews, but on the Man Himself: Ecce
Homo!…

Probably the most important Jewish leader in this transitional period was the priest
Ezra. “His main task,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “was the re-establishment of the Law
of Israel. Under him there began a collecting of the Sacred Scriptures and traditions,
and the people’s getting to know them, and a multiplication of copies of Scripture.
Around him there gathered the so-called soferim – the first ‘scribes’, the forerunners of
the Pharisees. Under their leadership the regeneration of Israel progressed, but this
regeneration was placed in the soil of the most narrow exclusiveness. The inhabitants
of Palestine in the time of the captivity, the Samaritans and others, wanted to join the
Jews and serve Jehovah together with them, but they were severely rejected. Since a
very large number of mixed marriages had been entered into, and a significant
number of children had been born from them, a triumphant repentance of the people
was appointed, the marriages were broken, and the foreign wives and their children
were sent back to their parents.

“The task of the religious conservatives, who were first of all national patriots,
consisted in strongly organizing the Jewish people and concentrating it under the
leadership of the intelligentsia of that time – the Pharisees. This was not a priestly
party and was even hostile to the ‘Sadducees’, the priestly party. The Pharisees
constituted the intelligentsia, who, inflating the cult of the law, received in it the means
for holding the whole people in their hands. The interpretation of the law given by the
Pharisees was in general rational and humane, being adapted to the conditions and
way of life of the time. But the endless details of the law thus interpreted required a
special class of scholars, since the mass of the people had no opportunity to study
these details and subtleties and had to seek enlightenment and guidance from the
specialists.

“It was these nationalists who at that decisive moment of history determined the
destinies of Israel…”203

202 Baron, Zechariah, Grand Rapids: Kriegel, 1918, 1988, p. 197.
203 Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, pp. 141-142.

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 16. FROM POLIS TO COSMOPOLIS: ALEXANDER THE GREAT

In 338 King Philip II of Macedon defeated the armies of the democratic city-states
of Athens and Thebes at Kenchreae. The age of the democratic city-state was over. It
was Philip’s son Alexander the Great who, even more than his father, was the
instrument of that change. At the age of 18 he had fought at Kenchreae. On becoming
king himself, he set out to conquer the world, and duly conquered the Persian empire,
finally defeating the armies of the Persian King Darius III at Issus in 333 BC, He then
created an even greater empire “that included not only Greece and Macedonia but
also the entire Middle East, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Mesopotamia, Persia and
beyond, into Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and, on the far side of the Hindu Kush
mountains, the rich valley of the Indus.”204 Moreover, according to Arrian, “he would
not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the
British Isles to Europe; he would always have reached beyond for something
unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed
against himself.”205

Alexander transformed the Classical Greek world of the polis into the Hellenistic
empire of the cosmopolis, a brilliant, “high and heady culture”, as John Lennox puts
it206, becoming himself the first true cosmopolitan. “Polis had given way to
cosmopolis,” writes McClelland. Henceforward, men were going to have to stop asking
themselves what it meant to be a citizen of a city, and begin to ask what it meant to be
a citizen of the world…”207

For Alexander, writes Paul Johnson, “had created his empire as an ideal: he wanted
to fuse the races and he ‘ordered all men to regard the world as their country… good
men as their kin, bad men as foreigners’. Isocrates argued that ‘the designation
‘Hellene’ is no longer a matter of descent but of attitude’; he thought Greeks by
education had better titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth’.”208 Isocrates’ attitude
would not last long, and the Greeks would become among the most nationalist of
races. But it became an important part of Romanitas, in which Roman citizenship
became more important than race, and of Christian Romanitas, in which the binding
element was Christian faith.

Alexander’s career is full of ironies. Setting out, in his expedition against the
Persians, to free the Greek democratic city-states on the Eastern Aegean seaboard from
tyranny, and to take final revenge on the Persians for their failed invasion of Greece
in the fifth century, Alexander not only replaced Persian despotism with another,
hardly less cruel one, but depopulated his homeland of Macedonia and destroyed
democracy in its European heartland. His pursuit of personal glory was so obsessive
that one modern biographer has speculated that he was suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder resulting from extended exposure to violence and danger.209 If we are

204 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 42.
205 Arrian, Anabasis, 7.1.
206 Lennox, Against the Flow, Oxford: Monarch, 2015, p. 261.
207 McClelland, op. cit., p. 82.
208 Johnson, A History of the Jews, London, p. 101.
209 Richard Gabriel, The Madness of Alexander the Great, 2015.

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seeking psychological explanations, which should perhaps also mention his
diminutive size (4 feet 6 inches). Many despots, from Alexander to Pope Gregory VII
to Napoleon to Benito Mussolini, have been small and may have tried to compensate
for their physical smallness with their psychological lust for power.

Though one of the greatest warriors in history, Alexander was a bisexual drunkard
and a paranoid megalomaniac, declaring himself a divine Pharaoh (a son of the Greek
Zeus and the Egyptian Ammon) in Egypt. “Only sex and sleep,” he said, “make me
conscious that I am mortal”. He forced his own Greek soldiers to perform an eastern-
style act of proskynesis to their fellow man210, and when his personal historian
Callisthenes criticised him for this he was tortured and killed.211 He married the
daughter of Darius, proclaimed himself heir to the Persian “King of kings” and caused
the satraps of Bithynia, Cappadocia and Armenia to pay homage to him as to a typical
eastern despot.212

Thus Alexander, like the deus ex machina of a Greek tragedy, brought the curtain
down on the Classical phase of ancient Greek civilization, merging it with the despotic
civilizations of the East, and spreading the resultant cultural mixture throughout the
East through his conquests.

Alexander’s successor-kings, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria,

went still further in an orientalising direction. Thus Roberts writes: “’Soter’, as
Ptolemy I was called, means ‘Saviour’. The Seleucids allowed themselves to be
worshipped, but the Ptolemies outdid them; they took over the divine status and
prestige of the Pharaohs (and practice, too, to the extent of marrying their sisters).”213

Classical Greek civilisation began with the experience of liberation from Persian
despotism; it ended with the admission that political liberation without spiritual
liberation cannot last. It was born in the matrix of a religion whose gods were little
more than super-powerful human beings, with all the vices and frailty of fallen
humanity; it died as its philosophers sought to free themselves entirely from the bonds
of the flesh and enter a heaven of eternal, incorruptible ideas, stoically doing their
duty in the world of men but knowing that their true nature lay in the world of ideas.
It was born in the conviction that despotism is hubris which is bound to be struck down
by fate; it died as the result of its own hubris, swallowed up in the kind of despotism
it had itself despised and in opposition to which it had defined itself.

And yet this death only went to demonstrate the truth of the scripture that unless
a seed falls into the earth and dies it cannot bring forth good fruit (John 12.24). For, in
the new political circumstances of empire, and through the new religious prism, first
of Stoicism and then of Christianity, Greek political thought did bring forth fruit.

210 E.E. Rice, Alexander the Great, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997, pp. 63-65. At the same time, it must
be remembered that Classical Greek religion’s confusion of gods and men implicitly raised the
possibility of men becoming godlike.
211 Spencer Day, “Alexander the Great”, History Revealed, 52, February, 2018, p. 38.
212 Roberts, op. cit., p. 173.
213 Roberts, op. cit., p. 175.

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 Stoicism, with the roughly contemporary new religion of Buddhism, was the first
truly universal, cosmopolitan religion (Judaism was potentially cosmopolitan, but
only became actually so in its fulfilment, Christianity.) The essential idea of the Stoics,
a philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC, emphasized
virtue over worldly happiness. Copleston summarizes their political teaching as
follows: “Every man is naturally a social being, and to live in society is a dictate of
reason. But reason is the common essential nature of all men: hence there is but one
Law for all men and one Fatherland. The division of mankind into warring States is
absurd: the wise man is a citizen, not of this or that particular State, but of the World.
From this foundation it follows that all men have a claim to our goodwill, even slaves
having their rights and even enemies having a right to our mercy and forgiveness.”214

Stoicism and the Hellenistic cosmopolis went well together; and Stoicism
continued to be very influential well into Roman times, when the cosmopolis became
Roman.

As McClelland perceptively argues: “The case for Alexander is that he made certain
political ideas possible which had never had a chance within the morally confining
walls of the polis classically conceived. Prominent among these is the idea of a multi-
racial state. The idea comes down to us not from any self-conscious ‘theory’ but from
a story about a mutiny in Alexander’s army at Opis on the Tigris, and it is a story
worth the re-telling. Discontent among the Macedonian veterans had come to a head
for reasons we do not know, but their grievances were clear enough: non-
Macedonians, that is Persians, had been let into the crack cavalry regiment, the
Companions of Alexander, had been given commands which involved ordering
Macedonians about, and had been granted the (Persian) favour of greeting Alexander
‘with a kiss’. The Macedonians formed up and stated their grievances, whereupon
Alexander lost his temper, threatened to pension them off back to Macedonia, and
distributed the vacant commands among the Persians. When both sides had simmered
down, the soldiers came back to their allegiance, Alexander granted the Macedonians
the favour of the kiss, and he promised to forget about the mutiny. But not quite.
Alexander ordered up a feast to celebrate the reconciliation, and the religious honours
were done by the priests of the Macedonians and the magi of the Persians. Alexander
himself prayed for omonoia [unanimity] and concord, and persuaded 10,000 of his
Macedonian veterans to marry their Asiatic concubines…

“The plea for omonoia has come to be recognised as a kind of turning point in the
history of the way men thought about politics in the Greek world, and, by extension,
in the western world in general. The ancient Greeks were racist in theory and practice
in something like the modern sense. They divided the world, as Aristotle did, between
Greeks and the rest, and their fundamental category of social explanation was race.
Race determined at bottom how civilised a life a man was capable of living. The
civilised life was, of course, only liveable in a properly organised city-state. Only
barbarians could live in a nation (ethnos) or in something as inchoate and meaningless
as an empire. The Greeks also seem to have had the modern racist’s habit of

Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, volume I,
214

part II, p. 143.

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stereotyping, which simply means going from the general to the particular: barbarians
are uncivilised, therefore this barbarian is uncivilised. The race question was
inevitably tied up with slavery, though is by no means clear that the ancient Greeks
had a ‘bad conscience’ about slavery, as some have claimed. From time to time, they
may have felt badly about enslaving fellow Greeks, and that was probably the reason
why thinkers like Aristotle troubled themselves with questions about who was most
suitable for slavery and who the least. Low-born barbarians born into slavery were
always at the top of the list of good slave material. Most Greeks probably believed that
without ever thinking about it much.

“The Macedonians may have lacked the subtlety of the Hellenes, but Alexander
was no fool. Whatever the Macedonians may have thought to themselves about the
races of the East, Alexander would have been asking for trouble if he had arrogantly
proclaimed Macedonian racial superiority over conquered peoples, and it would have
caused a snigger or two back in Hellas. What better way for the conqueror of a multi-
racial empire to conduct himself than in the name of human brotherhood?
Imperialism then becomes a gathering-in of the nations rather than the imposition of
one nation’s will upon another and this thought follows from the empire-builder’s
real desire: secretly, he expects to be obeyed for love. This was Alexander’s way of
showing that he was not a tyrant…”215

In Alexander’s empire, therefore, something like a creative fusion of the despotic

and democratic principles took place. It was an empire in form like the pagan empires
of old, with a god-king possessing in principle unlimited power. But the Greek idea
of the godlike possibilities of ordinary men able to direct their own lives in rationality
and freedom passed like a new leaven through the old despotic lump, bringing rulers
to a more humble estimate of themselves, while exalting the idea that the ruled had of
themselves.

Conversely, the experience gained by the Eastern despotisms of many nations

living in something like equality with each other under one rule - we remember the
honour granted to the Jewish Prophet Daniel by the Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persian King Cyrus’ command that the Jews be allowed to
return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple - expanded the consciousness of the
Greeks beyond the narrow horizons of the individual city-state or the one civilization
of the Greeks to the universal community of all mankind (or, at any rate, of the
oikoumene, the civilized world as they knew it), and from the worship of Athene of
Athens or Diana of the Ephesians to the One God Who created all men, gave them all
reason and freewill and brought them all together under one single dominion.

Indeed, as Rolf Strootman writes, the empires of Alexander and his successors were
the channel through which Cyrus the Great’s idea of universal empire entered the
Mediterranean world. “The conception of the whole (civilized) world as a single
empire was continually propagated by Middle Eastern monarchies from the third
millennium BCE. Undoubtedly it appealed to some common belief. People living in
the Achaemenid, Seleucid, or Sasanian Middle East adhered to a certain kind of belief

215 McClelland, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

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in a legitimate Great King whose existence was in some way connected with the
divinely ordained order of the world. The presence of a world ruler at the center of
civilization was believed to be an essential condition for peace, order, and prosperity.

“Essentially a religious concept already in pagan times, the ideal of world unity
became extremely forceful when imperialism and monotheism joined hands…

“… The Macedonian rulers of the Hellenistic Age adopted and transformed the
age-old traditions of empire of the Ancient Near East to create their own ideologies of
empire. Alexander the Great and his principal successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies,
‘Hellenized’ Eastern universalistic pretensions; they did so for the sake of their Greek
subjects, on whose loyalty and cooperation their power for a large part rested. By
converting Near Eastern royal ideology into Greek forms, adding Greek notions of
belonging and unity, and actively encouraging current universalistic tendencies
among the Greeks – Panhellenism, Stoic philosophy, religious syncretism – what was
previously looked upon by the Greeks as oriental despotism became an intrinsic part
of Hellenic polis culture. Macedonian imperialism thus shaped the ways in which the
Greek and Hellenized poleis of the eastern Mediterranean later conceptualized and
formalized their relationships with imperial authority under the Roman Empire.
Conversely, the Hellenized variant of an empire characterized by an ideal of universal
dominion provided the Roman Empire with an acceptable model for imperial
unification in a world characterized by a multitude of city-states.”216

216Strootman, “Hellenistic Imperialism and the Ideal of World Unity”, in Claudia Rapp and H.A. Drake
(eds.), The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World Changing Contexts of Power and Identity. Cambridge
University Press, pp. 38-39.

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 17. THE HASMONEAN KINGDOM

Alexander was good to Judah: after conquering Syria, Tyre and Sidon and all the
lands around, and in spite of the fact that Judah refused to surrender to him, he did
not destroy Jerusalem. For God had intervened…

As Simon Schama writes, “Josephus describes the Jews of Jerusalem, gratefully

faithful to the end to the collapsing Persian Empire, trembling before what they
imagine will be a terrible Macedonian retribution. But their high priest Jaddua is
visited by a dream in which he is told ‘to take courage, adorn the city and open the
gates’. The people were to assemble before the Greek conqueror clad in the white of
humility, while he and his Temple priests should dress themselves magnificently as
befitted their sacred station. A combination of purity and majesty: how could the
Greeks not be won over as Alexander’s triumphal progress halts before ‘a place called
Sapha, meaning “prospect”? So it is with that view of the towers and walls and the
Temple on its hill that the victorious general encounters the white-garbed multitude,
at their head the high priest attired in ‘scarlet and purple and his tiara sewn with a
gold panel on which was inscribed the tetragrammaton name of God’. Greetings are
exchanged…”

Then comes one of the most striking encounters between the God of Israel, His
people and the rulers of the pagan world. It is the more remarkable if we remember
that Alexander considered himself to be a god, the son of Zeus… Alexander says that
he “‘adores’ this [Jewish] God, for, as he explains to a surprised aide, he too had had
a vision in which the high priest, dressed exactly in this manner, would bestow divine
blessing on his conquest of the Persians. Alexander then ‘gives the high priest his right
hand’ and makes sacrifice to YHWH in the Temple ‘according to the high priest’s
direction’. The next day, after being shown the Book of Daniel prophesying his
triumph,… he repays the confidence by guaranteeing, as all good Greek rulers did,
‘the laws of their forefathers’. Alexander waives Jewish tribute in the sabbatical year
and promises (since the Jews were such accomplished soldiers) that those who joined
his army would be undisturbed according to their traditions’.”217

Alexander even gave equal citizenship to the Jews of Alexandria. The trouble began
only after Alexander’s death, when “his servants [the Ptolemys and Seleucids] bore
rule every one in his place. And… they all put crowns upon themselves. So did their
sons after them many years: and evils were multiplied in the earth…” (I Maccabees
1.7-9).

The image of “putting crowns upon themselves” reminds us of the difference

between the true, autocrat, whose crown is given him by God, and the false, despot,
who takes the crown for himself in a self-willed manner. (In modern times, the
equivalent would be Napoleon’s taking the crown from the hands of the Pope and
putting it on his own head.) So while Hellenistic civilization, as noted above, in a sense
united the despotic and democratic principles, the real winner was despotism...

217 Schama, The Story of the Jews, London: Vintage, 2014, pp. 94-95; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, xi, 8,
3.

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 *

Not only Alexander, but many of his successors were friendly to the Jews. Thus in
about 270 King Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt invited the great high priest of
Jerusalem, Eleazar, to send 72 scholars to Egypt to translate the Scriptures from
Hebrew into Greek for the benefit of the Hellenized Jews (or Judaized Greeks?) of
Alexandria. The resultant Septuagint (meaning “70”) translation became the basis
both for the transmission of the Old Testament to the Greek-speaking world; it was
this translation of the Scriptures that the Evangelists and Apostles used.

The translation was made, writes St. John Chrysostom, “for pressing reasons of
usefulness and necessity. You see, as long as it was addressed to one race of the Jews,
it remained in the Hebrew tongue: nobody at that time was likely to be interested in
it, the rest of the human race being reduced to utter savagery. But when Christ was
due to appear and call the whole world to Himself, not only through the apostles but
also through the Old Testament authors (they too guide us to faith in the knowledge
of Christ), then it was that He caused the Old Testament works… to be opened up to
all comers through translation so that all who came flooding in all directions from the
nations and traveling these paths might succeed through them in coming to the
kingdom of the inspired authors and adoring the Only-begotten Son of God.”218

But a later king of Egypt, Ptolemy IV Philopater, who came to the Temple towards
the end of the third century, was less benevolent. He, like Alexander, offered a
sacrifice and made thank offerings for his victory over the Seleucid king. However, he
then conceived a desire to enter the Temple, which was forbidden to pagans.

The high priest Simon prayed that he would be prevented, and his prayer was
fulfilled: “Then God, Who watches over all… heard this lawful supplication and
scourged the man who raised himself up in arrogance and audacity. He shook him on
one side and the other, as a reed is shaken by the wind, so that he lay powerless on
the ground. Besides being paralyzed in his limbs, he was unable to cry out, since he
was struck by a righteous judgement. Therefore his friends and bodyguards, seeing
the severe punishment that overtook him, fearing that they would die, quickly
dragged him away. Later, when he recovered, he still did not repent after being
chastised, but went his way making bitter threats…” (III Maccabees 2.21-24).

In 175 BC the Seleucid King Antiochus IV came to the Seleucid throne; his deeds
were by the Prophet Daniel (chapters 8-11). The blasphemous name he gave himself,
“Epiphanes”, meaning “Divine Manifestation”, “That underscored the primary
difference between the ancient Greeks and Jews: The Greeks glorified the
magnificence of man, while the Jews measured man’s greatness through his
partnership with the Creator. For the children of Israel, man was created in the image
of God; for the ancient Greeks, the gods were created in the likeness of man.”219

218 St. Chrysostom, “Second Homily on the Obscurity of the Old Testament,” in St. John Chrysostom Old
Testament Homilies, Boston, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2003, pp. 29-30.
219 Senator Joseph Lieberman, “Hanukkah”, Orthodox Christian Witness, 1483, January 17/30, 2000, p. 5.

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 Johnson has developed this distinction, one of the most important in the history of
ideas: "The Jews drew an absolute distinction between human and divine. The Greeks
constantly elevated the human – they were Promethean – and lowered the divine. To
them gods were not much more than revered and successful ancestors; most men
sprang from gods. Hence it was not for them a great step to deify a monarch, and they
began to do so as soon as they embraced the orient [where, as we have seen, kings
were commonly deified]. Why should not a man of destiny undergo apotheosis?
Aristotle, Alexander's tutor, argued in his Politics: ‘If there exists in a state an
individual so pre-eminent in virtue that neither the virtue nor the political capacity of
all the other citizens is comparable with his... such a man should be rated as a god
among men.' Needless to say, such notions were totally unacceptable to Jews of any
kind. Indeed, there was never any possibility of a conflation between Judaism and
Greek religion as such; what the reformers [the Hellenizing Jews] wanted was for
Judaism to universalize itself by pervading Greek culture; and that meant embracing
the polis.”220

With the agreement of King Antiochus, the Hellenizing Jews removed the lawful
high priest Onias, replacing him with his brother Jason, a Hellenist cosmopolitan.
Jason then built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, at which athletes competed in the nude
contrary to Jewish law. Many Jews then underwent a painful operation to hide their
circumcision. In this way, as the chronicler writes, “they made themselves as the
uncircumcision. So they fell away from the holy covenant…” (I Maccabees 1.15).

Antiochus was soon acting, not as “Epiphanes”, “divine manifestation”, but as

“Epimanes”, “raving madman”. After conquering Egypt, he returned to Jerusalem in
168 and pillaged the Temple. St. Hippolytus of Rome writes: Then “Antiochus arose,
surnamed Epiphanes, who was of the line of Alexander. And after he had reigned in
Syria, and brought under him all Egypt, he went up to Jerusalem, and entered the
sanctuary, and seized all the treasures in the house of the Lord, and the golden
candlestick, and the table, and the altar, and made a great slaughter in the land…”

“Then the king wrote to all his kingdom, that they all were to be as one people, and
that each one was to forsake his customs… Many from Israel also thought it good to
serve him, so they sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath” (I Maccabees 1.41-43).
He led many of the people away into slavery, banned circumcision, stopped the daily
sacrifice, which symbolized the Jews’ worship of Yahweh alone, Sabbath observance
and the reading of the law, declared that the Temple should be dedicated to the
worship of Zeus (was this Daniel’s “abomination of desolation”?), that pigs should be
sacrificed on the altar, and that non-Jews should be permitted to worship there with
Jews. Those who resisted him were killed.

However, a liberation movement led by Matityahu (Mattathias) Hasmon and his

sons, known to history as the Maccabees or Hasmonaeans, succeeded in inflicting a
series of crushing defeats on the better-equipped and far more numerous Greeks.
“Within three years,” writes Montefiore, “the Maccabees had taken Jerusalem, and in

220 Johnson, op. cit., p. 102.

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164 BC the now more accommodating Antiochus died and his successor sued for
peace (albeit a temporary one). Vitally, Jewish freedom of worship was restored. The
Temple was cleansed and rededicated in December 164 BC. Even though the oil for
the Temple lamp had run out, the lamp remained alight for eight days, a miracle that
inspired the joyful Hanukkah Festival of Lights, in which Jews still celebrate religious
freedom from tyranny221.

“Having won the right to practice their religion, the Maccabees fought on for the
political freedom that would protect it. The result was the creation of an independent
Jewish state, with Mattathias’ descendants at its head. Fighting to drive the Syrian
empire out of Judaea, Judah was killed in battle. His successor, Jonathan ‘the cunning’,
secured his brother’s military achievements with diplomacy. As dynastic struggle and
civil war consumed the Seleucid empire, Jonathan’s astute appraisal of the political
balance, and judicious offers of support, secured him substantial territorial gains. But
the Seleucids tried to re-conquer Judaea: Jonathan was tricked, captured and killed.
In 142 BC Simon the Great, the youngest and by now the only surviving son of
Mattathias, negotiated the political independence of Judaea…”222

The Hasmonaean dynasty reached its peak under the second Maccabee brother,
Simon.

“The other brothers,” writes Schama, “especially Judas, “had invoked the ancient
patriarchs and nation-fathers from Moses through David. Simon becomes the heir of
these ancestors as priest, prince, judge and general. It is he who finally succeeds in
cleaning out the Jerusalem Akra citadel of foreign troops, ending its occupation and
turning the subject status of the Jewish state into a true, independent kingdom. The
moment (in the year 142 BCE) becomes a jubilant climax of the epic, celebrated with
thanksgiving and branches of palm trees and with harps and cymbals, viols and
hymns and songs: because there was destroyed a great enemy out of Israel!

“A golden age of peace and prosperity then comes to pass under Simon’s rule. The
wars between Jews and Greeks – and indeed between Jews and Jews – are brought to
an end. Hellenized cities like Scythopolis, which had refrained from harbouring
enemy soldiers, are spared and, renamed as Beit She’an, became home to Jews and
Greeks alike. The borders of the state expand. A grand new harbor is built at Jaffa;
trade opens ‘to the isles of the sea’. Romans and Spartans are impressed, but not as
much as the writer of I Maccabees who paints a scene of multi-generational harmony
and benevolent quasi-despotism. The last books of the biblical canon, and some of the
Apocrypha were imagined to be authored by Solomon, and Simon appears in I
Maccabees as his reincarnation, presiding over a Judaic paradise on earth…”223

221“A single jar of pure olive oil remained undefiled, which was used to illuminate and rededicate the
Temple. Miraculously, the small quantity of oil lasted for eight days, leading to the eight-day festival,
The Feast of Dedication.” (“The Authentic Light of Chanukah”,
https://lp.israelbiblicalstudies.com/lp_iibs_biblical_hebrew_jesus_and_hanukkah.

223 Schama, op. cit., pp. 120-121.

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 “In this upsurge of nationalist sentiment,” writes Johnson, “the religious issues had
been pushed into the background. But the long struggle for independence from Greek
universalism left an indelible mark on the Judaic character. There were thirty-four
bitter and murderous years between the attack on the Law and the final expulsion of
the reformers from the Acra. The zeal and intensity of the attack on the Law aroused
a corresponding zeal for the Law, narrowing the vision of the Jewish leadership and
pushing them ever more deeply into a Torah-centred religion. With their failure, the
reformers discredited the notion of reform itself, or even any discussion of the nature
and direction of the Jewish religion. Such talk was henceforth denounced in all the
official texts as nothing less that total apostasy and collaboration with the foreign
oppressors, so that it became difficult for moderates of any kind, or internationally
minded preachers who looked beyond the narrow enclave of Orthodox Judaism, to
get a hearing. The Hasmonaeans spoke for a deeply reactionary spirit within
Judaism… Henceforth, any tampering with the Temple and its sanctuaries instantly
roused up a ferocious Jerusalem mob of religious extremists swollen by the excited
rabble. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, extremely
difficult to govern by anyone – Greeks or Hellenizers, Romans or their tetrarchs, not
least the Jews themselves.

“Against this background of intellectual terror by the religious mob, the secular
spirit and intellectual freedom which flourished in the Greek gymnasia and academies
was banished from Jewish centres of learning. In their battle against Greek education,
pious Jews began from the end of the second century BC, to develop a traditional
system of education. To the old scribal schools were gradually added a network of
local schools where, in theory at least, all Jewish boys were taught the Torah. This
development was of great importance in the spread and consolidation of the
synagogue, in the birth of Pharisaism as a movement rooted in popular education,
and eventually in the rise of the rabbinate. The education provided in these schools
was entirely religious, rejecting any form of knowledge outside the Law. But at least
these schools taught the Law in a relatively humane spirit. They followed ancient
traditions, inspired by an obscure text in Deuteronomy, ‘put it in their mouths’, that
God had given Moses, in addition to the written Law, an Oral Law, by which learned
elders could interpret and supplement the sacred commands. The practice of the Oral
Law made it possible for the Mosaic code to be adapted to changing conditions and
administered in a realistic manner.

“By contrast, the Temple priests, dominated by the Sadducees, or descendants of

Zadok, the great high-priest from Davidic times, insisted that all law must be written
and unchanged. They had their own additional text, called the Book of Decrees, which
laid down a system of punishment: who were to be stoned, who burned, who
strangled. But this was written and sacred: they would not admit that oral teaching
could subject the Law to a process of creative development. With their rigid adherence
to the Mosaic inheritance, their concept of the Temple as the sole source and centre of
Judaic government, and their own hereditary position in its functions, the Sadducees
were naturally allies of the new Hasmonaean high-priests, even though the latter had
no strict title to this position by descent. The Sadducees soon became identified with
Hasmonaean rule in a rigid system of Temple administration, in which the hereditary

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high-priest performed the functions of a secular ruler, and a committee of elders, the
Sanhedrin, discharged his religious-legal duties. To mark the supremacy of the
Temple, Simon Maccabee not only smashed the walls of the Acra into rubble but went
on (according to Josephus) ‘to level the very hill on which the citadel had stood, so
that the Temple might be higher than it.’”224

The Lord Jesus Christ would reject both the Sadducees and the Pharisees – the
former for their rejection of the resurrection, and the latter because the traditions they
invoked were false and went against the true commandments of the Law – which they
in any case did not fulfill themselves.

It was in the Hasmonaean period that we see the beginning of a remarkable

phenomenon that was to lay a solid foundation for the preaching of Christianity
throughout the Roman Empire: Jewish proselytism.

As Alfred M. Lilienthal writes: “Judaism became a tremendous proselytizing force

in the pagan world. Those who carried the religion of Yahweh to other parts of the
globe were hardly more than a drop in the ocean of foreign peoples who had never
possessed any racial, lingual, or cultural affinity with Israel and nevertheless became
members of the Judaic monotheistic faith. These converts included such diverse
peoples as Yemenites and Greeks, the Queen of Sheba, the people of Adiabene, the
Hellenistic state on the Tigris. Judean traders carried their faith eastward as far as
India and China. Conversions to Yahweh in Rome carried Judaism through Italy into
France, the Rhone Valley, and the Rhine Basin… Whole peoples of varying ethnic
strains became proselyte Judaists, especially during the two centuries before the birth
of Christ. Judeans migrated to the Arabian desert and converted Semitic peoples in
Yemen. Pagans as distant as those of the Kerch Strait and the Crimea accepted
Yahweh, the Hebrew God.

“The Hebrews were indeed a light unto the other nations and were spreading
monotheism, the task given to them by God. Many Romans, including members of
the nobility, embraced the simple teachings of Judaism, won by the appeal of what
Jewish historians have referred to as a ‘system of morals, anchored in the veneration
of the One and Holy God,’ and the ‘purity of Judean home life’. For the most part the
proselytes accepted the idea of monotheism and the moral law without the ceremonial
precepts.

“With the advent of Christianity, the parent faith ceased proselytizing.

Monotheism was now carried to the pagan world by the disciples of Jesus…”225

224 Johnson, op. cit., pp. 105-106.
225 Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1978, p. 734. “As early as 139

BC,” writes Andrew Marr. “Jews were being expelled from Rome for trying to convert Roman citizens.
A little later the great lawyer-politician Cicero complained about proselytizing Jews. Two emperors,
Tiberius and Claudius, transported Jews from Rome for the crime of trying to convert Romans. Roman
writers such as Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus all discuss the issue” (A History of the World,
London: Pan, 2012, p.129).

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 Now several of the prophets, as well as David in the Psalms, had hinted that the
true faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was not destined for the Jews alone.
But until the second century BC the emphasis had been on preserving the faith
untainted from foreign elements rather than on spreading it to the rest of the world.
Hence, for example, Ezra’s insistence that the Jews divorce their foreign wives in case
they be infected by their paganism.

However, elements of Hellenistic culture began to creep into Judah soon after the
Maccabees’ triumph over the Greek King Antiochus. One of these was the typically
pagan combination of kingship and priesthood in one person. The Hasmonaeans
unlawfully combined the roles of king and high priest (I Maccabees 13.42). Their
dynasty, which lasted until it was wiped out by Herod the Great in 37 B.C., was
composed exclusively of Levites, who could only be priests, not kings. Moreover,
God’s covenant with David had been with him and his son; the promises were only
to his descendants of the tribe of Judah. This may be why five of the great signs of
God’s presence and favour that were in the First Temple were not in the Second.

Another pagan innovation was the adoption of Greek names. Thus the grandson
of Mattathias, as Shlomo Sand writes, “added to his Hebrew name Yohanan the
typical Greek name Hyrcanus. The great grandson of the rebel priest was called Judas
Aristobulus, and his successor would be known as Alexander Jannaeus. The process
of Greek acculturation did not stop in Judea. In fact, as the Hasmonean dynasty
consolidated, it accelerated and triumphed. By the time of Aristobulus, the priestly
ruler – though not of the House of David – had become a Hellenistic monarch…”226

There was a positive aspect to this Hellenizing process: the universalist elements in
Judaism came more to the fore, competing with the cosmopolitanism of the Greek
Stoic philosophers.227 Thus the Eastern Mediterranean became the arena for a contest
for hearts and minds between Greek paganism and philosophy, on the one hand, and
Jewish monotheism, on the other.

In the environs of Judaea, the contest was settled by force. Thus in 125 Yohanan
Hyrcanus conquered Edom as far as Beersheba and converted the Edomites to accept
circumcision. He also destroyed the Samaritans’ capital of Shechem with their temple
on Mount Gerizim. In 104-103 Hyrcanus’ son Judas Aristobulus annexed Galilee, and
forced its Iturean inhabitants to convert. His brother, Alexander Jannaeus, was less
successful in getting the Hellenistic coastal cities to convert. “According to Josephus,
Alexander destroyed the city of Pella in Transjordan ‘because the inhabitants would
not bear to change their religious rites for those peculiar to the Jews’. We know that
he totally destroyed other Hellenistic cities: Samaria, Gaza, Gederah and many
others…”228

226 Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009, p. 156.
227 “Isocrates argued that ‘the designation ‘Hellene’ is no longer a matter of [ethnic] descent but of

attitude’; he thought Greeks by education had better titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth’”
(Johnson, op. cit., p. 101).
228 Sand, op. cit., p. 160.

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 More peaceful, and much more fruitful, was the conversion of a large part of the
population of the great Hellenistic city of Alexandria. We have seen that the Old
Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek at the initiative of King Ptolemy II
Philadelphus, and “we can be certain,” writes Sand, “that this translation, in its
numerous copies, even in the absence of printing, was an essential vehicle for the
dissemination of the Jewish religion among the cultural elites all around the
Mediterranean. The impact of the translation is best attested by Philo Judaeus, the
philosopher who was probably the first to merge skillfully the Stoic-Platonic logos
with Judaism… The Alexandrian philosopher viewed conversion to Judaism as a
reasonable and positive phenomenon that demographically enlarged his ethnos.

“… From this time on, the ancient association between religious boundaries and
everyday cultural and language characteristics began to fail. For example, Philo
himself, for all his extensive knowledge, knew neither Hebrew nor Aramaic, yet this
did not diminish his devout attachment to the Mosaic religion, which he, like many of
his fellow believers, knew in its famous translation. Some of his writing was probably
also intended to persuade gentiles to change their ways and abandon ‘their own
individual customs’.

“The Septuagint was the hesitant start of Jewish religious missionizing also realized
in the form of the works known as the books of the Apocrypha. The Letter of Aristeas
that mentions the translation was written in Greek before 200 BCE by a Jewish believer
in Alexandria. Aristeas may have been the author’s real name, though perhaps he took
the typical Greek name – that of a bodyguard of Ptolemy II Philadelphus – to appeal
to Hellenistic readers. As well as relating the legendary history of the translation, the
letter attacks idolatry and praises the Jewish faith, though it does so in an allegorical
manner. For example, it says nothing about circumcision, to avoid discouraging the
gentiles, but launches into an idyllic, even utopian, description of Jerusalem and its
temple. It describes Jewish scholars as wiser than the pagan Greek philosophers,
though paradoxically their superiority is demonstrated via the principles of Greek
philosophy, giving the impression that the anonymous author was more familiar with
the latter than with the Torah.

“Similar rhetoric is found in the third book of an ancient collection known as the
Sibylline Oracles, a book that most scholars date to the second century BCE, namely the
Hasmonean period. It too was translated in Alexandria and, like the Letter of Aristeas,
denounces the Egyptian animal cults. Jewish sermonizing in the form of verses
supposedly uttered by a Greek-style female prophet addresses all the children of men
who were created in God’s image, and prophesies that in future the people of the great
God will again serve all mortals as brave teachers. Idolatry was low and debauched,
it is declared, whereas the Jewish faith was a religion of justice, fraternity and charity.
The idolatrous were infected with homosexuality, whereas the Jews were far from
committing any abomination. Therefore the worshippers of wood and stone should
convert to the true faith or be chastised by a wrathful God.

“The obvious Jewish confidence of this work paralleled the success and rising
power of the Hasmonean kingdom. The Wisdom of Solomon, written probably in the
first century BCE, also links the proselytizing impulse in the Jewish communities in

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Egypt with the Judean rulers’ drive for converts. The first, visionary part of this work
is in Hebrew and comes from Judea; the second, more philosophical part is in Greek
and is Alexandrian in character. This work also derides the cult of animals and
revolves around the disdain for the worship of images. Like the third Sibylline oracle,
the Wisdom of Solomon associates the worship of many gods with licentiousness and
immorality, dooming one to punishment. Here, too, the objects of persuasion are
gentiles, chiefly rulers and kings, and the rhetoric is entirely derived from Greek
heritage. The Stoic logos is put into the mouth of King Solomon, who utters well
known Platonic statements…229

“Damascus was a flourishing Hellenistic center second only to Alexandria, and

conversion to Judaism there was even greater than in Egypt…

“The popularity of Judaism before and after the Common Era spread beyond the
Mediterranean region. In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus tells the fabulous story of the
conversion to Judaism in the first century CE of the rulers of Adiabene (Hadyab) [in
today’s Kurdistan]. As this conversion is described in other sources, there is no reason
to doubt its broad outline…”230

“If Alexander’s conquests created an open Hellenistic sphere,” continues Sand,

“Rome’s expansion and her enormous empire completed the process… The littorals
grew closer, and the passage from the eastern to the western end became easier and
faster. This emerging world opened a fresh perspective for the spread of Judaism; at
its high point there, Judaism was professed by 7 to 8 percent of all the empire’s
inhabitants. The word ‘Jew’ ceased to denote the people of Judea, and now included
the masses of proselytes and their descendants.”231

229 For example, he says of the Divine Wisdom: “In her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique,
manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible,
beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating
through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any
motion; For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror
of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. Though she is but one, she can do all things, and
while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and
makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with
wisdom. For she is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared
with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does
not prevail.” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-30) (V.M.)
230 Sand, op. cit., pp. 161-163, 165.
231 Sand, op. cit., pp. 166-167.

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 18. THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

In the second century BC the shadow of a new superpower began to fall across the
Middle East: Rome. Judas Maccabaeus had maintained friendly relations with the
Romans, who were inclined to support the Jews out of distrust of the Seleucids; and
Simon Maccabeus sought an alliance with them.232 For after conquering the Asia
Minor kingdoms of Pontus and Armenia, and then taking the place of the weakened
Seleucids and Ptolemys, the Romans were drawing closer to the Holy Land….

According to Larry Siedentop, following Fustel de Coulanges, the origins of

religious, social and political organization in both Greece and Italy lay in the absolute
power of the head of the family, the paterfamilias, in his own domain. Each family was
centred around worship of the gods of the hearth, who were deceased males of the
family. The head of the family was both the family’s king and priest; it was his duty
to keep the hearth fire alight at all times and to carry out the prescribed rituals and
prayers in honour of the family’s gods. Slaves and foreigners were not members of the
family. The supreme value of the family was its own immortality - the worship of the
past generations, the defence of the family’s members and property in the present,
and the provision for future generations. For any son of the family not to take a bride
was considered dereliction of duty and impiety, for it threatened that familial
immortality. As for a bride who married into the family, she was expected to abandon
the worship of her former family’s gods and transfer all her loyalty and worship to
her husband’s family and his gods.

“Other domestic practices in Greece and Rome – the subordinate role of women,
the nature of marriage, property rights and inheritance rules – were also direct
consequences of religious belief. Let us take the role of women first. Women could
participate in the worship of the dead only through their father or husband. For
descent was traced exclusively through the male line. But even then religion governed
the definition of relationships so entirely that an adopted son, once he was admitted
to the family worship, shared its ancestors, while a son who abandoned the family
worship ceased altogether to be a relation, becoming unknown…

“… The father exercised his authority on the basis of beliefs shared by the family.
His was not an arbitrary power. The overwhelming imperative was to preserve family
worship, and so to prevent his ancestors, untended, being cast into oblivion. This
restriction of affection to the family circle gave it an extraordinary intensity. Charity,
concern for humans as such, was not deemed a virtue, and would probably have been
unintelligible. But fulfilling obligations attached to a role in the family was everything.
‘The sense of duty, natural affection, the religious idea – all these were confounded,
were considered as one, and were expressed by the same word.’ That word was piety
(pietas).”233

232 See I Maccabees 8, which contains a largely approbatory portrait of the Roman republic.
233 Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 12,

15.

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 As families came together into larger units, clans, tribes and cities, the exclusive,
atomistic nature of each family’s worship was not destroyed. However, every new
association of families required the worship of a new common divinity that was
superior to the domestic divinities. Thus in Rome from the early sixth century BC the
new common divinity was Jupiter, for whom a huge new temple was built on the
central hill of the city, the Capitoline.

“Religious ideas expanded with the increased scale of association. Fustel does not
argue that religious progress brought about social progress in any simple way, but he
does emphasize the intimate connection between the two. Thus, as the scale of
association increased, the gods of nature or polytheism became more important – for
these were gods who could more easily be shared, gods less exclusively domestic than
ancestors, gods associated with the forces of nature rather than with divine ancestors.
These were gods who represented the sea, the wind, fertility, light, love, hunting, with
familiar names such as Apollo, Neptune, Venus, Diana and Jupiter. The building of
civic temples to these gods offered physical evidence of the enlargement of religious
ideas. Still, the gods of each city remained exclusive, so that while two cities might
both adore ‘Jupiter’, he had different attributes in each city.

“Particularism was the rule. Even after a city was founded, it was inconceivable for
the city not to respect the divine ancestors, the sacred rites and magistrates of the
different groups that had attended its foundation. For the souls of the dead were
deemed to live under the ground of the cities they had helped to create. The statesman
Solon, who in the sixth century BC endowed Athens with laws, was given the
following advice by the oracle of Delphi: ‘Honour with worship the chiefs of the
country, the dead who live under the earth.’ The city had to respect their authority in
matters concerning their descendants. For the city’s authority was all of a piece with
theirs. Gods and groups marched hand in hand.

“This corporate, sacramental character of the ancient city dominated its formal
organization. Whether it was a question of procedures for voting, military
organization or religious sacrifices, care was taken to represent tribes, curiae and
families – and to conduct civic life through them. It was deemed important that men
should be associated most closely with others who sacrificed at the same altars. Altars
were the bonds of human association. That emerged in the Greek and Roman
conception of warfare. In one of Euripides’ plays, a soldier asserts that ‘the gods who
fight with us are more powerful that those who fight on the side of the enemy…’

“Kingship was the highest priesthood, presiding over the cult established with the
city itself. The king was hereditary high priest of that association of associations that
was the ancient city. The king’s other functions, as magistrate and military leader,
were simply the adjuncts of his religious authority. Who better to lead the city in war
than the priest whose knowledge of the sacred formulas and prayers ‘saved’ the city
every day? And, later, when kingship gave way to republican regimes, the chief
magistrate of the city – the archon in Athens, the consul in Rome – remained a priest
whose first duty was to offer sacrifices to the city’s gods. In fact, the circlet of leaves

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worn on the head of archons when conducting such sacrifices became a universal
symbol of authority: the crown…”234

Just as devotion to the family had been the supreme value in the original form of
social organization, so devotion to the city - civic patriotism - now became the
supreme value in the Greek and Italian city-states. Religion and politics were
inextricably entangled. For “in devoting himself to the city before everything else, the
citizen was serving his gods. No abstract principle of justice could give him pause.
Piety and patriotism were one and the same thing. For the Greeks, to be without
patriotism, to be anything less than an active citizen, was to be an ‘idiot’. That, indeed,
is what the word originally meant, referring to anyone who retreated from the life of
the city.”235

The Latin saying, Dulce est pro patria mori, “Sweet it is to die for one’s country”,
illustrates how important the city, the homeland, was for the early Greeks and
Romans. It encompassed much more than the modern concept of homeland. It
included everything associated with the homeland, too, including moral values and
religion.

Nevertheless, both Greeks and Romans understood that piety – devotion to the
gods – was not always the same as patriotism, devotion to homeland. In Sophocles’
Antigone, for example, we see a direct conflict between the two, in which patriotism
had to yield ultimately to the higher claims of religious piety. And this contrast
became much sharper when the Greco-Roman world became Christian…

In spite of the absolute power of the paterfamilias, kingship in Greece and Rome had
shallower roots than in Babylon or Egypt; it was less absolute, less divine. The
Romans, like the Greeks, venerated liberty above all – that liberty which they had won
from their kings, but which they proceeded to deprive their neighbours of.

“According to legend,” writes Nigel Rodgers, “Rome was founded in 753 BC by

Romulus and Remus, twin princes of Alba Longa, supposedly itself founded four
centuries earlier by Aeneas, a Trojan prince. The twins, his distant descendants, were
abandoned as babies on the orders of Amulius, who had usurped their kingdom and
ordered their deaths. Miraculously, a she-wolf appeared from a wood to suckle them,
and they were brought up by Faustinus, a kindly shepherd, on the Palatine Hill [where
archaeologists have confirmed the existence of a settlement in the mid-eighth
century]. When they grew up, they killed the usurper and together founded a new
city, Rome. But they soon quarreled, Romulus killing Remus for jumping over his
ploughed boundary line. Romulus then populated Rome by inviting outlaws and
homeless men to join him, and by abducting the young women of his neighbours in
the famous ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’. When the Sabine men marched back in force

234 Siedentop, op. cit., p. 21-22, 23.
235 Siedentop, op. cit., p. 25. “Idiotis” in Greek literally means a man “belonging to himself”, what we

would now call a private citizen – that is, one who plays no part in public life.

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to reclaim their women, the latter, by now used to being Roman wives, intervened to
prevent a battle and the two people intermarried. Romulus later ascended into heaven
in a thunderstorm, becoming divine. From such violent, mythic beginnings sprang the
Eternal City, Rome.”236

In about 616 Rome came under the sway of the Etruscan kings, who created an
advisory council, or Senate, composed of 300 heads of extended families. The
Etruscans, writes Matthew Kneale, “could hardly have been more different from the
Romans. Their language, which is still little understood, was not Indo-European… It
is thought that the Etruscans may, like the Basques, have an ancient aboriginal people
who inhabited Europe long before the Indo-Europeans arrived. They would have a
huge influence on early Rome, contributing kings, noble families and numerous
cultural traditions, from the bundles of rods (fasces) that symbolized a state official’s
power, to purple-bordered togas for high officials, to gladiator fights…”237

In 509, Rome’s last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown by Brutus
the Liberator. “Rome became a Republic the year after, and the Romans always
remained acutely sensitive to the difference between a Kingdom (Regnum) and a
Republic (Res Publica, literally ‘the Public Thing’).”238 The change was marked by the
consecration of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, emphasizing that Jupiter was now
the chief god of Rome, guaranteeing her success in war – first, against other cities and
peoples in Italy, and then throughout the Mediterranean.

In 387 the Romans were defeated at the battle of the Allia by the Gauls, a related
people who dominated much of Europe from Galicia in present-day Turkey to Galicia
in present-day Ukraine to Galicia in present-day Spain. The defeat was followed by a
sacking of Rome that appears to have had a powerful effect on the Romans. They built
a city wall and reorganized the army, which became a formidable fighting machine
that by the early second century BC had conquered the surrounding peoples –
including all of Gallic northern Italy.239

Officially, sovereignty in the republic rested in the Senate and the people, Senatus
Populusque Romanorum, or SPQR for short. De facto, the Senate was the real ruler,
controlling the elections to the chief magistrate, or executive offices of state – the
consuls, the praetors, the quaestors, the censors, the aediles, the priesthood and the
tribunes. All male citizens, including the ‘plebs’, would vote in assemblies that passed
laws and elected officials; and by 69 BC there were almost a million voters on the
census.240 So the Roman republic was an oligarchy with democratic elements united
in its veneration for tradition, especially religious rites and respect for the austere
patrician virtues of self-discipline and devotion to duty, and in its revulsion against
anything that smacked of one-man-rule. As such, it became a model for the aristocratic
leaders of Britain and America in the eighteenth century.

236 Rodgers, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, London: Lorenz Books, 2005. P. 18.
237 Kneale, Rome. A History in Seven Sackings, London: Simon Schuster, 2017, p. 11.
238 Stephen P. Kershaw, A Brief History of the Roman Empire, London: Robinson, 2013, p. 2.
239 Kneale, op. cit., p. 27.
240 David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy, London: Penguin, 2011, p. 40.

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 “At the top of republican Roman society,” writes Andrew Marr, “were the
aristocratic families who traced their influence back to the time of the kings and who
formed the Senate. Relatively early this society also developed elections for key posts.
In 367 BC a major change took place when it was agreed that all classes, not only
patricians, could be elected as consuls, so long as they were wealthy enough. A
complicated, lengthy system of elections plus experience accumulated in office
resulted in the Senate evolving into a tough and effective ruling body. Serving as
executives was a double act of consuls, with a kind of super magistrate elected each
year. Then came the rest, the ordinary citizens organized into tribes and able, in their
own assembly, to vote for new laws by simple majority.

“If this sounds remarkably democratic, it was not. A Roman form of

jerrymandering, involving block voted and the intimidation of voters, kept the well-
off, mostly in control. A republic meant a ruling system without king, not a
representative one. But the Senate was able to draw on a constant supply of new talent
and to balance factions among the other citizens. The voting system and the tension
between different bodies kept absolute power, the folk memory of tyrant kings, at
bay…”241

Tyranny was averted by dividing the chief offices of state against each other. Thus
the consulship both inherited the powers of kingship and divided and nullified them
at the same time because each of the two consuls could veto the other. The task of each
was to rule while at the same time guarding against the other’s ambition to rule
alone.242

As Tom Holland writes, it was “a magistracy of literally regal scope… His authority
would be sanctioned by the trappings, as well as the powers of the ancient kings. Not
only would he inherit the toga bordered with royal purple and a special chair of state;
he would also be accompanied by lictors, a bodyguard of twelve men, each bearing
on his shoulder the fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, most dreaded of all the
attributes of monarchy. An escort, in short, sufficient to reassure anyone that he had
indeed reached the very top.

“Not that he would ever stay there for long. A consul was no tyrant. His fasces
served as symbols not of oppression but of an authority freely bestowed by the people.
Subject to the whims of the voters, limited to a single year in power, and accompanied
in office by colleagues their precise equal, magistrates of the Republic had little choice
but to behave in office with scrupulous propriety. No matter how tempestuous a
citizen’s ambitions, they rarely broke the bounds of the Romans’ respect for tradition.
What the Republic fostered it also served to trammel…”243

There were always two consuls. The idea was that they served as checks on each
other, preventing tyranny. Modern western civilization inherited this idea – that of
checks and balances – placing it at the head of the corner of its political philosophy.

241 Marr, A History of the World, London: Pan, 2012, pp. 132-133.
242 Holland, Rubicon, London: Abacus, 2003, pp. 2-3.
243 Holland, Rubicon, p. 64.

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 *

In the sixth century the aristocratic power of the heads of families and clans began
to decline. First, “primogeniture came under attack and gradually gave way, with the
consequence not only that younger sons inherited and became full citizens, but also
that junior branches of the ancient families or gentes became independent. These
developments greatly increased the number of citizens, and reduced the power of the
ancient family heads as priests.

“A second major change followed. The clients of the family were gradually
liberated, becoming free men. At the outset the clients could not own property. They
did not even have any security of tenure on land they worked for the paterfamilias.
They were little better than slaves. ‘Possibly the same series of social changes took
place in antiquity which Europe saw in the middle ages, when the slaves in the
country became serfs of the glebe, when the latter from serfs, taxable at will, were
changed to serfs with a fixed rent, and when finally they were transformed… into
peasant proprietors.’

“Fundamental to these changes was a rise in expectations. That rise was, in turn,
due to the comparisons that became possible once the patriarchal family was merely
part of a larger association, the polis or city-state. No longer was the paterfamilias, the
magistrate and priest, the only representative of authority in sight, the only
spokesman of the gods. The paterfamilias gradually lost his semi-sacred status
through being immersed in civic life. His inferiors now ‘could see each other, could
confer together, could make an exchange of their desires and griefs, compare their
masters, and obtain a glimpse of a better fate.’

“Obtaining the right of property was their first and strongest desire, preceding any
claim for the full privileges of citizenship. But the latter was bound to follow, for
obtaining greater equality on one front only increased a sense of exclusion on the
other. Citizenship, in turn, unleashed a process of abstraction which could and did
threaten inherited inequalities…”244

The needs of the increasing numbers of the non-patricians, or plebs, required

expression; and this was provided by the plebeian tribunes. “The Tribuni
Plebis… were instituted in 494 BC, after the first secession of the plebs [who went on
strike], in order to protect the interests of the plebeians against the actions of the senate
and the annual magistrates, who were uniformly patrician. The ancient sources
indicate the tribunes may have originally been two or five in number. If the former,
the college of tribunes was expanded to five in 470 BC. Either way, the college was
increased to ten in 457 BC, and remained at this number throughout Roman history.
They were assisted by two aediles plebis, or plebeian aediles. Only plebeians were
eligible for these offices, although there were at least two exceptions.

244 Siedentop, op. cit., pp. 30-31.

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 “The tribunes of the plebs had the power to convene the concilium plebis, or plebeian
assembly, and propose legislation before it. Only one of the tribunes could preside
over this assembly, which had the power to pass laws affecting only the plebeians,
known as plebiscita, or plebiscites. After 287 BC, the decrees of the concilium plebis had
the effect of law over all Roman citizens. By the 3rd century BC, the tribunes could
also convene and propose legislation before the senate.

“Although sometimes referred to as ‘plebeian magistrates,’ technically the tribunes

of the plebs were not magistrates, having been elected by the plebeians alone, and not
the whole Roman people. However, they were sacrosanct, and the whole body of the
plebeians were pledged to protect the tribunes against any assault or interference with
their persons during their terms of office. Anyone who violated the sacrosanctity of
the tribunes might be killed without penalty

“This was also the source of the tribunes' power, known as ius
intercessionis, or intercessio, by which any tribune could intercede on behalf of a Roman
citizen to prohibit the act of a magistrate or other official. Citizens could appeal the
decisions of the magistrates to the tribunes, who would then be obliged to determine
the legality of the action before a magistrate could proceed. This power also allowed
the tribunes to forbid, or veto any act of the senate or another assembly. Only
a dictator was exempt from these powers.

`’The tribunicia potestas, or tribunician power, was limited by the fact that it was
derived from the oath of the people to defend the tribunes. This limited most of the
tribunes' actions to the boundaries of the city itself, as well as a radius of one mile
around. They had no power to affect the actions of provincial governors.” 245

According to the famously pro-Roman and anti-Christian Edward Gibbon, “The

temperate struggle of the patricians and plebeians had finally established the firm and
equal balance of the constitution, which united the freedom of popular assemblies
with the authority and wisdom of a senate and the executive power of a regal
magistrate. When the consul displayed the standard of the republic, each citizen
bound himself, by the obligation of an oath, to draw his sword in the cause of his
country till he had discharged the sacred duty by a military service of ten years. This
wise institution eventually poured into the field the rising generations of freemen and
soldiers; and their numbers were reinforced by the warlike and populous states of
Italy, who, after a brave resistance, had yielded to the valour and embraced the
alliance of the Romans.”246

This complicated system of checks and balances served the Roman Republic well
in the early centuries of its existence before it collapsed under the weight of the civil
wars of the first century BC. Thereafter it became evident to the Romans, as it had to
the Hellenistic Greeks before them, that very large, complex and multinational polities
like the Roman Empire could only be governed by monarchical systems…

245 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune.
246 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London: The Folio Society, 1788, 1986, vol. IV, pp.

370-371.

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 *

Republican Rome came of age during its struggle with the maritime empire of
Carthage, a colony of the city of Tyre in Phoenicia, which had conquered much of the
Western Mediterranean, including Spain, under Hamilcar, the father of the famous
Hannibal. The Carthaginians were devotees of the Tyrian god Melquart, the Biblical
god Baal (whom the Greeks called Heracles and the Romans - Hercules). The Roman
historian Livy (History XXI, 21-23) records that Hannibal made a pilgrimage to the
shrine of the god that is now the island of Sancti Petri near Cadiz. Having offered
sacrifice and sworn to destroy Rome, he had a vision in which a youth of divine beauty
appeared to him in the night and told him that he had been sent by the supreme deity,
Melqart, to guide the son of Hamilcar to Italy. “Follow me,” said the ghostly visitor,
“and see that that you do not look behind you.” Hannibal followed the instructions of
the visitor. His curiosity, however, overcame him, and as he turned his head, he saw
a serpent crashing through forest and thicket causing destruction everywhere. It
moved as a black tempest with claps of thunder and flashes of lightning gathered
behind the serpent. When Hannibal asked the meaning of the vision Melqart replied,
“What you see is the desolation of Italy. Follow your star and inquire no farther into
the dark counsels of heaven.”

In obedience to the demonic vision, Hannibal crossed the Alps, invaded Italy and
defeated the Romans several times, his greatest victory being at Cannae (216 BC), in
which 70,000 Roman soldiers were killed in one day. But it was not God’s will that
Hannibal should conquer Rome. The Romans suspended their republican constitution
temporarily and appointed a dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, whose cautious
guerrilla warfare tactics, though unpopular, saved the republic… In 209 the Roman
general Scipio defeated the Carthaginians in Spain at Baecula, after which the Spanish
offered him to make him their king. But Scipio refused, pointing out that the Romans
did not have kings…”247

Scipio consolidated his conquest of Spain and returned to Rome. However, the
lieutenants he left in Spain were incompetent, and the army mutinied because it had
not been paid… In 204 the Romans under Scipio took the fight to their enemies in their
North African homeland. Hannibal was defeated at Zama in 202 BC. Pursued from
land to land, Rome’s greatest enemy finally committed suicide.

There now began the first of a series of ever more serious conflicts between the
Roman Senate and its leading generals, that would lead in the end to the Fall of the
Roman Republic.

Scipio, now called Africanus, the victor over Hannibal, was an arrogant and
ambitious man. Potter writes that he “was the most famous Roman in the world, ever,
Polybius would write. He had won victories no one else would have been capable of

247 David Potterr, The Origin of Empire, London: Profile, 2019, p. 73.

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winning, and he had brought peace and a chance for Roman Italy to recover from the
stresses of war. The Senate should do its best to tolerate him. In fact, Scipio had very
limited experience of domestic politics, and his insistence that people be grateful for
his achievements gave him a practically limitless capacity to alienate his peers.
Consequently, he virtually disappeared from public life for the next decade while the
Senate remained unwilling to confront his legacy. This legacy manifested itself largely
in Spain, where warfare had become endemic. The administrators that Scipio had left
there were still in post but with no plan for the future.

“Indeed, the end of the African war did nothing for Spain. Perhaps, if action had
been taken after the end of Barcid Spain, a solution could have been found that would
not have resulted in the peninsula being swamped in blood for the better part of two
centuries. If an outside power eliminates an existing power structure, it has a
responsibility to come up with an alternative. But Rome did not have either the
administrative structures to take on that responsibility or the desire to create them.
The victory in Spain had now become a feature of the Scipio personality cult (how
many times did people really need to be told about that vision Neptune [which he
received before conquering New Carthage]?), but it would be up to the Senate to
acknowledge what was basically a done deal in which it had no part. That was hard
to swallow.

“Spain’s leaders had made it clear what they expected after the battle of Baecula
when they asked Scipio to be king. They wanted some sort of functioning replacement
for the Carthaginian administration, which had been an effective referee between the
different Spanish factions, some of whom were now calling on the Romans to
massacre people they found uncongenial, exploiting he ‘butcher and bolt’ mentality
that was the default setting for post-Scipionic administrators. Such ongoing violence
required some sort of standing army. That was not something the Roman state had
ever had before. The Roman armies were traditionally raised for fixed terms and for
specific purposes. The support for a standing army would also require some sort of
bureaucracy. Within the Roman system of government, the only way this could be
done would be by contracting for the required services.

“Rome now had an empire, but it needed to learn how to run it…”248

And without excessive bloodshed. However, when Carthage began to recover, the
senator Cato repeatedly called for its destruction: Delenda est Carthago. But genocide,
even of one’s enemies, was contrary to Roman morality…

“Many argued,” writes Holland, “that the Republic needed a rival who was worthy
of the name. Without rivalry, they demanded, how would Rome’s greatness ever be
maintained? Such a question, of course could have been asked only in a state where
ruthless competition was regarded as the basis of all civic virtue. Unsurprisingly,
however, a majority of citizens refused to stomach its implications. For more than a
century they had been demonizing the Carthaginians’ cruelty and faithlessness. Why,
most citizens wondered, should the standards of Roman life be applied to the

248 Potter, op. cit., pp. 77-78.

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protection of such a foe? This question was duly answered by a vote to push Carthage
into war. By aiming at her complete annihilation, the Republic revealed what the
logical consequence of its ideals of success might be. In such brutality, unmediated by
any nexus of fellowship or duty, lay the extremes of the Roman desire to be the best.

“In 149 the hapless Carthaginians were given the vindictive order to abandon their
city. Rather than surrender to such a demand, they prepared to defend their homes
and sacred places to the death. This, of course, was precisely what the hawks back in
Rome had been hoping they would do. The legions moved in for the kill. For three
years the Carthaginians held out against overwhelming odds and in the final stages
of the siege the generalship of Rome’s best soldier, Scipio Aemilianus. At last, in 146,
the city was stormed, gutted of its treasures and set ablaze. The inferno raged for
seventeen days. On the cleared and smoking ruin, the Romans then place a deadly
interdiction, forbidding anyone ever to build upon the site again. Seven hundred years
of history were wiped clean.

“Meanwhile, just in case anyone was missing the lesson, a Roman army spent the
same spring of 146 rubbing it into the noses of the Greeks. That winter a ragbag of
cities in southern Greece had presumed to disturb the balance of power that Rome
had established in the area. Such lese-majesty could not be allowed to pass
unpunished. In a war that was over almost before it had begun, a Greek army was
swatted like a bothersome wasp, and the ancient city of Corinth reduced to a heap of
smoking rubble…

“… No wonder, in the face of it, that the Sibyl imagined a curse laid on Rome, one
borne upon the smoke from the twin sources of annihilation. Even the Romans
themselves felt a little queasy. No longer could it be pretended that they were
conquering the world in self-defence. Memories of the looting of Corinth would
always be recalled by the Romans with embarrassment. Guilt over Carthage, however,
provoked in them something far more. It was said that as Scipio watched the flames
lap at the crumbling walls of the great city, he had wept… Lines from Homer came to
him:

The day of the destruction of sacred Troy will come,

And the slaughter of Priam and his people.

But what he imagined might bring slaughter and destruction to the Republic, Scipio,
unlike the Sibyl, did not say…”249

The Romans killed more than half a million of Carthage’s 700,000 inhabitants.250
This may be seen as a long-delayed fulfilment of God’s commandment that the
peoples of Canaan should be destroyed. For, as we have seen, both in their Hamite
race and their Baalite religion, the Carthaginians were the direct descendants of the
Biblical Canaanites and Phoenicians. God abhorred the temple prostitution and child
sacrifice of the Baalite religion, and therefore ordered the Israelites to destroy the

249 Holland, op. cit., pp. 34-36.
250 Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Barbarians, London: BBC Books, 2006, p. 250.

145
Canaanites utterly. But successive leaders of Israel, notably King Saul, disobeyed the
Lord, which resulted in the penetration of these abominable practices into Israel,
which in turn led to Israel’s punishment and exile by the pagan peoples.251

By God’s Providence, Republican Rome here carried out what Israel had failed to
do. Imperial Rome was destined to do much greater service to God after its conversion
to Christ…

From 205 the Romans began to spread into Asia. They conquered Macedonia and
Greece, culminating, as we have seen, in the brutal sack of Corinth in 146. But they
could make concessions when it suited them. Thus they permitted self-rule, “the
liberty of the Greeks”, to the southern cities – as long as they recognized Roman
suzerainty. The subsequent penetration of Roman culture by Greek – every Roman
patrician would see that his son was educated in Greek language and culture by a
Greek slave tutor - was to be of great significance. Of the three foreign nations that
influenced the Romans – the Etruscans, the Carthaginians and the Greeks – it was the
Greeks who had the most profound and beneficial influence, especially in the arts,
philosophy and religion. As a result, when the empire became Christian, the
Christians would inherit all the riches of what we must now call “Greco-Roman
civilization”.

251Fr. John Whiteford, “How to Understand the Passages Related to Violence in the Old Testament?”
October 9, 2017, https://blog.obitel-minsk.com/2017/10/how-to-understand-passages-related-
to.html?fbclid=IwAR2OxlBbzeNoTzLIaeduyCY9Mm_tzlrkarHcT_x2H_3IMvZu6WPwarLS2F4.

146
 19. THE FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

In the Punic Wars that ended in 146 BC “the Romans became Romans”, acquiring
that iron streak that made them the great conquerors of antiquity and the model of
would-be world conquerors for all subsequent ages. But success and prosperity had
the same corrupting effect on them as it has had on all the conquering nations of
history. For “down to the destruction of Carthage,” wrote the historian Sallust, “the
people and senate shared the government peaceably and with restraint… Fear of its
enemies preserved the good morals of the state. But when the people were relieved of
this fear, the favourite vices of prosperity – licence and pride – appeared as a natural
consequence… The nobles started to use their position, and the people their liberty, to
gratify their selfish passions, every man snatching and seizing what he could for
himself… One small group of oligarchs had everything in its control alike in peace
and war – the treasury, the provinces, all distinctions and triumphs. The people were
burdened with military service and poverty, while the spoils of war were snatched by
the generals and shared with a handful of friends… Thus the possession of power
gave unlimited scope to ruthless greed, which violated and plundered everything…
till finally it brought about its own downfall….”252

As Rome expanded, a major flaw in her character became more prominent: a

fanatical love of honour and glory - honestas in Latin – that ruled the hearts of Romans
both individually and collectively. We have seen this already in Scipio Africanus. The
historian Livy called ambition “the ancestral curse” of Rome, going back to Romulus
and Remus; and so it was. On the one hand, the individual Roman was fiercely
ambitious, seeking the praise and admiration of his fellow-countrymen through the
attainment of high political office or military exploits. On the other hand, at least until
the end of the Punic Wars, the Romans as a whole did not tolerate these individual
ambitions going too far, to the detriment of the state as a whole. The glory of Rome
was the highest value, higher than the glory of any individual Roman; and the
constitution was designed to preserve this balance.

However, as Adrian Galsworthy writes: “The immense profits of conquest and

empire threatened delicate balances within politics, society, and the economy.
Competition among the aristocracy for high office and status had always been intense,
but in the past was kept within strict confines of convention and law. Now many of
the props of the system came under threat as senators spent ever-increasing sums to
win popularity and significant groups within the population who felt their plight was
desperate and readily rallied to anyone who championed their cause. There were
opportunities for a few men to rise far higher than had ever been possible in the past
and their peers resented and resisted this.”253

In the second half of the second century BC, as the Republic’s conquests multiplied,
and more and more people from the conquered lands poured into Rome’s crowded
slums, tensions between the rich and the poor increased. The poor were led by two

252 Sallust, The Jugurthine War, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell,
2004, p. 72.
253 Galsworthy, Augustus. From Revolutionary to Emperor, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014, p. 25.

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brother-tribunes, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, grandsons of Scipio Africanus. As
Tom Holland writes, “First Tiberius, in 133 BC, and then Gaius, ten years later, used
their tribunates to push for reform in favour of the poor. They proposed that publicly
held land be divided into allotments and handed out to the masses, that corn be sold
to them below the market rate; even, shockingly, that the Republic should provide the
poorest soldiers with clothes. Radical measures indeed, and the aristocracy,
unsurprisingly, was appalled. To most noblemen, there appeared something
implacable and sinister about the devotion of the Gracchi to the people. True, Tiberius
was not the first of his class to have concerned himself with land reform; but his
paternalism, as far as his peers were concerned, went altogether too far and too fast.
Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic
imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between
the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would
serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue
for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? What struck them as
particularly ominous was the fact that Tiberius, having finished his year of office, had
immediately sought re-election, and that Gaius, in 122 BC, had actually succeeded in
obtaining a second successive tribunate. Where might illegalities like these not lead?
Sacred as the person of a tribune might be, it was not so sacred as the preservation of
the Republic itself. Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was
answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a
violent brawl, Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse
was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three
thousand of his followers were executed without trial.”254

This was the last time that the state was threatened by revolution, - if it was really
threatened, - from below, from the plebs. However, in the first century another, still
greater threat appeared in the form of rival aristocrats and war-lords who opposed
the authority of the Senate, and manipulated its magistracies, in order to satisfy their
own personal ambitions. Men such as Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey and Julius
Caesar profited from the fact that the Republic was now fast becoming an empire,
with vast territories in both East and West that the senate could not control directly.
So ambitious aristocrats sought to be made proconsul of, for example, Asia or Spain
or Gaul, where, in addition to enhancing their reputations through military victories,
they could make fortunes through looting and tax farming and recruit armies with
which to intimidate the Senate when they returned to Rome.

The first to do this was Sulla, and it was Sulla’s breaking of the taboo which forbade
generals from bringing their troops into the city in 88 that marked the first major break
with republican political tradition. After defeating Marius in the first of several civil
wars, Sulla became dictator, murdered thousands of his opponents, and in 81 decreed
a new, purely political path of advancement for aspiring politicians: he engineered
that the major offices of state - quaestor, praetor and consul – should be kept among
his supporters, and also muzzled the tribunate…

254 Holland, Rubicon, London: Abacus, 2003, pp. 28-29.

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 The next great warlord was Pompey the Great, who had made his reputation by
defeating King Mithridates of Pontus and pursuing him as far as Georgia.
Overthrowing the enfeeble Seleucids, he conquered Judaea, entering the Holy of
Holies and installing the worst king he Jews ever had, Herod the Great. Through his
Eastern Settlement of 62, he subdued almost the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean
as far as the borders of Parthia. “Pompey had exceptional organizational skills, and
his Eastern Settlement of 62 BCE laid the foundations for the later Pax Romana in the
region by means of a three-faceted arrangement that involved: creating a virtually
continuous ring of provinces from the southern shore of the Black Sea to
Syria/Palestine; founding about forty new cities, and organizing and promoting
independent ‘client’ states as a kind of firewall outside the ring of provinces. On the
whole, the new cities began to flourish, bringing Rome a 70 per cent increase in
revenue from the region. The client states, many of whose rulers owed their position
to Pompey, were nominally independent and maintained friendly relations with
Rome in an arrangement modeled on that between a high-ranking Roman patronus
(‘patron’) and his clientes (‘dependents’). Pompey’s administrative talents were
indisputable, but what really mattered to Rome was that he was a conqueror. He was
now an incredibly powerful man: he received divine cult on Delos; his eye-watering
wealth made him the richest man in Rome; kings were in his debt, both literally and
figuratively; his client base encompassed individuals, cities, provinces and kingdoms;
and he commanded vast military resources.”255

But it was Julius Caesar, Pompey’s father-in-law and an equally formidable

general, who really destroyed the Republic, turning it into a military dictatorship. In
59 he formed “the first triumvirate” with Crassus (probably the richest man in Rome)
and Pompey that played fast and loose with the constitution, which was defended by
such men as the senator Cato and the lawyer Cicero. However, in 53 Crassus was
killed by the Parthians at Carrhae, a terrible defeat second only to the similar-
sounding defeat at the hands of Hannibal, leaving only Caesar and Pompey
controlling the destinies of the Republic... When Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife
Julia died in childbirth, the bonds between the two men weakened. Pompey now
emerged as the champion of the constitution and the Senate. But Caesar proved
stronger than all; and “Caesar” with its cognates (“Kaiser”, “Tsar”, etc.) was to be a
byword for one-man, monarchical, especially imperial rule for many centuries to
come...

Having smashed the power of the Celts of Gaul in a series of brilliant campaigns,
he also subdued the Celts of Southern England. However, not getting what he wanted
from the senate in Rome, Caesar led his battle-hardened veterans across the river
Rubicon into Italy on January 10, 49.

255 Stephen P. Kershaw, A Brief History of the Roman Empire, London: Robinson, 2013, p. 6.

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 This, writes Dominic Sandbrook, “was a treasonable offence, punishable by death.
Little wonder, then, that at the water’s edge he hesitated. ‘Even now we can turn back’,
he said, ‘but when we pass this little bridge, it means war.’

“According to the historian Suetonius, it was now that the gods intervened.
Suddenly there appeared ‘a being of wondrous stature and beauty, who sat and
played upon a reed.’ As some of the soldiers stepped towards him, the apparition
grabbed one of their trumpets, ‘rushed to the river, and sounding the war-note with a
mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank.’ That, Suetonius wrote, was the signal that
Caesar wanted. ‘Let us go where the omens of the gods and the crimes of our enemies
call us!’ he shouted to his men. ‘Alea iacta est!’ (the die is cast). With that Caesar spurred
on his horse. The Rubicon had been crossed. Peace wouldn’t return to Rome for close
on two decades…”256

Cowed and humiliated by Caesar’s swift advance, the Senate evacuated Rome on
the orders of Pompey while Pompey and his army crossed over to Greece. Caesar
pursued him there, but Pompey nearly defeated him at Dyrrachium in Albania. As
Caesar himself admitted, with a little more boldness Pompey could have won the war
there and then. But then, at the battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly in 48, Caesar defeated
Pompey, who fled to Alexandria, where he was murdered by Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII.
Caesar pursued him to Egypt, where he had an affair with Cleopatra, who bore him a
son, Caesarion. He then defeated the die-hard Pompeians at Thapsus in North Africa
and Munda in Spain in 46. Having defeated all his opponents, Caesar returned to
Rome to receive a ceremonial triumph (his fifth). In 44 he was proclaimed dictator for
life. The Republic was dead: kingship – more precisely: despotism - was back in
power….

As well as being a great general, Caesar was an efficient administrator and less
blood-thirsty than some of his warlord predecessors, such as Sulla; he forgave
defeated opponent who were prepared to join his camp, and tried to unite the different
classes of Rome around himself But his ambition was astronomical; he considered
himself destined by birth to the very highest rank, being descended from kings
through his aunt Julia, and from Venus (!) on his father’s side. As he said, “there is in
our line the integrity of kings who had the greatest power among mortals and the
sanctity of the gods, in whose power are kings.”257

Thus in the last year of his life he “did not end the speculation [about] the
establishment of a state cult of [himself]… The granting of divine honours to mortals
was common the eastern Mediterranean. It was a way of thanking civic benefactors;
and in Ptolemaic lands, as it had once been in Seleucid lands, it was also a way of
directing public opinion. Indeed, Caesar was already the recipient of divine honours
in eastern Greek cities – also true of a number of other senators at this point – and had
been honoured as a god by some individuals in Italy. He had received honours typical
of a ruler cult – although without the apparatus of a cult – following his victorious
return from Thapsus and Munda.

256 Sandbrook, “Caesar Crosses the Rubicon”, BBC History Magazine, January, 2017, p. 8.
257 Suetonius, Life of Caesar, 6.1.

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 “Caesar knew perfectly well that he was mortal – he had been discussing the best
way to die the night before he was assassinated – although he does appear to have
been working towards some sort of personal state cult, quite possibly based on the
Ptolemaic model. In late February or early March the Senate, apparently, voted to
create such a cult – perhaps in support of Caesar’s plan to invade Parthia. The
campaign would give him the opportunity to put down deeper roots in the eastern
provinces, where Pompey’s memory was still powerful, while a state cult would
provide a mechanism of communication with provincial groups through routine
celebrations that offered a chance to spread good news about the regime. Caesar has
plainly decided that the way the Roman state had run its empire needed some
profound changes, and reforms verging on the regal were just that – tried and trusted
administrative forms adopted from other states to improve Rome’s efficiency…”258

“The rule of the dictator,” writes Adrian Galsworthy, “was far from harsh, his
reforms practical and generally for the wider good of the state. Yet no one [in the
opinion of the Romans] should have such vast powers at all, let alone in perpetuity.
Sulla had been far more brutal, but at least Sulla had resigned his dictatorship after a
few years and retired to private life. Julius Caesar called him ‘a political illiterate’ for
doing so, and showed no sign of willingness to give up his dominance of the state. He
was in his fifty-sixth year and although troubled with epilepsy, it was perfectly
possible that he would live on for decades. The planned Parthian War would give him
the clean glory of fighting a foreign enemy, and add even more to his prestige when
he returned in three years or so.

“Julius Caesar had regnum, effectively royal power over the state. The honours
given to him were extensions to those granted to the great men of the past – most
notably Pompey - but far surpassed them all in scale. He sat on a golden chair of office,
wore the triumphing general’s toga and laurel wreath on all public occasions, and was
given the right to sport the high boots and long-sleeved tunic which he claimed were
the garb of his distant ancestors, the kings of Alba Longa – a city near Rome and a
rival in its early history. A pediment, like those on a temple, was added to his house.
Other honours brought Julius Caesar very close to divine status, although it is harder
to say whether or not he was actually deified in his life-time. The idea was anyway
less shocking to the Romans with their polytheistic tradition than to us. Stories told of
heroes who became gods through their deeds, and it was common enough to praise
great achievements as ‘god like’…

“’I am not King [rex], but Caesar,’ said the dictator in response to a crowd hailing
him as king – Rex was a family name of another aristocratic line. The subject was
delicate. When tribunes had coronets removed from one of his statues, Julius Caesar
responded angrily, claiming that they denied him the chance to refuse himself and
wanted to blacken his name by drawing attention to the whole business. The most
famous incident came at the Festival of the Lupercalia, celebrated on 15 February 44
BC, with teams of priests clad only in goatskin loincloths running through the heart
of the City, gently flicking passers-by with their whips. The dictator presided on a

258
Potter, op. cit., p. 268.

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tribunal, and the leader of the priests Mark Antony concluded by running up and
offering a crown to him. Julius Caesar refused, to the delight of the crowd, repeating
the gesture when Anthony offered it again. The most likely interpretation of the affair
is that it was a deliberate pantomime, intended to show once and for all that he did
not want the title of king. If so, then it did not work. Soon people were saying that it
was a test, and that Julius Caesar would have taken the crown if only the people had
responded with enthusiasm. Another story circulated that the Senate would debate
making him king everywhere except inside Rome itself.

“The truth scarcely mattered. Deep in their souls senators knew that this was not
how things should be. King or not, god or not, and however kind and efficient
personally, Julius Caesar possessed supreme power, effectively regnum, whatever he
called himself, and that meant that there could be no res publica – no state. For a Roman
aristocrat the true Republic only existed when the senatorial class shared control,
guiding magistrates elected through open competition and changing them regularly,
so that plenty of people won the chance for high command and profit. This was
liberty, and even for quite a few Caesareans it was now clearly dead.”259

So if Rome could be called a kind of quasi-democracy until the destruction of

Carthage in 146, in the century that followed it descended into anarchy, while by
Caesar’s death in 44 it had become a benevolent despotism, a military dictatorship on
the verge of god-man-kingship on the Hellenistic model…

Caesar was told that he should beware the Ides of March. Ignoring the warning, he
went without a bodyguard to meet the Senate in Pompey’s assembly hall on the Ides
of March, 44 BC. “Pompey’s statue,” writes Holland, “still dominated the Senate’s
meeting-space. After Pharsalus it had been hurriedly pulled down, but Caesar, with
typical generosity, had ordered it restored, along with all of Pompey’s other statues.
An investment policy, Cicero had sneered, against his own being removed – but that
was malicious and unfair. Caesar had no reason to fear for the future of his statue.
Nor, walking into the assembly hall that morning and seeing the senators rise to greet
him, for himself. Not even when a crowd of them approached him with a petition,
mobbing him as he sat down on his gilded chair, pressing him down with their kisses.
Then suddenly he felt his toga being pulled down from his shoulders. ‘Why,’ he cried
out, startled, ‘this is violence!’ At the same moment he felt a slashing pain across his
throat. Twisting around he saw a dagger, red with his own blood.

“Some sixty men stood in a press around him. All of them had drawn daggers from
under their togas. All of them were well known to Caesar. Many were former enemies
who had accepted his pardon – but even more were friends. Some were officers who
had served with him in Gaul, among them Decius Brutus, commander of the war fleet
that had wiped out the Venetians. The most grievous betrayal, however, the one that
finally numbed Caesar and stopped him in his desperate efforts to fight back, came
from someone closer still. Caesar glimpsed, flashing through the mêlée, a knife aimed
at his groin, held by another Brutus, Marcus, his reputed son. ‘You, my boy!’ he
whispered, then fell to the ground. Not wishing to be witnessed in his death agony,

259 Galsworthy, op. cit., pp. 74-76.

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he covered his head with the ribbons of his toga. The pool of his blood stained the
base of Pompey’s statue. Dead, he lay in his great rival’s shadow…”260

Were the Romans now really free again? And does revolution against despotism,
even in the name of “liberty” or “democracy”, necessarily bring the real thing? History
would prove again and again that it does not.

Caesar was right when he “predicted renewed civil war if he died suddenly or was
killed, and believed others would have the sense to realise this and see that it was for
the greater good for him to live… Writing over a century later, Tacitus would
characterise the years of civil war and triumvirate as an era when there was ‘neither
law nor custom’. Basic institutions had broken down and were replaced with arbitrary
power.”261 Caesar’s dictatorship had restored law and order up to a point. His
assassination would plunge the Roman world into civil war again…

Until the rise of the military dictators, the real power in Rome had been the rich,
landowning aristocracy of the senators, who manipulated the popular elections
through a patronage system and disposed of real champions of the poor such as
Tiberius Gracchus. They naturally opposed the dictators, who threatened their power.
But it must be remembered that dictatorship was allowed for in the Roman
constitution in emergencies – and as long as it was temporary. Moreover, the dictators
were popular because they were also populists who knew how to buy the support of
the lower classes. Thus Sulla gave land to his soldiers (who often found themselves
displaced from their farms by neighbours on returning from military service). And
Caesar not only gave land to his soldiers but also grain to the poor (many of whom
had been also displaced from their land by the landowners). So when Caesar was
murdered, the people rioted against the Senate and rallied around Caesar’s heirs,
especially Mark Antony and Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, a teenager who had
been adopted by Caesar and now traded on his name.

In the first part of the civil war that followed, Mark Antony and Octavian fought
against each other. But then the two joined up with Lepidus, Caesar’s deputy,
murdering several hundreds, if not thousands, of their enemies in the senate and
elsewhere. The famous orator Cicero was one of the victims of these “proscriptions”.

The last of the diehard republicans and anti-Caesareans, Brutus and Cassius, who
had established themselves in the East, were defeated by Antony at the huge battle of
Philippi in 42 and committed suicide. (Octavian was at Philippi, but took little direct
part in the battle because of illness, although he claimed otherwise.) As Lepidus’ army
was subverted, forcing him into retirement, the two remaining triumvirs decided to
divide the world between them, with Antony taking the East and Octavian – the West.

260 Holland, op. cit., pp. 346-347.
261 Galsworthy, op. cit., pp. 77, 222.

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 But those brought up in the traditions of warlordism can rarely share power among
themselves; it was inevitable that they should come to blows eventually. In the conflict
that followed, it seemed that Antony, a seasoned warrior, had many advantages as
against the young and inexperienced Octavian. But Octavian was intelligent, sober
and calculating, while Antony was defeated both on the battlefield by the Parthians
and in the bedchamber by his famous passion for Cleopatra. Under her influence he
“soon embraced a Hellenistic eastern vision of kingship, encouraged by Cleopatra,
which was very different from the Roman tradition of austere dignity. She was
determined to use Roman backing to re-establish the Ptolemaic empire.”262

But this was something the Romans could never accept. As Holland writes,
“Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalised in 32 when he divorced Octavia,
was instinctively recognised by most Romans for what it was – a betrayal of the
Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic was dead did not make it
any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was
unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was
flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly
and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird
themselves for war and imagine that the Republic and their own virtue were not, after
all, entirely dead.

“Many years later, Octavian would boast: ‘The whole of Italy, unprompted, swore
allegiance to me, and demanded that I lead her into war. The provinces of Gaul, Spain,
Africa, Sicily and Sardinia also swore the same oath.’ Here, in the form of a plebiscite
spanning half the world, was something utterly without precedent, a display of
universalism consciously designed to put that of Antony and Cleopatra in the
shadow, drawn from the traditions not of the East but of the Roman Republic itself.
Undisputed autocrat and champion of the city’s most ancient ideals, Octavian sailed
to war as both. It was a combination that was to prove irresistible. When, for the third
time in less than twenty years, two Roman forces met head to head in the Balkans, it
was [Octavian] Caesar, yet again, who emerged triumphant…

“Throughout the summer of 31 BC, with his fleet rotting in the shallows and his
army rotting with disease, Antony was blockaded on the eastern coast of Greece. His
camp began to empty… Finally, when the stench of defeat had grown too
overpowering for Antony to ignore, he decided to make a desperate throw. On 2
September he ordered his fleet to attempt a break out, past the cape of Actium, into
the open sea. For much of the day the two great fleets faced each other, motionless in
the silence of the crystalline bay. Then suddenly, in the afternoon, there was
movement: Cleopatra’s squadron, darting forwards, smashing its way through a gap
in Octavian’s line, slipping free. Antony, abandoning his giant flagship for a swifter
vessel, followed, but most of the fleet was left behind, his legions too. They quickly
surrendered. With this brief, inglorious battle perished all of Antony’s dreams, and all
the hopes of the new Isis [Cleopatra].”263

262 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, p. 65.
263 Holland, op. cit., pp. 375-376.

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 Antony committed suicide; Cleopatra did the same nine days later. Octavian was
now the sole master of what we must now call the Roman empire; he was to rule from
29 BC to his death in 14 AD. The western half appeared to have triumphed over the
eastern, western republican virtue over eastern despotic decadence. But it was a
Pyrrhic victory: the decadence and luxuriousness of the East would penetrate the
Roman Empire that Octavian was about to inaugurate. Many western and republican
forms remained; but the imperial power became in essence eastern and despotic.
Julius Caesar had rejected the offer of a crown by Mark Antony; for kingship still
remained a dirty word in the political discourse of the proud, freedom-loving
Romans. But Octavian, while claiming to restore and renew the republic, in effect
buried it; and after so many years of civil war, the people were prepared to submit to
what was in effect a revival of the kingdom, choosing peace over freedom…

The real victor over the Roman republic was the feminine principle incarnate in
Cleopatra and Egypt, which had triumphed over the masculine principle incarnate in
Caesar and Rome. From now on, the emperors of Rome began to acquire the aura of
profane, luxurious divinity that permeated Hellenistic culture, leading in the end to
the thoroughly Eastern concept of the god-king that we find in Nero, Domitian and
Diocletian. Even Octavian, on his tour of the Eastern Mediterranean after defeating
Cleopatra, had given permission to provincials to offer him divine honours, “and
major shrines were established at Pergamum the province of Asia and Nicomedia in
Bithynia.”264 And the conduit of this cultural transformation was Cleopatra, the
goddess-queen of Egypt, the last successor of the Pharaohs, the new Isis, who in defeat
conquered her conquerors. …

The Senate had been prepared to murder Julius Caesar for the sake of liberty and
anti-monarchism. But the years of civil war seem to have persuaded them to value
stability and peace over freedom. So there was no opposition when, on January 1, 27,
Octavian “announced that he was resigning his powers, and returning control of the
provinces, armies and laws to the Senate. In Dio’s version he begins by declaring that
what he is about to say will amaze them, since he is at the height of well-earned
success and could not be forced to give up power. It is only if they consider his
virtuous life, and understand that he had acted out of duty to avenge his father [Julius
Caesar] and protect the state, that they will find his action now less surprising and
more glorious… Julius Caesar is constantly invoked, for his achievements, his own
refusal to accept the crown and title of king and his undeserved murder. His heir now
follows in his footsteps, perhaps winning even greater glory by laying down the
power he wields. He has done what needed to be done, leaving the commonwealth
strong and stable, so that the task of governing it can now safely be left to others.”265

The Senate could do little other than applaud wildly. But then they pleaded with
him to remain as consul at the head of the state. Octavian reluctantly agreed, and in
the days that followed he agreed to take responsibility “for some provinces, on the

264 Galsworthy, Augustus, p. 208.
265 Galsworthy, Augustus, p. 231.

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basis that these were more in need of protection from foreign enemies or internal
disorder. As a result he took control of all of the Spanish Peninsula, where conquest
was incomplete, all of Gaul, where the occupation was still fairly recent and stability
threatened by the German tribes from across the Rhine, and Syria, so often disturbed
in the civil wars and with Parthia as a neighbour. He also retained control of Egypt,
perhaps on the basis that it was a very new province. The entire command was voted
to him for ten years, although he stressed that he hope to return some of the regions
to senatorial control earlier than this, should he succeed in bringing the area under
full control more quickly. The remaining provinces were placed under the supervision
of the Senate.

“Caesar’s provinces contained the greater part of the Roman army. There were
legions in Macedonia… Africa also contained several legions. Otherwise the senatorial
provinces contained no significant military forces. The soldiers in Macedonia and
Africa may well have continued to take an oath to Caesar, as was certainly the case
within a few years…

“No one could have had any doubts about Caesar’s supremacy. His ten-year
command mirrored earlier extraordinary commands of the likes of Pompey and Julius
Caesar. It helped to create a façade of a public servant, taking on heavy responsibilities
for the common good. The wider population are unlikely to have felt any qualms
about this. Extraordinary commands had a proven track record of getting things done
far more effectively than the traditional pattern of frequent transfer of responsibilities
from one ambitious magistrate to another. Some senators may have felt the same way,
and even those who did not drew solace from the chance of participating in the
system. There was no other realistic alternative for as long as Caesar controlled the
overwhelming bulk of the army. Dio notes cynically that one of the first things Caesar
did after he was persuaded to accept a major role in the state was to get the Senate to
pass a decree awarding a substantial payrise to his praetorian cohorts. The evidence
is poor, but these probably received an annual salary of 375 denarii instead of the 225
denarii paid to legionaries. There were nine cohorts of praetorians, so they were kept
just below the nominal strength of a ten-cohort legion, and several cohorts were
routinely stationed in or near Rome itself. This was in contrast to Julius Caesar, who
had dismissed his bodyguard early in 44 BC. Armed forced remained the ultimate
guarantee of Caesar’s supremacy.

“Much of the senators’ time in the meetings on 13 and especially 15 and 16 January
were taken up with praising Caesar, and awarding him permanent honours. This may
well have been an area where members could exercise genuine independence as
regards detail, although no doubt the debate was shaped both by Caesar’s selection of
the order of speakers and by contributions made by men who had already been
primed. Considerable momentum quickly gathered to grant Caesar an additional
cognomen as a mark of his incredible past and future services to the state. Some
speakers suggested that he be called Romulus, linking him for ever with the founder
of Rome since he had renewed and effectively refounded the City.

“As well as founder, Romulus was also Rome’s first king, and one tradition
maintained that instead of dying he had been raised to the heavens to become a god.

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Yet some of the associations were less attractive. The foundation of Rome had begun
with fratricide, Romulus’ twin brother being killed with a spade, and that was an
uncomfortable thought for a generation who had seen so much civil was. An
alternative tradition explained the disappearance of Rome’s first king less grandly,
claiming that he had been torn in pieces by a mob of senators. After a while, opinion
in the Senate shifted away from the idea of giving Caesar the name. Suetonius claims
that he and his close advisers were keen, but if so they must have changed their minds
at some point. That it was considered so openly and seriously tells us a good deal
about the mood of the times. Senators were eager to vote honours to so powerful a
man. Whether or not they liked him and what he had done, no one doubted the reality
of his supremacy.

“Eventually a vote was taken on a proposal by Munatius Plancus, the same man
who had once painted himself blue and donned a fishtail to dance for Antony and
Cleopatra, and who had later defected to Caesar, bringing news of his rival’s will.
Plancus proposed the name Augustus, and the resolution was passed with a sweeping
– perhaps unanimous – vote as senators moved to show their acquiescence by
standing beside him. The presiding consul now became formally Imperator Caesar
Augustus, divi filius. No Roman had ever had such a name, and it is easy for familiarity
to make us forget just how novel it was. Augustus carried heavy religious overtones
of the very Roman tradition of seeking divine guidance and approval through augury.
Ennius, Rome’s earliest and most revered poet, spoke of the City being founded with
‘august augury’ in a passage as familiar to Romans as the most famous Shakespearean
quotes are to us today.

“Caesar Augustus – sometimes the order was reversed to Augustus Caesar for
added emphasis – was special, unlike anyone else, and, unlike the ten-year provincial
command, the new name was a permanent honour. It was hard, perhaps impossible,
to imagine Imperator Caesar Augustus, the son of a god, ever retiring to private life,
or even being approached in glory, auctoritas, and pre-eminence by anyone else.
Earlier precedents – for instance, Pompey’s extraordinary commands, and his distant
supervision of the Spanish provinces from 54 BC onwards – falls far short of Caesar
Augustus’ position. Other men had won grand names in the past – Sulla was Felix
(lucky) and Pompey Magnus (great), but none had held so grand and sacred a name
as Augustus. The only person to wield comparable power and pre-eminence was
Julius Caesar. The convention of referring to his heir as Augustus and not Caesar
Augustus can conceal the great similarities between their places in the state…

“Caesar Augustus held a personal permanent pre-eminence in the state, matched

in the past only by his father. Like Julius Caesar he continued to hold the consulship
every year. The charade of handing over power to the Senate and being handed it
straight back was important… This should not make us focus so much on the few
differences in Caesar Augustus’ self-presentation and conduct that we are blind to the
overwhelming – and very public – similarities between him and his father. In a sense,
he had now fulfilled his teenage announcement of his intention to win the honours
and offices of his father. Julius Caesar once dismissed the res publica as a ‘mere name
without form or substance’, although we do not know when and in what context he
expressed the view. His heir was more tactful, and avoided the abolished title of

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dictator, but the difference is more apparent than real. He was also divi filius, the ‘son
of a god’, and both this and the name Caesar constantly paraded his connection with
the murdered Julius Caesar. The monuments adorning Rome and associated with him
already far surpassed the ones celebrating the dictator during his lifetime…”266

The real significance both of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and of Caesar Augustus’
principate is that, although they were both, as everyone knew, despots wielding
essentially absolute power, they both tried to justify their power democratically, by
reference to the will of the people – more precisely, of the Senate and the People
(SPQR). Of course, republicanism was already in the genes of the Romans since the
expulsion of their kings. And that purely Roman republicanism was reinforced by the
profound influence that Greek culture and political philosophy exerted on the
Romans after Greece had been incorporated into the empire. All educated Romans
knew Greek as well as Latin and had been tutored, often by Greek tutors, in the
humanist ideals of Classical Athens and the anti-authoritarian rhetoric of
Demosthenes - Cicero called his anti-Antonian speeches Philippics in honour of
Demosthenes, and Augustus was particularly fond of citing Greek epigrams. For that
cultural milieu, dictatorship might be accepted de facto as necessary for the
preservation of the state, but it could not be accepted de jure – because it was against
the law! The only solution was to sugar the pill of despotism with a thick layer of
(pretty outrageous) constitutionalism. So the despot had to pretend to surrender his
power to the people, and the people then had to pretend to give it back to him. The
upshot was that everyone was (more or less) happy: the despot had preserved his
power without the threat of civil war, while the Senate had placed the seal of their
constitutional approval on his power. Of course, it was a charade. But it was a very
important charade, and a charade with lasting and long-term consequences – nothing
less than the preservation of the empire for another three hundred years (at least).
Augustus’ great achievement was that he played this game with great skill and
supremely successfully. Thereby he created a precedent that was to be repeated right
down the centuries of European history. For while despotism did not disappear,
neither did democracy, and the despots had to try and provide democratic
justifications for their despotism. So Napoleon was elected first consul of the French
Republic by a National Assembly – but four years later crowned himself emperor.
And Hitler was legally elected Chancellor of Germany by the Reichstag. And even the
most powerful despot of all, Stalin, created a constitution and had himself elected by
an “elected” Supreme Soviet. They were all, politically speaking, the children of
Caesar Augustus, divi filii, “the son of a god”, who first fused the despotic and
democratic principles so as to create the greatest empire the world has ever known…

But the main lesson of the period is stark: even the most powerful, most firmly
grounded republic in ancient history, breathing the spirit of democracy, failed,
descending into anarchy, civil war and murder on a large scale, which paved the way
for despotism, just as Plato and Aristotle predicted. The eighteenth-century admirers
of the Roman republic thought that this fundamental defect could be corrected by
more and better laws, more democracy, more education and built-in constitutional
safeguards. But they were wrong: the nineteenth, and especially the twentieth

266 Galsworthy, Augustus, pp. 233-237.

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century, proved that this lesson from the ancients, at any rate, was universally true in
space and time…

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 20. PAX ROMANA

On January 16, 27 BC, as we have seen, the Roman senate gave Octavian the titles
Augustus, Princeps et Imperator, Caesar, Divi Filius, “The illustrious one, the first head
and commander, Caesar, the son of a god”. These titles, as Peter Furtado writes,
“asserted the scope of his power and the benevolence of his rule, and they established
him as the leading senator, the head of the army and the descendant of the now-
deified Julius Caesar. The last of these titles effectively made his family name Caesar
a synonym with the holder of imperial power – a meaning it retained in Russia
(Czar/Tsar) and Germany (Kaiser) into the 20th century.”267

Although Augustus emphasized the republican nature of his rule by calling himself
princeps senatus, first among equals among the senators, rather than rex or dictator, and
making his reign technically limited in time, there is no doubt that in reality both he
and all his successors until Diocletian, were despots, some more humane than others,
and some more sane than others, but despots nevertheless.

According to Stephen Kershaw, “Historians conventionally call this new phase of

Roman history the Principate, so in a sense they have swallowed Augustus’
propaganda: Augustus developed ‘new truthful narratives about the past’ and many
contemporaries bought into them: ‘Thus the ancient time-honoured constitution of the
Republic was revived.’ The Fasti Praenestini for 27 BCE tell how: ‘The Senate decreed
that an oak-leaf crown be placed above the door of the house of Imperator Caesar
Augustus because he restored the Republican Constitution to the People of Rome.’
Even so, Augustus wasn’t able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Tacitus
characterized him as a power-crazed autocrat hiding behind a veneer of
Republicanism, and Dio Cassius stated that ‘all the power of the people and that of
the senate reverted to Augustus, and from his time there was a genuine monarchy’.

“The overall package, known nowadays as the First Settlement of 27 BCE, was not
an unqualified success, and a conspiracy against him by Fannius Caepio and A.
Terentius Varro Murena, combined with a potentially life-threatening illness, made
him reassess his position. In 23 BCE he vacated the consulship and only held it twice
more for limited, specific purposes. But to offset this loss he received tribunicia potestas
– the powers of a Tribune of the Plebs – which crucially included the right of veto and
of putting legislation to the people. From now on, Rome’s Emperors would count their
reigns from the year when they acquired tribunicia potestas.

“The loss of his consular powers was counterbalanced by the grant of imperium
proconsulare (the command associated with a Proconsul). This was renewed
automatically at (usually) ten-year intervals, and was valid both in Italy and inside
the city of Rome itself. The icing on the cake was that his imperium was made maius –
superior to that of any other Proconsul. Augustus could now legally intervene in
whatever province he liked, whenever he liked…”268

267 Furtado, History day by day, London: Thames & Hudson, 2019, p. 20.
268 Stephen P. Kershaw, A Brief History of the Roman Empire, London: Robinson, 2013, pp. 47-49.

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 In 12 BC Augustus was elected chief priest, Pontifex Maximus. The election of the
pontifex had been the object of political infighting since 104 BC, so its sacred,
independent nature had long ago been compromised; but Julius Caesar himself had
assumed the post in 63 BC, so it must have been worth having, as was only to be
expected in a world and an electorate that was still very religious. As Augustus wrote
in his Res Gestae: “So great was the multitude that flocked to my election from all over
Italy that no such gathering in Rome had heretofore been recorded.” So now he held
the fullness of both political and religious power in his hands, making his rule, for all
its republican forms, conformable to the classic definition of despotism – that is, the
concentration of supreme power, both political and religious, in the hands of one
man…

Edward Gibbon writes in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “Every
barrier of the Roman constitution had been leveled by the vast ambition of the
dictator; every fence had been leveled by the hand of the Triumvir. After the victory
of Actium, the fate of the Roman world depended on the will of Octavianus, surnamed
Caesar, by his uncle’s adoption, and afterwards Augustus, by the flattery of the senate.
The conqueror was at the head of forty-four legions, conscious of their own strength,
and of the weakness of the constitution, habituated, during forty years of civil war, to
every act of blood and violence, and passionately devoted to the house of Caesar, from
whence alone they had received, and expected, the most lavish rewards. The
provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government
of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants.
The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the
aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows, and were supplied with both by
the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally
embraced the [hedonistic] philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of
ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the
memory of their old tumultuous freedom. With its power, the senate had lost its
dignity; many of the most noble families were extinct. The republicans of spirit and
ability had perished in the field of battle, or in the proscription. The door of the
assembly had been designedly left open, for a fixed multitude of more than a thousand
persons, who reflected disgrace upon their rank, instead of deriving honour from it.

“The reformation of the senate was one of the first steps in which Augustus laid
aside the tyrant, and professed himself the father of his country. He was elected
censor; and, in concert with his faithful Agrippa, he examined the list of the senators,
expelled a few members, whose vices or whose obstinacy required a public example,
persuaded near two hundred to prevent the shame of an expulsion by a voluntary
retreat, raised the qualification of a senator to about ten thousand pounds, created a
sufficient number of patrician families, and accepted for himself the honourable title
of Prince of the Senate, which had always been bestowed, by the censors, on the citizen
most eminent for his honours and services. But whilst he thus restored the dignity, he
destroyed the independence of the senate. The principles of a free constitution are
irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

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 “Before an assembly thus modeled and prepared, Augustus pronounced a studied
oration, which displayed his patriotism, and disguised his ambition. ‘He lamented,
yet excused his past conduct. Filial piety had required at his hands the revenge of his
father’s murder; the humanity of his own nature had sometimes given way to the laws
of stern necessity, and to a forced connection with two unworthy colleagues: as long
as Antony lived, the republic forbade him to abandon her to a degenerate Roman, and
a barbarian queen. He was now at liberty to satisfy his duty and his inclination. He
solemnly restored the senate and people to all their ancient rights, and wished only to
mingle with the crowd of his fellow-citizens, and to share the blessings which he had
obtained for his country.’

“It would require the pen of Tacitus (if Tacitus had assisted at this assembly) to
describe the various emotions of the senate; those that were suppressed, and those
that were affected. It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to
distrust it was still more dangerous. The respective advantages of monarchy and a
republic have often divided speculative inquirers, the present greatness of the Roman
state, the corruption of manners, and the licence of the soldiers, supplied new
arguments to the advocates of monarchy, and these general views of government
were again warped by the hopes and fears of each individual. Amidst this confusion
of sentiments, the answer of the senate was unanimous and decisive. They refused to
accept the resignation of Augustus; they conjured not to desert the republic, which he
had saved. After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the
senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general
command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of Proconsul and
Imperator. But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration
of that period, he hoped that the wounds of evil discord would be completely healed,
and that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer
require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate. The memory of
this comedy, repeated several times during the life of Augustus, was preserved to the
last ages of the empire, by the peculiar pomp with which the perpetual monarchs of
Rome always solemnized the tenth years of their reign…

“The victory over the senate was easy and inglorious. Every eye and every passion
was directed to the supreme magistrate, who possessed the arms and treasure of the
state, whilst the senate, neither elected by the people, not guarded by military force,
not animated by public spirit, rested its declining authority on the frail and crumbling
basis of ancient opinion. The fine theory of a republic insensibly vanished, and made
way for the more natural and substantial feelings of monarchy. As the freedoms and
honours of Rome were successively circumscribed in the provinces, in which the old
government had been either unknown, or was remembered with abhorrence, the
tradition of republican maxims was gradually obliterated. The Greek historians of the
age of the Antonines observe with a malicious pleasure, that although the sovereign
of Rome, in compliance with an obsolete prejudice, abstained from the name of a king,
he possessed the full measure of legal power. In the reign of Severus, the senate was
filled with polished and eloquent slaves from the eastern provinces, who justified
personal flattery by speculative principles of servitude. These new advocates of
prerogative were heard with pleasure by the court, and with patience by the people,
when they inculcated the duty of passive obedience, and descanted on the inevitable

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mischiefs of freedom. The lawyers and the historians concurred in teaching that the
Imperial authority was held, not by the delegated commission, nut by the irrevocable
resignation of the senate, that the emperor was freed from the restraint of civil laws,
could command by his arbitrary will the lives and fortunes of his subject, and might
dispose of the empire as of his private patrimony…”269

Why were the Romans so willing to exchange their vaunted republican freedom
for an absolutist servitude? Partly out of exhaustion and revulsion at the bloodshed
and chaos of the last century of the Republic – freedom in almost every age of human
history involves giving freedom to the unrestrained passions of men, with all their
destructive consequences. That is why most human beings in most ages prefer
stability and peace to the excitement of freedom. Rome might produce some monster
emperors, like Nero and Caligula. But their monstrosities affected only a small
minority of the citizens of the empire, whereas the stable, long-lasting Roman system
of laws under one-man-rule benefited all free citizens. Only one thing was lacking,
“the one thing necessary”: salvation, the rule of the One True God, bringing peace with
God into the hearts and minds of men. But they did not have long to wait for that:
God the Saviour was coming. Indeed, he had already come: He was born as a man
under the rule of Caesar Augustus, and His first act was to be registered in one of
Augustus’ censuses …

And so if the supreme value of the Roman Republic had been freedom, that of the
Roman Empire under its first emperor, Augustus, was peace. In 13 BC the Senate
erected an altar to the Roman goddess of peace to commemorate Augustus’ return to
Rome after his campaigns in Spain and Gaul. The altar’s sculptures symbolized the
coming of a golden age to the earth through the benevolent despotism of Augustus
and his family.

The Roman Peace, Pax Romana, both pacified the empire and united it. Partly
through technological inventions, such as the famous straight roads and the postal
service (cursus publicus), which used the roads; and partly through limiting offensive
wars and providing linguistic and cultural modes of integration. “It is thanks to
them,” wrote St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (+177) of the emperors, “that we are able
to walk along well-kept roads without fear, and take ship wherever we wish.”270

Of course, the republic had gloried in offensive wars, and the “peace” it created
was often the peace of the dead. Even Virgil, the official poet of the Augustan age,
exhorted the Romans to “impose [by force] the ways of peace”.271 Moreover, even
during the imperial period offensive wars, though rarer, did not disappear. Thus “in
84, writes Simon Schama, “an enormous pan-European pitched battle took place on
the slopes of an unidentified Highland mountain, certainly north of the Tay, which

269 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London: The Folio Society, 1776, 1983, vol. I, pp. 78-
80, 130.
270 St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.30.3.
271 In Virgil’s Aeneid, Jupiter says: For the empire of these people I impose neither limits of space nor

time. I have given them power without end (I, 278).

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Tacitus [in Agricola, 30] calls Mount Grampius, where 30,000 of the Caledonians and
their northern allies engaged with the Roman legions and their Dutch (Batavian) and
Belgian (Tungrian) auxiliaries. The result was the slaughter of 10,000 of the natives
and 360 Romans. The most remarkable pages in Tacitus’s history are not the battle
scenes, with their predictable gore, but the speeches he puts through the mouths of
the opposing commander, especially the Caledonian general Calgacus, who delivers
the first of the great back-to-the-wall, anti-imperialist speeches on Scotland’s soil, a
ringing appeal for his native country’s freedom: ‘here at the world’s end, on its last
inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, defended by our remoteness
and obscurity. But there are no other tribes to come; nothing but sea and cliffs and
these more deadly Romans whose arrogance you cannot escape by obedience and self-
restraint. Robbers of the world, now that the earth falls into their all-devastating
hands, they probe even the sea; if their enemy have wealth they have greed… [neither]
East nor West has glutted them… To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they
misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace…’”272

However, by Augustus’ time a longing for real peace was evident among the
Romans – although their belief in their right to conquer the world never left them…
As Edward Gibbon wrote: “The principal conquests of the Romans were achieved
under the republic; and the emperors, for the most part, were satisfied with preserving
those dominions which had been acquired by the policy of the senate, the active
emulation of the consuls, and the martial enthusiasm of the people. The first seven
centuries were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for
Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to
introduce a spirit of moderation into the public counsels. It was easy for him to
discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to
fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the
undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the
possession more precarious, and less beneficial. The experience of Augustus added
weight to these salutary reflections, and effectually convinced him that, by the
prudent vigour of his councils, it would be easy to secure every concession which the
safety of the dignity of Rome might require from the most formidable Barbarians.
Instead of exposing his person and his legions to the arrows of the Parthians, he
obtained, by an honourable treaty, the restoration of the standards and prisoners
which had been taken in the defeat of Crassus [in 53 BC].”273

And so, with the exception of the new conquests of Britain under Claudius and of
Dacia (Romania) and Nabataea under Trajan, the Roman Empire remained for
centuries broadly within the limits set by Augustus. Excursions beyond those limits
were made only for defensive purposes, in order to protect it against the attacks of
barbarians. One of those limits was the Rhine, beyond which lay the Germanic tribes
who had wiped out three Roman legions under Varus in 9 AD - a defeat that engrained
itself in the psyche of the Romans more than any other until the defeat and capture of
the Emperor Valerian by the Persian King Shapur in 260. (Augustus himself tore his
clothes and banged his head against the doors of his house, crying: “Quinctilius Varus,

272 Schama, A History of Britain 1, London: BBC Publications, 2003, p. p. 34.
273 Gibbon, op. cit., pp. 11-12.

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give me back my legions!”) The Rhine became a permanent boundary of the
“inhabited world” until the German tribes themselves began to breach it in the third
century. The Romans even did something that they had been too proud to do before:
retreat, as when the Antonine Wall in southern Scotland was abandoned in favour of
Hadrian’s Wall further south.

Thus “the terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation
of the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war; and while
justice regulated their conduct, they announced to the nations on their confines that
they were as little disposed to endure as to offer an injury. The military strength,
which it has been sufficient for Hadrian and the elder Antoninus to display [in
Britain], was exerted against the Parthians and the Germans by the emperor Marcus.
The hostilities of the barbarians provoked the resentment of that philosophic
monarch, and, in the prosecution of a just defence, Marcus and his generals obtained
many signal victories, both on the Euphrates and on the Danube…”274

Within the multi-national empire, peace was preserved by a combination of

religious ecumenism, the planting of veterans’ colonies, farmers and traders all over
the empire, and the state’s allowing more and more colonials to partake of the
advantages of Roman citizenship or limited citizenship, thereby integrating the
peoples by creating a kind of Roman imperial patriotism that extended through the
natives of many nations, something that the leaders of the Roman Republic had not
succeeded in doing.

For, as Gibbon writes, “After the legions were rendered permanent by the
emperors, the provinces were peopled by a race of soldiers; and the veterans, whether
they received the reward of their service in land or in money, usually settled with their
families in the country where they had honourably spent their youth. Throughout the
empire, but more particularly in the western parts, the most fertile districts, and the
most convenient situations, were reserved for the establishment of colonies; some of
which were of a civil, and others of a military nature. In their manners and internal
policy, the colonies formed a perfect representation of their great parent, and were
soon endeared to the natives by the ties of friendship and alliance, they effectually
diffused a reverence for the Roman name, and a desire, which was seldom
disappointed, of sharing, in due time, its honours and advantages. The municipal
cities insensibly equally the rank and splendor of the colonies; and in the reign of
Hadrian, it was disputed which was the preferable condition, of those societies which
had issued from, or those which had been received into the bosom of Rome. The right
of Latium, as it was called, conferred on the cities to which it had been granted a more
partial favour. The magistrates only, at the expiration of their office, assumed the
quality of Roman citizens; but as these offices were annual, in a few years they
circulated round the principal families. Those of the provincials who were permitted
to bear arms in the legions; those who exercised any civil employment, all, in a word,
who performed any public service, or displayed any personal talents, were rewarded
with a present, whose value was continually diminished by the increasing liberality
of the emperors. Yet even, in the age of the Antonines, when the freedom of the city

274 Gibbon, op. cit., p. 17.

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had been bestowed on the greater number of their subjects, it was still accompanied
with very solid advantages. The bulk of the people acquired, with that title, the benefit
of the Roman laws, particularly in the interesting articles of marriage, testaments, and
inheritance; and the road of fortune was open to those whose pretensions were
seconded by favour or merit. The grandsons of the Gauls, who had besieged Julius
Caesar in Alesia, commanded legions, governed provinces, and were admitted into
the senate of Rome. Their ambition, instead of disturbing the tranquility of the state
was intimately connected its safety and greatness.

“So sensible were the Romans of the influence of language over national manners,
that it was their most serious care to extend, with the progress of their arms, the use
of the Latin tongue. The ancient dialects of Italy, the Sabine, the Etruscan, and the
Venetian, sunk into oblivion; but in the provinces, the east was less docile than the
west, to the voice of its victorious preceptors. This obvious difference marked the two
portions of the empire with a distinction of colours, which, though it was in some
degree concealed during the meridian splendour of prosperity, became gradually
more visible as the shades of night descended upon the Roman world. The western
countries were civilized by the same hands which subdued them. As soon as the
barbarians were reconciled to obedience, their minds were opened to any new
impressions of knowledge and politeness. The language of Virgil and Cicero, though
with some inevitable mixture of corruption, was so universally corrupted in Africa,
Spain, Gaul, Britain and Pannonia, that the faint traces of the Punic or Celtic idioms
were preserved only in the mountains, or among the peasants. Education and study
insensibly inspired the natives of their countries with the sentiments of Romans; and
Italy gave fashions as well as laws to her Latin provincials. They educated with more
ardour, and obtained with more facility, the freedom and honours of the state;
supported the national dignity in letters and in arms; and, at length, in the person of
Trajan, produced an emperor whom the Scipios would not have disowned in their
countryman. The situation of the Greeks was very different from that of the
Barbarians. The former had been long since civilized and corrupted. Such was the
general division of the Roman Empire into the Latin and Greek languages…

“It is a just though trite observation, that victorious Rome was herself subdued by
the arts of Greece. Those immortal writers who still command the admiration of
modern [eighteenth-century] Europe, soon became the favourite object of study and
imitation in Italy and the western provinces. But the elegant amusements of the
Romans were not suffered to interfere with their sound maxims of policy. While they
acknowledged the charms of the Greek, they asserted the dignity of the Latin tongue,
and the exclusive use of the latter was inflexibly maintained in the administration of
civil as well as military government. The two languages exercised at the same time
their separate jurisdiction throughout the empire: the former as the natural idiom of
science; the latter as the legal dialect of public transactions. Those who united letters
with business were equally conversant with both; and it was almost impossible, in any
province, to find a Roman subject of a liberal education, who was at once a stranger
to the Greek and to the Latin language.

“It was by such institutions that the nations of the empire insensibly melted away
into the Roman name and people. But there still remained, in the centre of every

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province and of every family, an unhappy condition of men who endured the weight,
without sharing the benefits, of society. In the free states of antiquity the domestic
slaves were exposed to the wanton rigour of despotism. The perfect settlement of the
Roman Empire preceded by ages of violence and rapine. The slaves consisted, for the
most part, of barbarian captives, taken in thousands by the chance of war, purchased
at a vile price, accustomed to a life of independence, and impatient to break and
avenge their fetters. Against such internal enemies, whose desperate insurrections had
more than once reduced the republic to the brink of destruction, the most severe
regulations, and the most cruel treatment, seemed almost justified by the great law of
self-preservation. But when the principal nations of Europe, Asia and Africa, were
united under the laws of one sovereign, the source of foreign supplies flowed with
much less abundance, and the Romans were reduced to the milder but more tedious
method of propagation. In their numerous families, and particularly in their country
estates, they encouraged the marriage of their slaves. The sentiments of nature, the
habits of education, and the possession of a dependent species of property,
contributed to alleviate the hardships of servitude. The existence of a slave became an
object of greater value, and though his happiness still depended on the temperament
and circumstances of the master, the humanity of the latter, instead of being restrained
by fear, was encouraged by the sense of his own interest. The progress of manners
was accelerated by the virtue or policy of the emperors; and by the edicts of Hadrian
and the Antonines the protection of the laws was extended to the most abject part of
mankind. The jurisdiction of life and death over the slaves, a power long exercised
and often abused, was taken out of private hands, and reserved to the magistrates
alone. The subterranean prisons were abolished, and upon a just complaint of
intolerable manners, the injured slave obtained either his deliverance, or a less cruel
master.”275

275 Gibbon, op. cit., pp. 59-62.

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 21. HEROD THE GREAT

One part of the East, Judaea, continued to have no truck with the idea of the god-
king or queen that was the dominant in neighbouring Syria and Egypt. Nevertheless,
the corrupt habits of Hellenistic, and, later, of Roman imperialism began to penetrate
there too. Thus Alexander Jannaeus was a cruel despot with heretical tendencies; his
refusal to perform the libation ceremony at the Feast of Tabernacles led to a rebellion
and a civil war lasting six years and costing 50,000 lives. He died in 76BC, and was
succeeded by his wife Salome, who died in 67. Her two sons Hyrcanus II and
Aristobulus II fought each other for the kingship and high priesthood, and they both
appealed to Pompey, who in 64, after defeating the Pontic King Mithridates the Great,
arrived in Antioch and deposed the last of the Seleucid kings. The Pharisees also sent
a delegation to Pompey; but they asked him to abolish the monarchy in Judaea, which
was dominated by their rivals, the Sadducees, since they said it was contrary to their
traditions. In 63 Pompey took the side of Hyrcanus, appointing him ethnarch; he
captured Jerusalem after a three-month siege involving horrific bloodshed, and, to the
horror of the Jews, entered the Holy of Holies.

Hyrcanus’ power was then effectively usurped by his powerful chief-minister,

Antipater, an Idumaean (Edomite) from the other side of the Jordan, whom the
Romans placed in charge of Judaea, with special responsibility for controlling
disturbances and collecting taxes. In 47, after Julius Caesar had defeated Pompey,
Antipater hastened to ingratiate himself with him. As a reward, he was given Roman
citizenship and was later appointed the first Roman Procurator of Judaea. Then
Antipater appointed his son Phasael as governor of Judaea and his other son, Herod,
as governor of Galilee.

After the assassination of Caesar in 44, Antipater sided with Cassius in the civil war
with Mark Antony. This gave an opportunity to the anti-Roman Pharisees, who were
always on their guard against contamination of the faith by Greek paganism and
deeply resented Roman domination of the homeland. In 43, they poisoned Antipater,
and his son Herod was forced by the Sanhedrin to flee to Rome. Meanwhile, Mark
Antony had won his war against Cassius, and in 41 he confirmed Antipater’s sons
Herod and Phasael in their positions. Civil war then broke out in Judaea. The nominal
Hasmonean king of the country, Hyrcanus, was overthrown by his nephew
Antigonus with the help of the Parthians.

Herod promptly fled to Rome again. Thus when the Parthians were conquering
Jerusalem in 37, Herod was in Rome being fêted by Antony and Octavian. In a
triumphant procession they led him to the Capitol. “And there,” as A. Paryaev writes,
“amid sacrifices to Jupiter Capitolinus that were impermissible for a Jew, and which
caused deep consternation among the Jews, he was formally raised onto the Jewish
throne.”276

276Paryaev, “Tsar Irod i ego Soobshchiki: Istoria i Sovremennost’” (“King Herod and his Associates:
History and Modernity”), Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Suzdal Diocesan News), N 3, January-
February, 1998, pp. 31-32.

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 After Actium in 31, Herod visited Octavian and was confirmed as king by him.

“Another visit and further gifts followed when Caesar [Octavian] left Egypt, and
in return he regained territory taken from him by Antony to give to Cleopatra. The
queen’s bodyguard of several hundred Gauls – another gift from Antony – was also
presented by Caesar to the king of Judaea.”277

But Herod was not only not of the line of David: he was not even a Jew by race. As
Tom Mueller writes: “His mother was an ethnic Arab [from Nabataea], and his father
was an Edomite, and though Herod was raised as a Jew, he lacked the social status of
the powerful old families in Jerusalem who were eligible to serve as high priest, as the
Hasmonaean kings had traditionally done. Many of his subjects considered Herod an
outsider – a ‘half Jew’, as his early biographer, the Jewish soldier and aristocrat Flavius
Josephus later wrote – and continued to fight for a Hasmonaean theocracy.”278 Pious
Jews inevitably wondered how the promises made by God to David about the eternity
of his dynasty (Psalm 131.11-15) could be fulfilled now that the Davidic line appeared
to have died out. Perhaps the time had come for the appearance of the Messiah, whose
kingdom would be eternal… After all, the “seventy times seven” prophecy of Daniel
(9.24-27) indicated that his coming would be in the first half of the first century AD.279
Moreover, had not the Patriarch Jacob, declared: “The sceptre shall not depart from
Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto Him shall
the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49.10)? Now that the sceptre, in the form of
the Jewish kingship, appeared to have departed from Judah, was it not time for the
appearance of Shiloh? 280

Herod tried to correct his non-Jewishness by marrying the Hasmonaean princess

Mariamne. But his Jewish faith was superficial at best. Pinero writes that “If the
writers of the New Testament saw him as a tyrant, Herod saw himself as the paragon
of refinement. He befriended leading Roman figures, showering them with invitations
to his palaces in Jerusalem and Jericho. The succession of Gentile nobles, philosophers,
historians, poets, and playwrights flowing through the royal court rankled with the
Pharisees and the Essenes, the principal Jewish sects concentrated in and around
Jerusalem. In some ways, both groups were very different: The Pharisees represented
the establishment, holding high religious office in the Temple, while the Essenes were

277 Adrian Galsworthy, Augustus, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014, p. 209.
278 Mueller, “Herod: The Holy Land’s Visionary Builder”, National Geographic Magazine, December,

2008, p. 41.
279 John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: the Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, Oxford: Monarch,

2015, pp. 294-301. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of Argentina (“On the Threshold”, Orthodox America, vol.
XVIII, N 5 (161), January, 2000, p. 12) writes: “Daniel’s prophecy so explicitly and synonymously points
to Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah, that the Gemaric rabbi forbids his compatriots to calculate the
dates of the Daniel septenaries, saying, ‘Those who calculate the times will hear their bones rattle’
(Sanhedrin 97).”
280 Bishop Alexander recounts a tradition from the Midrash “that when the members of the Sanhedrin

learned that they had been deprived of the right to try criminal cases (in AD 30), they put on sackcloth
and, tearing their hair, gathered and began to cry out: ‘Woe to us, woe to us: it has been a great while
since we had a king from Judah, and the promised Messiah is not yet come!’ This occurred at the very
beginning of Jesus Christ’s ministry” (ibid.).

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an apocalyptic sect who wanted to see Judaism purified and reformed. Even so, both
believed that the king was intentionally corrupting Jewish customs within his court.

“According to the historian Nicholas of Damascus, one of Herod’s closest friends,

the king neglected affairs of state and the study of Jewish law to spend his time
studying philosophy, rhetoric, and the history of Greece and Rome. State affairs were
delegated to those officials with a Greek education. When the king did carry out
religious acts, his pious critics remained unconvinced. Herod knew that ruling Judaea
was impossible without the consent of the influential Pharisees, whom he carefully
courted with various concessions. He was able to keep them just about on side, but he
would never win their total trust or loyalty.

“According to the historian Josephus, Herod’s new cities irked the Jewish priestly
class because their pagan monuments were insultingly close to Jerusalem. Built
between 22 and 10 BC, Herod named Caesarea Maritima for his patron, Caesar
Augustus. It was… the base of the Herodian fleet, which he placed entirely at the
disposal of Rome.

“Caesarea’s temples were dedicated to the goddess Roma, and to Augustus

himself. [He also built a temple to Augustus at Sebaste, which is a Greek translation
of “Augustus”.] Every five years, Herod organized gladiatorial fights, dedicated to
Augustus and his wife Livia, and where foreign dancers almost outnumbered the
guests. Magnificent prizes were awarded to the winners, and rumors of wild, orgiastic
parties circulated. The Jewish authorities looked on the excess with deep disapproval.
They saw gladiatorial fighting as fundamentally immoral, believing that all human
life belonged to the Most High.

“If Caesarea – officially the Judaean capital from 6 BC – could be written off as a
city for pagans, the holy city of Jerusalem was also threatened by the Romanizing
instincts of their ruler. Tension focused on the Second Temple there, a building that
symbolizes Herod’s complex relationship with his faith.

“Begun in 20 BC, Herod’s restoration program refaced the structure in white stone,
and doubled the courtyard around it. Herod sought to exalt the Jewish faith, yet did
so using Hellenic architects. The grandiose court was soon filled with moneylenders
– an affront to pious Jews, who, according to Josephus and other Jewish writers of the
time, were angered at the corrupt management of the Temple, an anger felt later by
one Jesus of Nazareth: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer,’ Jesus cries in
the Gospel of Matthew, ‘but ye have made it a den of thieves’.

“Perhaps the most spectacular religious scandal Herod the Great unleashed was
the breaching of King David’s tomb in Bethlehem. Rumors had long circulated that
the tomb believed to be David’s resting place held treasure. Having spent large sums
of money on the building of Caesarea, and perhaps seeing himself as the descendant
of King David, Herod, it was said, secretly accompanied workmen to rob the tomb.
The historian Joseph recounts how, on entering, they found that nothing remained of

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the riches. According to his account, Herod’s two guards were killed by ‘a flame that
burst out upon those that went in’, and Herod fled the scene.”281

Nevertheless, Palestine under Herod (Augustus made him procurator of Syria, too)
became the most powerful Jewish kingdom since Solomon and the wonder of the East.
Under Herod, the Jews, though under Roman dominion, reached the peak of their
influence in the ancient world. Paul Johnson writes: “The number of Jews, both born
and converts, expanded everywhere, so that, according to one medieval tradition,
there were at the time of the Claudian recensus in 48 AD some 6,944,000 Jews within
the confines of the empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in
Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian
period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to
2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 per cent of the Roman
empire.”282

But of course the essence of the kingdom was quite different from that of David
and Solomon. Apart from the fact that the real earthly ruler was Rome, and that
outside Jerusalem itself Herod showed himself to be a thorough-going pagan, the
whole direction of Herod’s rule was to destroy the last remnants of the Jewish Church
and monarchy. Thus he killed most of the Sanhedrin and all of the Hasmonaean
family, not excluding his own wife Mariamne and their sons Alexander and
Aristobulus.

Herod “had no fewer than ten wives and a large number of children. Two of the
most favoured were sent to Rome to be raised and educated in Augustus’ household,
but since these were sons of the executed Mariamne, trust was always in short supply.
Years later Herod recalled them, and in 13 BC took them to Italy where father and
sons appeared before the princeps and accused each other of treachery. Matters were
temporarily resolved, but in 7 BC the king again accused them of plotting against him.
This time he did not go to Rome in person, but sent ambassadors, and Augustus
ordered that a special court including his legate in Syria and other Romans meet in
Berytus to try the case. The sons were found guilty and swiftly executed, even though
the Romans had advocated no more than imprisonment.

“Aged and in poor health, Herod’s final years witnessed a spate of executions of
family members, as the king saw threats and treachery in every direction. Augustus
commented drily that he would ‘rather be Herod’s pig than his son.’”283

Herod introduced confusion into the line of the high-priesthood. Eusebius writes:
"Hyrcanus, who was the last of the regular line of high priests, was very soon
afterward taken prisoner by the Parthians, and Herod, the first foreigner, as I have
already said, was made King of the Jewish nation by the Roman senate and by
Augustus. Under him Christ appeared in bodily shape, and the expected Salvation of
the nations and their calling followed in accordance with prophecy. From this time

281 Pinero, “Herod the Great”, National Geographic History, November/December, 2016, pp. 44-46.
282 Johnson, op. cit., p. 112.
283 Galsworthy, op. cit., p. 391.

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the princes and rulers of Judah, I mean of the Jewish nation, came to an end, and as a
natural consequence the order of the high priesthood, which from ancient times had
proceeded regularly in closest succession from generation to generation, was
immediately thrown into confusion. Of these things Josephus is also a witness, who
shows that when Herod was made King by the Romans he no longer appointed the
high priests from the ancient line, but gave the honor to certain obscure persons. A
course similar to that of Herod in the appointment of the priests was pursued by his
son Archelaus, and after him by the Romans, who took the government into their own
hands."284

Metropolitan Moses of Toronto writes that Herod “arranged that his brother-in-
law Aristobulus be made High Priest. Aristobulus was from the Hasmonean dynasty
and a legitimate choice for high priest. For this reason he was extremely popular with
the Jews and fearing his popularity, the tyrant Herod had him drowned in an
‘accident.’ From this point on, the high priests were not of the legitimate lineage and
were put in place by the tyrant Herod, i.e., not according to the proper order.

“Shapiro, a modern Rabbi comments, ‘As a result of Herod's interference and the
ever-spreading Hellenistic influences among the Jewish upper classes, the Temple
hierarchy became very corrupt. The Sadducees, a religious group of the wealthy, who
collaborated with the Romans in order to keep their power base, now controlled the
Temple, much to the chagrin of the mainstream Jewish majority, the Pharisees, and of
the extreme religious minority, the Zealots.’

“This was the state of things ‘in the fullness of time’ when our Creator fulfilled His
promises. These events were prophesied to take place when ‘a ruler failed from the
house and lineage of Judah.’”285

The Pharisees, who had led the movement against Hellenism in the first century
BC, degenerated sharply under Herod’s rule. They even once sent a delegation to
Rome asking for the establishment of a republic in Judaea under the sovereignty of
Rome. This was a clear betrayal of the Israelite autocratic tradition.286

Like Herod, they persecuted Christ, the True King of the Jews, leading to the
abandonment of the Jewish people by God, while Herod himself became the closest
forerunner of the Antichrist in the Old Testament...

“The last years of the life of Herod,” writes Paryaev, “were simply nightmarish.
Feeling that his subjects profoundly hated him, haunted at night by visions of his
slaughtered wife, sons and all the Hasmonaeans, and conscious that his life, in spite
of all its external successes and superficial splendour, was just a series of horrors.
Herod finally lost his mental stability and was seized by some kind of furious
madness.”287

284 Eusebius, History of the Church, Bk. I, Chapter 6, 7-9.
285 Metropolitan Moses, Sermon on the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, 2013.
286 Paryaev, op. cit., p. 34.
287 Paryaev, op. cit., p. 33.

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 The final, most notorious product of his madness was his attempt to kill the Lord
Jesus Christ and his slaughter of the 14,000 innocents of Bethlehem (it was his son,
Herod Antipas, who killed John the Baptist).288

But the Child Jesus had fled to Egypt, where His presence was sufficient to cause
the destruction of all the pagan temple idols. In this way, as in His drawing the Persian
Magi from Babylon to Bethlehem, Christ demonstrated that He was the King not only
of Israel, but also of the ancient pagan lands of Egypt and Babylon, the true King of
both the Jews and the Gentiles. For He was, as Simeon said, “a light to lighten the
Gentiles, and the Glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2.32).

288“The Cave with the Relics of the Holy Innocents in Bethlehem”, Mystagogy Resources Center,
December 30, 2017, http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2017/12/the-cave-with-relics-of-holy-
innocents.html

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 22. THE END OF THE STATE

The history of Israel culminating in the Coming of her true King and God, the Lord
Jesus Christ, provides us with the answer to a question which neither the despots of
the east nor the democrats of the west could answer - the question, namely: what is
the end of the State?

This question can be divided into two further questions. First, what is the end, that
is, purpose of the State? And second, what is the end, that is, destroyer of the State, that
which brings the State to an end? The two questions are logically related. For that
which brings the State to an end is its failure to carry out the end or purpose for which
it was created by God…

It will be recalled that the origin of the State lies in its ability to save men from death
– in other words, its survival value. Man as an individual, and even in small groups or
families, cannot survive for long; he has to combine into larger groups that are self-
sufficient in order to provide for his basic needs and protect himself against external
enemies. That is why Aristotle defined the State as a large community that is “nearly
or completely self-sufficient”.289

However, for Aristotle, the State had a positive as well as a negative purpose. It
was not distinguished from the smaller units of the family or the village simply
because it was better able to guarantee survival: it was qualitatively as well as
quantitatively distinct from them insofar as it enabled man to fulfill his potential as a
human being. Hence his famous definition of man as “a political animal”, that is, an
animal who reaches his full potential only by living in cities. For city states were the
dominant form of political organization in the Greece of Aristotle’s time, and it was
only in city-states that man, according to him, was able to develop that free spirit of
rational inquiry that enabled him to know the True, the Beautiful and the Good. It was
only in such states that he had the leisure and the education to pursue such uniquely
human activities as art, science, organized religion and philosophy, which constitute
his true happiness, eudaemonia.

The problem was that Greek democracy – like Roman democracy after it - did not
attain its positive end, that is, eudaemonia, and even failed to attain its negative end,
survival. First, Athenian democracy was defeated by the Spartan system of dual
kingship and aristocracy, a kind of political organization that theoretically should
have been much inferior to democracy. And then the Greek city-states as a whole were
defeated by, and absorbed into, Alexander the Great’s despotic empire, a kind of
political organization which the Greek philosophers agreed was the worst and most
irrational of all – although the multi-racialism of the empire, and the spread of Greek
philosophical ideas, prepared the way for something new and better.

Israel was a completely different kind of state: the first and only autocracy of the
ancient world. The distinguishing mark of this state was that its origin was not the

289 Aristotle, Politics, 1252 b 28.

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need to survive physically, but spiritually through obedience to God. That is why the
word “Israel” means “he who sees God”.

The Jews achieved this in the first place by obeying the call of God to leave the
existing satanocratic states and their settled way of life and enter the desert on the way
to the Promised Land where God alone is King. Here physical survival was actually
more difficult than before, but the prize was far greater - spiritual survival, life with
God. Thus we may say that the negative end of Israelite autocracy was the avoidance
of spiritual death (Babylon, Egypt, the kingdom of sin and death), and its positive end
was the attainment of spiritual life (the Promised Land, Israel, the Kingdom of
righteousness and life).

But since spiritual life is not a political category attainable by purely political
means, the end of the Israelite autocracy was not in fact political at all as the word
“political” is usually understood, but religious. For its aim was not happiness in this
life, the peace and prosperity of its citizens in this world, but the blessedness of its
citizens in the world to come, in which there will be no politics and no states, but only
Christ and the Church, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom that is “not of this world”.
Thus the end of the state lies beyond itself, and beyond space and time, in serving the
Church, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16), which alone can lead the people into the
Promised Land, which is not simply the physical land of Israel, “flowing with milk
and honey”, but the spiritual and eternal Israel, flowing with the Grace of the Spirit.

The Israelite state survived so long as it placed spiritual ends above purely political
ones and was faithful to the Lord God of Israel. When it faltered in this it was punished
with exile and suffering. When it faltered to such a degree that it killed its true King,
the Lord Jesus Christ, declaring that “we have no king but Caesar”, it was finally
destroyed…

However, since, as the Archangel Gabriel said to the Holy Virgin Mary, Christ “will
reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His Kingdom there will be no end” (Luke
1.33), and since the purpose of God remains unchanging, the salvation of all men for
eternity, the Israelite autocracy was re-established on a still firmer and wider and
spiritual base, the Church of Christ, while in its political protector became the very
state that had destroyed the old Israel – Rome…

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III. CHRIST, THE JEWS AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE

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 23. THE KING OF KINGS, THE LORD JESUS CHRIST

In the fullness of time, in accordance with the plan that He had indicated to Adam
and Eve immediately after the Fall, and to the Old Testament righteous in the
millennia that followed, the Creator took on flesh and became a man in the womb of
the Holy Virgin Mary. He was born probably in 5 or 6 BC.290 There is no good reason
to believe, with modern sceptics, that the date was not December 25, exactly nine
months after the Church celebrates His conception (the Annunciation) on March 25.

The faith which justified the Old Testament righteous (Hebrews 11) was
exemplified to the highest degree by the Holy Virgin Mary. For by her words of faith,
"Be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1.38), the perfect act of obedience, she
brought God Himself into the world, to live as a man among men in accordance with
the prophecy: “A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name
Emmanuel [God with us]” (Isaiah7.14). "Thus let us stand in awe," writes Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow, "at the immeasurably lofty faith of the All-holy Virgin, before
which the faith of Abraham, the father of the faithful, who believed in the prophecy
of the birth of Isaac despite the barrenness of old age, is less than a mustard seed before
the cedar of Lebanon…"

Both Jews and Gentiles, shepherds and Magi, were waiting for Christ…

The Gentile world was seething with rumours of the coming of a Saviour. They
were looking for a universal kingdom ruled by a universal king, as in the verse of
Virgil that could be seen as involuntarily referring to Jesus Christ:

Now virginal Justice and the golden age return,

Now its first-born is sent down from high heaven.
With the birth of this boy the generation of iron will pass,
And a generation of gold will inherit all this world.291

However, the expectations of the Jews were much more intense – and much more
precise – than those of the Gentiles. The Holy Spirit, speaking through the holy
prophets, had foretold a Messiah, “the Son of David”, that is, a descendant of the old
royal dynasty of Israel, that was destined to become eternal through Him.

Christ came to restore all men to the Kingdom of God. At the same time, He
restored the old Davidic line and make it eternal in accordance with the prophecy:
“Once have I sworn by My holiness that to David I will not lie: his seed for ever shall
abide. And his throne shall be as the sun before Me, and as the moon that is established
for ever, and is a faithful witness in the sky” (Psalm 88.34-35). That prophecy began
to be fulfilled when the Archangel Gabriel said to the Holy Virgin at the Annunciation:
“He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will

290 Galsworthy, Augustus, p. 488.
291
Eclogues 4.6-9.

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give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob
forever, and of His Kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1.32-33).

What kingdom was meant here? Was it the same kind of kingdom as the Jews had
in mind for themselves? If not, what were (are) the consequences?

William Barclay writes: “Throughout all their existence, the Jews never forgot that
they were in a very special sense God's chosen people. Because of that, they naturally
looked to a very special place in the world. In the early days, they looked forward to
achieving that position by what we might call natural means. They always regarded
the greatest days in their history as the days of David; and they dreamed of a day
when there would arise another king of David's line, a king who would make them
great in righteousness and in power (Isaiah 9:7, 11:1; Jeremiah 22:4, 23:5, 30:9).

“But as time went on, it came to be pitilessly clear that this dreamed-of greatness
would never be achieved by natural means. The ten tribes had been carried off to
Assyria and lost forever. The Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and carried the Jews
away captive. Then came the Persians as their masters; then the Greeks; then the
Romans. So far from knowing anything like dominion, for centuries the Jews never
even knew what it was to be completely free and independent.

“So another line of thought grew up. It is true that the idea of a great king of David's
line never entirely vanished and was always intertwined in some way with their
thought; but more and more they began to dream of a day when God would intervene
in history and achieve by supernatural means that which natural means could never
achieve. They looked for divine power to do what human power was helpless to do.

“In between the Testaments were written a whole flood of books which were
dreams and forecasts of this new age and the intervention of God. As a class, they are
called Apocalypses. The word literally means unveilings. These books were meant to be
unveilings of the future. It is to them that we must turn to find out what the Jews
believed in the time of Jesus about the Messiah and the work of the Messiah and the
new age. It is against their dreams that we must set the dream of Jesus.

“In these books, certain basic ideas occur. We follow here the classification of these
ideas given by Emil Schuerer, who wrote A History of the Jewish People in the Time of
Jesus Christ.

“(1) Before the Messiah came, there would be a time of terrible tribulation. There
would be a messianic travail. It would be the birth-pangs of a new world. Every
conceivable terror would burst upon the world; every standard of honour and
decency would be torn down; the world would become a physical and moral chaos....
The time which preceded the coming of the Messiah was to be a time when the world
was torn in pieces and every bond relaxed. The physical and the moral order would
collapse.

“(2) Into this chaos there would come Elijah as the forerunner and herald of the
Messiah. He was to heal the breaches and bring order into the chaos to prepare the

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way for the Messiah. In particular he was to mend disputes....

“(3) Then there would enter the Messiah.... Sometimes the Messiah was thought of
as a king of David's line, but more often he was thought of as a great, superhuman
figure crashing into history to remake the world and in the end to vindicate God's
people.

“(4) The nations would ally themselves and gather themselves together against the
champion of God....

“(5) The result would be the total destruction of these hostile powers. The Jewish
philosopher Philo said that the Messiah would 'take the field and make war and
destroy great and populous nations'.... The Messiah will be the most destructive
conqueror in history, smashing his enemies into utter extinction.

“(6) There would follow the renovation of Jerusalem. Sometimes this was thought
of as the purification of the existing city. More often it was thought of as the coming
down of the new Jerusalem from heaven....

“(7) The Jews who were dispersed all over the world would be gathered into the
city of the new Jerusalem.... It is easy to see how Jewish this new world was to be. The
nationalistic element is dominant all the time.

“(8) Palestine would be the centre of the world and the rest of the world subject to
it. All the nations would be subdued. Sometimes it was thought of as a peaceful
subjugation.... More often, the fate of the Gentiles was utter destruction at which Israel
would exult and rejoice.... It was a grim picture. Israel would rejoice to see her enemies
broken and in hell. Even the dead Israelites were to be raised up to share in the new
world.

“(9) Finally, there would come the new age of peace and goodness which would last
forever.”292

Christ by no means rejected all of these apocalyptic ideas. After all, several of them
were grounded in the Holy Scriptures. But He rejected their cruelty, their national,
worldly ambition, their anti-Gentilism and their exclusive reference to this world of
space and time. Though He is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matthew 16.18),
He came as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, not the ferocious war-lord of the
apocalypses. And He came to restore Israel, not as a State ruling over all the nations
by the power of the sword, but as the kernel of the Universal Church ruling a spiritual
realm by the power of the Holy Spirit alone. His Kingdom was not of this world; it
was the inner Kingdom of Grace, for “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke
17.21).

Moreover, there was one Pharisaic tradition disputed by the priestly party of the
Sadducees (Matthew 22.8; Acts 23.8) that the Lord came to confirm in the most direct

292 Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, pp. 223-230.

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possible way - in His own Person: the resurrection from the dead. In the Old
Testament we find the belief in the resurrection in the twelfth chapter of Daniel and
in the story of the Maccabees: "Under the tunic of each of the dead [after a certain
major battle] they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids
the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was the reason these men had
fallen... Judas... took a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand
drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin-offering. In doing so
he acted very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were
not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been
superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking for the splendid
reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious
thought." (II Maccabees 12.40-45). Thus the making of sin-offerings for the dead is
justified on the grounds that there will be a resurrection from the dead.

The question put before the Jews in Christ’s lifetime was: did they accept Him as
the Messiah, “the Son of God, the King of Israel” (John 1.49)? On this would depend
the salvation both of the people and of their State… Tragically, in their great majority
the Jews failed this test; they both crucified their True King and God, and said to Pilate:
"We have no other king but Caesar" (John 19.15).

At that moment they became no different spiritually from the other pagan peoples;
for, like the pagans, they had come to recognize a mere man, the Roman emperor, as
higher than God Himself. As St. John Chrysostom writes: “Here they declined the
Kingdom of Christ and called to themselves that of Caesar.”293 What made this
apostasy worse was the fact that they were not compelled to it by any despotic decree.
Pilate not only did not demand this recognition of Caesar by them, but had said of
Christ – “Behold your king” (John 19.14), and had then ordered the sign, “Jesus of
Nazareth, King of the Jews”, to be nailed above the cross.

The Jews had, in effect, without the slightest external coercion, carried out a
democratic revolution against their True King, and accepted a mere mortal – and a
pagan despot to boot - as their only king, thereby undermining and betraying the
whole long tradition of Jewish zealotry. Of course, Christ, too, had recognized the
kingship of Caesar - but only under God: He emphasized that Pilate had received his
earthly kingdom from the Heavenly King and never confused the kingship of God
with the kingship of Caesar.

Thus did the City of God on earth become the City of Man - and the stronghold of
Satan: “How has the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of justice, righteousness
lodged in it, but now murderers” (Isaiah 1.21). Thus did the original sin committed
under Saul, when the people of God sought a king who would rule them "like all the
nations", reap its final wages in their voluntary submission to the pagan Emperor of

293St. John Chrysostom, Homily 85 on John, P.G. 59:505, col. 461. See also Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), "Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution", Orthodox Life, vol. 35, N 4, July-August,
1988, pp. 11-31.

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Rome.

But the positive result was that the Kingdom, with all its ineffable and inestimable
benefits, was passed to other peoples. As the Lord Himself had prophesied: “The
Kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits
thereof” (Matthew 21.43). Or as St. Paul put it: “What then? Israel has not obtained
what it seeks; but the elect [from the Gentiles] have obtained it, and the rest were
blinded” (Romans 11.7). Thus all the other peoples of the world were now given the
opportunity, through the preaching of the apostles and their successors, of joining
God’s Kingdom in the Church, the New Testament successor of the Old Testament
Israel, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16).

Having lived a life of perfect virtue, Christ offered Himself as an immaculate

Sacrifice to the Holy Trinity for the sins of all mankind on the Cross. He died in His
Humanity, while remaining immortal in his Divinity, and descended into hades,
destroying the power of the devil and leading all the dead who believed in Him into
Paradise. Then, on the third day, He rose from the dead, appearing to His disciples in
His resurrected Body. On the fortieth day He ascended in glory into heaven. Ten days
later, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples, creating the New
Testament Church.

The main recounters of the Gospel story were the holy Evangelists, Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John, together with the holy Apostle Paul. However, there were other
witnesses from among those who are not known to have been Christians. Foremost
among them was the Jew Flavius Josephus, the eye-witness and historian of the Siege
of Jerusalem in 70AD, who, on seeing the futility of his countrymen’s struggle against
the Romans, joined the camp of the latter.

Although, as far as we know, he never became a Christian, he wrote a valuable

testimony to Christ: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful
to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as
receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many
of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal
men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did
not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine
prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.
And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day.”294

The Gospels record the most important series of events in the history of the world,
its hinge and turning-point. By His Resurrection from the dead, Christ proved the
truth of all His claims: that He was truly “The Word of God and God” (John 1.1), “the
Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world” (John 1.29), “the Way, the Truth
and the Life” (John 14.6), the same pre-eternal God Who had created the heavens and
the earth and led the Jews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. Through His

294 Josephus, Antiquities. Italics mine (V.M.).

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Incarnation as a man, His blameless life and Sacrificial Death on the Cross and
Resurrection from the dead, He truly gave all men who believe in Him the possibility
of remission of their sins, deliverance from hell after death, and eternal life with God
in the age to come.

The Resurrection of Christ is described in great detail in the Gospels, leaving no

doubt of its veracity to any seriously thinking person. For “the Lord showed Himself
alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days” (Acts
1.3.). When the Apostle Thomas put his hand into the side of the Lord’s resurrected
body and exclaimed “My Lord and my God” (John 20.28), he became the first of many
who were able to say: "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what
we looked upon and touched with our hands - we proclaim now to you" (1 John 1:1).

Thus, as St. Nikolai Velimirović (+1956) writes, “The Lord’s Resurrection has
indeed remained to this day the most proven fact in human history. What other fact
from the distant past stands so comprehensively and carefully proven as this?”295

“Behold, such is the apostolic preaching! The apostles do not speak as worldly
sages, nor like philosophers and even less as theoreticians who make suppositions
about something in order to discover something. The apostles speak about things
which they have not sought but which unexpectedly surrounded them; about the fact
which they did not discover but, so to speak, unexpectedly found them and seized
them.

“They did not occupy themselves with spiritual researches nor have they studied
psychology, neither did they, much less, occupy themselves with spiritism.

“Their occupation was fishing - one totally experiential physical occupation. While
they were fishing, the God-Man [Jesus] appeared to them and cautiously and slowly
introduced them to a new vocation in the service of Himself.

“At first, they did not believe Him but they, still more cautiously and slowly with
fear and hesitation and much wavering, came toward Him and recognized Him. Until
the apostles saw Him many times with their own eyes and until they discussed Him
many times among themselves and, until they felt Him with their own hands, their
experienced fact is supernatural but their method of recognizing this fact is
thoroughly sensory and positively learned.

“Not even one contemporary scholar would be able to use a more positive method
to know Christ. The apostles saw not only one miracle but numerous miracles. They
heard not only one lesson but many lessons which could not be contained in
numerous books.

“They saw the resurrected Lord for forty days; they walked with Him, they
conversed with Him, they ate with Him, and they touched Him. In a word: they
personally and first handedly had thousands of wondrous facts by which they learned

295 Velimirović, Homilies, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, vol. I, 1996, Homily on Thomas Sunday, p. 224.

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and confirmed one great fact, i.e., that Christ is the God-Man, the Son of the Living
God, the Man-loving Savior of mankind and the All-Powerful Judge of the living and
the dead.”296

The core meaning and content of the whole of history since the Coming of Christ
to this day has consisted in the self-determination of every nation and every
individual in relation to this one central, supremely important fact - “the one thing
necessary” to know, as Christ Himself said. Every major event in history is to be
evaluated in relation to the supreme criterion: does this event bring the individual or
society closer to, or further away from, Christ the Saviour?… The eternal destiny of
every man in every age depends on his sincerely believing this good news and
fulfilling the commandments of Christ.

296 Velimirović, “Homily about the Personal Experiences of All the Apostles”, Prologue from Ochrid.

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 24. THE FALL OF JERUSALEM

The Jews’ killing of Christ was not only regicide, but also Deicide, an act
unparalleled in evil in the history of the world; and their punishment was
consequently unparalleled. Together with their subsequent rebellion against the
Romans in 66-70 AD, what we may call the Jewish revolution set the pattern for all
subsequent revolutions of apostate Christian peoples up to the French revolution in
1789, the Russian revolution in 1917 and the incipient American revolution of our
times. This pattern consisted of two aspects: an external rebellion against socio-
political oppressors, foreign and/or domestic, and an internal, spiritual or religious
revolution against God. The Jewish revolution was both a political and a religious
revolution. Therefore there came upon them the punishment prophesied by Christ:
“great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this
time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matthew 24.21). “That on you may come all the righteous
blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah,
son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly I
say to you, all these things will come upon this generation…” (Matthew 23.35-36).

In its external aspect, the ideology of the Jewish revolution, as Neil Faulkner writes,
was a message “of sectarian radicals and messiahs… addressed, above all, to the poor.
Josephus was explicit about the class basis of the conflict: it was, for him, a struggle
between dunatoi – men of rank and power, the property-owning upper classes – and
stasiastai – subversives, revolutionaries, popular leaders whose appeal was to ‘the
scum of the districts’. The Dead Sea Scrolls were equally explicit, though from the
other side of the barricades: whereas ‘the princes of Judah… wallowed in the ways of
whoredom and wicked wealth’ and ‘acted arrogantly for the sake of riches and gain’,
the Lord would in due time deliver them ‘into the hands of the poor’, so as to ‘humble
the mighty of the peoples by the hand of those bent to the dust’, and bring them ‘the
reward of the wicked’…

“The popular movement of 66 CE amounted to a fusion of Apocalypse and Jubilee,

the radical minority’s vision of a revolutionary war to destroy corruption having
become inextricably linked with the peasant majority’s traditional aspiration for land
redistribution and the removal of burdens…”297

It was also, of course, a war of national liberation against the Romans. A liberated
Israel ruling over the Gentile nations under a warrior Messiah was the very earthly
vision of the Zealots, directly contrary to the other-worldly vision of Christ, of whom
Josephus wrote that “all sorts of misfortunes sprang forth from these men, and the
nation was infected with this doctrine [of rebellion] to an incredible degree.” Over a
million Jews were killed (although this figure is disputed298) and the Temple and City
were completely destroyed.

297 Faulkner, “The great Jewish revolt against Rome, 66-73 CE”, History Today, vol. 52 (10), October, 2002,
pp. 50, 51.
298 The revisionist case has been presented by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand. Josephus, our only

source for these events, writes Sand “estimated that 1.1 million people died in the siege of Jerusalem
and the great massacre that followed, that 97,000 were taken captive, and that a few thousand more
were killed in other cities”. (This is confirmed by St. Caesarius of Arles who says: “The Jews as if driven

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 Those who survived were forced to pay a “fiscus Iudaicus, a new empire-wide tax
on all Jews – women, children, the elderly and slaves included – that effectively
diverted the half-shekel that they contributed to the Temple of Jerusalem to that of
Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome”.299

However, the primary cause of the catastrophe that came on the Jews was their
inner, spiritual rebellion against God, first when they declared: “We have no other
king but Caesar” (John 19.15), and then when they said: ‘His blood be on us and on
our children” (Matthew 27.25). As Archbishop Averky writes, this curse was fulfilled
“in the whole of the subsequent history of the Jews when they were scattered from
that time throughout the world, in those innumerable ‘pogroms’ to which they have
been constantly subjected, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Moses in Deuteronomy
(28.49-57, 64-67).”300 The culmination of their apostasy was their murder of Christ,
followed by their persecution of the apostles who preached to them for forty years
after the Resurrection of Christ. In fact, the disaster took place just after the Jews had
killed St. James, the Brother of the Lord, the first Bishop of Jerusalem.

In 132 another rebellion of the zealots under Bar Kokhba broke out in response to
the Emperor Hadrian’s decision to ban circumcision, to rebuild Jerusalem as a Roman
city, and to build a temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the site of the old Temple.
It was crushed by the Emperor at the cost, according to Dio Cassius, of fifty fortresses
and 985 villages razed to the ground, 580,000 Jewish soldiers killed, many Jews sold
into slavery, and “as for the numbers who perished from starvation, disease or fire,
that was impossible to establish”.301 The city and its ruins were ploughed over, Aelia
Capitolina was built in its place, Judaea renamed Syria Palaestina and Jews were
barred from entering it. Finally, a temple to Jupiter was planned for the site of the
Temple, while Golgotha was covered by a temple to Venus…

by the hand of God assembled in Jerusalem according to their custom to celebrate the Passover. We read
in history that three million Jews were gathered in Jerusalem; eleven hundred thousand of them are
read to have been destroyed by the sword of hunger, and one hundred thousand young men were led
to Rome in triumph. For two years that city was besieged, and so great was the number of the dead who
were cast out of the city that their bodies equalled the height of the walls.” (Sermon 127)). However,
Sand argues that these figures were grossly exaggerated, and that “a cautious estimate suggests that
Jerusalem at that time could have had a population of sixty thousand or seventy thousand inhabitants”
(The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009, p. 131).
299 Stephen P. Kershaw, A Brief History of the Roman Empire, London: Robinson, 2013, p. 138.
300 Averky, Rukovodstov k izucheniu Sviashchennago Pisania Novago Zaveta (Handbook to the Study of the

Holy Scriptures of the New Testament), part 1: The Four Gospels, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity
Monastery, 1974, p. 311.
301 Dio, in Kershaw, op. cit., pp. 197-198. Again, Sand disputes these figures. He claims that the

population of Palestine “in the second century CE remained predominantly Judeans and Samaritans,
and it started to flourish again for one or two generations after the end of the revolt” (op. cit., p. 133).
He also denies that there was any significant exile from the land after the destruction of the Second
Temple, arguing that it was only the conquest of Palestine by the Arabs early in the seventh century that
“put an end to the presence of the Jewish people in its land” (p. 141).

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 The ploughing up of the Temple site took place on August 9, the day on which all
the major catastrophes of Jewish history took place. Thus David Baron writes: “The
fast of the fifth month, which is the month of Ab, answering to August, is still observed
by the Jews on the ninth day, in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem by
Nebuchadnezzar; but, according to the Talmud and Jewish historians, the following
list of calamities all happened on the same day, namely: (1) On that day the decree
went forth from God in the wilderness that the people should not enter the land
because of their unbelief; (2) on the very same day of the destruction of the First
Temple by the Chaldeans [in 586 BC], the Second Temple also was destroyed by the
Romans [in 70 AD]; (4) on that day, after the rising under Bar Kochba, the city of
Bethar was taken, ‘in which were thousands and myriads of Israel, and they had a
great king whom all Israel and the greatest of the wise men thought was King
Messiah’; but (4) he fell into the hands of the Gentiles, and they were all put to death,
and the affliction was great, like as it was in the desolation of the Sanctuary; (5) and
lastly, on that day ‘the wicked Turnus Rufus, who is devoted to punishment,
ploughed up the (hill of the) Sanctuary, and the parts round about it, to fulfill that
which was said by Micah, “Zion shall be ploughed as a field”’.”302

Paradoxically but significantly, the Jews’ last stand in both their rebellions took
place in the hilltop fortresses built (at Herodium and Masada) by that arch-Hellenist
and pseudo-king of the Jews, Herod the Great.303 Equally significantly, their
submission to pagan rulers was the result of their rejection of their mission to the
pagans. Instead of serving as God’s priests to the pagan world, enlightening them
with the knowledge of the One True God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who
had become man in Christ, they were puffed up with dreams of national glory and
dominion over the nations. And so God subjected them to those same nations whom
they despised, entrusting the original mission to the New Israel, the Church.

“In this striking way,” writes St. John of Kronstadt, “did the people chosen in
accordance with the merits of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob stumble against the
inheritance of these merits, which were being received as their own impersonal virtue;
they stumbled on their preference for the earthly kingdom over the Kingdom of
Heaven, on their preference for a political messiah over the Messiah Whose Kingdom
is not of this world.

“Let us look at the consequences to which this mistake led. First of all, this bitter
error of the chosen people was bewailed by the Messiah Himself. In His triumphant
procession into Jerusalem, when Christ came close to the city, then, looking at it, He
wept over it and said: ‘If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the
things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days
will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you,
surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within
you, to the ground, because you did not know the time of your visitation’ (Luke 19.42-
44). As He ascended onto Golgotha, Christ the Saviour sorrowed, not over the
torments that were facing Him, but about the torments that awaited Jerusalem. He

302 Baron, Zechariah, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1918, 1988, pp. 213-214.
303 Mueller, op. cit., pp. 58-59.

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expressed this to the women who were sympathetic to His sufferings, who wept and
sobbed over Him: ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for your
selves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say,
“Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!”
Then they will begin to say to the mountains: “Fall on us!”’ (Luke 23.28-30).

“Already in ancient times the prophets were pointing to the woes that would strike
the Jewish people for its betrayal of God – the people that was nevertheless chosen for
the salvation of the world, for the foreseen fall of Israel had to bring salvation to the
Gentiles (Romans 11.11).

“1500 years before, the Prophet and God-Seer Moses foretold the siege, the
scattering of the Jews across the whole face of the earth and the terrible trials that
followed: ‘The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the
earth, as swift as the eagle flied, a nation whose language you will not understand, a
nation of fierce countenance, which does not respect the elderly nor show favour to
the young. And they shall eat the increase of your livestock, and the produce of your
land, until you are destroyed; they shall not leave you grain or new wine or oil, or the
increase of your cattle or the offspring of your flocks, until they have destroyed you.
They shall besiege you at all your gates until your high and fortified walls, in which
you trust, come down throughout all your land, and they shall besiege you at all your
gates throughout all your land which the Lord your God has given you. You shall eat
of the fruit of your own body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters whom the
Lord your God has given you, in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy
shall distress you… Then the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end
of the earth to the other… And among those nations you will find no rest… Your life
shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance
of life’ (Deuteronomy 28.49-53, 64-65, 66)…

“The holy Prophet Ezekiel points to the siege of Jerusalem as the consequence of
the multiplication of lawlessnesses which attained a greater development than among
the neighbouring people.

“’Therefore thus says the Lord God: Because you have multiplied disobedience
more than the nations that are all around you, have not walked in My statutes nor
kept My judgements, nor even done according to the judgements of the nations that
are all around you. Therefore thus says the Lord God, Indeed I, even I, am against you
and will execute judgements in your midst in the sight of the nations. And I will do
among you what I have never done, and the like of which I will never do again,
because of all your abominations. Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in your midst,
and sons shall eat their fathers, and I will execute judgements among you, and all of
you who remain I will scatter to all the winds. Therefore as I live, says the Lord God,
surely, because you have defiled My sanctuary with all your detestable things and
with all your abominations therefore I will also diminish you. My eye will not spare,
nor will I have any pity. One third of you shall die of the pestilence, and be consumed
with famine in your midst, and one third shall fall by the sword all around you, and I
will scatter another third to all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them’ (5.7-
12).

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 “In this way the prophets of God clearly announced the causes of the destruction
of Jerusalem and what had once been the chosen people, as they were called in antiquity,
according to the merits of their forefathers. What became of them with their dreams
of an earthly kingdom of Israel? Their destinies serve as a vivid example for the
Christian peoples, of what awaits them, too, for abandoning the ways of the
commandments of God and for accepting principles that contradict the truth.”304

In the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jews around the world the
Scripture was fulfilled: “I will set My face against you, and you shall be defeated by
your enemies. Those who hate you will reign over you, and you shall flee when no
one pursues you. And after all this, if you do not obey Me, I will punish you seven
times more for your sins. I will break the pride of your power… And after all this, if
you do not obey Me, but walk contrary to Me, then I also will walk contrary to you in
fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. You shall eat the flesh
of your sons, and eat the flesh of your daughters. I will destroy your high places, cut
down your incense altars, and cast your carcasses on the lifeless forms of your idols.
And My soul shall abhor you. I will lay your cities waste and bring your cities to
desolation, and I will not smell the fragrance of your sweet incense. I will lay your
cities waste and bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not smell the fragrance
of your sweet aromas. I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell
in it shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a
sword after you. Your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. Then the land will
enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, and you are in your enemies’ land. Then
the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall rest – for the
time it did not rest on your Sabbaths when you dwelt in it… You shall perish among
the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up… Yet for all that, when they
are in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away; nor shall I abhor them, to
utterly destroy them and break My covenant with them…” (Leviticus 26.17-19, 27-35,
38, 44)

St. John, Nachalo i Konets Nashego Zemnogo Mira (The Beginning and End of our Earthly Life), Moscow,
304

1901, 2004, pp. 49-50, 51-52.

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 25. ROME, THE CHURCH AND THE SYNAGOGUE

What was left to the Jews from the catastrophe? Certain Scriptures and rites, whose
meaning and significance they no longer understood. And a fierce and violent love of
their own nation – but a love divorced from the great glory of their nation, the Lord,
God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and combined with a hatred of the non-Jewish nations
that was so murderous and deceitful that it elicited a counter-hatred, known as anti-
Semitism, which, with the permission of God, pursued them everywhere.

There is nothing wrong with patriotism, the love of one’s nation, so long as it
suffused with, and subordinate to, the love of God and the love of one’s neighbour, of
whatever race he might be.

“On coming into the world,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “the Saviour Jesus Christ as
a man loved his fatherland, Judaea, no less than the Pharisees. He was thinking of the
great role of his fatherland in the destinies of the world and mankind no less than the
Pharisees, the zealots and the other nationalists. On approaching Jerusalem (during
His triumphal entry) He wept and said: ‘Oh, if only thou hadst known, even thou, at
least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!’…, and recalling the
coming destruction of the city, He added: ‘because thou knewest not the time of thy
visitation’ (Luke 19.41, 44). ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… which killest… them that are
sent to thee!’ He said a little earlier, ‘how often would I have gathered thy children
together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and yet would not!’ (Luke
13.34). What would have happened if the Jews at that decisive moment had accepted
the true Messiah? Israel would have become the spiritual head of the whole world,
the beloved guide of mankind. At that very time Philo of Alexandria wrote that ‘the
Israelites have received the mission to serve as priests and prophets for the whole
world, to instruct it in the truth, and in particular the pure knowledge of God’. If they
had recognized this truth in full measure, then the coming of the Saviour would have
confirmed forever that great mission. But ‘the spirit of the prophets’ turned out to be
by no means so strong in Jewry, and its leaders repeated the role of Esau: they gave
away the right of the firstborn for a mess of pottage.

“Nevertheless we must not forget that if the nationalist hatred for the Kingdom of
God, manifested outside tribal conditions, was expressed in the murder of the Saviour
of the world, all His disciples who brought the good news of the Kingdom, all His first
followers and a multitude of the first members of the Church to all the ends of the
Roman empire were Jews by nationality. The greatest interpreter of the spiritual
meaning of the idea of ‘the children of Abraham’ was the pure-blooded Jew and
Pharisee, the Apostle Paul. He was a Jew by blood, but through the prophetic spirit
turned out to be the ideological director of the world to that place where ‘there is
neither Jew nor Greek’.”305

The Apostles were all Jews, and in spite of persecution from the Jewish authorities
they did not immediately break definitively with the Jewish community in Jerusalem,
continuing to worship in the Temple and to read the Holy Scriptures of the Old

305 Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, p. 142.

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Testament, which they saw as fulfilled in Jesus Christ.306 As Protopresbyter George
Florovsky writes: “The famous phrase of St. Augustine can be taken as typical of the
whole Patristic attitude towards the Old Dispensation. “Novum Testamentum in
Vetere latet. Vetus Testamentum in Novo patet” [the New Testament is concealed in
the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New]. The New Testament is an
accomplishment or a consummation of the Old. Christ Jesus is the Messiah spoken of
by the prophets. In Him all promises and expectations are fulfilled. The Law and the
Gospel belong together. And nobody can claim to be a true follower of Moses unless
he believes that Jesus is the Lord. Any one who does not recognize in Jesus the
Messiah, the Anointed of the Lord, does thereby betray the Old Dispensation itself.
Only the Church of Christ keeps now the right key to the Scriptures, the true key to
the prophecies of old. Because all these prophecies are fulfilled in Christ.

“St. Justin rejects the suggestion that the Old Testament is a link holding together
the Church and the Synagogue. For him quite the opposite is true. All Jewish claims
must be formally rejected. The Old Testament no longer belongs to the Jews. It belongs
to the Church alone. And the Church of Christ is therefore the only true Israel of God.
The Israel of old was but an undeveloped Church. The word "Scriptures" itself in early
Christian use meant first of all just the Old Testament and in this sense obviously this
word is used in the Creed: "according to the Scriptures," i.e. according to the
prophecies and promises of the Old Dispensation.”307

True, the first Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) established that pagan converts to
Christianity did not have to practice Mosaic rites such as circumcision: faith in Christ
and baptism was all that was required to become a fully-entitled member of the
Church. And there was no question that the Christians were now the people of God,
“a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (I Peter 2.9), “the Israel of
God” (Galatians 6.16), taking the place of the apostate Jews, who had once been “a
kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Deuteronomy 4.23-24), but were now enemies
of God. However, the Jewish Christian community in Palestine retained its outward
semblance to Judaism, in order to facilitate the conversion of the Jews.

Of course, the Christians differed fundamentally from the Jews in their worship of
Christ as the Messiah and God, one of the Holy Trinity. And the specifically Christian
rite of the Eucharist was restricted only to those who believed in Christ and accepted
baptism. Nevertheless, for the first forty years or so after the Resurrection the Church
did not hasten to break all bonds with the Synagogue, hoping that as many Jews as
possible could be converted. For although it is true, according to Professor A.D.

306 In fact, they were as deeply believing in the inspiration of the Old Testament as the Jews. Thus St.
Irenaeus of Lyons (second century) wrote: “Look carefully into the Scriptures, which are the true
utterances of the Holy Spirit. Observe that nothing of an unjust or counterfeit character is written in
them” (First Epistle to the Corinthians, 45). And St. Gregory the Theologian (fourth century): “We who
extend the accuracy of the Spirit to the merest stroke and tittle will never admit the impious assertion
that even the smallest matters were dealt with haphazard by those who have recorded them, and have
thus been borne in mind down to the present day: on the contrary, their purpose has been to supply
memorials and instructions for our consideration under similar circumstances, should such befall us,
and that the examples of the past might serve as rules and models, for our warning and imitation”
(Oration II: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus, and His Return, After His Ordination to the Priesthood, ch. 105).
307 Florovsky, Aspects of Church History, pages 31-32.

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Belyaev, that “the sacrifices which the Jews continued to offer in accordance with the
Old Testament rite were no longer necessary after the death of Jesus Christ and were
invalid after the offering of the Golgotha sacrifice, nevertheless they were not yet the
abomination of desolation after the death of Jesus Christ, they were not offerings to
the devil. The book of the Acts of the Apostles records the daily presence of the
believers in the temple (2.46) and the visits of the apostles during the hours of prayer
(3.1). More than that: the Apostle Paul once even offered a sacrifice in the Jerusalem
temple (Acts 21.21-26). Let it be that he did this out of condescension to the weakness
of conscience of the Jews, fulfilling the rule: ‘I was for the Jews as a Jew, so as to win
the Jews’ (I Corinthians 9.20). Nevertheless, he would not have offered a sacrifice if it
has been an offering to the devil, as Eusebius puts it. For him it was an indifferent act,
just as the fulfillment of the whole ritual law of Moses became a matter of indifference
for the Christians.”308

And this approach bore fruit, in that, at least in the first two generations, there was
a steady trickle of converts from the Jews into the Church of Jerusalem, which was
headed by the much-revered St. James the Just, the Brother of the Lord. After his
martyrdom and the destruction of Jerusalem, his brother St. Symeon became bishop
of Jerusalem. But the Christians, warned by God, had already fled the city for Pella,
across the Jordan…

The Jews were not deprived of signs that they were losing the Grace of God. Even
the fiercely anti-Christian Talmud preserves a record of some of these signs. Thus Dr.
Seraphim Steger writes, commenting on Gemara, 39b, that during the last 40 years of
the Temple’s existence, from 30 to 70, “a bad omen occurred on Yom Kippur every
year because:

“(1) The Lot for the LORD came up in the left hand, not the right hand of the High
Priest of Israel on Yom Kippur. What happened in 30 CE that might have caused
this? Could it have been the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Yeshua Ha-
Maschiach? Could it have been that the High Priest of Israel had lost his authority
because now there was a new High Priest in town, Yeshua Ha-Maschiach? In
his Letter to the Hebrews the Apostle Paul speaks of Yeshua Ha-Maschiach as a High
Priest after the Order of Melchezadek sitting at the right hand of the Father in the
Heavens.

“Because the crimson ribbon tied between the horns of the bullock did not
miraculously turn white for the last 40 years the Temple stood when the scapegoat
was thrown over the cliff in the wilderness, we can say that the LORD did not accept
the Temple sacrifice of the scapegoat for the nation of Israel on Yom
Kippur. Why? Could it be because Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, our Passover
(Pesach) Sacrifice has been slain for us once and for all had been accepted by the Father
on our behalf? Consequently, there was no more need for a scapegoat because Christ
not only was a propitiation for our sins, but has carried our sins away from us as far
as the East is from the West.

Belyaev, in Sergei and Tamara Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second
308

Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. 2, p. 393.

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 “(2). We can say that for the last 40 years the Temple stood neither did the
westernmost Menorah lamp miraculously shine longer than the others as it had once
done, now indicating that the Presence of the Lord, the Shekinah glory, had deserted
the Temple all those last 40 years. Was the Shekinah, the glory of the Lord, now to be
found outside the Temple? Could it be that it was now to be found in the Church,
having descended upon the Church at Pentecost some 50 days after the crucifixion
and resurrection of Yeshua?

“(3). We can say that during those last 40 years the Temple stood, the doors to the
Hekel//Hekhal, the Holy Place/sanctuary, opened repetitively during those last 40
years by themselves, when they should have been closed, showing that access to the
LORD in the Holy Place was not limited to the priests in their daily service, or the
Holy of Holies to the High Priest but once a year. Could it be that through the risen
Yesua Ha-Mashiach, Jesus the Messiah, “the Door” as He is sometimes called in the
New Testament Gospels, that worship in the “Holy Place” was now open not just to
the priests but to all who wished to enter in and to draw close to the Holy God of
Israel, through faith in Yeshua, in the Church?

“Now, this testimony of the last 40 years that the Temple stood, is juxtaposed to the
passages about a Simeon the Righteous who ministered in the Temple for 40 years [so
presumably a priest, or levite at a minimum], during whose time the Temple was
blessed.

“Reading this gemara again we can see that during the 40 years Simeon ministered,
the sacrifices for the Israel were blessed and the scapegoat accepted, (removing the
sins of the entire nation) because the lot for the Lord would always come up in the
right hand. I.e., the people of Israel were being blessed by the LORD. Interestingly,
after those 40 years, sometimes the sacrifices were accepted, sometimes not. Also, the
priests suffered from the curse on the omer, two loaves, and shewbread--i.e., they
were not nourished by the bread of the Temple as they were before.

“Who is Simeon the Righteous?

“… There is controversy over who this “Righteous Simeon” may have been since
there are four men that have born this name in traditional Jewish history and there is
some question of later Rabbinical fabrication of their tradition to favor their views at
that later time. Perhaps this Simeon was none of the four major candidates. Could
this Simeon possibly be Simeon the Just and Pious mentioned in the Gospel of Luke
2:25-36, the Simeon the Orthodox Church remembers as “Righteous Simeon” who
held in his arms infant Jesus Christ at His presentation in the temple? Let’s look into
this a bit further.

“We can see that during the 40 years Simeon ministered the Lord forgave the sins
of the nation of Israel because the crimson-coloured strap [tied between the bullocks’
horns] would become white after the scapegoat was sent into the wilderness. As part
of the blessing of the nation of Israel the Lord was forgiving the sins of the Israelites,
sanctifying and preparing them for the enfleshment of the Logos.

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 “We can see that during the 40 years Simeon ministered the Shekhinah Glory/Holy
Spirit remained present in the Holy of Holies blessing the nation [in preparation for
the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living
God] because throughout those forty years the westernmost light was shining, having
been lighted first and burning longer that the other lights. The Lord was blessing and
preparing the Temple and its priests for receiving God in the flesh.

‘Lastly, we can see that during the 40 years Simeon ministered the fire of the pile of
wood kept burning strong on the altar showing that the Lord was accepting of all the
animal, meal, grain, oil, and wine sacrifices commanded in the Torah, the Law of
Moses, under the Old Covenant, further underscoring the sanctifying of the Temple,
the priests, the nation, and all the people by the various offerings.”309

The Apostles rejected the possibility of salvation through the Mosaic Law and
declared that salvation was only through faith in Jesus Christ. Nor, as St. Peter, the
apostle to the Jews, added, “is there salvation in any other, but there is no other name
under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4.12). St. Paul, the
apostle to the Gentiles, was particularly clear on this point, writing his Epistle to the
Galatians precisely in order to refute the Judaizing Christians. Already in his earliest
Epistle he wrote that the Jews “killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and
have persecuted us and do not please God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us
to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of
their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the uttermost…” (I Thessalonians 2.15-
16).

God’s wrath was manifest particularly in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD,

after which the situation for the Christians changed – first in relation to the Jews, who
saw the Christians as traitors to the national cause, and then also in relation to the
Romans, who began to treat the Christians as a separate religion. However, the
Christians continued to pray for the Romans and the Greeks, who intermittently
tolerated them, unlike the Jews, who always persecute them.

Moreover, the Jewish religion itself was changed into what should better be called
Talmudism - after the “Talmud”, or “Teaching”, which claims to be an oral tradition
set down by Moses310 - in order that the Jews should set themselves apart finally and
irrevocably from Christ… Steger explains how this happened: “Just before the fall of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Roman army led by Vespasian,

309 Steger, “Tidbits of 1st Century Christian History Preserved in the Babylonian Talmud and their
Relationship to St. Simeon the Righteous”,
http://www.stseraphimstjohnsandiego.org/St._Seraphim_of_Sarov_and_St._john_of_Kronstadt_Ort
hodox_Church/History/Entries/2014/5/9_History__Tidbits_of_1st_Century_History_Preserved_in_
the_Babylonian_Talmud.html. See also N. Federoff & T. Peterson, “Talmudic Evidence for the Messiah
at 30 C.E. - Four Unique Events Point to Messiah and His Identity”, August 2, 2014, Window View.
310 Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, The Talmud Unmasked, St. Petersburg, 1892, translated by Bloomfield Books,

Sudbury.

193
one of the leading sages of the Pharisees in Jerusalem, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai,
was captured by the Romans according to one early Palestinian tradition and taken
against his will to the town of Yavne’el / Jamnia (modern Yavne on the Mediterranean
coast) which served as a place of detention for those who had surrendered to the
Romans. In Jamnia Rabban Yochannan ben Zakkai reconstituted the Sanhedrin,
proclaimed New Moons and leap-years, and proceeded to construct a new religion
for the war torn nation: ‘Rabbinical Judaism’ which was centered around the beliefs
of the Pharisees as well as the practices of the Synagogue [the priests having become
superfluous since the destruction of the Temple and the discontinuance of its services
and sacrifices]. He preserved the oral traditions of the schools of the Pharisees
encompassing the years 536 BC to AD 70. Jamnia subsequently became the new
spiritual center for those Jews who survived the war.

“Some 150 years later Rabbi Yehudah haNasi set to writing a broad and
comprehensive redaction of the Oral Law known as the Mishnah. Subsequent
rabbinical commentaries, the Gamara, were added to each of the individual tractates
forming two authoritative collections known as the Babylonian and the Jerusalem
Talmudim. These contained 700 years’ worth of the oral tradition of the rabbinical
schools. Their final forms were completed around AD 600.”311

The Jewish Professor Norman Cantor writes: “This withdrawal of the rabbis from
the political fate of the homeland was the end result of what was already clear in the
first century B.C. Pharisaic Judaism was a self-subsisting culture and a kind of mobile
religious and moral tabernacle that could function autonomously and perpetually
almost anywhere that the Jews had a modicum of physical security and economic
opportunity. This was to be the single most continuous and important theme in Jewish
history until modern times, the sacred chain that binds the generations together…”312
Except that there was nothing sacred about it; for this false tradition of men prevented
generation after generation of Jews (with a few exceptions) from learning the truth
hidden in their own genuine Scriptures

The Jews constituted a large and important part of the population of the Empire.
“Jewish colonies,” writes Alexander Dvorkin, “could be found in any corner of the
Mediterranean world – from Cadiz to the Crimea. In all there lived up to 4 million
Jews in the diaspora out of a general population of the Roman Empire of 50 million,
while the Jewish population of Palestine consisted of not more than one million
people.

“In the first century after Christ there were 11 or 12 synagogues in Rome. But the
highest percentage of Jewish settlement was in Alexandria: throughout Egypt
(including Alexandria) there lived about a million Jews. The municipal authorities had
to reckon with them, although the social isolation of the Jews did not allow them to
form their own kind of ‘lobby’ for participation in the local power structures.

311 Steger, op. cit.
312 Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, p. 50.

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Everywhere that they lived they refused to be merged into the life of their pagan
surroundings, but unfailingly kept to their own religion and customs. Every Saturday
they gathered to chant psalms and to read the Scriptures, after which there followed
a sermon on the subject of the Biblical extract read and common prayers.

“Although scattered throughout the world, the Jews preserved the feeling of unity
with the land of their fathers: they carried out private pilgrimages to the holy city of
Zion and every year sent contributions to the Temple. Sometimes this export of
currency from the provinces with its numerous Jewish population created definite
difficulties for the Roman tax authorities. However, the Romans understood that in
this question – as, however, in all questions connected with the basic principles of
Judaism, - it was much more peaceful not to stop the Jews from acting in their own
way. The Jews were not excluded from a single sphere of public life in which they
themselves wanted to take part. But, of course, not all Jews observed their native
customs as strictly as their religious leaders would have liked, and many of them
experienced a powerful temptation to give in to seduction and live no differently from
their neighbours.

“But the Jews for their part also exerted a noticeable influence on the inhabitants of
the Empire. Although both the Greeks and the Romans saw circumcision as a
disgusting anti-aesthetic custom, very many of the pagans were attracted to Judaism
by its strict monotheism, the purity of its moral life and the antiquity (if not the style)
of its Sacred Scriptures. There was no teaching on asceticism in Judaism (if you don’t
count some marginal groups), but it spoke out for chastity, constancy and faithfulness
in family life. In their communities the Jews constantly practised charity, visiting the
sick and giving alms to the poor.

“Around many of the synagogues in the diaspora there formed groups of pious
pagans whom the Jews usually called ‘God-fearers’ (in general this term was applied
to every pious member of the synagogue). A pagan could pass through circumcision
and ritual washing (immersion from the head down in a basin of water, which was
required for the reception of converts into Judaism), but this did not often take place.
As a rule, the Hellenized Jews of the diaspora, who were much more open to the
external world than their rigorist Palestinian brethren, to the chagrin of the latter
accepted converts from the pagans into their circle without insisting that circumcision
was necessary for their salvation.

“The net of synagogues covering the empire turned out to be providential

preparatory path for the Christian preaching. Through it Christianity penetrated into
the midst of those who were drawing near to Judaism. Among these groups of former
pagans the Christian missionaries found their own first uncircumcised followers. One
could liken them to a ripe fruit, for they had the advantage not only of a lofty morality
but also a knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures. From them the first Christian
communities were formed. They consisted of the most varied people, not only from
the proletarians and lower levels of society who had despaired of finding justice in
this life, as the Marxist historians and those with them affirmed. St. Paul in his Epistle
to the Romans gives a greeting to Erastus, a city guardian of the general purse; in
Athens a member of the Areopagus (the city council), Dionysius, was converted; and

195
in Thessalonica there were ‘quite a few noble women’ (Acts 17.4). The governor of
Bithynia, Pliny the Younger, in his letter to the Emperor Trajan (111-113) writes about
the multitude ‘of Christians of various classes’. The majority of these people were
educated pagans who came to Christianity from circles attached to the Jews.”313

Many noble women from the Gentiles converted to Judaism, such as Poppaea
Sabina, the emperor Nero’s second wife.

“The Jewish conception of the divine,” writes Tom Holland, “was indeed well
suited to an age that had seen distances shrink and frontiers melt as never before. The
God of Israel was a ‘great King over all the earth’. Author of the Covenant that bound
him uniquely to the Jews, he was at the same time capable of promising love to
‘foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord’ [Isaiah 56.6]. Of these, in the great
melting pot of the Roman Mediterranean, there were increasing numbers. Most, it is
true, opted to lurk on the sidelines of the synagogue, and rest content there with a
status not as Jews, but as theosebeis, ‘God-fearers’. Men in particular shrank from
taking the ultimate step. Admiration for Moses did not necessarily translate into a
willingness to go under the knife. Many of the aspects of Jewish life that appeared
most ridiculous to outsiders – circumcision, the ban on eating pork – were dismissed
by admirers of Moses’ teaching and priests. Jews themselves naturally disagreed; and
yet there was, in the widespread enthusiasm for their prophets and their scriptures,
just a hint of just how rapidly the worship of their god might come to spread, were
the prescriptions of the Torah only to be rendered less demanding…”314

However, “as the rate of conversion to Judaism intensified, so did the government’s
disquiet and the resentment on the part of many Latin intellectuals”.315

The first recorded expulsion of Jewish converts from Rome was in 139 BC. A second
was in 19 AD, when the Emperor Tiberius exiled four thousand converts to Sardinia.

In 49-50 the Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews again. For they were constantly
“making disturbances”, according to Suetonius, “at the instigation of Chrestus
[Christ]”. But it was not Christ Who instigated the riots – it was rather the Jews who
instigated riots, not only against the Romans, but also against the Christians, as we
see several times in the Acts of the Apostles. These anti-Christian pogroms intensified
after the Fall of Jerusalem. Suetonius’ confusion arose because in the beginning the
Romans made no clear distinction between Jews and Christians, who lived “under the
cover of Judaism”, as Tertullian put it. By the reign of Nero the distinction had become
clear: it was the Christians, not the Jews, who were put to the torch for supposedly
burning down Rome…

313 Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the Universal
Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novogorod, 2006, pp. 41-42.
314 Holland, Dominion, pp. 59-60.
315 Sand, op. cit., p. 169.

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 As regards the attitude of the Christians to the Jews, St. Justin the Martyr wrote:
“The woes that have struck you have done so justly and rightly, for you killed the
Righteous One [the Lord Jesus Christ] and before Him His prophets, and even now,
as far as you can, you despise and dishonor those who hope on Him and on God the
Ruler and Creator of all, Who sent Him; and you curse those who believe in Christ in
your synagogues. At the present time you do not have the power to kill us yourselves
– in this you are hindered by the present powers that be [the Romans]; but if you
could, you would do this too… The other nations are not as guilty as you in the
injustice that they show towards us and to Christ; for you are to blame for their bad
prejudice against the Righteous One and against us, His followers. When you
crucified Him, the only immaculate and righteous man, by Whose wounds all those
who come to the Father through Him are healed, and when you learned that He had
risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, as was foretold in the prophecies, you
not only did not repent of your evil deeds, but even sent people chosen by you from
Jerusalem throughout the earth to proclaim that the supposedly godless heresy of
Christianity had appeared, and to spread slanders against us, which all those who do
not know us customarily repeat. Thus you are the causes not only of your own
injustice, but also of all the other people’s…”316

The Jews were different from the other nations of the Roman Empire in three major
ways. First, their faith was exclusive; they claimed to worship the one and only True
God, and rejected the ecumenist tolerance of the other faiths practised by the other
peoples of the empire. Secondly, and especially after the Romans’ destruction of
Jerusalem in 70 AD, they could never reconcile themselves with their conquered
status, or delight in the achievements of the Pax Romana like most of the other
conquered nations. And thirdly, they were unique in that, although their homeland
was Palestine, most Jews lived abroad, in the diaspora, which providentially allowed
them to exert an important influence on the whole of the Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, the Jewish religion, unlike Christianity, was a licit cult that was given
a certain leeway by the Roman authorities. It was only when they openly rebelled
against Rome - in Judea in 66-70 and 135, and again in Libya in 115-117 - that they
were suppressed…

We have seen that the Jews were successful proselytizers in the Greco-Roman
world before and after the Coming of Christ. However, as Alfred Lilienthal writes, “it
was in the face of growing competition from the new Christian faith that the rabbinate
and other Jewish leaders ceased proselytization.”317 In reaction to this competition,
they formed an inner ghetto around themselves, whose laws were their religion,
whose lawmakers were the rabbis, and whose sacred text was not the Sacred
Scriptures of the Old Testament, but the Talmud…

316 St. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho.
317 Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978, p. 10.

197
 The Talmud, writes Seraphim McCune, was “a direct response to the razing of the
Temple in AD 70. Its primary premise is how to be a Jew without the temple.”318

And, of course, without Christ. Indeed, the Talmud is without doubt the most
abhorrent and anti-Christian book ever written. It purports to record a secret oral
tradition going back to Moses and representing the true interpretation of the Torah,
the first five books of the Bible. In fact, it bears only the most strained and perverse
relation to the Torah, often completely corrupting the true meaning of the Holy
Scriptures. It even asserts its own superiority over the Scriptures. For it declares: “The
Law is water, but the Mishna [the first form of the Talmud] is wine.” And again: “The
words of the elders are more important than the words of the Prophets.” "According
to the Babylonian Talmud, God himself is subservient to the rabbis. 'Since God already
gave the Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to
heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of the rabbis'.
(BT Bava Metzia 59b).”319

Talmudic Judaism is therefore a different religion from that of the Old Testament. It does
not contain a formal creed in the manner of Christianity. But it does contain 613
commandments that all Jews are expected to fulfill and which constitute the essence
of their religion. It was the Pharisee-Talmudists who incited Christ’s death because
He preached a spiritual, universalist Kingdom opposed to their nationalist dreams.
This opposition between the God-inspired Tradition of the Holy Scriptures and the
man-made traditions of the Pharisees was pointed out by Christ when He said: “Thus
have ye made the commandment of no effect by your tradition…Ye blind guides, who
strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew 15.6, 23.24).

These man-made traditions were gathered together in the Talmud, which was
assembled in two editions – in Palestine in the second century, and in Babylon in about
500 (the latter is much more authoritative). Its laws, as Douglas Reed writes,
“governed every imaginable action of a Jew’s life anywhere in the world: marriage,
divorce, property settlements, commercial transactions, down to the pettiest details of
dress and toilet. As unforeseen things frequently crop up in daily life, the question of
what is legal or illegal (not what is right or wrong) in all manner of novel
circumstances had incessantly to be debated, and this produced the immense records
of rabbinical disputes and decisions in which the Talmud abounds.

“Was it as much a crime to crush a flea as to kill a camel on a sacred day? One
learned rabbi allowed that the flea might be gently squeezed, and another thought its
feet might even be cut off. How many white hairs might a sacrificial red cow have and
yet remain a red cow? What sort of scabs required this or that ritual of purification?
At which end of an animal should the operation of slaughter be performed? Ought
the high priest to put on his shirt or his hose first? Methods of putting apostates to
death were debated; they must be strangled, said the elders, until they opened their
mouths, into which boiling lead must be poured. Thereon a pious rabbi urged that the

318 McCune, Facebook, October 21, 2018.
319 Michael Hoffman, “What Does Rabbinic Judaism Say About What Makes Jews and Gentiles

Different?”, Revisionist History, no. 111, October-November, 2020, p. 2.

198
victim’s mouth be held open with pincers so that he not suffocate before the molten
lead enter and consume his soul with his body. The word ‘pious’ is here not
sardonically used; this scholar sought to discover the precise intention of ‘the Law’.”320

A dominant feature of these Jewish “holy” books was their hatred of Christ and
Christianity.

“The Jewish Encyclopaedia says: ‘It is the tendency of Jewish legends in the Talmud,
the Midrash… and in the Life of Jesus (Toledoth Jeshua) that originated in the Middle
Ages to belittle the person of Jesus by ascribing to him an illegitimate birth, magic and
a shameful death’. He is generally alluded to as ‘that anonymous one’, ‘liar’, ‘imposter’
or ‘bastard’ (the attribution of bastardy is intended to bring him under the Law as
stated in Deuteronomy 23.3: ‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the
Lord’). Mention of the name, Jesus, is prohibited in Jewish households.

“The work cited by the Jewish Encyclopaedia as having ‘originated in the Middle
Ages’ is not merely a discreditable memory of an ancient past, as that allusion might
suggest; it is used in Hebrew schools today. It was a rabbinical production of the
Talmudic era and repeated all the ritual of mockery of Calvary itself in a different
form. Jesus is depicted as the illegitimate son of Mary, a hairdresser’s wife, and of a
Roman soldier called Panthera. Jesus himself is referred to by a name which might be
translated ‘Joey Virgo’. He is shown as being taken by his stepfather to Egypt and
there learning sorcery.

“The significant thing about this bogus life-story (the only information about Jesus
which Jews were supposed to read) is that in it Jesus is not crucified by Romans. After
his appearance in Jerusalem and his arrest there as an agitator and a sorcerer he is
turned over to the Sanhedrin and spends forty days in the pillory before being stoned
and hanged at the Feast of Passover; this form of death exactly fulfils the Law laid
down in Deuteronomy 21.22 and 17.5, whereas crucifixion would not have been in
compliance with that Judaic law. The book then states that in hell he suffers the torture
of boiling mud.

“The Talmud also refers to Jesus as ‘Fool’, ‘sorcerer’, ‘profane person’, ‘idolater’,
‘dog’, ‘child of lust’ and the like more; the effect of this teaching over a period of
centuries is shown by the book of the Spanish Jew Mose de Leon, republished in 1880,
which speaks of Jesus as a ‘dead dog’ that lies ‘buried in a dunghill’. The original
Hebrew texts of these Talmudic allusions appear in Laible’s Jesus Christus im Talmud.
This scholar says that during the period of the Talmudists [which, of course, has not
ended, but continues to this day in Orthodox Judaism] hatred of Jesus became ‘the
most national trait of Judaism’, that ‘at the approach of Christianity the Jews were
seized over and again with a fury and hatred that were akin to madness’, that ‘the
hatred and scorn of the Jews was always directed in the first place against the person
of Jesus’ and that ‘the Jesus-hatred of the Jews is a firmly-established fact, but they
want to show it as little as possible’.

320 Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, South Africa, 1978, p. 93.

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 “This wish to conceal from the outer world that which was taught behind the
Talmudic hedge led to the censoring of the above-quoted passages during the
seventeenth century. Knowledge of the Talmud became fairly widespread then (it was
frequently denounced by remonstrant Jews) and the embarrassment thus caused to
the Talmudic elders led to the following edict (quoted in the original Hebrew and in
translation by P.L.B. Drach, who was brought up in a Talmudic school and later
became converted to Christianity):

“’This is why we enjoin you, under pain of excommunication major, to print

nothing in future editions, whether of the Mishna or of the Gemara, which relates
whether for good or for evil to the acts of Jesus the Nazarene, and to substitute instead
a circle like this: O, which will warn the rabbis and schoolmasters to teach the young
these passages only viva voce. By means of this precaution the savants among the
Nazarenes will have no further pretext to attack us on this subject’ (decree of the
Judaist Synod which sat in Poland in 1631). At the present time, when public enquiry
into such matters, or objection to them, has been virtually forbidden by Gentile
governments, these passages, according to report, have been restored in the Hebrew
editions of the Talmud…

“The Talmud sets out to widen and heighten the barrier between the Jews and
others. An example of the different language which the Torah spoke, for Jews and for
Gentiles, has previously been given: the obscure and apparently harmless allusion to
‘a foolish nation’ (Deuteronomy 32.21). According to the article on Discrimination
against Gentiles in the Jewish Encyclopaedia the allusion in the original Hebrew is to ‘vile
and vicious Gentiles’, so that Jew and Gentile received very different meanings from
the same passage in the original and in the translation. The Talmud, however, which
was to reach only Jewish eyes, removed any doubt that might have been caused in
Jewish minds by perusal of the milder translation; it specifically related the passage
in Deuteronomy to one in Ezekiel 23.20, and by so doing defined Gentiles as those
‘whose flesh is as the flesh of asses and whose issue is like the issue of horses’! In this
spirit was the ‘interpretation’ of the Law continued by the Talmudists.

“The Talmudic edicts were all to similar effect. The Law (the Talmud laid down)
allowed the restoration of a lost article to its owner if ‘a brother or neighbour’, but not
if a Gentile. Book-burning (of Gentile books) was recommended… The benediction,
‘Blessed be Thou… who hast not made me a goi [Gentile]’ was to be recited daily.
Eclipses were of bad augury for Gentiles only. Rabbi Lei laid down that the injunction
not to take revenge (Leviticus 19.18) did not apply to Gentiles, and apparently invoked
Ecclesiastes 8.4 in support of his ruling (a discriminatory interpretation then being
given to a passage in which the Gentile could not suspect any such intention).

“The Jews who sells to a Gentile landed property bordering on the land of another
Jew is to be excommunicated. A Gentile cannot be trusted as witness in a criminal or
civil suit because he could not be depended on to keep his word like a Jew. A Jew
testifying in a petty Gentile civil court as a single witness against a Jew must be
excommunicated. Adultery committed with a non-Jewish woman is not adultery ‘for
the heathen have no lawfully wedded wife, they are not really their wives’. The

200
Gentiles are as such precluded from admission to a future world…”321

Michael Hoffman writes: “That goyim are nefesh [soul]-deficient is the fixed sacred
law of Orthodox Judaism. How the law that goyim are less than fully human is applied
is indeed subject to discussion and contestation in the Mishnah Torah, Kesef Mishneh
and hundreds of cognate legal texts derived from the Talmud…

“The Babylonian Talmud states, ‘Only Jews are human. Non-Jews are not human’
(Bava Metzi 114b. Also: BT Kerithoth 6b and 58a).

“One of the earliest laws distinguishing between Jews and goyim is found in the
Talmud, in Sanhedrin 57a:

“’Regarding bloodshed, the following distinction applies, if a non-Jew killed

another non-Jew, or a non-Jew killed a Jew, the killer is liable for execution; if a Jew
killed a non-Jew, he is exempt from punishment.’

“’Regarding a Jew stealing from a non-Jew, the act is permitted’ (BT Sanhedrin 57a).

“It is commanded in the Talmud’s Kiddushim 66c: ‘The best of the gentiles: kill
him; the best of snakes: smash its skull; the best of women: is filled with witchcraft.’
(The uncensored version of the text appears in Tractate Soferim [New York, M. Higher,
1937], 15:7, p. 282).

“The Talmud decrees in Sanhedrin 81b-82a: ‘All gentile women without exception
are ‘Niddah, Shifchah, Goyyah and Zoah’ (menstrual filth, slaves, heathens and
prostitutes).

“The Talmud rules that black people are cursed: ‘The sages taught: Three violated
that directive and engaged in intercourse in the ark, and all of them punished for
doing so… Ham was afflicted in that his skin turned black’ (Sanhedrin 105b)…

“The founding text of the theologically influential and, in the United States,
politically powerful, Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism, is the Tanya, which was
written by Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady. This foundational
Chabad volume decrees that:

“’Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. Their material
abundance derives from supernal refuse. Indeed, they themselves derive from refuse,
which is why they are more numerous than Jews.’”322

*

321 Reed, op. cit., pp. 89-91. The Zohar also says: “Tradition tells us that the best of the Gentiles deserves
death” (Section Vaiqra, folio 14b). For a more detailed exposé of the Talmud and the religion founded
upon it, see Pranaitis, op. cit., and Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, Independent History and
Research, 2008.
322 Hoffman, “What does Rabbinic Judaism say about what makes Jews and Gentiles Different?’

Revisionist History, 111, October-November, 2020, pp. 5-6.

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 Of particular importance for the future history of the Jews in their relations with
the Christian and Gentile world were their different attitudes towards usury, lending
money on interest.

Now the Old Testament forbids the lending of money for interest to brothers, but
allows it to strangers (Exodus 22.25; Leviticus 25.36; Deuteronomy 23.24). The Talmud
exploited the letter of this law to justify outright exploitation of the Christians.

According to Oleg Platonov, it “teaches the Jew to consider the property of all non-
Jews as ‘gefker’, which means free, belonging to no one. ‘The property of all non-Jews
has the same significance as if it had been found in the desert: it belongs to the first
who seizes it’. In the Talmud there is a decree according to which open theft and
stealing are forbidden, but anything can be acquired by deceit or cunning…

“From this it follows that all the resources and wealth of the non-Jews must belong
to representatives of the ‘chosen people’. ‘According to the Talmud,’ wrote the
Russian historian S.S. Gromeka, “God gave all the peoples into the hands of the Jews”
(Baba-Katta, 38); “the whole of Israel are children of kings; those who offend a Jew
offend God himself” (Sikhab 67, 1) and “are subject to execution, as for lèse-majesté”
(Sanhedrin 58, 2); pious people of other nations, who are counted worthy of
participating in the kingdom of the Messiah, will take the role of slaves to the Jews’
(Sanhedrin 91, 21, 1051). From this point of view, … all the property in the world
belongs to the Jews, and the Christians who possess it are only temporary, ‘unlawful’
possessors, usurpers, and this property will be confiscated by the Jews from them
sooner or later. When the Jews are exalted above all the other peoples, God will hand
over all the nations to the Jews for final extermination.’

“The historian of Judaism I. Lyutostansky cites examples from the ancient editions
of the Talmud, which teaches the Jews that it is pleasing to God that they appropriate
the property of the goyim [Gentiles]. In particular, he expounds the teaching of Samuel
that deceiving a goy is not a sin…

“Rabbi Moses said: ‘If a goy makes a mistake in counting, then the Jew, noticing
this, must say that he knows nothing about it.’ Rabbi Brentz says: ‘If some Jews, after
exhausting themselves by running around all week to deceive Christians in various
places, come together at the Sabbath and boast of their deceptions to each other, they
say: “We must take the hearts out of the goyim and kill even the best of them.” – of
course, if they succeed in doing this.’ Rabbi Moses teaches: ‘Jews sin when they return
lost things to apostates and pagans, or anyone who doesn’t reverence the Sabbath.’…

“To attain the final goal laid down in the Talmud for Jews – to become masters of
the property of the goyim – one of the best means, in the rabbis’ opinion, is usury.
According to the Talmud, ‘God ordered that money be lent to the goyim, but only on
interest; so instead of helping them in this way, we must harm them, even if they can
be useful for us.’ The tract Baba Metsiya insists on the necessity of lending money on
interest and advises Jews to teach their children to lend money on interest, ‘so that
they can from childhood taste the sweetness of usury and learn to use it in good

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time.’”323

The transformation of Judaism into Talmudism marked the last, most impenetrable
barrier between the Jews and the Church. From now on, as Metropolitan Hilarion of
Kiev said in the eleventh century: “Christ is glorified, and the Jews are vilified. The
nations are gathered, and the Jews are scattered. As the prophet Malachi pronounced:
‘I have no pleasure in the sons of Israel, and I will not accept a sacrifice at their hands.
For from the east even to the west My name is glorified among the Gentiles, and in
every place incense is offered to My name, for My name is great among the Gentiles.’
And according to David: ‘All the earth shall worship Thee, and sing unto Thee’, and:
‘Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is Thy name in all the earth.’”324

323 Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow, 1998,
324 Hilarion, Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati (Word on the Law and Grace), 34.6.

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 26. CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Roman power already began fulfilling the role of protector of the Christians as early
as 35, when, on the basis of a report sent to him by Pilate, the Emperor Tiberius
proposed to the senate that Christ should be recognized as a god. The senate refused
this request, and declared that Christianity was an “illicit superstition”; but Tiberius
ignored this and forbade the bringing of any accusations against the Christians. 325
Moreover, when St. Mary Magdalene complained to the emperor about the unjust
sentence passed by Pontius Pilate on Christ, the emperor moved Pilate from Jerusalem
to Gaul, where he died after a terrible illness.326 Again, in 36 or 37 the Roman legate to
Syria, Vitellius, deposed Caiaphas for his unlawful execution of the Archdeacon and
Protomartyr Stephen (in 34), and in 62 the High Priest Ananias was similarly deposed
for executing St. James the Just, the first Bishop of Jerusalem. In between these dates
the Apostle Paul was saved from a lynching at the hands of the Jews by the Roman
authorities (Acts 21, 23.28-29, 25.19).327

So at first the Romans, far from being persecutors of the Christians, were their
protectors… For, as Edward Gibbon writes: “The various modes of worship which
prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by
the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful. And thus
toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”328

As Alexander Dvorkin writes: “The Roman government in practice was tolerant to

any cult if only it did not incite to rebellion and did not undermine morality.
Moreover, the Romans thought that one of the reasons for their military successes was
the fact that while other peoples worshipped only their own local gods, the Romans
showed marks of honour to all the gods without exception and for that were rewarded
for their special piety. All cults not established by the state were allowed, but
theoretically did not have the right to propagandize in Rome, although their gods also
entered into the Roman pantheon. In the first century after Christ religions already
known to the contemporary Roman were not, as a rule, persecuted for
propagandizing. However, the law retained its prior force and theoretically the
possibility of applying it remained. The permitted religions had to satisfy two criteria:
place and time. Religion was always a local matter – that is, it was linked to a definite
people living in a definite locality, - and also an ancient matter, linked to the history
of this people. It was more complicated to assimilate the God of the Jews, Who had no
representation and did not accept sacrifices in any place except Jerusalem, into their
pantheon. The Jews themselves did not allow His representation to be placed
anywhere and stubbornly declined to worship the Roman gods. The Jews were
monotheists and theoretically understood that their faith in principle excluded all

325 Marti Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 18.
326 Velimirovič, The Prologue from Ochrid, part III, July 22, p. 94. Annas and Caiaphas also came to bad

ends.
327 Sordi, op. cit., chapter 1.
328 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 2.

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other forms of religion. Nevertheless, in spite of all the complications with the Jews
and the strangeness of their religion, it was still tolerated: the religion of the Jews was
a national one and, besides, ancient, and it was considered sacrilege to encroach on it.
Moreover, the Jews occupied an important political niche that was for the Romans a
stronghold of their eastern conquests. In view of all these considerations, the Romans
gritted their teeth and recognized the Jewish religion to be permitted. Privileges were
given to the Jewish people also because their rites seemed strange and dirty. The
Romans thought that the Jews simply could not have proselytes among other peoples
and would rather repel the haughty Roman aristocrat. Therefore the Jews were given
the right to confess their belief in one God. Until the rebellion of 66-70 the Roman
authorities treated them with studied tolerance. Augustus gave the Jews significant
privileges, which, after the crisis under Caligula, who wanted to put his statue in the
Jerusalem Temple (cf. Mark 13.14 and II Thessalonians 2.3-4), were again renewed by
Claudius.

“The circumstances changed when Christianity appeared. Having examined it, the
Romans classified the Christians as apostates from the Jewish faith. It was precisely
the traits that distinguished the Christians from the Jews that made them still lower
in the eyes of the Romans even than the Judaism they had little sympathy for.
Christianity did not have the right of belonging to historical antiquity – it was the ‘new
religion’ so displeasing to the Roman conservatives. It was not the religion of one
people, but on the contrary, lived only through proselytes from other religions. If the
propagandizing of other cults by their servers was seen rather as a chance violation,
for Christians missionary work was their only modus vivendi – a necessity of their very
position in history. Christians were always reproached for a lack of historical and
national character in their religion. Celsius, for example, saw in Christians a party that
had separated from Judaism and inherited from it its inclination for disputes.

“The Christians could demand tolerance either in the name of the truth or in the
name of freedom of conscience. But since for the Romans one of the criteria of truth
was antiquity, Christianity, a new religion, automatically became a false religion. The
right of freedom of conscience that is so important for contemporary man was not
even mentioned at that time. Only the state, and not individuals, had the right to
establish and legalize religious cults. In rising up against state religion, the Christians
became guilty of a state crime – they became in principle enemies of the state. And
with such a view of Christianity it was possible to interpret a series of features of their
life in a particular way: their nocturnal gatherings, their waiting for a certain king that
was to come, the declining of some of them from military service and above all their
refusal to offer sacrifices to the emperor.

“The Christians refused to carry out this self-evident, most simple of state duties.
Beginning with the Apostle Paul, they affirmed their loyalty, referring to the prayers
they said for the emperor, for the authorities and for the homeland. But they refused
to recognize the emperor as ‘Lord’ and to carry out even an external worship of the
idols, for they knew only one Lord, Jesus Christ. The Christians accepted both the state
and society, but only to the degree that they did not limit the Lordship of Christ, did
not drown out the confession of the Kingdom.

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 “The Kingdom of God had come and been revealed in the world, and from now on
became the single measure of history and human life. In essence, the Christians by
their refusal showed that they – almost alone in the whole of what was then an
exceptionally religious world – believed in the reality of the idols. Honouring the idols
meant recognizing the power of the devil, who had torn the world away from the
knowledge of the only true God and forced it to worship statues. But Christ had come
to free the world from this power. Paganism came to life in its true religious
significance as the kingdom of evil, as a demonic invasion, with which the Christians
had entered into a duel to the death.

“Christianity came as a revolution in the history of the world: it was the appearance
in it of the Lord for the struggle with that which had usurped His power. The Church
had become the witness of His coming and presence. It was precisely this witness that
it proclaimed to the whole world…”329

The first persecution against the Christians was that of Nero in 64, in which the
Apostles Peter and Paul were killed. It was a local persecution in Rome, and was not
directly related to religion. The real reason was that Nero needed scapegoats for the
fire he himself had caused, which destroyed a large part of the city. Tacitus, writing
in about 115, says that the founder of the sect was named Christus; that he was
executed under Pontius Pilate; and that the movement, initially checked, broke out
again in Judea and even in Rome itself.330 Thus Nero’s blaming the Christians for the
great fire of Rome led to his calling the faith superstitio illicita, which hardened the
Romans’ attitude to the Church harden temporarily.

However, the first epistle of St. Peter was written during the time of Nero’s
persecution, and the apostle is insistent that the Christians should remain faithful
subjects of the Roman emperor (“Honour the king”, he says), suffering it patiently if
they were treated unjustly. Similarly, during the Jewish rebellion of 66-70, the
Christians of Jerusalem refused to join the rebels. This remained the attitude of the
Church throughout the pre-Constantinian period. They were loyal to the State, which
they wished to convert to Christ. But until that conversion, contradictions remained.

It was not until the persecution under Domitian in the 90s that we see the first
violent ideological clash between Rome and the Church. Domitian proclaimed himself
“lord and god”, and required people to swear “by the genius of the emperor”. Those
who did not were proclaimed to be “atheists”. The Apostle John was exiled to Patmos
for his refusal to obey the emperor.331

A little later, the Emperor Trajan killed St. Clement, third Bishop of Rome and a
disciple of St. Peter, and then St. Ignatius the God-bearer, Bishop of Antioch and a

329 Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the Universal
Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novogorod, 2006, pp. 79-81.
330 Tacitus, Annales, book 15, chapter 44.
331 Domitian was seen in antiquity as the worst of the Roman emperors, worse even than Nero and

Caligula (Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, London: Pan Books, 2013, p. 114).

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disciple of St. John, in 107. “After his victory over the Scythians, Trajan was swollen
with pride and decided to offer thanks to his vile gods for the aid he imagined they
had given him. He ordered his subjects throughout the Empire to sacrifice to the idols,
in the hope that the demons would always be inclined to assist him in governing and
defending the realm. At the same time, learning that the Christians reviled his deities
and refused to offer oblations to them, he initiated a persecution of the faithful in every
province, ordering that whoever refused to adore the gods pay the ultimate penalty.

“Shortly afterwards, the Emperor set out to do battle with the Persians and arrived
in Antioch. He was told that in the city lived a man called Ignatius the Godbearer who
worshipped Jesus Christ. He Who taught his followers to live chastely and to disdain
wealth and the sweet things of the present existence, and was condemned to
crucifixion by Pontius Pilate. Hearing this, Trajan did not delay, but had the saint
brought before him and his advisors. He asked, ‘Are you the man called the
Godbearer, the wretch who dares to defy our ordinances, corrupting the Antiochians
and persuading them to follow Christ?’

“’I am the one you seek,’ answered the holy Ignatius.

“’And why are you called by this name?’ Trajan demanded.

“Because I carry Christ in my soul,’ the saint replied.

“The Emperor laughed. ‘So you say you carry your Christ within you?’

“’I most certainly do,’ answered the blessed one. ‘The Lord Himself testifies in the
Scriptures concerning His disciples, I will dwell in them and walk in them.’

“’And what do you think?’ asked Trajan. ‘Are we not also ever mindful of our gods,
who assist us in gaining victories?’

“’It is bitter for me to hear you call the idols divine,’ replied the God-bearer. ‘There
is only one true God, the Maker of heaven and earth and the sea, and of all things
therein. Moreover, there is one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,
Whose kingdom is without end. If you knew him, O Emperor, your rule would be
more firmly established!’…”332

Ignatius was sent to be eaten the lions in Rome, which so impressed the Emperor
that he ordered the end of the persecution of Christians. Moreover, he advised Pliny
the Younger, a provincial governor who did not know what to do with them, not to
seek them out for punishment…

332
St. Demetrius of Rostove, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom
Press, 2000, vol. IV, pp. 393-394.

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 Over the next two centuries and a bit, there were periods of persecution, as, for
example, under the Emperor Decius in 251. But while cruel, they were sporadic and
short-lived. In fact, as often as not, the emperors, not seeing in the Church any political
threat to themselves, and wishing to preserve the general peace, acted in effect to
protect the Christians against the pagan mobs that sometimes turned against the
Christians in times of natural disaster. It was only with the Great Persecution under
Diocletian in 305 that the relationship between Church and State become one of
permanent hostility, a struggle to the death. This came to an end only with the
Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity…

The foundation of the Church’s political theology was laid by the Lord Himself,
Who accepted the Roman political order as legitimate, and exhorted His disciples to
obey it as long as it did not compel them to disobey the Law of God: “Render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew
22.21). Although Christians, being in essence free-born sons of the Heavenly King,
were inwardly not subject to the yoke of earthly kings, nevertheless this yoke was to
be accepted voluntarily “lest we should offend them” (Matthew 17.27).

For, as St. Theophan the Recluse writes, “The Lord paid the required temple tribute
and kept all other practices, both temple-related and civic. He fulfilled this and taught
the Apostles to do the same, and the Apostles in turn passed this same law on to all
Christians. Only the spirit of life was made new; externally all remained as it had been,
except what was clearly against the will of God – for instance, participating in
sacrifices to idols, etc. Then Christianity gained the upper hand, displaced all the
former practices, and established its own.”333

Following the Lord’s teaching, the holy Apostle Peter writes: "Be subject for the
Lord's sake, to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or
to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and praise those who do
right... Fear God. Honour the king." (I Peter 2.13, 17) And the holy Apostle Paul
commands Christians to give thanks for the emperor "and for all that are in authority;
that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life in all godliness and honesty" (I Timothy 2.1-
2). For it is precisely the emperor's ability to maintain law and order, "a quiet and
peaceful life", which makes him so important for the Church. And so “let every soul
be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power that is not from God; the powers
that be are ordained by God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God, and those who resist shall receive for themselves damnation”
(Romans 13.1-2).334

333 St. Theophan, Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2010,
p. 167.
334 The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia wrote that “the Apostles Peter and Paul

required of the Christians of their time submission to the Roman authority, even though it later
persecuted the followers of Christ. The Romans by nature were distinguished by their moral valor, for
which, according to the words of Augustine in his book On the City of God, the Lord magnified and
glorified them. To the genius of the Romans humanity owes the working out of a more perfect law,
which was the foundation of its famous governmental structure, by which it subjected the world to

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 It is worth pondering on what a remarkable doctrine this was if we take into
account the (at least intermittent) hostility of the Roman emperors to the Christians
and their extreme wealth and moral corruption. The Apostles’ secular lords were the
emperors of the Julio-Flavian dynasty that began with Augustus and contained such
monsters as Caligula and Nero. Rome’s cruelty and corruption was symbolized above
all by the gladiatorial contests and spectacles held in the Flavian Amphitheatre, later
called the Colosseum because of “a colossal golden statue 35 metres high that stood
just beside it. The statue had been commissioned by Emperor Nero, whom it depicted,
quite naked, until his successor Vespasian had the head removed and replaced by that
of the sun god Helios. The towering Flavian Amphitheatre was by far the largest of its
kind in the Empire: a dazzling feat of architecture that could be emptied of its 50,000
spectators in minutes and which had water fountains at every level. It was a source of
immense pride to the Romans”335 – and of immense suffering to the many Christians
who were martyred there. “To this day the Colosseum remains the world’s most
concentrated killing ground, and it is estimated that between a quarter and half a
million people had their lives abruptly ended in the arena, along with several million
animals large and small, common and rare. Species became extinct in its service…”336

And yet the Christians honoured and obeyed the monsters of depravity that so
many of the Roman emperors were, in obedience to the apostolic command. The only
exception was when they were asked to worship idols…

The question arises: was the apostle saying that all political authority is established
by God, whatever its attitude to God Himself? Or are some authorities not established
by God, but only allowed to exist by Him, so that they should not be obeyed as being
in fact established by Satan? The patristic consensus is that the apostle was not saying
that everything that calls itself an authority is blessed by God, but that authority is in
principle good and God-established and therefore should be obeyed – because, as he
goes on to say, political power is in general wielded in order to punish evil-doers and
protect public order. Roman power, he says, is established by God, and therefore is a
true political authority that must be obeyed in all its commands that do not directly

itself to an even greater degree than by its renowned sword. Under the shadow of the Roman eagle
many tribes and nations prospered, enjoying peace and free internal self-government. Respect and
tolerance for all religion were so great in Rome that they were at first also extended to recently
engendered Christianity. It is sufficient to remember that the Roman procurator Pilate tried to defend
Christ the Savior from the malice of the Jews, pointing out His innocence and finding nothing
blameworthy in the doctrine He preached. During his many evangelical travels, which brought him
into contact with the inhabitants of foreign lands, the Apostle Paul, as a Roman citizen, appealed for
the protection of Roman law for defense against both the Jews and the pagans. And, of course, he asked
that his case be judged by Caesar, who, according to tradition, found him to be innocent of what he
was accused of only later, after his return to Rome from Spain, did he undergo martyrdom there.
“The persecution of Christians never permeated the Roman system, and was a matter of the personal
initiative of individual emperors, who saw in the wide dissemination of the new Faith a danger for the
state religion, and also for the order of the State, until one of them, St. Constantine, finally understood
that they really did not know what they were doing, and laid his sword and sceptre at the footstool of
the Cross of Christ…” (Encyclical Letter of the Council of Russian Bishops Abroad to the Russian Orthodox
Flock, 23 March, 1933; Living Orthodoxy, #131, vol. XXII, N 5, September-October, 2001, pp. 13-14)
335 Matthew Kneale, Rome. A History in Seven Sackings, London: Simon & Schuster, 2017, p. 42.
336 Kneale, op. cit., p. 44.

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contradict the commandments of God Himself. Hence the veneration and obedience
that the early Christians displayed towards it.

Thus St. John Chrysostom asks: “Is every ruler elected by God to the throne he
occupies? Is every emperor, king, and prince chosen by rule? If so, is every law and
decree promulgated by a ruler to be regarded as good, and thus to be obeyed without
question? The answer to all these questions is, no. God has ordained that every society
should have rulers, whose task it is to maintain order, so that people may live in peace.
God allows rulers to employ soldiers, whose task it is to capture and imprison those
who violate social order.

“Thus God will bless and guide any ruler and any soldier who acts according to
these principles. But many rulers abuse their authority by amassing huge wealth for
themselves at the expense of their people, by unjustly punishing those who dare to
speak against their evil, and by making unjust wars against neighbours. Such rulers
have not been elected by God, but rather have usurped the position which a righteous
ruler should occupy. And if their laws are wrong, we should not obey them. The
supreme authority in all matters is not the law of the land, but the law of God; and if
one conflicts with the other, we must obey God’s law.”337

This “theology of politics”, enjoining the veneration of, and obedience to, political
authorities so long as they do not compel transgression of the Law of God, is found in
the earliest Fathers. Thus St. Clement of Rome writes in the first century: “Give us, O
Master, peace and concord, even as Thou didst give it to our forefathers when they
called devoutly upon Thee in faith and truth. And make us obedient to Thine own
almighty and all-holy name, and to all who have the rule and governance over us
upon the earth. For it is Thou, O Lord, Who in Thy supreme and ineffable might hast
given them their sovereign authority; to the intent that we, acknowledging the glory
and honour Thou hast bestowed upon them, should show them all submission. Grant
to them health and peace, that they may exercise without offence the sovereignty
which Thou hast given them.”338

Again, in the second century St. Justin the Martyr wrote: “We worship God only,
but in other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging you as emperors and rulers
of men and women, and praying that with your imperial power you may also be
found to possess sound judgement…”339 Similarly, the holy Martyr Apollonius (+c.
185) expressed the classic Christian attitude towards the emperor thus: “With all
Christians I offer a pure and unbloody sacrifice to almighty God, the Lord of heaven
and earth and of all that breathes, a sacrifice of prayer especially on behalf of the
spiritual and rational images that have been disposed by God’s providence to rule
over the earth. Wherefore obeying a just precept we pray daily to God, Who dwells in
the heavens, on behalf of Commodus who is our ruler in this world, for we are well
aware that he rules over the earth by nothing else but the will of the invincible God
Who comprehends all things.” Again, Athenagoras of Athens wrote to Marcus

337 St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply.
338 St. Clement of Rome, To the Corinthians, 60.
339 St. Justin the Martyr, First Apology, 17.

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Aurelius that Christians pray for the authorities, so that the son should inherit the
kingdom from his father and that the power of the Caesars should be continually
extended and confirmed, and that everyone should submit to it. 340 And St. Theophilus
of Antioch wrote: “Therefore I would rather venerate the king than your gods –
venerate, not worship him, but pray for him… Praying in this way, you fulfil the will
of God. For the law of God says: ‘My son, fear the Lord and the king, and do not mix
with rebels’ (Proverbs 24.21).”341

Tertullian (+ c. 240) “insisted that Christians rendered ‘such reverential homage as

is lawful for us and good for him; regarding him as the human being next to God who
from God has received all his power, and is less than God alone.’ Christians, Tertullian
argued, were even perfectly willing to offer sacrifice on behalf of the emperor, though
it had to be a Christian sacrifice: ‘We therefore sacrifice for the emperor’s safety, but
to our God and his, and after the manner God has enjoined, in simple prayer.’ Pagan
sacrifices are useless, the ‘food of devils’. Christians appeal to God, praying ‘for the
imperial well-being, as those who seek it at the hands of Him who is able to bestow
it.’.. Christians do just what the imperial cult demands, though in his own way.”342 In
other words, the only legitimate sacrifice a Christian can make to the emperor is the
sacrifice of prayer on his behalf; for he rules, not as a god, but “by the will of God”. So
the Christians by no means refused to give to Caesar what was his. Indeed, the
emperor was, in Tertullian’s words, “more truly ours (than yours) because he was put
into power by our God”, which is why the Christians prayed that he should have “a
long life, a safe empire, a quiet home, strong armies, a faithful senate, honest subjects,
a world at peace”.343

As for the pagan sacrifice to the emperor himself, Hieromartyr Hippolytus of Rome
(+235) wrote: “Believers in God must not be hypocritical, nor fear people invested in
authority, with the exception of those cases when some evil deed is committed
[Romans 13.1-4]. On the contrary, if the leaders, having in mind their faith in God,
force them to do something contrary to this faith, then it is better for them to die than
to carry out the command of the leaders. After all, when the apostle teaches
submission to ‘all the powers that be’ (Romans 13.1), he was not saying that we should
renounce our faith and the Divine commandments, and indifferently carry out
everything that people tell us to do; but that we, while fearing the authorities, should
do nothing evil and that we should not deserve punishment from them as some
evildoers (Romans 13.4). That is why he says: ‘The servant of God is an avenger of
[those who do] evil’ (I Peter 2.14-20; Romans 13.4). And so? ‘Do you not want to fear
the authorities? Do good and you will have praise from him; but if you do evil, fear,
for he does not bear the sword without reason’ (Romans 13.4).”344

340 Athenagoras, Representation for the Christians, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972, p. 93.
341 St. Theophilus, Three Books to Autolycus.
342 Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2010, p. 281.
343 Tertullian, Apologeticum 33.1.
344 St. Hippolytus, in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second

Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 56.

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 This attitude was well exemplified by St. Maurice and his Christian legion in
Agaunum. Like many martyrs before them, they did not refuse to fight in the armies
of the pagan Roman emperors against the pagans. But they refused to destroy a village
composed of fellow-Christians. For “we are your soldiers, yes,” said Maurice, “but we
are also the soldiers of God. To you, we owe the dues of military service – but to Him
the purity of our souls.”345

So even the persecuting emperors were recognized as having legitimate authority:

it was only when their commands contradicted the Law of God that they were defied.
And even then, there is no hint of physical rebellion against the powers that be among
pre-Constantinian Christians. Their attitude to Diocletian was like that of the Prophet
Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar: his power is from God, even if he sometimes uses it
against God. And this attitude bore good fruit: Nebuchadnezzar threw the Holy Three
Children into the furnace, but he later repented and praised the God of Daniel.

However, the mention of Daniel reminds us that there was a somewhat different
and darker attitude to Rome among the Christian writers. Following Daniel’s
prophecy of the four beasts (Daniel 7), Rome was seen as the last of four kingdoms –
the others were Babylon, Persia and Macedon - that would finally be destroyed in the
last days by the Kingdom of Christ. According to this tradition, the pagan absolutist
kings who persecuted the people of God were not legitimate rulers but tyrants.
Nebuchadnezzar, for example, is called “tyrant” in some liturgical texts: “Caught and
held fast by love for the King of all, the Children despised the impious threats of the
tyrant in his boundless fury.” 346

Now the distinction between the true monarch, basileus, and the unlawful usurper,
rebel or tyrant, tyrannis, was not new. Aristotle wrote: “There is a third kind of
tyranny, which is the most typical form and is the counterpart to the perfect
monarchy. This tyranny is just that arbitrary power of an individual which is
responsible to no-one and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to
its own advantage, not to that of its subjects and therefore against their will.”347

King Solomon wrote: “Fear the Lord and the king, and do not mix with rebels”
(Proverbs 24.21). After Solomon’s death, there was a rebellion against his legitimate
successor, Rehoboam, by Jeroboam, the founder of the northern kingdom of Israel.
And although the Prophets Elijah and Elisha lived and worked mainly in the northern
kingdom, they always made clear their loyalty to the legitimate kings of Judah over
the usurping kings of Israel. Thus when both kings, in a rare moment of alliance,
approached the Prophet Elisha for his advice, he said to the king of Israel: “What have
I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and the prophets of your mother…
As the Lord of hosts lives, Whom I serve, were it not that I have regard for Jehoshaphat
the king of Judah, I would neither look at you, nor see you.” (II Kings 3.13, 14)…

345 Eucherius of Lyons, The Passion of the Martyrs.
346 Festal Menaion, The Nativity of Christ, Mattins, Canon, Canticle Seven, second irmos.
347 Aristotle, Politics, IV, 10.

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 If Rehoboam and Nebuchadnezzar were tyrants, then it was logical to see tyranny
also in the Roman emperors who persecuted the Church. Thus some early interpreters
saw in one or other of the evil symbolic figures of the Revelation of St. John the
Theologian, which was written during the persecution of Domitian (c. 92), references
to Roman power.

Indeed, what contemporary Christian could not fail to think of Rome when reading
about that great city, symbolically called a whore and Babylon, who sits on seven hills
(Rome is situated on seven hills), who is “the mother of harlots and abominations of
the earth”, that is, the multitude of pagan cults that all found refuge in Rome, “a
woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of
Jesus” (17.5, 6)? Thus Hieromartyr Victorinus, Bishop of Petau, wrote that the whore’s
downfall was “the ruin of great Babylon, that is, of the city of Rome.”348 In other
words, Rome, according to this tradition, was seen, not as a lawful monarchy or the
blueprint of a future Christian autocracy, but as a bloody and blasphemous despotism,
in the tradition of the ancient despotisms that derived from Nimrod’s Babylon.349

This tradition became more popular as the history of pagan Rome reached its
bloody climax in the early fourth century. For the Church was now threatened, not
with a merely local persecution by local madmen, but with a determined attempt to
destroy it completely at the hands of men who considered themselves gods and whose
personal lives were often extraordinarily corrupt. The empire concentrated in itself,
and especially in its capital city, all the demons of all the pagan cults together with all
the moral depravity and cruelty and rabid antichristianity which those cults
encouraged. How could such a kingdom be established by God? Was it not that
tyrannical beast of which Scripture said that it was established by the devil (Revelation
13.2)? And so the image of the Empire was ambiguous for the early Christians: it was
both a true kingdom, an anti-type of God’s Kingdom, and a tyranny, a forerunner of
the kingdom of the Antichrist that would be wiped out at the Second Coming of Christ
Himself…

Nevertheless, it was the more optimistic view of Rome that prevailed. And even
during the persecution of Diocletian, when the Church was threatened with
extinction, the Christians never rebelled against the empire, but only against its
unlawful demands. And in reward for this patience, the Lord finally broke the crust
of ancient pagan despotism, bringing to birth a new creature designed specifically for
the spreading of the Faith throughout the world – Christian, or New Rome…350

348 Hieromartyr Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse.
349 Some saw in I Peter 5.13 a similar identification of Rome with Babylon, but this is doubtful. The

Babylon referred to there is probably Babylon in Egypt, from where St. Peter was writing his epistle.
However, there can be no doubt that for John’s first readers the image of Babylon would have reminded
them in the first place of Rome under Nero and Domitian.
350 Fr. Michael Azkoul, The Teachings of the Orthodox Church, Buena Vista, Co.: Dormition Skete

publications, 1986, part I, p. 110.

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 “The first millennium BC,” writes Harari, “witnessed the appearance of three
potential universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire
world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws.
Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The first universal
order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order to
appear was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the
order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

“Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to
transcend the binary division, ‘us vs. them’, and foresee the potential unity of
mankind. For the merchants, the entire world was a single market and all humans
were potential customers. They tried to establish an economic order that would apply
to all, everywhere. For the conquerors, the entire world was a single empire and all
humans were potential subjects, and for prophets, the entire world held a single truth
and all humans were potential believers. They too tried to establish an order that
would be applicable for everyone everywhere.

“During the last three millennia, people made more and more ambitious attempts
to realize that global vision…”351

The first state that realized this vision – that is, provided a potentially global
economic, political and religious order – was the Roman empire in the time of
Augustus. By the time of St. Constantine the vast empire was united economically by
the Roman denarius, politically by the Roman emperor, culturally by Hellenism and
religiously by Christianity. The fact that this empire did not in fact rule over the whole
world is less important than the fact that it aspired to that, thereby containing within
itself the potential for a godly globalization, the only possible real unity of the human
race.

When the Lord Jesus Christ, the King of heaven, was born as a man on earth, He
was immediately enrolled as a citizen of a state of the new-born Roman empire. For
“in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be
taxed” (Luke 2.1), and Christ, too, went to Bethlehem, the city of David, to be
registered for taxation in the universal empire ruled by Augustus. As Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovič writes: “In those days, Caesar Augustus was ruling the land. His supreme
rule over the whole earth is an image of God’s supreme rule over both worlds: the
spiritual and the material. The many-headed dragon of power, that had, from the
beginning of sin, brought decay to the peoples of the earth, was left with only one
head. All known nations and tribes on earth were subject to Augustus’ power, directly
or indirectly, whether only by sending him their tribute or by acknowledging Roman
gods and Roman officials. The struggle for power had died down for a time, and the
sole power over the whole world was entirely in the hands of Caesar Augustus. There
was neither man nor god over him; he himself was proclaimed a god, and men made
sacrifices to his image: slaughtered animals and unclean things. From the foundation
of the world, no mortal man had risen to greater power than Caesar Augustus, who
ruled without rival over the whole world; and indeed, from the foundation of the

351 Harari, op. cit., p. 191.

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world, man, created by the living God, had never fallen to such a depth of nothingness
and despair as then, when the Roman Emperor began to be deified – and he a man
with all man’s frailties and weaknesses, with the life-span of a willow tree, with a
stomach, intestines, liver and kidneys that were, after a few decades, to turn into a
worm-infested stench and lifeless dust; a man, the statues of whom, raised during his
reign, were to outlast his life, his power and his reign.

“In this time of external peace and internal despair, the Lord Jesus Christ, the
Saviour of the human race and Renewer of all creation, was born…”352

This coincidence of the birth of the King of kings with the birth of the Roman
Empire pointed, for many of the Holy Fathers and Church writers, to a certain special
mission of the Roman empire, as if the Empire, being born at the same time as Christ,
was Divinely established to be a vehicule for the spreading of the Gospel to all nations,
coming into existence precisely for the sake of the Christian Church, and creating a
political unity that would help and protect the spiritual unity created by the Church.

Thus Melitus, Bishop of Sardis wrote to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a

philosopher-king who was no friend of the Christians or their philosophy: “Our
philosophy flourished first among barbarians; but after it had appeared among your
peoples during the mighty principate of your ancestor Augustus, it became an
auspicious benefit, especially to your empire. From that time on the power of the
Romans increased in a great and splendid way: you became the successor to this
whom the people desired and will continue to do so, along with your son, if you
protect the philosophy which was nursed in the cradle of the empire and saw the light
along with Augustus, which also your ancestors honoured, as they did other religions.
And this is the greatest proof of its excellence, that our doctrine has flourished at the
same time as the happy beginnings of the empire and that from the time of the
principate of Augustus no evil has befallen it, but, on the contrary, all things have been
splendid and glorious in accordance with the prayers of all…”353

Gibbon said that the century or so of the reigns of the Emperors Nerva, Hadrian,
Trajan, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were probably the most peaceful and
prosperous in the history of the world. But this was also the period in which the Peace
of Christ was preached throughout the inhabited world, to the furthest bounds of the
empire and beyond. Thus a hymn to the Mother of God on an Egyptian papyrus and
dating to the mid-second century has even been found as far north as Manchester…

Again, in the third century Origen wrote: “Jesus was born during the reign of
Augustus, the one who reduced to uniformity, so to speak, the many kingdoms on
earth so that He had a single empire. It would have hindered Jesus’ teaching from
being spread throughout the world if there had been many kingdoms… Everyone
would have been forced to fight in defence of their own country.”354

352 Velimirovič, “The Nativity of Christ. 2”, Homilies, volume 1, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1996, pp.
25-26.
353 St. Melito, in Eusebius, Church History, IV, 26, 7-8.
354 Origen, Against Celsus II, 30.

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 Origen considered that the peace of Augustus was prophesied in Holy Scripture:
“He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the rivers even unto the ends of
the inhabited earth” (Psalm 71.7), and that it prefigured the spiritual peace of Christ.
Moreover, under the reigns of Augustus’ successors, the differences between the
peoples had been reduced, so that by the time of Christ’s Second Coming they would
all call on the name of the Lord with one voice and serve Him under one yoke.355

Again, in the fourth century St. Gregory the Theologian said: “The state of the
Christians and that of the Romans grew up simultaneously and Roman supremacy
arose with Christ’s sojourn upon earth, previous to which it had not reached
monarchical perfection.”356

And in the fifth century the Spanish priest Orosius, claimed that the Emperor
Augustus had paid a kind of compliment to Christ by refusing to call himself Lord at
a time when the true Lord of all was becoming man. Christ returned the compliment
by having Himself enrolled in Augustus’ census. In this way He foreshadowed
Rome’s historical mission.357

Also in the fifth century, St. Leo the Great, Pope of Rome, wrote: "Divine
Providence fashioned the Roman Empire, the growth of which was extended to
boundaries so wide that all races everywhere became next-door neighbours. For it was
particularly germane to the Divine scheme that many kingdoms should be bound
together under a single government, and that the world-wide preaching should have
a swift means of access to all people, over whom the rule of a single state held sway."358

As Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus wrote, “through the pax Romana” God “facilitated
the work of the preachers of truth. You see, once a single empire was formed, the
uprisings of the nations against one another ceased and peace took hold throughout
the whole world; the apostles, entrusted with the preaching of true religion, travelled
about safely, and by traversing the world they snared humankind and brought them
to life” 359

"When Augustus reigned alone upon earth, the many kingdoms of men came to an
end: and when Thou wast made man of the pure Virgin, the many gods of idolatry
were destroyed. The cities of the world passed under one single rule; and the nations
came to believe in one sovereign Godhead. The peoples were enrolled by the decree
of Caesar; and we, the faithful, were enrolled in the Name of the Godhead, when
Thou, our God, wast made man. Great is Thy mercy: glory to Thee.”360

355 Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages”, in Richard Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome, Oxford University
Press, 1992, p. 67.
356 St. Gregory, Sermon 4, P.G. 47, col. 564B.
357 Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans; in Jenkyns, op. cit., pp. 72-74.
358 St. Leo, Sermon 32, P.L. 54, col. 423.
359 Blessed Theodoret, Commentary on Zechariah, 9. Again, E. Kholmogorov writes: “Rome set herself an

unprecedentedly bold task – to establish peace throughout the inhabited world and root out barbarism”
(“Vybor Imperii” (The Choice of Empire), Epokha, N 11, 2001, pp. 15-16).
360 Festal Menaion, Vespers, the Nativity of Christ, "Lord, I have cried", Glory... Both now...

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 Christian kingdoms and autocracies could and did facilitate the acquisition of the
inner Kingdom of Grace; indeed, that was their main function. But they could not
replace it: the kingdom of men, however exalted, is no substitute for the Kingdom of
God. Moreover, the resurrection of kingdoms is as nothing compared to the
resurrection of souls and bodies… The degeneration of truly Christian kingdoms into
anti-Christian or pseudo-Christian despotisms or democracies that hinder rather than
facilitate the acquisition of the Kingdom of God, which resides within the redeemed
and deified human soul (for, as the Lord said: “The Kingdom of God is within you”
(Luke 17.21)), constitutes the main tragedy of history in its social, political, collective
dimension.

That the Roman Empire came into existence for the sake of the Church was a very
bold and paradoxical teaching. After all, the people of God at the beginning of the
Christian era were the Jews, not the Romans, while the Romans were pagans who
worshipped demons, not the True God Who had revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob. In 63 BC they had actually conquered the people of God; their general,
Pompey, had blasphemously entered the Holy of holies (this was considered by some
to be “the abomination of desolation”), and their rule was bitterly resented. In 70 AD
they destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in a campaign of appalling cruelty and
scattered the Jews over the face of the earth. How could pagan Rome, the Rome of
such fearsome tyrants as Nero and Titus and Caligula and Decius and Domitian and
Diocletian, possibly be construed as working with God rather than against Him?

The solution to this paradox is to be found in two encounters between Christ and
two “rulers of this world” – Satan and Pontius Pilate. In the first, Satan takes Christ
onto a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of this world in a moment of
time. “And the devil said to Him, ‘All this authority I will give You, and their glory;
for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You
will worship before Me, all will be Yours.’ And Jesus answered and said to him: ‘Get
behind Me, Satan! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him
only will you serve.’” (Luke 4.6-8). Thus Satan has control over all the kingdoms of
the world – but by might, the might given him by the sins of men, - not by right. Thus
St. Cyril of Alexandria exclaims: “How dost thou promise that which is not thine?
Who made thee heir of God’s kingdom? Who made thee lord of all under heaven?
Thou hast seized these things by fraud. Restore them, therefore, to the incarnate Son,
the Lord of all…”361 And indeed, the Lord accepted neither Satan’s lordship over the
world, nor the satanism so closely associated with the pagan states of the ancient
world. He came to restore true Statehood, which recognises the ultimate supremacy
only of the one true God, and which demands veneration of the earthly ruler, but
worship only of the Heavenly King. And since, by the time of the Nativity of Christ,
all the major pagan kingdoms had been swallowed up in Rome, it was to the
transformation of Roman Statehood that the Lord came.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke, Homily 12, New York: Studion
361

Publishers, 1983, p. 89.

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 For “the good news announced by the Lord Jesus Christ could not leave
untransfigured a single one of the spheres of man’s life. One of the acts of our Lord
Jesus Christ consisted in bringing the heavenly truths to the earth, in instilling them
into the consciousness of mankind with the aim of its spiritual regeneration, in
restructuring the laws of communal life on new principles announced by Christ the
Saviour, in the creation of a Christian order of this communal life, and, consequently,
in a radical change of pagan statehood. Proceeding from here it becomes clear what
place the Church must occupy in relation to the state. It is not the place of an opponent
from a hostile camp, not the place of a warring party, but the place of a pastor in
relation to his flock, the place of a loving father in relation to his lost children. Even in
those moments when there was not and could not be any unanimity or union between
the Church and the state, Christ the Saviour forbade the Church to stand on one side
from the state, still less to break all links with it, saying: ‘Give to Caesar what is
Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’ (Luke 20.25).362

Nevertheless, full integration of the Church in the Empire was impossible; for, as
Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, “in ‘this world’ Christians could be but pilgrims and
strangers. Their true ‘citizenship’, politeuma, was ‘in heaven’ (Philippians 3.20). The
Church herself was peregrinating through this world (paroikousa). ‘The Christian
fellowship was a bit of extra-territorial jurisdiction on earth of the world above’ (Frank
Gavin). The Church was ‘an outpost of heaven’ on earth, or a ‘colony of heaven’. It
may be true that this attitude of radical detachment had originally an ‘apocalyptic’
connotation, and was inspired by the expectation of an imminent parousia. For, even
as an enduring historical society, the Church was bound to be detached from the
world. An ethos of ‘spiritual segregation’ was inherent in the very fabric of the
Christian faith, as it was inherent in the faith of Ancient Israel. The Church herself was
‘a city’, a polis, a new and peculiar ‘polity’. In their baptismal profession Christians
had ‘to renounce’ this world, with all its vanity, and pride, and pomp, - but also with
all its natural ties, even family ties, and to take a solemn oath of allegiance to Christ
the King, the only true King on earth and in heaven, to Whom all ‘authority’ has been
given. By this baptismal commitment Christians were radically separated from ‘this
world’. In this world they had no ‘permanent city’. They were ‘citizens ‘of the ‘City to
come’, of which God Himself was builder and maker (Hebrews 13.14; cf. 11.10).

In His trial before Pilate, the Lord insisted: “You could have no power at all against
Me unless it had been given to you from above” (John 19.11). These words both limit
Caesar’s power, insofar as it is subject to God’s, and strengthen it, by indicating that
it has God’s seal and blessing in principle. They do not contradict His earlier words:
“My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36) because as Blessed Theophylact
writes: “He did not say: It is not in this world and not here. He rules in this world,
takes providential care for it and administers everything according to His will. But
His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, but from above and before the ages, and ‘not from
here’, that is, it is not composed from the earth, although it has power here”.363

362 K.V. Glazkov, “Zashchita ot Liberalizma” (“A Defence from Liberalism”), Pravoslavnaia Rus’
(Orthodox Russia), N 15 (1636), August 1/14, 1999, p. 10.
363 Bl. Theophylact, On John 18.36.

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 Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič writes: “Let no-one imagine that Christ the Lord does
not have imperial power over this world because He says to Pilate: ‘My Kingdom is
not of this world.’ He who possesses the enduring has power also over the transitory.
The Lord speaks of His enduring Kingdom, independent of time and of decay,
unrighteousness, illusion and death. Some man might say: ‘My riches are not on
paper, but in gold.’ But does he who has gold not have paper also? Is not gold as paper
to its owner? The Lord, then, does not say to Pilate that He is not a king, but, on the
contrary, says that He is a higher king than all kings, and His Kingdom is greater and
stronger and more enduring than all earthly kingdoms. He refers to His pre-eminent
Kingdom, on which depend all kingdoms in time and in space…”364

The Lord continues: “Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater
sin” (John 19.11). The one who delivered Christ to Pilate was Caiaphas, chief priest of
the Jews. For, as is well known (to all except contemporary ecumenist Christians), it
was the Jews, His own people, who condemned Christ for blasphemy and demanded
His execution at the hands of the Roman authorities in the person of Pontius Pilate.
Since Pilate was not interested in the charge of blasphemy, the only way in which the
Jews could get their way was to accuse Christ of fomenting rebellion against Rome –
a hypocritical charge, since it was precisely the Jews, not Christ, who were planning
revolution, and in fact rebelled in 66 A.D.365 Not only did Pilate not believe this
accusation: as the Apostle Peter pointed out, he did everything he could to have Christ
released (Acts 3.13), giving in only when he feared that the Jews were about to start a
riot and denounce him to the emperor in Rome.

Consequently, insofar as Pilate could have used his God-given power to save the
Lord from an unjust death, Roman state power appears in this situation as guilty, but
also as the potential, if not yet the actual, protector of Christ from His fiercest enemies.
In other words, already during the life of Christ, we see the future role of Rome as the
guardian of the Body of Christ and “that which restrains” the Antichrist (II
Thessalonians 2.7).

364 Velimirovič, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part III, September 30, pp.
395-396.
365 Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), "Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution", Orthodox Life,

vol. 35, no. 4, July-August, 1988, pp. 11-31.

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 27. WHY ROME?

Why did God choose the Roman Empire over other States as the special instrument
of His Providence and the protector of His Church, to the extent that, from the time of
St. Constantine in the fourth century, Christianitas came to be closely linked with
Romanitas? Professor Marta Sordi offers some speculative answers to this question.

First, “the Romans and the Christians, albeit in different ways and from different
points of view, both represented a way of overcoming the Graeco-Barbarian and
Graeco-Jewish antimony which the Hellenistic culture, despite all its ecumenical
claims, actually contained within itself.”366

Christianity is a truly universal religion in which “there is neither male nor female,
…neither Greek nor Jew, neither circumcised nor uncircumcised, neither barbarian
nor Scythian, neither slave nor freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Galatians 3.28;
Colossians 3.11). The Jews were not inclined either to accept or to propagate this
message; for in spite of the universalist hints contained in the prophets, the racial
distinction between the Jews and Gentiles (or goyim) remained a fundamental divide
in Jewish thought (although, as we have seen, Jewish proselytism began in the last
centuries before Christ). Similarly, the Greeks, even in the persons of their greatest
philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, looked on slaves, women and barbarians as unable
to partake fully in the splendours of Hellenic civilization.

True, there was a universalist element in the Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism,

which extended the notion of who was entitled to equality and democracy beyond the
narrow circle of free male Greeks to every human being. Fr. Frederick Copleston has
summarised the Stoic idea as follows: “Every man is naturally a social being, and to
live in society is a dictate of reason. But reason is the common essential nature of all
men: hence there is but one Law for all men and one Fatherland. The division of
mankind into warring States is absurd: the wise man is a citizen, not of this or that
particular State, but of the World. From this foundation it follows that all men have a
claim to our goodwill, even slaves having their rights and even enemies having a right
to our mercy and forgiveness.”367 Clearly, the idea of the brotherhood of man,
preached by the Stoics and adopted by the Romans, helped prepare the way for Christ,
in Whom “is neither Greek nor Jew, neither circumcised nor uncircumcised, neither
barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave nor freeman, but Christ is all, and in all”
(Colossians 3.11).

Another important element in Stoicism was fate. Stoicism took fate for a fact, and
made a virtue of it. Since men cannot control their fate, virtue lies in accepting it as the
expression of the Divine Reason that underpins the whole universe. Moreover, virtue
should be practised for its own sake, and not for any benefits it might bring, because
fate may thwart our calculations…

366 Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.
367 Copleston, History of Philosophy, p. 143.

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 However, it was not the Hellenistic Greeks that adopted this philosophy most
eagerly, but the Romans, demonstrating thereby that typically Roman trait of being
able, in Polybius’ words, “more than any others before them have ever been to change
their customs and to imitate the best”.368 The classical Greek Stoic concepts of
citizenship and equality before the law were now given a deeper connotation and
wider denotation through Roman writers like Cicero and his legions of imitators.

For in 212 the Emperor Caracalla offered citizenship to all free men in the empire,
so that they could both identify with the empire as their own country and rise to the
highest positions within it. “Though fiscally motivated,” writes Leithart, “the
constitution [of 212] had a profound effect on the character of the empire. The empire
was transformed from a patchwork of cities with their own local cults, customs and
laws into a single civitas, all its residents cives. Around the same time (223), Ulpian’s
treatise De officiis proconsulis was distributed to provincial governors as ‘the first
standard collection of laws and their underlying principles that provincial governors
had ever received.’ By the middle of the third century, the empire was theoretically a
single city, with one law and one worship uniting its citizens.”369

Indeed, the universalism of Roman law, applying a single standard to all citizens
of the Roman Empire, regardless of race or culture or creed, came to be, with
Christianity, one of the two main pillars of European civilization, giving practical
expression to the universalist leanings of the Roman – and Christian - soul. Indeed, it
was the universalism of Roman law that constituted the essence of the Roman people,
its Romanitas.

For, as Patrick Geary writes, in antiquity there were basically “two sorts of
‘peoples’. The one was constitutional, based on law, allegiance, and created by a
historical process. The other, standing largely outside the process of historical change,
was biological, based on descent, custom, and geography.” The Romans, in their own
eyes, were the uniquely constitutional people. “Romans alone were given a sense of
historical development, fluidity, and complexity. The ethnogenesis of the Roman
people, as enshrined in the works of Virgil and Livy, created a populus out of disparate
gentes. For Livy, Roman identity was the result of a continuous process of political
amalgamation. First, Aeneas united the Trojans and the Aborigines ‘under one law
and one name’. Likewise, Romulus called together the ‘multitude’ and gave them laws
by which they could coalesce into a single body of people. Thus the populus Romanus
alone, unlike foreign ‘peoples’, had a history. That history was the story of how the
Roman people, as a body of individuals who lived according to a single law, came
into being. Here was no question of putative ancestry, geography, culture, language,
or tradition. Throughout its long history, membership in the populus Romanus was a
question of constitutional law, not natural law, and, thus theoretically accessible to
all.”370

368 Polybius, in Sordi, op. cit., p. 169.
369 Leithart, Defending Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2010, p. 35. The flip side of this

situation, however, was that “deviation from Roman religion was by definition treason…” (ibid.).
Hence the persecution of Decius…
370 Geary, The Myth of Nations, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 42, 49-50.

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 This explains why the Roman Republic (rather than the Empire, because of the
latter’s despotism) was such an attractive model for Western political philosophers
from the eighteenth century onwards. For modern western thought about the state is
above all constitutional…

Roberts writes: “The essential qualities of the structure which sustained [the Roman
Empire] were already there under the republic, above all in the cosmopolitanism
encouraged by Roman administration, which sought not to impose a uniform pattern
of life but only to collect taxes, keep the peace and regulate the quarrels of men by a
common law….

“The empire and the civilization it carried were unashamedly cosmopolitan. The
administrative framework contained an astonishing variety of contrasts and
diversities. They were held together not by an impartial despotism exercised by a
Roman élite or a professional bureaucracy, but by a constitutional system which took
local elites and romanized them. From the first century AD the senators themselves
included only a dwindling number of men of Italian descent. Roman tolerance in this
was diffused among other peoples. The empire was never a racial unity whose
hierarchies were closed to non-Italians. Only one of its peoples, the Jews, felt strongly
about the retention of their distinction within it and that distinction rested on
religion…”371

Already in the first century we hear that “Hebrew of Hebrews”, St. Paul, saying
without shame or sense of contradiction: “Civis romanus sum”, “I am a Roman citizen”.
And already from the beginning of the second century, we find non-Roman emperors
of Rome; they came from as far afield as Spain and Arabia, Dacia and Africa.

For, as Rutilius Namatianus said of Rome: “You have made out of diverse races
one patria”.372 And Claudian wrote: “we may drink of the Rhine or Orontes”, but “we
are all one people”. For the they had become one in Rome:

She is the only one who has received

The conquered in her arms and cherished all
The human race under a common name,
Treating them as her children, not her slaves.
She called these subjects Roman citizens
And linked far worlds with ties of loyalty.373

“The breadth of the East,” wrote the Spanish priest Orosius, “the vastness of the
North, the extensiveness of the South, and the very large and secure seats of the
islands are of my name and law because I, as a Roman and Christian, approach
Christians and Romans.”374

371 Roberts, op. cit., pp. 189, 198.
372 Charles Davis, op. cit., p. 68.
373 Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1996, p. 128.
374 Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, 5.2.

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 Again, Namatianus wrote in about 420:

You created one homeland

For the differing peoples.
Those without justice
Benefited from your rule.
By allowing the vanquished
To share in your own laws,
You made a city
Out of what was once a world.

As Bertrand Russell writes, “The long dominion of Rome accustomed men to the
idea of a single civilization under a single government. We are aware that there were
important parts of the world which were not subject to Rome – India and China, more
especially. But to the Roman it seemed that outside the Empire there were only more
or less barbarian tribes, who might be conquered whenever it should be worthwhile
to make the effort. Essentially and in idea, the empire, in the minds of the Romans,
was worldwide. This conception descended to the Church, which was ‘Catholic’ in
spite of Buddhists, Confucians, and (later) Mohammedans. Securus judicat orbis
terrarum is a maxim taken over by the Church from the later Stoics; it owes its appeal
to the apparent universality of the Roman Empire. Throughout the Middle Ages, after
the time of Charlemagne, the Church and the Holy Roman Empire were worldwide
in idea, although everybody knew that they were not so in fact. The conception of one
human destiny, one Catholic religion, one universal culture, and one world-wide
State, has haunted men’s thought ever since its approximate realization by Rome…”375

Sordi points out, secondly, that “the Roman soul suffered from a perennial
nostalgia for the stern moral code and the virtues on which their culture had been
founded and that a religion which called for rigorous moral commitment and the
practice of personal and domestic austerity would have attracted many of those who
were disgusted with the corruption they saw around them. Equally attractive to those
who longed for the security of the group was, probably, the Christians’ strong
community feeling and their capacity for mutual assistance in times of need; and in
fact this kind of solidarity would be recognizable to the Romans as their own collegia,
enlarged and enriched with new ideas and with a deeper sense of human values…”376

The moralism of the Romans was closely linked to their respect for tradition,
especially religious tradition. “Their state,” said Posidonius, “is founded not only
upon their manpower, but upon their traditional way of doing things.”377 When
disaster threatened, “the Romans’ time-sanctioned ways, the customs of their
ancestors, were resurrected or reaffirmed. Catastrophe was staved off…”378 This fitted
in well with the Christians’ veneration of Holy Tradition…

375 Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 305.
376 Sordi, op. cit., p. 147.
377 Posidonius, in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2013, p. 138.
378 Holland, Rubicon, London: Abacus, 2003, p. 11.

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 Early Rome, as we have seen, was a very religious state. And when the empire was
inaugurated, religion immediately took an important part in state life. Thus in 28 BC,
the first Roman emperor Augustus “responded to a request from the Senate and
ordered the restoration of eight-two temples within Rome. Many were small, and in
most cases the structures conformed to the simple traditional designs rather than the
grander styles of the modern era. Structural restoration was accompanied by careful
revival of the old rituals undertaken in each one. Pietas was a virtue central to Rome’s
sense of identity and the neglect of proper reverence due to the old gods of the Roman
people was symptomatic of the moral decline of recent generations, so evident in the
decades of discord and violence. Moral explanations for upheaval came most readily
to the Roman mind and so restoration must involve changes in behaviour, conduct
and a reassertion of a good relationship with the gods who had guided Rome’s rise to
greatness. At the same time the Egyptian cult of Isis was banned from the City itself
[it was later permitted]. The spirit of religious revival was strictly traditional and was
led by Caesar personally.”379 Of course, the religion of the Romans was false, but the
place accorded to religion in state life could be filled by the true one, as it was during
the reign of Constantine.

Thirdly, the Romans’ religious concept of history, so different from the cyclical,
naturalistic ideas of the Greeks and other pagans, fitted in well with the Christian
concept. For, like the Christians, the Romans saw history as moving towards a definite
end in accordance with justice. The Aeneid of Virgil, their greatest poet, was a kind of
historical epic that justified Rome’s ascent to supremacy and showed sympathy for
subjugated people like Dido of Carthage. He warned the Romans not to forget the
ethical justification of their empire: “to impose the ways and works of peace, to spare
the vanquished, and to overthrow the mighty by means of war”. The historian Livy,
although “fiercely patriotic, [was] also inclined to judge in moral terms – for him,
Rome prospered when standards of morality were high and the Romans respected
tradition and the gods, and behaved with virtue. Failures, outbreaks of disorder and
ultimately civil war happened when all classes, and especially their senatorial leaders,
failed to live up to proper standards.”380

The Emperor Augustus worked very much within the guidelines laid out by Virgil
and Livy. His monuments and celebrations, while glorifying his own achievements
first of all, did so in the context of a justification of Roman history as a while, trying to
see the best even in enemies of his, such as Pompey, trying to see the present as the
culmination of the best aspects of the past. Moreover, he promoted private morality,
passing laws against adultery. Perhaps the greatest failure of his life was the
punishments he felt forced to pay out to the lovers of his daughter Julia, whom he
exiled to a remote island.

Thus Sordi writes: “Whereas Hellenic thinking had always seen the end in terms
of natural phenomena based on the concept of the corruption of the human
constitution and the exhaustion of the world itself, the Romans rarely saw things in
these terms. For the Romans, even before the advent of Christianity, the concept of

379 Galsworthy, op. cit., pp. 223-224.
380 Galsworthy, op. cit., p. 412..

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decadence was closely linked to morality and religion, so that the end tended to take
on apocalyptic overtones. This concept was to emerge in full force during the great
crisis of the third century, at the time of Decius and Valerian, but Augustan writers
had already diagnosed it in Rome’s first great crisis, the Gallic catastrophe of 386 BC,
and it was equally present in the first century before Christ. In all three cases, but
particularly in the period preceding Augustus’ accession, the crisis was felt to be a
consequence of a sin which had contaminated the roots of the Roman state and had
caused the gods to hate it. For example, in the first century the civil wars symbolic of
the scelus of Romulus’ fratricide, were thought to be the cause.381 Equally in all three
cases but particularly in the first century BC it seems that the Romans were convinced
that the sin could be expiated, the punishment postponed and Rome renewed. With
Augustus, the celebration of the return of the golden age follows punctually on the
heels of the crisis, as will happen again under Gallienus.

“This religious concept of history with its sequence of sin, expiation and
redemption, was part of the inheritance handed on to the Romans by the Etruscans.
According to ancient Etruscan beliefs, every human being and every nation had been
given a fixed period of life, divided into periods (saecula for nations), and marked by
moments of crisis which could be postponed by means of the expiation of the sin
which had originally caused them. The only exception was the supreme crisis, the last
and fatal one, for which there was no remedy…”382

The real redeemer of Rome, of course, was not Augustus, but Christ, Who was born
in Augustus’ reign and within the bounds of his empire. He truly expiated the original
sin, not only of Rome, but of all mankind, and brought the enmity between man and
God to an end. And the Roman conception of history undoubtedly made the reception
of Christ’s Gospel easier; it was a “schoolteacher to Christ” just as the Jewish law had
been…

Finally, the political system of the Roman Empire could be adapted to Christian
ends. For it was, in J.S. McClelland’s words, “a fortunate mixture of the three basic
types of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The Greek Polybius said
of the Republic: “The Romans themselves find it impossible to state for sure whether
the system is an aristocracy, a democracy, or a monarchy” 383 Even the Emperor
Hadrian, one of the most powerful rulers in history, could say, in a remarkably
democratic spirit: “I shall manage my responsibility as prince in the knowledge that
it is the affair of the people and not mine personally.”384

“The constitution of the Roman republic served long enough to be a miracle of

longevity, and the standard explanation for that longevity came to be that Roman
government was a fortunate mixture of the three basic types of government:

381 Thus the poet Horace wrote of the “original sin” of Remus’ murder, that “bitter doom pursues the
Romans: a crime, a murdered brother, once Remus’s guiltless blood flowed on the ground, a curse upon
his children.” (Jorge Martinez-Pinna, “The Founding of Rome”, National Geographic History, June-July,
2015, pp. 62-63) (V.M.)
382 Sordi, op. cit., p. 148.
383 Polybius, in Holland, Rubicon, p. 25.
384 Hadrian, in Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: A History of Prussia, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 41.

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monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The Roman consuls were its kings, the Senate
its aristocracy, and its people and their tribunes its democracy. It was standard
doctrine in the ancient world that ‘pure’ forms of government were not likely to last.
Even the best of monarchies eventually became corrupted, self-disciplined
aristocracies degenerated into oligarchies admiring only wealth, and democracies
always ended up in mob rule. Rome was lucky, because in the government of the
republic each part of the state tended to cancel out the vices of the other parts, leaving
only their virtues. The people tempered the natural arrogance of the aristocrats, the
senators tempered the natural turbulence of the people, while consulship for a year
was a constant reminder to the consuls that they were only temporary kings…. The
Romans stopped being the citizens of a free republic, and became the subjects of an
emperor, with their fixed political ideas largely intact.”385

Each of these elements - monarchical, aristocratic and democratic – brought

something important to Rome. On the one hand, its monarchical element served to
provide that strong framework of law and order over a vast area, the Pax Romana,
which so greatly assisted the spread and establishment of the Church – and
strengthened the teaching that all true authority comes from above, ultimately from
God. On the other hand, its democratic and humanistic elements served to encourage
the belief in the free will of the individual human being, and the value of each
individual soul, which is so important in Christianity. They tempered the tendency to
deify the ruler that was so pronounced in all the Near Eastern despotisms and had
crept into Rome from the East.

Old Rome was the universal kingdom that summed up the old world of paganism,
both pagan-despotic, pagan-aristocratic and pagan-democratic. Later, the new Rome
of St. Constantine crossed these pagan traditions with the autocratic traditions of
Israel.

The ultimate triumph of Christ over Roman paganism was prophesied in chapter
2 of Daniel. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had a vision: he saw a metal statue
in four parts: gold, silver, bronze and iron, which was crushed to pieces by a great
stone. The Prophet Daniel interpreted the vision to be a summary of world history:
the four parts of the statue refer to four world-empires, beginning with
Nebuchadnezzar’s own, which are crushed by a stone symbolizing the Kingdom of
Christ, which fills the whole earth and lasts forever.

The Holy Fathers completed the prophet’s interpretation by identifying the four
world-empires as those of pagan Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. The iron part of
the statue is said to crush all the other parts – which is precisely what Rome did in the
centuries before the Coming of Christ. For Rome was cruel and very strong – truly the
strongest of the ancient empires. “The image’s two legs,” writes St. Demetrius of
Rostov, “represent the two parts of this fourth kingdom, Eastern and Western, Greek
and Roman. Its feet are partly or iron and partly of clay, to portray how that kingdom
will itself be scattered like a vessel and be divided into many parts. As for the stone
that smote the image, this is Christ the Son of God, hewn from the mountain not cut

385 McClelland, op. cit., pp. 84, 85.

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by the hand of man, for He shall be born of a pure virgin, innocent of wedlock. He
will shatter and crush every temporal kingdom and raise up a spiritul kingdom that
shall abide forever.”386

The statue is also said to have had ten toes made of a mixture of iron and clay. This
refers to the flawed nature of ten successors of Roman power, which are divided,
forming a mixture of strength and weakness - firm one-man rule and anarchic
democracy. “The diminishing value of metals from gold to iron represent the
decreasing grandeur of the rulers of the successive empire [for their kingdoms were
inferior to yours, said the Prophet to Nebuchadnezzar], from the absolute despotism of
Nebuchadnezzar to the democratic system of checks and balances that characterized
the Roman senates and assemblies.”387

Nevertheless, as we have seen, it was the iron power of one-man rule that gained
the upper hand over the democratic elements in Roman history from the time of Julius
Caesar.388

386 St. Demetrius, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press,
2000, vol. IV: December, p. 315.
387 The Lives of the Holy Prophets, Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1998, p. 387. Charles T. Cook

put it as follows: “Babylon, the Head of Gold, was governed by an Absolute Autocracy. Medo-Persia,
the Breast and Arms of Silver, favoured an Aristocratic Oligarchy. This form gave place to Alexander
the Great’s Military Oligarchy. And in turn Rome, the Legs of Iron, represented Democratic
Imperialism.” (“Is the Book of Daniel Fact or Fiction?” Watching and Waiting, 2, May 1919, republished
in vol. 28, no. 15, July-September, 2015, p. 238)
388 Wiseman, “The Slow Death of Democracy”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 6, N 12, December, 2005, p.

15.

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 28. ROME AND CHINA

As we have seen, Rome encompassed all the major kingdoms of Europe and the
Middle East except Persia, and claimed to be the one, universal empire. However,
there was another contemporary kingdom that also claimed universality and would
seem to have had at least an equal claim to greatness – China. Moreover, the Chinese
empire lasted much longer than Old Rome, expiring at almost the same time as the
Third Rome, Russia, the early twentieth century; it even eventually succumbed to the
same enemy – communism. But China not only was not destined to become the cradle
for the growth of Christian civilization: it remained more impervious to the True Faith
than any other major nation on earth (with the possible exception of India), acquiring
its first truly Christian martyrs only in 1900.

Why? By attempting to answer this question, we may gain further insights into the
specific qualities of Rome that made it the object of the Lord’s election as the Guardian
of the Ark, the saving Ark of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Chinese history begins in about 3000 BC, and the first Yellow Emperor, Huangdi,
is said to have begun his reign in 2697 BC.389 China acquired both cultural and political
unity at about the same time as Rome came of age – in the late third century BC. Just
as Rome’s conquest of Carthage in 202 BC finally established her as the dominant
power in the Western Mediterranean, which dominance was extended to the East by
Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 BC, so the victory of the Chin over their last enemy
in 221 BC established that there would be only one Chinese State on the North China
plain, while the early Han dynasty had extended this rule over almost the whole of
modern China by its fall in 9 BC.390

Francis Fukuyama writes: “China succeeded in developing a centralized, uniform

system of bureaucratic administration that was capable of governing a huge
population and territory when compared to Mediterranean Europe. China had

389 Niall Ferguson, Doom..The Politics of Catastrophe, London: Allen Lane, 2021, p. 55.
390 And yet, writes Dominic Lieven, “there was nothing inevitable about the predominance of empire

in East Asia over the last two millenia. Nature in many ways pulled hard in the opposite direction, not
merely because of China’s unmanageable size but also because of the rivers and mountains that divide
so much of southern China into semi-enclosed regions with separate economies, cultures and
languages. A polity whose core, Han (that is, ethnic Chinese) population even today speaks a range of
first languages almost as diverse as the major languages of Europe could easily be seen as ripe for
divisions into nation states. For much of China’s history, separate states did in fact exist. In the long
run the preservation of a single written script understood and venerated by all educated Chinese as the
medium of high culture and of government was crucial to China’s unity. In the centuries immediately
before China’s unification in 221 BC, however, this script was beginning to diverge from one polity to
another. The same era witnessed a ‘proliferation of local literatures’. It was the supreme achievement
of the ‘First Emperor’, Qinshihuangdi, to reverse this process irrevocably by reimposing a standardized
Chinese script. ‘Without the Ch’in reform, it is conceivable that several regionally different
orthographies might have come into existence. And had this happened, it is inconceivable that China’s
political unity could long have survived.’ In his vast and scholarly history of world government, Sam
Finer comments that the First Emperor, in ‘his short, barbarous, but prodigiously energetic reign
irrevocably shaped the entire subsequent history of the Chinese state. His reign was decisive and
irreversible.’ No other individual has ever ‘left so great and so indelible a mark on the character of
government at any time or in any place of the world.’” (Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 33-34).

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already invented a system of impersonal, merit-based bureaucratic recruitment that
was far more systematic than Roman public administration. While the total
population of the Chinese empire in 1 A.D. was roughly comparable to that of the
Roman empire, the Chinese put a far larger proportion of its people under a uniform
set of rules than did the Romans. Rome had other important legacies, particularly in
the domain of law… But although Greece and Rome were extremely important as
precursors of modern accountable government, China was more important in the
development of the state.”391

This last judgement is doubtful. While the Chinese State is as impressive in its own
way as the Roman, it embodies what we may call the negative imperial idea as
opposed to the more complex, but positive imperial idea of Rome. Chinese
imperialism could only be despotic, having no way out, as it were, of the worship of
the state; whereas Roman imperialism was able to develop into the God-pleasing
polity of Christian Rome.

There were other similarities. Thus both universal empires of Rome and China
proclaimed their exclusion of the northern barbarians who did not share in their
civilization by building a wall. This was Hadrian’s Wall in the Roman West, and the
far longer and more massive Great Wall of China.

But there the similarities end… Let us begin with the walls. Hadrian’s wall was
built by Roman professional soldiers, at no significant cost in lives. But the Great Wall
of China, according to legend, cost a million lives. And this was only one of the
empire’s vast public works, such as the system of canals linking the Yangtse River
with the Yellow River to the north and Hangchow to the south. J.M. Roberts writes:
“Millions of labourers were employed on this and on other great irrigation schemes.
Such works are comparable in scale with the Pyramids and surpass the great
cathedrals of medieval Europe. They imposed equally heavy social costs, too, and
there were revolts against conscription for building and guard duties.”392

In other words, China was essentially the same kind of despotism as the pagan
empires of Egypt and Babylon, whereas Rome, as we have seen, had evolved a unique
system composed of republican, aristocratic and despotic elements. This meant that
the vitally important combination of freedom and discipline that characterized Roman
statehood was lacking in China, where, as Niall Ferguson writes, “there was no
religious authority superior to the emperor” and “there was no law other than laws
the emperor made”.393

Moreover, the ancestor-worship which was at the root of the Egyptian and
Babylonian systems of king-worship was still more clearly the root of Chinese
despotism.

391 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. 21.
392 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 359.
393 Ferguson, The Square and the Tower, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 64. So we must disagree with David

Starkey’s estimate that the Roman empire was “perhaps the purest, the most absolute monarchy the
world has ever seen” (Crown and Country). That title belongs to China…

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 “As a rule,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “all the monotheistic religions are more
favourable to the appearance of a monarchical form of supreme power [as opposed to
aristocratic or democratic forms], while polytheistic religions, on the contrary, are not
very favourable to it, unless the cult of ancestors creates the deification of the
representative of a dynasty in some ascending line of kinship.

“It is understandable how the deification of ancestors, who were at the same time
the founders of the royal dynasty, confers on the king the significance of being the
living expression of the spirit and faith of the people. The presence of this element is
more or less noticeable in all the ancient kingdoms. In Assyria the chief god was Assur,
who was also worshipped as the protector of the dynasty. He is called the son of Shem
[and therefore the nephew of Ham] in the Bible. In Egypt they openly declared that
originally the gods ruled in the country - in other words, the ancestors of the kings
were counted among the gods. As regards China, our well-known Sinologist S.
Georgievsky has very convincingly explained the significance of the worship of
ancestors through an analysis of Chinese hieroglyphs. As is well known, the
hieroglyphs of the Chinese express, not sounds, but concepts and combinations of
concepts, and therefore the analysis of hieroglyphs gives us the opportunity to
determine what circumstances and facts conditioned the composition of a given
hieroglyph. Thus, for example, we can clearly see from what elements ‘state’ or ‘army’
or ‘people’, etc., were constructed.

“Such an analysis of the hieroglyphs led Georgievsky to the conclusion that the
ancient Chinese kings were no more than elected leaders. They were elected as leaders
for their military services, since the hieroglyph ‘dai’ expresses precisely the fact that
the royal person is skilled in military matters. And then this originally elected leader
is later turned into a representative of Heaven itself.

“The general picture that emerges is as follows. One of the dynastic founders of the
Chinese, having been elected as leader during their conquest of their present
territories, was gradually turned into a supreme god, while the Chinese emperors
became his ‘sons’. The son of the first leader, who had probably not been very
powerful yet, offered sacrifices to him in accordance with the demands of ancestor-
worship. Consequently he became a necessary mediator between the people and the
dead leader, whose spirit was necessary to the people as a protector. In this way the
authority of his descendants grew from generation to generation. All the later kings,
on their death, filled up heaven with yet more spirits, who were protectors of the
Chinese, and all of them lived in ‘Shan-Di’ (Heaven). But each Emperor was ‘the son
of heaven’, and his very reign was called ‘the service of heaven’. In reality the ‘service
of heaven’ was at the same time both a family obligation of the Emperor in accordance
with ancestor-worship, and administration of the people over whom all these spirits
had ruled during their lives, becoming the protectors of their former subjects after
death.

“The ancestor-worship that was obligatory for each separate family had no
significance for all the other families of the Chinese people, while the cult of the
powerful tribe of Shan-Di touched them all. The ancestors of the other families
remained domestic spirit-protectors, while Shan-Di gradually grew into the main

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national Divinity. It is understandable what an aura of power the cult of Shan-Di gave
to the Chinese Emperor, who was unquestionably the natural preserver of this cult by
inheritance. In submitting to heaven, that is, Shan-Di, the people were thereby obliged
to submit to his earthly representative, the Chinese Emperor, and could not refuse him
obedience without at the same time refusing obedience to heaven itself. Thus from the
original, fortunate war-leader, who was raised from the midst of the leaders of the
Chinese clans equal to him, there grew, on the soil of ancestor-worship, a supreme
power that no longer depended on the people’s desires and choices, but on the will of
‘heaven’, ‘Shan-Di’.”394

“According to traditional Chinese political theory,” writes Yuval Noah Harari,

“Heaven (Tian) is the source of all legitimate authority on earth. Heaven chooses the
most worthy person or family and gives them the Mandate of Heaven. This person or
family then rules over All Under Heaven (Tianxia) for the benefit of all its inhabitants.
Thus, a legitimate authority is – by definition – universal. If a ruler lacks the Mandate
of Heaven, then he lacks legitimacy to rule even a single city. If a ruler enjoys the
mandate, he is obliged to spread justice and harmony to the entire world. The
Mandate of Heaven could not be given to several candidates simultaneously, and
consequently one could not legitimize the existence of more than one independent
state.”395

The concept of the will or mandate of heaven explained dynastic changes, as when
the Shang dynasty was overcome by the Chou in 1027 BC. For, as Roberts writes, “the
Chou displacement of the Shang was religious as well as military. The idea was
introduced that there existed a god superior to the ancestral god of the dynasty and
that from him there was derived a mandate to rule. Now, it was claimed, he had
decreed that the mandate should pass to other hands.”396

Already in the Shang dynasty the king, according to Gernet, was both “head of the
armies and chief priest”.397 Igor Shafarevich writes that the kings even in this very
early period ruled in a despotic, quasi-socialist manner: they called their subjects
“cattle”, their graves were surrounded by thousands of corpses of those killed to
accompany them into the next life, agriculture was controlled by the king, even the
time of marriages was determined by him.398

These despotic tendencies culminated in the reign of the first Ch’in emperor, Qin
Shi Huang. As R.W. L. Guisso and C. Pagani write: “Although Shihuang had only
eleven more years to live after [uniting the Warring States and] founding his dynasty,
under his rule a total transformation of the land we now call China took place. He
created new administrative units for the capital city of Xianyang and the rest of the
country, he abolished the feudal system of landholding and removed the aristocratic
warlords. Weights, measures and currencies were standardized throughout the land,

394 Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp. 79-80.
395 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, p. 220.
396 Roberts, op. cit., p. 111.
397 Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 22.
398 I.R. Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak iavlenie mirovoj istorii (Socialism as a phenomenon of world history),

Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 223-228.

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and even such details as the width of chariot axles were regulated to help prevent ruts
in the thousands of miles of new roads that were being constructed. The various and
confusing local scripts were eliminated and one standardized script used throughout
the land where a uniform and enormously detailed code of law was imposed
everywhere.

“Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of labourers and convicts were conscripted

into Shihuang’s great building projects – the canals and irrigation works plus the
hundreds of palaces and pavilions for the nobles whom he had moved away from
their own conquered territories in order to weaken their power. His most magnificent
works, those which would make his name immortal, were also being carried out
during this period of enormous change – the Great Wall, his fabled palace at Afang
and his enormous tomb where his childless concubines were buried with him.

“And in the year 213 BC an event took place which would make the First Emperor
infamous to all succeeding generations – the burning of the country’s books followed
by the deaths of 460 [Confucian] scholars of the period whom he buried alive.”399

In many ways, Shihuang represents the archetypal despot: his rise to power as a
warrior, drive for uniformity, cruelty, megalomania and paranoia, building projects,
militarization of society, mass displacement of vast numbers of people, distrust of
thinkers and book-learning, fear of death and search for immortality. It is not,
therefore, surprising that Mao Tse-tung – who, like Shihuang, seized control over the
whole of China from the north-west - should have looked to him as a role model.

“In 1958 at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
Chairman Mao remarked that Qin Shihuang was a ruler who advocated the
extermination of those who ‘used the past to criticize the present.’ Mao went on to say,
‘What does he amount to anyway? He buried only 460 scholars, while we have buried
46,000 counter revolutionary scholars alive.’”400

However, this seeming strength of Chinese civilization contained within itself one
major weakness – racial pride. The Romans followed the universalist tradition first
exemplified by Cyrus the Great; they were able to see the superiority of the Greek
civilization which they absorbed, and to learn from it. And their adoption from the
Christians of the religion of the True God under St. Constantine probably extended
the life of the empire for another eleven hundred years. The Chinese, on the other
hand, were so convinced of their infinite superiority over all non-Chinese that, as
Lieven writes, “from the Han era until today few Chinese have ever doubted the
absolute superiority of their culture to all others in the region. One contemporary
expert on China’s minority peoples speaks of ‘an innate, almost visceral Han sense of
superiority.’”401

399 Guisso and Pagani, The First Emperor of China, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989, pp. 14, 16.
400 Guisso and Pagani, op. cit., p. 14.
401 Lieven, op. cit., p. 28.

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 This conception was reinforced by the servile attitude of other eastern peoples in
the “Chinese sphere of influence” to the Han Chinese. Thus in 500 one Tatar ruler
imposed Chinese customs and dress on his people by decree.402 And so when the first
western embassies came to them in the eighteenth century they thought that they must
be bringing tribute, and could not understand the westerners’ refusal to kow-tow to
them. That arrogance (on both sides) cost the Chinese dear, and led to the final
collapse of the Chinese empire in 1911 and its surrender to communism in 1949.

But the most important element determining the fate of any empire is its religion.
The Romans’ adoption of Christianity under St. Constantine gave it discipline and
stability but at the same time also the freedom to think and strive beyond the earthly
homeland to the Heavenly Kingdom. The Chinese adoption of Confucianism, on the
other hand, while introducing discipline and order - Confucius’ definition of good
government was: “May the prince be a prince, the subject a subject, the father a father,
the son a son”403 – suppressed the striving for higher things.

It might have been different if the other Chinese religion, Taoism, with its amazing
foreshadowings of Christianity, had triumphed.404 According to the modern Chinese
philosopher Gi-ming Shien, as interpreted by Fr. Seraphim Rose, the distinctions
between various Chinese philosophies and religions are illusory. “In fact, there is a
very strong idea in the Chinese mind of orthodoxy: that there is a right teaching, and
that the whole society depends on that right teaching. This orthodoxy is expressed in
different forms. My teacher made it quite clear that Taoism is the esoteric side, and
Confucianism is the more social side. Taoism has to do with spiritual life and
Confucianism with social, public life.”405

Thus while “for his personal spiritual satisfaction, the [first] emperor turned to
Taoism and the folk beliefs which had become a part of it”, “for ruling the state, he
selected Legalism with its emphasis on strength, discipline and organization”, and
“for ruling his Blackhaired people, he chose Confucianism.”406 And so, as Roberts
writes: “Over a social ocean in which families were the fish that mattered [there]
presided one Leviathan, the state. To it and to the family the Confucians looked for
authority; those institutions were unchallenged by others, for in China there were no
entities such as Church or communes which confused questions of right and
government so fruitfully in Europe”.407

This point is reinforced by Fukuyama through his comparison between Chinese

and Indian attitudes to politics and religion: “In China, there were priests and
religious officials who officiated over the court’s numerous ritual observances and the

402 Roberts, op. cit., p. 354.
403 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 178.
404 Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999.
405 Shien, in Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Father Seraphim Rose, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of

Alaska Brotherhood, 2003, p. 76.

406 Guisso and Pagani, op. cit., p. 134.
407 Roberts, op. cit., p. 355.

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emperor’s ancestral tombs. But they were all employees of the state and strictly
subservient to royal authority. The priests had no independent corporate existence,
making the Chinese state what would later be labeled ‘caesaropapist’. In India, on the
other hand, the Brahmins [priests] were a separate varna [social class] from the
Kshatriyas [warriors] and recognized as having a higher authority than the warriors.
The Brahmins did not constitute a corporate group as well organized as the Catholic
church, but they nonetheless enjoyed a comparable degree of moral authority
independent of the power of the state. Moreover, the Brahmin varna was regarded as
the guardian of the sacred law that existed prior to and independently of political rule.
Kings were thus regarded as subject to law written by others, not simply as the makers
of law as in China. Thus in India, as in Europe, there was germ of something that
would be called the rule of law that would limit the power of secular political
authority.”408

This is not to say that Confucianism never countenanced any rebellion against the
state. But rebellion was rationalized in terms of a new “mandate from heaven”. In this
way as the foundations of society were preserved intact.

“For Confucian principles taught that, although rebellion was wrong if a true king
reigned, a government which provoked rebellion and could not control it ought to be
replaced for it was ipso facto illegitimate.”409

Thus Hegel’s later idea of the State as "the divine idea on earth" was in essence a
reformulation of the Confucian Chinese conception of the State as the reflection of the
impersonal heavenly order. For, as N.N. Alexeyev writes, "for Confucius, as for Hegel,
the State is 'the highest form of objective morality', than which there is nothing
higher".410

This may partially explain why the Chinese accepted communism with its
Hegelian philosophical roots so quickly…

There were other features making for the uniqueness of this monolithic and self-
perpetuating system… Thus “Chinese government,” writes Lieven, “though still
ultimately dependent on local landowners’ collaboration, was far more direct,
centralized and bureaucratic than the Roman even in the first and second centuries,
let alone subsequently under the Song and Ming dynasties. Writing on the period 27
BC to AD 235, one authority on Roman government comments that ‘the Roman
empire remained undergoverned, certainly by comparison with the Chinese empire,
which employed, proportionately, perhaps twenty times the number of functionaries.’
Even after the dramatic increase in bureaucracy and centralization under Diocletian
in the next century, the late Roman empire still had only one-quarter of the Chinese
level of bureaucrats.”411

408 Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 152.
409 Roberts, op. cit., p. 360.
410 Alexeyev, "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhii" (“Christianity and the Idea of the Monarchy), Put' (The

Way), N 6, January, 1927, p. 660.

411 Lieven, op. cit., p. 30.

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 This meant, however, that the Romans could make changes more easily than the
Chinese. Thus Constantine was able to ignore the Senate and bureaucracy and
introduce an entirely new official religion, Christianity. This would have been
impossible in China, where the bureaucrats, having a virtual monopoly of education
and power (the army had less prestige and therefore less power in China than in
Rome), and being committed to the perpetuation of their caste and its ideology, would
have stopped any such moves. It was this capacity of Rome to renew itself – to receive
a new faith in Christianity as it had received a new culture from Greece - that made it
the best political vehicle for the Gospel of Christ and its mission to the rest of the
world.

“From the perspective of AD 2000 the crucial elements in Roman culture were the
rationalist and logical way of arguing inherited from the Greeks, the Roman system
of law, the Greek stress on the individual and on existential tragedy, and the Graeco-
Roman tradition of self-government. To these one must add the impact of the
Christian drama of Christ’s life and resurrection; belief in the individual soul, its
sinfulness and redemption; and the importance of monotheism and the exclusionary
and dogmatic mindset it fosters. Most of these elements are alien to China’s Confucian
tradition, to Chinese Legalism and to later Buddhist influences on Chinese
civilization.”412

412 Lieven, op. cit., p. 29.

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 29. THE CULT OF EMPEROR-WORSHIP

Let us look a little more closely at the cult of the worship of the emperor, that last
and most serious obstacle to the whole-hearted embrace of Rome by the Church, the
last barrier to the reconciliation of Romanitas with Christianitas…

It is significant that the Christian martyrs of the Roman period were officially
condemned, not for their religion as such (Roman law did not punish beliefs, but acts),
but mainly because they were violators of the laws of the state, and in particular the
law that compelled the worship of the emperors. They were judged as hostes Caesari
(enemies of Caesar) and hostes rei publicae (enemies of the republic), that is, as political
prisoners and as “enemies of the people”. In the trials of the Christians three main
accusations were brought against them: that they were opponents of the state religion
(sacrilegium - godless ones), as non-venerators of the cult of Caesar (crimen laesae
majestatis) and as secret plotters (they formed secret societies).413

Now religion in Rome had always been a department of State. As J.M. Roberts
writes: “It had nothing to do with individual salvation and not much with individual
behaviour; it was above all a public matter. It was a part of the res publica, a series of
rituals whose maintenance was good for the state, whose neglect would bring
retribution. There was no priestly caste set apart from other men (if we exclude one or
two antiquarian survivals in the temples of a few special cults) and priestly duties
were the task of the magistrates who found priesthood a useful social and political
lever.414

“Nor was there creed or dogma…

413
Zhuravsky, Zhizneopisaniya Novykh Muchenikov Kazanskikh God 1918, Moscow, 1996, pp. 4-5; Bolotov,
V.V. Lektsii po Istorii Drevnej Tserkvi (Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church), Saint Petersburg,
1907, reprinted in Moscow, 1994, volume 2, pp. 14-15, Saint Petersburg, 1907, reprinted in Moscow,
1994, volume 2, pp. 14-15.
414 M.V. Zyzykin writes: “In the beginning the priestly functions, being a constituent part of the

imperium, had been carried out by State officials and only later were transferred to the particular duty
of the priests…
“[Religion] without the State did not have that independent life and task, distinguishing it from the
task of the State, that the Christian religion has. Its task was to guard the material interests of the State.
Each god was in charge of some aspect of earthly life and State life; prayers to the gods included only
requests for material good things; each god was besought in accordance with his speciality, but the
Roman gods did not touch the moral side of life...
“Not one single god was concerned with questions of morality. None of the gods inspired or laid
down moral rules. Care for the morality of the people lay on the family and the State; philosophical
morality also appeared without the gods… It worked out that it was not the gods who ruled the will of
the Romans, but the Romans – the will of the gods…
“The priesthood among the Romans was not a special form of service established from on high.
Among the Romans the right and duty to carry out sacrifices was indissolubly bound up with the
imperium. In private life the priest was a representative of authority – the head of the family, of the
tribe, of the college, of the brotherhood. In State life the natural priest was the head of the State… [Thus]
the highest official of the State was the guardian of religion, and not only of State order…” (Patriarkh
Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, pt. I, pp. 37, 38, 42, 43) (V.M.)

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 “Men genuinely felt that the peace of Augustus was the pax deorum [‘the peace of
the gods’], a divine reward for a proper respect for the gods which Augustus had
reasserted.” 415

The gods in question were not only the specifically Roman gods, but all the gods of
the various peoples of the empire. The tolerant, ecumenist attitude of the Romans to
the different religions of the empire was thought to be one of the causes of its survival.
None of the pagan cults excluded the others: in the minds of some of the sophisticated
intellectuals who studied Greek philosophy, they were all different expressions of a
single Divinity…

It was a natural step from the empire tolerating the worship of all the gods to its
worshipping itself. For if all the gods were worshipped for the sake of the stability of
the empire, then the empire was the supreme value. Thus, as Alexander Dvorkin
writes, “The most capable emperors tried to… attach to the ancient popular cults the
character of the worship of the state and its head. This patriotic deification of the
Roman state began already in the time of the republic. The cult of Dea Roma was
practiced in Smyrna already in 195 BC. It became noticeably stronger thanks to the
popularity of the Empire in the provinces, which were happy with the improvement
in the level of administration under the empire’s laws…”416

Emperor-worship seems to have begun with Julius Caesar, who made himself
dictator for life while refusing the title of “king” in respect for Rome’s anti-
monarchical traditions. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, Caesar was killed by a group of
senators determined to preserve the republic from a return to one-man rule; and
almost immediately a cult grew up. As Montefiore writes, “he turned down the throne
but received the titles Father of the Country, imperator, dictator for life and consul for
ten years, and he was declared to be sacred…”417 Again, Jonathan Hill writes: “A
number of inscriptions in the east, dating from late in his lifetime, hail him as a living
god. Caesar himself clearly approved of the development, since he had a month
named after himself, built a temple to himself, and appointed his friend Mark Antony
as his own chief priest.

“Caesar’s nephew, Augustus, the first true Roman emperor, developed some
aspects of this idea and abandoned others. He did not have temples and priests
dedicated to himself, but since he was Caesar’s adopted son, he was known as ‘the
divine son’ [or ‘son of a god’]. He avoided actually calling himself a god, but he did
not stop other people from doing so – especially in the provinces and the eastern part
of the empire. He revived the old position of pontifex maximus or chief priest in the city
of Rome, but he took over the position himself. All of Augustus’ successors adopted
the same title until AD 382. And after Augustus’ death, he was officially deified. This
became standard procedure for every emperor, except for the particularly unpopular
ones; a witness would swear to the Senate that he had seen the dead emperor’s soul

415 Roberts, op. cit., p. 203. Somewhat cynically, Seneca said that “the wise man will observe all the
religious rites because they are prescribed by law, and not because they are pleasing to the gods”.
416 Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the Universal

Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 29.

417 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 59.

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ascend to heaven from his funeral pyre, and the Senate would agree that he was now
a god. Even in their lifetimes, the emperors were held to be inspired by a divine spirit,
‘Caesar’s genius’, and people were expected to worship this spirit…”418

The most notorious of the god-kings of Rome was Nero. “Divine favour had
touched him from the very moment of his nativity, when the first rays of a December
dawn had bathed him in gold. Flatterers compared him to Apollo, praising him for
putting the scattered stars to flight, for bringing a new age of joy, and for ‘giving to
silenced laws new breath’. More literally than Augustus had ever done, he pushed
such propaganda to ferocious limits. When Nero brought his evangelion to Greece, he
did so in the flashiest manner possible: by remitting the province’s taxes, starting a
canal across the Isthmus of Corinth, and starring in the Olympic Games. The resources
of the entire world were at his service. Coins, statues, banners: all promoted Nero as
being haloed with divine fire. In the streets of the capital he would pose as the
charioteer of the sun. When he made his public debut on the lyre, an instrument to
which he had devoted much practice, he pointedly chose to sing of the punishment of
Niobe. Apollo, radiant in his cruelty, seemed to Nero’s dazzled admirers manifest on
earth…

“…Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab
and wearisome conventions that governed the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some
figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death;
he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth.
What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was
rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD
64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate a new order of things. In the very heart
of the city, a lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed
with whores ranging from the cheapest street-walkers to the most blue-blooded of
aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who wanted them, and knew
that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a
minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would
take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’”419

In 63 Nero executed the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and burned hundreds of
Christians in punishment for his own crime of burning down much of old Rome. (As
the saying went, he fiddled (on his lyre) while Rome burned…) So there would seem
to have been good reasons for Christians to refuse to recognize this incarnation of
everything that was abominable and anti-Christian. And yet, while refusing to give
him divine honours, the Christians, following the instructions of their martyred
apostle, both recognized him and prayed for him fervently…

Nero was creating his own new world; for emperor-worship was not part of the
original constitution of the Roman Empire; such famous emperors as Tiberius, Trajan
and Marcus Aurelius explicitly rejected it. "In fact," as Sordi writes, "the imperial cult
had never been imposed formally, or even encouraged, by any of the emperors to

418 Hill, Christianity. The First 400 Years, London: Lion Hudson, 2013, p. 130.
419 Holland, Dominion, London: Abacus, 2019, p. 79-80.

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whom the Christian apologists from Aristides to Quadratus, from Melito to
Athenagoras, were addressing their works."420 In the cases of those few who tried to
enforce it, such as Nero and Domitian, it was in essence an import from the eastern
pagan theocracies, an heretical aberration from the true Roman tradition.

Thus the early Christians could quite clearly and sincerely distinguish the honour
in which they held the institution of the empire and the emperor himself from the
disgust they felt for the cult of emperor-worship during the few reigns in which it was
imposed; which is why they refused to offer incense to the emperor's statue, while
continuing to pay taxes and carry out military service.

Emperor-worship, as we have seen, may have been imported from Egypt. Both
Caesar and Augustus had been in Egypt; and Augustus was clearly impressed, as had
been Caesar and Mark Anthony, by the civilization he found there. And, of course, by
its queen, Cleopatra. He brought back an obelisk to Rome and named himself, it is
said, after the month in which Cleopatra died, August…

There is even a theory that Plutarch’s story of Cleopatra’s suicide by snake-bite was
a rewriting of history ordered by Augustus, and that Cleopatra was in fact killed on
Augustus’ orders in order to remove a dangerous contender to the throne of Rome.
For Cleopatra had made her son, Caesarion, her co-ruler, and he, being the natural
son of Julius Caesar, was a more direct heir to Caesar than Augustus himself. If
Caesarion had become the emperor in Rome, then not only would eastern ideas of
divine kingship been introduced still more directly into Rome, but Rome itself may
have become an oriental despotism…

Dio Cassius writes that Augustus “gave permission for sacred precincts to be set
up in both Ephesus and Nicaea, dedicated to Rome and his father [Julius] Caesar, to
whom he had given the title, the Divine Julius. These cities at that time held pre-
eminent positions in Asia and Bithynia respectively. The Romans who lived there he
bade pay honour to these two divinities, but he allowed the provincials, whom he
styled Greeks, to consecrate precincts to himself, the Asians in Pergamum, the
Bithynians in Nicomedia. From such a beginning this practice has also occurred under
other emperors, and not only in the Greek provinces but also in the others that are
subject to Rome. In the city of Rome itself and the rest of Italy, however, no emperor,
no matter how deserving of praise, has dared to do this (i.e. style himself a god). Yet
even there divine honours are accorded and shrines set up to emperors who have
ruled well, after their demise."421

It is no accident that the only martyr mentioned by name in Revelation is Antipas,

Bishop of Pergamum, “where Satan’s seat is” (2.13). For Pergamum was where the
worship of Augustus was first instituted. The altar at Pergamum later became the
model for Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow…

420 Marta Sorti, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 176.
421 Dio Cassius, LI, 20, in S. Ireland, Roman Britain: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 175.

239
 However, the same emperor was compelled to curb excessive emperor-worship by
his regard for the traditions of republican Rome, where sovereign power was deemed
to belong to the Senate and the People. Julius Caesar had been murdered precisely
because he made himself dictator. So Augustus, while wielding all power de facto, still
maintained the fiction that he was merely princeps, “first among equals”. In this
context, it is probably significant that Augustus allowed altars to be dedicated to
himself only in the provinces, whose inhabitants he called “Greeks”, and not in Rome
itself. The strength of this republican tradition, allied to other philosophical elements
such as Stoicism, guaranteed that emperor-worship, as opposed to the worship of
“ordinary” gods, remained an intermittent phenomenon. It was felt to be an
essentially alien, non-Roman tradition throughout the imperial period. Thus if
Augustus had a temple erected to his divinity, Tiberius rejected divine honours; if
Domitian considered himself a god, Trajan emphatically did not.

“After Augustus,” writes Roberts, “emperors always held the office of chief priest
(pontifex maximus) and political and religious primacy were thus combined in the same
person. This began the increasing importance and definition of the imperial cult itself.
It fitted well with the Roman’s innate conservatism, his respect for the ways and
customs of his ancestors. The imperial cult linked respect for traditional patrons, the
placating or invoking of familiar deities and the commemoration of great men and
events, to the ideas of divine kingship that came from the East, from Asia. It was there
that altars were first raised to Rome or the Senate, and there that they were soon
reattributed to the emperor. The cult spread through the whole empire, though it was
not until the third century AD that the practice was wholly respectable at Rome itself,
so strong was the republican sentiment. But even there the strains of empire had
already favoured a revival of official piety which benefited the imperial cult.”422

Sometimes the emperors deified their favourites. Thus early in the second century
the Emperor Hadrian deified his favourite Antinous, of whom St. Athanasius the
Great writes: “Although they knew he was a man, and not an honourable man but
one filled with wantonness, yet they worshipped him through fear of the ruler… So
do not be surprised or think that what we have said is improbable, for quite recently,
and perhaps even up to now, the Roman senate decrees that their emperors who
reigned from the beginning – either all of them or whomever they choose and decide
upon – are among the gods, and prescribes that they be worshipped as gods.”423
Similarly, Arnobius wrote: “We worship one born a man. What of that? Do you
worship no one born a man? Do you not worship one or another, yes, countless
others? Indeed, have you not elevated from the level of mortals all those you now
have in your temples and made a gift of them to heaven and the stars?”424

In the 150 years between Domitian and Decius, although Christianity remained
technically illegal, the emperors initiated no systematic, empire-wide persecution
against the Christians, convinced as they were that they did not constitute a political
threat. Thus in 112, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, “wrote a famous letter to

422 Roberts, op. cit., p. 203.
423 St. Athanasius, Contra Gentes, 9.
424 Arnobius, The Case against the Pagans, I, 37:

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the emperor Trajan asking him for advice about Christianity. Apparently many people
had been accused of Christianity, but when Pliny interrogated them, he found that
they seemed to be innocent of the crimes of which they were usually accused. He
executed them anyway because he thought that their ‘obstinacy and unbending
perversity’ should be punished, but he was unsure whether it was a crime simply to
be a Christian, or whether the criminality lay in the things that Christians were said
to do. Trajan replied (rather briefly, suggesting that this matter was low on his list of
priorities) that Pliny was acting quite correctly. Any Christian that turned up should
be executed if they refused to sacrifice to the gods, or freed if they did sacrifice, but it
was not worth making a special effort to find and arrest them. In around 125 AD, the
emperor Hadrian told the proconsul of Asia that Christians needed to be shown to
have done something illegal before being punished, and that people making
groundless accusations should themselves be punished severely. Most governors
during the second and early third centuries seem to have taken this approach, and
many Christian communities seem to have been quite open about their faith.”425

The emperors were often more favourably inclined towards the Christians than
either the Senate, which remained a powerful bastion of paganism, or the masses, who
tended to blame the Christians’ “atheism”, that is, their refusal to worship the gods,
for the disasters that befell the empire. The Roman authorities generally looked for
ways to protect the Christians, and were only compelled to adopt stricter measures in
order to appease the mob. We see this, for example, in the martyrdom of St. Polycarp,
Bishop of Smyrna. It was therefore in the Church’s long-term interest to support the
imperial power, enduring the occasional madmen, such as Nero and Domitian, and
waiting for the time when the emperor would not only protect her against her
enemies, but take the lead in converting the body of the empire to Christ. For the
Church knew, through the Spirit dwelling within her, that God had chosen Rome to
be the cradle of the Church. And we know that the countries that trace their descent
from Rome have ever since taken the lead, for better or worse, in the religio-political
development of mankind.

A landmark in the history of Christianity in the Roman Empire was reached when
the Emperor Philip the Arab (244-249) and his son and heir Philip were baptized by
St. Fabian, Pope of Rome.426 Immediately the evil empire struck back: the new
emperor, Decius (249-51) initiated the first systematic, empire-wide persecution of the
faith. St. Fabian was among the holy martyrs…

“The rise of Christianity,” writes Paul Stephenson, “coincided with a period of

crisis for the empire. It was held by many to be the cause of the crisis, and for that
reason one finds, for the first time in the mid-third century, a systematic persecution
of Christians throughout the empire. At the same time, in response to the crisis but in
fact contributing far more effectively to its perpetuation, one witnesses a dramatic rise

425 Hill, op. cit., pp. 137-138.
426 Velimirović, Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, vol. 3, July 1, p. 5, August 5,

pp. 157-158.

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in the political power of the army. Through the third century, the army was the only
instrument of state that could rise up and strike down emperors. To retain power,
therefore, third-century emperors struggled with only limited success to maintain
control over their errant soldiers. In the half-century between the end of the Severan
dynasty (193-235) and the foundation of the Tetrarchy (in 284),… more than fifty men
claimed the title emperor. Twenty-two of these were universally recognized, of which
the vast majority were both acclaimed and later murdered by troops under their
command. All but two of the recognized emperors who reigned from AD 251 until
284 died in this manner, the exception being Valerian (253-60), who was captured in
battle with the Persians, and Claudius II Gothicus (268-70), who died of ‘a most
grievous pestilence’, probably measles or smallpox.”427

In 259, when he was co-emperor with his father Valerian, the Emperor Gallienus
(260-68) issued the first official declaration of tolerance in relation to the Christians,
restoring their places of worship and cemeteries; which was de facto recognition of the
property of the Church. “It is not, perhaps, a coincidence,” writes Sordi, “that
Gallienus’ change of policy towards the senate went hand in hand with the official
recognition of the Christian religion which the senate had forbidden for the previous
two centuries. Gallienus broke completely with the pro-senate policy of the preceding
emperors, he forbade the senators military command and he cut them off from all the
sources of real power. It was this break with the senate, this decision on the part of
Gallienus to do without its consent, that made it possible for the Emperor to grant to
the Christians the recognition which was so necessary for the well-being of the empire,
but which the traditionalist thinking of the senate had always feared so much.”428

An important change in the relationship between the Church and the Empire was
signaled when, in 270, a Council of the Church of Antioch appealed to the Emperor
Aurelian to remove the heretical bishop Paul of Samosata, who considered the Trinity
as three aspects of God rather than persons.429 They thereby created a precedent for the
intervention of emperors into Church matters.430 But Paul, relying on the patronage
of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, rejected this judgement. Then, in 272, Aurelian, having
defeated Zenobia in battle and taken her captive to Rome, referred the case to the
bishop of Rome, whose verdict he undertook to uphold.

Meanwhile, the Lord Himself had revealed the truth about Paul’s heretical teaching
directly, without the mediation of emperors or popes, to St. Gregory the
Wonderworker, Bishop of Neocaesarea (+275). At first, “since Gregory was uncertain
how regard it, he began to pray fervently to God and the Mother of God to reveal to
him the truth concerning the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. One night, while he was
praying ardently, the most pure Virgin Mary appeared to him, radiant as the sun, in
the company of Saint John the Theologian, who was clothed in a bishop’s garments.
Pointing to Gregory with her hand, the most pure Virgin commanded Saint John to
instruct him in the correct teaching concerning the mystery of the Holy Trinity. By the

427 Stephenson, Constantine. Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor, London: Quercus, 2009, p. 62.
428 Sordi, op. cit., p. 117. And yet he caused the martyrdom of the Holy Martyr Eugenia and her family,
who are commemorated on December 24.
429 Aurelian, too, was a persecutor of Christians. See the life of St. Chariton (September 28).
430 Stephenson, op. cit., p. 260.

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command of the Mother of God, saint Gregory drew from the inexhaustible depth of
wisdom, quickly learning the great mysteries of God from Saint John the Theologian.
The words of revelation spoken by John were these: ‘There is one God, the Father of
the living Word, the hypostatic Wisdom, Power, and the Father’s eternal Image: the
perfect begetter of Him Who is perfect, Father of the only-begotten Son. There is one
Lord, one God of one God, the Imprint and Image of the Divinity, creative Word,
Wisdom which sustains everything that exists, the Power which has made all creation,
true Son of the true Father, unseen God of the invisible Father, incorruptible Offspring
of the incorruptible One, immortal and eternal Child of the everlasting One. There is
one Holy Spirit, Who has His being from the Father and is revealed unto men through
the Son. He is the perfect Image of the perfect Son, the Source of life for all things, the
sacred Fountain in Whom God the Father and God the Son are revealed. He is at once
above all and in all, and fills all things. This is the perfect Trinity, Which knows no
division nor estrangement in respect to Its shared glory, immortality and sovereignty.
There is nothing created in the Trinity or subject to another or brought from without,
as though once non-existent and later introduced, for at no time did the Father exist
without the Son or the Son without the Spirit; because the Trinity abides forever
unchanged, without variation or mutation.”

“After seeing this vision, Saint Gregory wrote out with his own hand the words
Saint John the Theologian had spoken to him. This record was preserved for many
years in the Church of Neo-Caesarea.”431

It was the Emperor Aurelian who introduced the cult of the Unconquered Sun, the
original faith of St. Constantine. And it would be Constantine who would make the
crucial epoch-making change from this monotheistic but pagan cult to that of the
Unconquerable Sun of Righteousness, Jesus Christ…

St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Missouri:
431

Chrysostom Press, 2001, vol. III: November 17, pp. 372-372.

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 30. THE DIOCLETIAN PERSECUTION

In 284 the Emperor Diocletian came to the throne. He promptly decided to divide
his power into four, into a “tetrarchy” of emperors consisting of two Augusti, one for
the East and the other for the West, together with their deputies, the Caesars. The four
emperors were bound together through intermarriage and through the supposed
descent of the Augusti from Jupiter and of the Caesars from Hercules, “gods by birth
and creators of gods”. At first the reorganization worked well; peace and prosperity
was restored to the empire. Moreover, Diocletian was at first tolerant towards
Christianity. Thus, as Arthur Mason writes, “his own wife and daughter were
reckoned Christians by a writer who lived in the imperial city and must have known.
His most trusted chamberlains and court officials were all avowedly Christians.
Christians were entrusted with the government of provinces and high offices of state,
and were expressly dispensed, it is said, from attending religious ceremonies which
were not agreeable to their consciences…”432

However, in spite of an increase in its numbers, within the Church there was a low
level of morality, according to Eusebius. “He speaks of pride, sloth and hypocrisy, of
factions and envy which gave rise to fierce disputes and violent abuse. The bishops
themselves only added to the furious contentions. Jealousy and ambition inflamed
their enmity and mutual hatred until they forgot their religious duties and, as if they
had been mere atheists, ‘took not the least care to secure the good will and propitious
favour of the Deity’. The persecutions that broke out at the beginning of the fourth
century appear to Eusebius the just punishment of such wickedness.”433

In 299, an ominous event took place in Antioch. The priests repeatedly failed to get
any responses to their questions through the entrails of their sacrifical victims. This
seemed to indicate that the gods were displeased, and Diocletian was worried…

“Living in the east and moving constantly through the provinces,” writes
Stephenson, “Diocletian became increasinly intolerant of religious differences. He was
no longer willing to countenance claims by Christians, like Origen, that they prayed
in their own way for his well-being. Their forms of worship, their ways of being
Roman, clashed with his own limited conception of romanitas. Riding beside
Diocletian on a protracted trip through Egypt and Syria in 301-2 was the military
tribune Constantine, who observed the aging emperor’s consternation at the antics of
adherents of various religious sects. In March, 302, a letter was despatched from
Alexandria, where Diocletian had recently arrived, to Julianus, the proconsul of
Africa, instructing him that: ‘Excessive leisure sometimes provokes ill-suited people
to cross natural limits and encourages them to introduce false and outrageous forms
of superstitious doctrine… No new belief should criticize the religion of old.’”434

432 Mason, The Historic Martyrs of the Primitive Church, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905, p. 205.
Nevertheless, there were still Christian martyrdoms in this period. See the life of St. Sebastian and his
companions in Rome in the year 287.
433 Marjorie Strachey, Saints and Sinners in the Fourth Century, London: William Kimber, 1958, p. 14.
434 Diocletian, in Stephenson, op. cit., p. 104.

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 In 302 the same disturbing silence of the pagan gods to the iniquiries of their
worshippers took place at Antioch. And in the autumn, in the same place, Diocletian
felt compelled to order the execution of Deacon Romanus of Caesarea in Palestine…
He summoned the Caesar of the East, Galerius, to his capital at Nicomedia… Galerius
advised him to persecute the Christians.

Diocletian still hesitated; he hated any novelty in religion, any departure from the
ancient religion of Rome, but at the same time he feared that persecution would be
unpopular… As Sordi writes, “During the first two centuries it had been public
opinion itself which had called for persecution and the state which had hesitate or
even refused to go along with the demands of the populace. Now, the two great state
persecutions – that of Valerian and that, far more serious, of Diocletian, Galerius and
Maximinus – saw the progressive and increasingly determined dissociation of the
pagan masses from the persecutions organised by their leaders…”435

Seeking guidance, Diocletian consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. The oracle
replied that “the just ones” had silenced the prophecy.

“The just ones” were interpreted to mean the Christians, and on February 23, 303
the feast of the Terminalia, the persecution designed to terminate Christianity began
with the destruction of the Christian basilica in Nicomedia. Later, the tetrarchy
assembled in Rome to celebrate their joint rule and to establish the old religions and
their morals and “exterminate completely” the new ones. 436 Churches were
destroyed, the Holy Scriptures burned, and Christians who refused to sacrifice were
tortured and killed.

“Then, then it was,” writes Eusebius, “that many rulers of the churches bore up
heroically under horrible torments, an object lesson in the endurance of fearful
ordeals; while countless others, their souls already numbed with cowardice, promptly
succumbed to the first onslaught. Of the rest, each was subjected to a series of different
tortures, one flogged unmercifully with the whip, another racked and scraped beyond
endurance, so that the lives of some came to a most miserble end. But different people
came through the ordeal very differently: one man would be forcibly propelled by
others and brought to the disgusting, unholy sacrifices, and dismissed as if he had
sacrificed, even if he had done no such thing; another, who had not even approached
any abomination, much less touched it, but was said by others to have sacrificed,
would go away without attempting to repudiate the baseless charge. Another would
be picked up half dead, and thrown away as if already a corpse; and again a man lying
on the ground might be dragged a long way by his feet, though included among the
willing sacrificers. One man would announce at the top of his voice his determination
not to sacrifice, another would shout that he was a Christian, exulting in the confession
of the Saviour’s Name, while yet another insisted that he had never sacrificed and
never would…

435 Sordi, op. cit., p. 131.
436 Jean-Louis Voisin, “Le Songe de l’Empereur” (The Dream of the Emperor), Histoire (Le Figaro), 8,

June-July, 2013, p.46.

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 “But words cannot describe the outrageous agonies endured by the martyrs in the
Thebais [Egypt]. They were torn to bits from head to foot with potsherds like claws
till death released them. Women were tied by one foot and hoisted high in the air,
head downwards, their bodies completely naked without a morsel of clothing,
presenting the most shameful, brutal, and inhuman of all spectacles to everyone
watching. Others again were tied to trees and stumps and died horribly; for with the
aid of machinery they drew together the very stoutest boughs, fastened one of the
martyr’s legs to each, and then let the boughs fly back to their normal position; thus
they managed to tear apart the limbs of their victims in a moment. In this way they
carried on, not for a few days or weeks, but year after year. Sometimes ten or more,
sometimes over twenty were put to death, at other times at least thirty, and at yet
others not far short of sixty; and there were occasions when on a single day a hundred
men as well as women and little children were killed, condemned to a succession of
every-changing punishment.

“I was in these places, and saw many of the executions for myself. Some of the
victims suffered death by beheading, others punishment by fire. So many were killed
on a single day that the axe, blunted and worn out by the slaughter, was broken to
pieces, while the exhausted examiners had to be periodically relieved. All the time I
observed a most wonderful eagerness and a truly divine power and enthusiasm in
those who had put their trust in the Christ of God. No sooner had the first batch been
sentenced, than others from every side would jump on to the platform in front of the
judge and proclaim themselves Christians. They paid no heed to torture in all its
terrifying forms, but undaunted spoke boldly of their devotion to the God of the
universe and with joy, laughter, and gaiety received the final sentence of death: they
sang and sent up hymns of thanksgiving to the God of the universe till their very last
breath…”437

Several of the martyrs were high-ranking officials in the Roman hierarchy. One
famous example is the holy, glorious great martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica. As
Bishop Maximus (Marretta) writes: “Saint Demetrius was governor-general of
Thessalonica, a position that gave him authority not only over the city, but over all of
Macedonia, as well as other parts of Greece and some areas of modern Bulgaria. The
emperors at that time were the brutal Diocletian and Maximian, who presided over
the most ferocious persecution of the Church in history, except for the one perpetuated
by the Bolsheviks in Russia during the twentieth century.

“As military governor, Demetrius was responsible for apprehending and executing
the Christians of the region, but the young general was himself a secret Christian and
instead used his lofty position to further the faith of Christ, becoming a new Saint Paul
to the Thessalonians. Word of this of course reached Emperor Maximian, who at that
time had just concluded a campaign in the northern Balkans. Learning that Maximian
was on his way to deal with him, Demetrius freed all his slaves and gave his
possessions to the poor. Then he prepared himself with intense prayer and fasting for
the coming ordeal.

437 Eusebius, The History of the Church, VIII, 3, 9.

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 “Maximian imprisoned Demetrius in the lower rooms of a public bath, which have
survived to this day as the crypt of the great church of the saint in Thessalonica.
Meanwhile, the Emperor sought to win the people’s favour by holding violent games
of the sort to which the Romans were so addicted. Among these were wrestling
matches featuring Maximian’s Vandal lover Lyaeus, a huge German. A platform was
set up, surrounded by spears pointing upwards, and the barbarian would hurl his
opponents onto the spears. Many Christians were among the unfortunates forced to
wrestle with Lyaeus. The tyrant and most of the soldiers were delighted when the
brute skewered his victims, but the Thessalonians were horrified, for the better part
of them had been converted to Christ by Saint Demetrius.

“One of the soldiers who had been under Demetrius’ command, a teenager called
Nestor, visited the saint and asked his permission to take on Lyaeus. Although it
seemed a hopeless mismatch, Demetrius blessed him to do this. Nestor miraculously
prevailed over the barbarian and threw him to his death on the spears, for which
Maximian had the youth beheaded. Then, having learned that Demetrius had blessed
Nestor to contend with his favourite, the Emperor sent soldiers to the bath, and they
ran through Saint Demetrius with their spears.”438

To many Christians it seemed that the world was about to end insofar as
Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, the greatest in Roman history, threatened
to destroy the Roman empire in its role as “that which restraineth” the advent of the
Antichrist and thereby usher in the end of the world. As St. Constantine’s tutor,
Lactantius, wrote: “It is apparent that the world is destined to end immediately. The
only evidence to diminish our fear is the fact that the city of Rome continues to
flourish. But once this city, which is the veritable capital of the world, falls and there
is nothing in its place but ruins, as the sibyls predict, who can doubt that the end will
have arrived both for humanity and for the entire world?”439

However, at the height of the persecution, on May 1, 305, the Augusti Diocletian
and Maximian abdicated and the persecution ceased – immediately in the West, but
only gradually in the East (where it continued until 313). For in the East, as St.
Demetrius of Rostov writes, “it seemed that even earth and sea were shaken and
troubled, rising up against the Churh of Christ. Yet despite every affliction, the Church
grew and its strength increased: it was watered by the blood of the martyrs, which
enabled it to blossom like a lily among thorns.”440

But the Old Rome was indeed passing away. For, as we read in the Life of Saints
Cyril and Methodius that once the Jewish teachers of the Khazars asked “the
Philosopher” (St. Cyril): “If we accept that He [Christ] has already come, as you claim
on the basis of the Prophets and other arguments, then how is it that the Roman
Empire is still in power?” The Philosopher replied: “It is no longer in power, for it has

438 Bishop Maximus, “An Account of the Passion of the Holy Great Martyr, and About Our Sacred Duty
of Obeying the Civil Authorities”, October 26 / November 8, 2020.
439 Lactantius, Divine Institutions; quoted in Robert Garland, “Countdown to the Beginning of Time-

Keeping”, History Today, vol. 49 (4), April, 1999, p. 42.

440 St. Demetrius, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press,

2000, vol. IV: December 10, p. 173.

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passed away, like all empires in its likeness, for our Empire is not of Rome, but of
Christ…”441

For the Old, pagan Rome of Diocletian, Maximian and Galerius indeed passed
away, to be succeeded by the New, Christian Rome of St. Constantine the Great…

441 Life of SS. Cyril and Methodius, chapter 10.

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III. NEW ROME

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 31. ST. CONSTANTINE AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS

In the past the Romans had not been too proud to learn from the Greeks whom
they had conquered. In fact, it was the Greeks who conquered Rome culturally while
being in subjection to her politically. Nor, centuries later, did the best of them despise
the humble fishermen who preached a Jewish God Whom they themselves had
crucified. The penetration of the apostles’ preaching even into the emperor’s own
family was witnessed by St. Paul, who declared: “My bonds in Christ are manifest in
all the palace [of the emperor]” (Philippians 1.13), and he spoke of “the saints who are
of Caesar’s household” (Philippians 4.22). In fact, Nero’s daughter Domnina came into
contact with Photine, the Samaritan woman of John 4 in prison, and was brought by
her to the Christian faith.442 Emperor Philip the Arab was a Christian, as were the wife
and daughter of the persecutor Diocletian…

This process came to fruition with the conversion of St. Constantine. “It has been
estimated,” writes Paul Stephenson, “that the number of Christians grew at a rate of
forty percent per decade, through reproduction and conversion. From a tiny pool of
believers, the number of Christians grew slowly at first, but eventually exponentially.
The period of exponential growth began in the later third century, when from around
one million in AD 250, there were almost six million Christians in AD 300, and almost
thirty-four million in AD 350.”443

The Protestants have often reviled St. Constantine, belittling his achievement and
even hinting that his conversion was detrimental to the faith in that it made the
Church subservient to the State. The opposite is the truth: it was the state that
succumbed to the Church… Even when the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian the
apostate, tried to reverse the Constantinian revolution, the momentum of
Christianization proved unstoppable. Like all the previous persecutors of the
Christians, he perished in agony, crying, “You have triumphed, Galilean!” And when
the last Emperor to unite East and West, Theodosius the Great, bowed in penitence
before a Christian bishop, Ambrose of Milan, it seemed as if Ambrose’s dream of a
Rome purged of its pagan vices and uniting its traditional virtues to the Cross of Christ
– a Rome truly invicta and aeterna because united to the invincible and eternal God -
had been realized. For, as St. Leo the Great, Pope of Rome, said, addressing Rome:
“[The Apostles] promoted thee to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen
people, a priestly and royal state, and the head of the world through the blessed Peter's
holy See thou didst attain a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly
government. For although thou wast increased by many victories, and didst extend
thy rule on land and sea, yet what thy toils in war subdued is less than what the peace
of Christ has conquered… That state, in ignorance of the Author of its
aggrandizement, though it ruled almost all nations, was enthralled by the errors of
them all, and seemed to itself to have fostered religion greatly, because it rejected no
falsehood [an excellent definition of ecumenism]. And hence its emancipation through
Christ was the more wondrous in that it had been so fast bound by Satan.”444

442 St. Nikolai Velimirovič, The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, part 1, p. 307.
443 Stephenson, Constantine. Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor, London: Quercus, 2009, p. 38.
444 St. Leo, Sermon LXXXII, on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

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 In spite of its paganism, Christ had recognized Roman power as legitimate, as
established by God. However, when He brought Constantine the Great to the throne,
He gave it rebirth, raised it to a new and much higher spiritual level, and enabled it
to become an instrument of His will in a much broader and more direct way. Just as
He renewed the Old Zion in the New Zion of the Church, so He renewed the Old
Rome in the New Rome of Constantinople…

After the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian, the empire was ruled by the
former Caesars, now Augusti, Galerius in the East and Constantius Chlorus in the
West with Maximinus Daia and Severus as their Caesars.

The first task of Constantius, the father of Constantine, as Caesar had been “to
remove the separatist Carausius from Boulogne in AD 293 and then invaded Britain
in Ad 296. His troops reached London in time to stop Frankish mercenaries sacking it,
which so pleased Londoners that they struck a medal hailing Constantius as the
‘restorer of light’. A restoration of the whole province followed, ushering in a
prosperous half century. Nine years later, Constantius, now a full Augustus, returned
to Britain and led a campaign to crush the Picts, before returning to York to die of
illness in July AD 306. Constantius was notably tolerant in religious matters, just
closing down one or two churches. He was a worshipper of the Sol Invictus (the
Unconquered Sun), a form of solar motheism popular in the army of the time.”445

After Constantius’ death, on July 25, the Roman troops in York proclaimed his son
Constantine emperor.446 Yet another rebellion from the empire by the Roman army in
Britain? Not this time: Constantine was a legal emperor, or at any rate, Caesar. He
now made his capital Trier in Gaul.

Meanwhile, in the East, “orders were given,” writes Arthur Mason, “to inflict the
sentence of death more sparingly; but the humanity which dictated this decree
betrayed itself by prescribing that dreadful mutilations should take the place of death,
and hundreds of unfortunate Christians were condemned to lose an eye or a foot, and
in this miserable condition were set to work in the mines and quarries, as slaves of the
imperial treasury. At last, in 311, when Galerius lay dying of a terrible disease, he
published a strange edict of toleration, in which he began by explaining why the
persecution had been undertaken, then confessed that it had completely failed of its
object, and ended by requesting the Christians to pray for him.”447

In 312, after consolidating his power in Western Europe outside Italy, Constantine
defeated Maxentius’ forces in northern Italy and then marched on Rome to fight
Maxentius himself. Just before the fateful battle of the Milvian Bridge, outside Rome,
he had a vision, which was described slightly differently by Eusebius, his religious

445 Nigel Rodgers, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, London: Lorenz Books, 2004, p. 74.
446 The place, under York Minster, where Constantine was proclaimed emperor, and the Christian

Roman Empire began, has now been excavated by archaeologists.

447 Mason, The Historic Martyrs of the Primitive Church, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 190. p. 323.

Galerius declared his faith in Christ after witnessing a miracle of the Martyrs Cosmas and Damian
(Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996, pp. 142-143)

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advisor, and Lactantius, the tutor of his sons. Although the two accounts differ, Peter
Leithart has convincingly shown that they can both be accepted as true, referring as
they probably did to two different events following one after the other…448

As Marta Sordi writes, while Constantine is praying, “he calls on his father’s god,
begging him to reveal himself and to stretch out his right hand to help him. While he
is praying, an extraordinary vision appears to him, a vision – says Eusebius – that ‘had
it been told me by anyone else than Constantine himself, I would not have believed’.
As the day was on the wane, he saw above the sun a trophy in the form of a cross
made of light, and writing which said ‘With this, conquer’. He was utterly amazed, as
was the whole army which was marching with him and which – it is still Constantine
speaking – had also seen the vision. Full of doubts, he asked himself what this vision
could possibly mean. Night came, and God’s Christ appeared to him in a dream with
the same sign as had appeared in the sky, exhorting him to make a similar one and to
use it as defence against his enemies. The next day, Constantine discussed the affair
with all his friends, had the sign constructed (Chapter 31 gives a description of the
famous labarum) and took the decision to ‘honour no other god than the One he had
seen’… He then called for the ‘initiates of that doctrine’ – the Greek word here is
mystai, and the allusion may be to Ossius of Cordoba – and asked them who this God
was and what was the meaning of the words of the vision. They answered that he had
seen the only begotten Son of the one and only God and that the sign was a sign of
immortality and a trophy of victory over death…”449

Constantine had the pagan standards removed and the Christian one with the chi-
rho, the so-called Labarum, put in their place. The result was an easy victory over the
much larger army of Maxentius.

The next day, October 29, Constantine entered Rome and was hailed as Emperor of
the West.450 Breaking with tradition, on entering Rome Constantine refused to offer
sacrifice to the pagan gods, and in particular to Jupiter in the Capitol. By this
controversial and courageous act, he demonstrated for all those with eyes of see that
his conversion to Christianity was completely sincere.

“And because Constantine made no supplication to evil spirits,” wrote St.

Augustine, “but worshipped only the true God, he enjoyed a life more favoured by
marks of worldly prosperity than anyone would have dared imagine was possible.”451

448 Leithart, Defending Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2010, chapter 4; Eusebius, On the
Life of Constantine, I, 28; quoted in John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, London:
Penguin, 1990, p. 39. See Jan Bremmer, “The Vision of Constantine”,
http://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/9899550/Bremmer-CONSTANTINE.pdf. Much later, in
the reign of Julian the Apostate, the Martyrs Eusignius and Artemius confirmed the truth of this vision,
having been witnesses of it themselves.
449 Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 140.
450 Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1981, p. 43.

451 St. Augustine, The City of God, 5.25.

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 Moreover, he was not slow to ascribe his victory to Christ and the Cross: “In the
royal city he raised this sacred standard and inscribed definitely and indelibly that
this saving sign is the preserver of the Roman Empire and the whole kingdom. But
when in the most crowded place of Rome they raised a statue to him, he immediately
ordered that a long spear in the shape of a cross be put in the hand of his
representation and that the following inscription be written word for word in Latin:
‘By this saving and famous sign, the true witness of courage, I saved and liberated
your city from the yoke of tyranny, and on liberating it, returned to the Roman senate
and people its freedom, its former glory and its celebrity.’”452

He continued to experience the power of the Cross. Thus “wherever the sign of the
cross was shown, enemies were turned to flight, while the victors pursued them.
When the Emperor heard about this, he ordered the saving sign, as being the most
genuine means of victory, to be transferred to the place where he saw one of his
regiments weakening. Immediately victory was restored to it, because the warriors at
the sight of it were strengthened by a vigour and a power sent from on high.”453

In 313 St. Constantine met the new emperor of the East, Licinius, at Milan, and with
him proclaimed an Edict of religious toleration: “Our purpose is to grant both to the
Christians and to all others full authority to follow whatever worship each man has
desired; whereby whatsoever divinity dwells in heaven may be benevolent and
propitious to us, and to all who are placed under our authority”.454

As Fr. Alexis Nikolin writes: “The Edict of Milan decisively rejected many
traditions of antiquity. St. Constantine clearly proclaimed that Christianity is not the
property of any particular people, but is a universal religion, the religion of the whole
of humanity. If formerly it was thought that a given religion belongs to a given people
and for that reason it is sacred and untouchable, now the lawgiver affirmed a new
principle: that the sacred and untouchable religion was that religion which belonged
to all peoples – Christianity. It was obviously not an attempt to bring Christianity
under the usual (pagan) juridical forms, but a principled change in those forms.”455

As a result, as Eusebius of Caesarea wrote: “Divine joy blossomed in all hearts as

we saw that every place which a little whole before had been reduced to dust by the
tyrants’ wickedness was now, as if from a prolonged and deadly stranglehold, coming
back to life; and that cathedrals were again rising from their foundations high into the
air, and far surpassing in magnitude those previously destroyed by the enemy.
Emperors, too, the most exalted (Constantine and Licinius) by a succession of
ordinances in favour of the Christians, confirmed still further and more surely the
blessings God showered upon us; and a stream of personal letters from the emperor
reached the bishops, accompanied by honours and gifts of money. Old troubles were
forgotten, and all irreligion passed into oblivion; good things present were enjoyed,

452 Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, I, 40.
453 Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, II, 7.
454 Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, 48. 2-12.
455 Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Moscow, 1997, p. 27.

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those yet to come eagerly awaited. In every city the victorious emperor published
decrees full of humanity and laws that gave proof of munificence and true piety. Thus
all tyranny had been purged away, and the kingdom that was theirs was preserved
securely and without question for Constantine and his sons alone.”456

However, persecution of Christians did not immediately cease in the East. After
Galerius’ death in 311, persecution continued under Maximinus Daia; and Licinius, in
spite of signing the Edict of Milan, was still a pagan devoted to Jupiter. So when
Licinius turned from toleration to persecution of Christians, beheading St. Basil,
Bishop of Amasea, in 322, Constantine declared war and defeated him at Chrysopolis,
opposite Byzantium, in 324. Now the whole of the East as far as the borders of Persia
came within Constantine’s dominion, and all persecution of the faith came to an end…

And yet the Triumph of the Cross under St. Constantine proved, paradoxically,
that God does not need Christian kings in order to save the world. They help – they
help greatly. But for almost three centuries from the Resurrection of Christ the Church
had survived and grown in the teeth of everything that Jewish and pagan fury could
hurl against her, and without the help of any earthly forces.

For, as Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow wrote: “there is benefit in the union of the
altar and the throne, but it is not mutual benefit that is the first foundation of their
union, but independent truth, which supports both the one and the other. May the
king, the protector of the altar, be blessed; but the altar does not fear the fall of this
protection. The priest is right who preaches that the king should be honoured, but not
by right of mutuality, but by pure obligation, even if this took place without the hope
of mutuality… Constantine the Great came to the altar of Christ when it already stood
on the expanses of Asia, Europe and Africa: he came, not in order to support it with
his strength, but in order to submit himself with his majesty before its Holiness. He
Who dwells in the heavens laughed at those who later thought of lowering His Divine
religion to dependence on human assistance. In order to make their sophistry
laughable, He waited for three centuries before calling the wise king to the altar of
Christ. Meanwhile, from day to day king, peoples, wise men, power, art, cupidity,
cunning and rage rose up to destroy this altar. And what happened in the end? All
this has disappeared, while the Church of Christ stands – but not because it is
supported by human power…”457

Tertullian had said in the third century, “The world may need its Caesars. But the
Emperor can never be a Christian, nor a Christian ever be an Emperor.”458 How wrong
he was! In response to the patience and prayer and martyric sacrifices of the
Christians, the most powerful, secular and pagan element in Old Roman society, the
very apex of its antichristian system, was transfigured into an instrument of the Grace
of God. “The kingdom of this world”, it seemed, had become “the Kingdom of our
Lord and of His Christ” (Revelation 11.15).

456 Eusebius, The History of the Church, X, 2, 10.
457 Metropolitan Philaret, in Lev Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the

Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, p. 23.

458 Tertullian, in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 155.

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 *

“It would be no exaggeration,” writes Protopresbyter James Thornton, “to call the
reign of Saint Constantine a genuine revolution, particularly from the standpoint of
religion. The Synaxarion for May 21, the day of his commemoration, states that the
Church was ‘able to inspire governors and profoundly transform the lives of men and
states with the inbreathing of evangelical principles’. However, the Christian
revolution was a peaceful revolution, a revolution from above, one that retained all
that was wholesome from pagan antiquity – for example art, architecture, literature,
and law -, while slowly extinguishing that which was spiritually noxious, unworthy,
or morally debilitating. It wisely left essentially untouched the Roman societal
structure and the economic system, anticipating their gradual evolution towards the
good, under the influence of Christian teaching. Yet, it was a revolution that imbued
the Empire with renewed life…”459

It was indeed a renewal, a Renovatio Imperii. In this respect, it can be compared

with the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Both Augustus and Constantine
aimed at a renewal of the empire through a reformation of faith, morals and politics.
However, Constantine’s renewal was more radical, more long-lasting and less
hypocritical. From a purely political and administrative point of view, their aims were
very similar: both wanted to restore one-man rule and consolidate the boundaries of
the empire rather then expand them; but Constantine was much more open about the
nature of his autocracy, with less reverence for the senate and the established elites,
and without any of the pretence of democracy that Augustus employed. In morals,
both emperors came down hard on family members who violated their strict rules of
sexual morality. Both emphasized that they were peace-makers, but Constantine, after
destroying the enemies of peace within the empire, brought not only peace on earth,
but peace (for Christians) with heaven. Augustus boasted that he had found Rome a
city built of brick, and left it built of marble, but Constantine built a completely new
capital while adorning Old Rome with beautiful churches instead of pagan temples.
Augustus revived paganism, being ignorant of the True God Who was born in his
realm in his time, while Constantine, condemned pagan sacrifices to the demons,
protected Christianity through many laws and the convening of church councils, and
placed the True God at the head of the corner of the whole of political life.

Fr. George Florovsky writes: “The Age of Constantine is commonly regarded as a

turning point of Christian history. After a protracted struggle with the Church, the
Roman Empire at last capitulated. The Caesar himself was converted, and humbly
applied for admission into the Church. Religious freedom was formally promulgated,
and was emphatically extended to Christians. The confiscated property was returned
to Christian communities. Those Christians who suffered disability and deportation
in the years of persecution were now ordered back, and were received with honors.
In fact, Constantine was offering to the Church not only peace and freedom, but also
protection and close cooperation. Indeed, he was urging the Church and her leaders

Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and
459

Modern Greek Studies, 2013, p. 97.

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to join with him in the ‘Renovation’ of the Empire… Constantine was firmly convinced
that, by Divine Providence, he was entrusted with a high and holy mission, that he
was chosen to re-establish the Empire, and to re-establish it on a Christian foundation.
This conviction, more than any particular theory, was the decisive factor in his policy,
and in his actual mode of ruling.”460

Justly, then, did Fr. John Meyendorff say of St. Constantine that “no single human
being in history has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the conversion of so many
to the Christian faith…”461 It is paradoxical, therefore, that in spite of his vast – indeed,
unprecedented - achievements, St. Constantine has received a remarkably bad press.
He has been accused of being the originator of “Caesaropapism”, of causing the fall
of the very Church that he saved from destruction, even of a supposed “heresy of
Constantinianism”…462

Constantine not only renewed the empire from within through the power of the
Cross: he transformed the very ideology of empire, and the relationship of Rome to
other kingdoms and empires. He presented a new ideal of kingship which, even if
rarely realized in later centuries, nevertheless changed the nature and language of
politics forever. Some Christian kings would still act like pagans, but they could no
longer appeal to pagan ideals.

The pagan Roman empire was founded on the familiar fallen passions of love of
glory and love of power. Excuses were neither given nor sought for invading
neighbouring territories, killing thousands of innocent “barbarians”, and seizing their
lands and property. Nations that resisted Roman power, such as the Carthaginians
and the Jews and the Britons, were treated with vengeful cruelty. Julius Caesar’s
extraordinarily bloody conquest of Gaul is a typical example of how the Roman
empire was enlarged. Glory was the aim; that needed no justification. A British
chieftain had summed up the Romans’ “achievement” at least until Augustus tried to
civilize them: “They are the robbers of the world… If their enemy is opulent, they are
greedy for wealth; if he is poverty-stricken, they are eager for glory… They alone out
of everyone lust for wealth and war with equal passion. They call plunder, murder
and rape by the spurious names of ‘empire’, and where they make a desert they call it
‘peace’.”463

Constantine tried to change this bloody tradition, which was, of course, dominant
throughout the pagan world. Although an experienced and highly successful soldier
himself, who did not flinch from extreme measures when he considered them
necessary, he glorified true peace rather than war, the glory of Christ rather than his
own or Rome’s, and while defending the boundaries of the empire, undertook no
offensive campaigns beyond them. The one apparent exception to this rule proved it;
it only went to prove that the imperial ideology really had changed.

460 Florovsky, “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont,
Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 72, 74.
461 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,

1989, p. 7.
462 Peter Leithart, op. cit. p. 250, note 61.
463 Tacitus, Agricola, 30.4, in Kershaw, op. cit., p. 60.

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 *

The one apparent exception was Persia, the age-old rival of Rome in the East, which
had deeply humiliated Rome by defeating, capturing and humiliating the Emperor
Valerian before killing him in 260. Constantine had been preparing an expedition
against Persia just before he died in 337. At first sight, writes Leithart, “Constantine’s
abortive Persian conquest looks like another Roman adventure driven by sacrificial
frenzy, vengeance and a desire to keep enemies in their subordinate place. Yet there
are hints that between 306 and the 330s something had changed. Sometime before,
Constantine had written a ‘tactful, allusive, and indirect’ letter in his own hand to
Shapur. Addressing the Persian king as a ‘brother’, he summarized the ‘most holy
religion’ that had given him ‘deeper acquaintance with the most holy God’. Finding
common ground with nonsacrificial Persian Zoroastrian practice, Constantine
emphasized that the ‘God I invoke with bended knees’ is horrified by ‘the blood of
sacrifices’ and recoils from ‘their foul and detestable odors.’ The sacrifice he craves is
‘purity of mind and an undefiled spirit’ that manifests itself in ‘works of moderation
and gentleness’. ‘He loves the meek,’ Constantine continued, ‘and hates the turbulent
spirit…. While the arrogant and haughty are utterly overthrown, he requites the
humble and forgiving with deserved rewards.’

“The purpose of the letter was to advise Shapur about how to deal with the sizable
Christian community in his own realm. [He exhorted him to “cherish them with your
customary humanity and kindness; for by this proof of faith you will secure an
immeasurable benefit both to yourself and us”.] Constantine was an eyewitness of ‘the
end of those who lately harassed the worshippers of God by their impious edicts,’ and
he warned Shapur not to follow their example. Everything is ‘best and safest’ when
men follow God’s laws and recognize that God is at work through the church,
endeavouring to ‘gather all men to himself’. He expressed his joy at hearing that Persia
was full of Christians, and he closed the letter with a prayer that ‘you and they may
enjoy abundant prosperity, and that your blessings and theirs may be in equal
measure,’ so that ‘you will experience the mercy and favor of that God who is the Lord
and Father of all.’

“Constantine’s letter has been called a ‘veiled warning’ and has been interpreted
as a provocation, a threat and a sign of his belief that as Roman emperor he had
responsibility for all Christians. Constantine’s Persian policies certainly backfired. He
initiated his final campaign when a delegation from Armenia visited Constantinople
in 336 to ask him for assistance against a Persian coup. Since the conversion of the
Armenian king Trdat (Tiridates) in 314, Armenia had been officially Christian, more
explicitly so than was the Roman Empire under Constantine. In the 330s, Persians
under Shapur II had invaded, captured and blinded the Armenian King Tirhan, and
placed Shapur’s brother Narseh on the Armenian throne. Constantine responded
swiftly. He designated his nephew Hannibalianus as ‘king of kings’ and gave him
authority over Armenia and Pontus. Like his letter, his preparations for war with
Persia were intended, among other things, to defend a Christian people. When
Constantine died before the campaign could be launched, Shapur, apparently
suspicious that the Christians of Persia were allied with Rome, initiated a violent

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persecution. Persian Christians, in response, kept themselves aloof from the dominant
orthodoxy of the West.

“Yet I cannot agree that the letter to Shapur was intended as a provocation.
Constantine warned Shapur, but he warned him of divine judgement, not that he
would personally take vengeance if Shapur were to attack Christians. In the closing
section Constantine issued an altar call, inviting Shapur to protect Christians and to
join him in worship of the high God, the God of the Christians. Hermann Dorries
summarizes the message of the letter as an invitation to share in the blessing of
Christianization: ‘what the true faith had done for the Roman Empire,’ Constantine
urged, ‘it would do also for the Persian.’ It was an unprecedented diplomatic move –
a Roman emperor who ‘attributed his success to heavenly assistance… invited his
only formidable enemy to share in this aid.’ More broadly, the letter reveals how far
Constantine had moved from tetrarchic political theology. For Diocletian ‘religion and
nation meant the same thing,’ but for Constantine there was a potential unity, even
between East and West, even between Persia and Rome, that transcended boundaries
and national interests…”464

This is an insightful and true remark, and if anything underestimates the

revolutionary character of Constantine’s new imperial ideology. Pagan religion and
politics were irredeemably particularist. The pagan gods protected particular men and
cities or states against other men, cities and states that were protected by other gods.
And if pagan Rome had a policy of including as many local gods as possible into its
“pantheon” (which means “all gods”), this did not alter the fundamentally
particularist nature of Roman paganism. Christianity was difficult to absorb within
this structure not only because the Christians refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods,
but also because their God was of a totally different kind – universal, completely all-
encompassing, and infinitely above everything that can be called “god”, “far above
all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named,
not only in this age but also in that which is to come” (Ephesians 1.21). Moreover, this
God claimed dominion not only over Rome but also over all the kingdoms of men…

When Constantine came to power, being a sincere, determined and deeply

thoughtful Christian, he sought to adapt the Roman political theology to its new God,
making it truly universalist. Scornfully rejecting all divine honours for himself, he
sought to subdue himself and all his subjects to the true King of kings. But this also
transformed his relationship with other kings, such as Shapur of Persia. For Shapur,
too, had been given his dominion by God, making him and Constantine no longer
rivals, but “brothers”, as Constantine himself put it – if not in Christ, at any rate in
kingship, as political rulers established by God. But this had the further consequence
that extension of the empire by the former bloody and rapacious methods was no
longer acceptable. Only if Shapur maltreated his Christian subjects or other Christians,
such as the Armenians, could Constantine intervene on the assumption that Shapur
had now ceased to be his brother in kingship, having “disestablished” himself from
God. Now Christian love compelled Constantine to go to war to defend his brothers
in Christ. The Gospel, not glory or realpolitik, would now govern his actions.

464 Leithart, op. cit., pp. 246-247.

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 *

But where did this leave the Roman Empire? No longer unique, but just one
kingdom among many? Not quite. If all legitimate political authorities have been
established as such by God, and there is no genuine authority that has not been thus
established (Romans 13.1), this would appear to place all authorities essentially on the
same level. But the Roman Empire remained unique in that Christ had been born in it
and God had chosen the empire also to be the birthplace and seed-plot of His Church.
This gave it a certain uniqueness, seniority and prestige in the eyes of all Christians,
even those who lived in other polities and therefore owed obedience to other
authorities. In this sense, therefore, it became the universal empire. But this did not
mean that the empire was destined to become, in Constantine’s eyes, the ruler of all
nations (this was where he differed from the Chinese emperors), as some later
Byzantines tended to think: it meant that the Roman Empire would be, as long as it
lasted, the “first among equals” among Christian states, and therefore the object of
universal veneration by the Christians of all nations.

Another consequence was that the Roman Empire now had a special obligation to
spread the Gospel to other kingdoms. And Constantine was fully alive to his
missionary calling. As Leithart writes, he “had a deep sense of historical destiny, and
as a result his foreign policy was guided in part by the desire to extend the church’s
reach. He envisioned a universal empire united in confession of the Nicene Creed, an
empire that would have a symbolic center in the Church on Golgotha in Jerusalem
and that would stretch to India and Ethiopia and someday include even Persia. But
Constantine did not necessarily regard annexation into the Roman empire as an
essential element of that vision. He seems instead to have envisioned a Christian
commonwealth. Perhaps the empire would have remained dominant, but in
Constantine’s cosmopolitan mind it would not have been coextensive with ‘Christ’s
dominion’.

“Though he probably did not impose Christianity on conquered Goths, his

triumphs among the Goths assisted the spread of Christianity. After his victory in 332,
Bishop Ulfila was consecrated and sent as a missionary in Gothic territory. Churches
were also established in the ‘Mountain Arena’, the Arab territories that served as a
buffer between the empire and Persia. Eusebius mentions Arab Christian
communities, and there was an Arab bishop at the council of Nicaea. Further east in
Iberia (Georgia) there were Christians, and to the south Ethiopia (Aksum) also became
Christian under Ezana… Armenia became officially Christian shortly after
Constantine defeated Maxentius. By the time he died, Constantine had left behind a
‘universal Christian commonwealth embracing Armenians, Iberians, Arabs, and
Aksumites that continued to take form under his Byzantine successors. This was not,
it should be noted, an extension of Roman governance; it is rather that Roman imperial
order had been reshaped, to some degree, by the demands of Christian mission…”465

465 Leithart, op. cit., p. 288.

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 The demands of Christian mission in the East, and the need to protect Eastern
Christians from pagan Persia, necessitated moving the capital of the empire further
east. Thus “Colchis [Western Georgia].” Writes Bettany Hughes, “only returned to the
Hellenic world when Emperor Constantine moved his capital to Byzantium-
Constantinople.”466 Let us look briefly at this missionary land.

“The Christian history of Georgia begins at the time of our Lord’s Crucifixion. The
Jewish community in the old capital of Mtskheta – which had taken refuge in Georgia
during the time of Nebuchadnezzar – sent two of its rabbis, Elioz and Longinos, to
pass judgement on the Savior. When the Jewish leaders returned, they brought back
the Lord’s robe, one of the most sacred relics of the Church. Today it rests beneath the
Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta.

“In the decades that followed, the Apostles Andrew, Simon the Zealot and Matthias
proclaimed the Gospel in Georgia. Although the seeds of Christianity were planted in
the 1st century, it was not until the 4th century that the conversion of Georgia occurred.
In 323 the virgin Nino (Nina) arrived from Jerusalem, having been sent by the Mother
of God to evangelize the country. Through her labors King Mirian (265-342) and
Queen Nana accepted baptism and proclaimed Christianity as the state religion in 326.
The Byzantine held dominion in the region, and Emperor Constantine the Great (306-
337) sent a bishop and priests to baptize Georgia along with architects to construct
churches. Shortly thereafter the first bishop of Georgia was consecrated at Antioch,
signaling the birth of the Georgian Church under the See of Antioch.”467

Let us now look at Constantine’s most ambitious project, his transfer of his capital
from Old Rome in Italy to the New Rome of Constantinople… While his renovatio
imperii had some precedent in Augustus’ reign, the translatio imperii that Constantine
effected in 324 was absolutely unprecedented – and elicited predictable hostility from
the old capital of the world. For “as an open patron of the Christians,” writes St.
Demetrius of Rostov, “Constantine was little loved in Rome, where many pagan
rituals and customs were still entrenched. Nor did he himself love Rome, with its
pantheon of gods, where almost automatically the heathen gods of all subject peoples
were gathered, and he rarely visited the old capital. The Romans, though grateful to
the one who had delivered them from the tyranny of Maxentius, did not understand
and were not able properly to appreciate the accomplishments of the Emperor; in him
they saw a destroyer of their old national order, an enemy of their religion, which was
closely bound up with the political majesty of Rome.

“Their displeasure and complaints, their plots and even at times open revolts, were
the reason why Constantine conceived the idea of founding a new capital for himself,
a Christian city which would in nowise be bound up with paganism.”468

466 Donald Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, London: Reaktion, 2012, p. 36.
467 Riassophor Monk Adrian, in Archpriest Zakaria Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, Platina, Ca.:

St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006, p. 18.

468 The Menology of St. Demetrius of Rostov, 1908, vol. 10, May 21.

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 The site he chose (after a Divine revelation) was the old Greek colony of Byzantium
on the European side of the Bosphorus, opposite the site of his victory over Licinius
at Chrysopolis in 324. He called the new city Constantinople. The future glory of
Constantinople had been foreshadowed already in the reign of Septimius Severus,
who, while beautifying the city, had constructed a monument in it called the Milion,
from which all distances in the Roman Empire were measured.469

Now, as Hughes writes, Constantine built “a new palace tumbling down the
hillside to the sea, he extended the hippodrome, introduced a grid-system of streets,
a circular forum, a Senate house [with 300 senators], at least two churches, a new mint,
a series of splendid private houses, inviting in high-ranking Romans from across the
empire to occupy them… And protecting all this he reinforced the city walls. St. John
might have described Old Rome as ‘Babylon’, but the New Rome was a vigorous start
for a new kind of Christian metropolis…

“This city that Constantine had called Constantinoupolis was, simply, God-given
– or, as the Emperor put it, ‘given to him by the command of God’.”470

Constantinople was perfectly situated to unite East and West, embracing both like
the arms of the Cross. Protected in the west by huge fortifications, and in the east by
the Bosphorus, it also protected all the wealthy and populous eastern provinces of the
empire from invaders coming across the Danube from the north. Constantinople,
then, was to be, as St. Gregory the Theologian said, “a bond of union between East
and West to which the most distant extremes from all sides are to come together, and
to which they look up as the common centre and emporium of their faith.”471

At the same time, Constantine tried hard to transform the old capital into a
Christian city: the two oldest and greatest churches, St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill and
St. John’s by the Lateran Palace, were his foundations. But Old Rome, in contrast to
many of her individual citizens, had never been baptized. There was a pagan
rottenness at her heart that even its Christian head, the Emperor, was not able to cut
out.472 By making a fresh start for the newly Christianized empire in his New Rome,
St. Constantine implicitly declared that Old Rome was irredeemable.

The symbolism of his act was clear: if the state, like the individual man, was to be
redeemed and enjoy a long and spiritually fruitful life, it, too, had to make a complete
break with the past, renounce the demonic sacrifices and pagan gods and philosophies
that it had loved, and receive a new birth by water and the Spirit. In fact, New Rome
quickly filled up with pagan statues and monuments to serve the needs of its pagan
citizens. But this did not change the aim and the symbol, and the blood sacrifices to
the demons remained banned.473

469 Hughes, Istanbul. A Tale of Three Cities, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017, pp. 66-67.
470 Hughes, op. cit., p. 110.
471 St. Gregory, in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1997, p. 198.
472 Dirk Bennett, “Ecstasy in Late Imperial Rome”, History Today, vol. 48 (10), October, 1998, pp. 27-32.
473 Judith Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 11.

“Let superstition cease,” decreed Constantine’s successor Constantius. “Let the madness of the

261
 But the crowning glory of Constantine’s reign was his mother St. Helena’s finding
of the True Cross, which led him to build the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over both
Golgotha and the site of the Resurrection of Christ. The church was dedicated with
great splendour and a great concourse of bishops in 336. And a new church feast, the
feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, was established to commemorate the event, to
celebrate the victory of the Cross that Constantine had seen in the heavens, and its
triumph over the darkness of the pagan Roman empire. The date of the feast was
appointed as September 14. It is one of the twelve feasts of the Orthodox Church year,
and the only one that does not commemorate a major event in the life of Christ or the
Mother of God…

St. Constantine died at midday on Pentecost, 337, and was buried in the church of
the Holy Apostles amidst the sepulchres of the twelve apostles. For in his person the
Church had indeed found an “equal to the apostles”; he came to power when about
10% of the empire was Christian: at his death the figure was about 30%.474 In his reign
the process of converting the world that began at the first Pentecost reached its first
climax…

There are two accounts of when and how Constantine was baptized. According to
the first, which is to be found in the Life of St. Sylvester of Rome written in the early 400s,
the sixth-century writer Malalas, and the liturgical texts for his feast in the Menaion,
he fell ill with leprosy in Rome. The priests and doctors advised him to bathe in the
blood of slaughtered children, which he refused to do. Then the Apostles Peter and
Paul appeared to him and told him to seek out St. Sylvester, Pope of Rome. The bishop
instructed him in the faith and baptized him. The leprosy then disappeared.

According to the second version, by Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine was

baptized by Eusebius of Nicomedia, who was an Arian (albeit a secret one at that
time). However, this has been disputed from early times. Thus the Chronicle of St.
Theophanes dismisses the claims of Eusebius of Caesarea as Arian lies. 475

Nevertheless, many modern scholars have accepted the second version. Assuming
it is true, we may ask: why did he leave his baptism so late? Was it because ruling the
empire involved committing so much violence that he had to put off baptism until as
late as possible? This violence had included executing his own wife Fausta and son
Crispus for adultery…

Or perhaps he had to repent of still more serious sins – sins against the faith that
his position as Roman emperor had made almost inevitable?

sacrifices be exterminated, for if anyone should dare to celebrate sacrifices in violation of our father,
the deified Emperor [i.e., Constantine], and of this decree of Our Clemency, let an appropriate
punishment and sentence immediately be inflicted on him” (in Kershaw, op. cit., p. 320).
474 Hughes, op. cit., p. 142.
475 Information supplied by Bishop Enoch.

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 Thus Florovsky writes that one of the reasons why he delayed his baptism “was
precisely his dim feeling that it was inconvenient to be ‘Christian’ and ‘Caesar’ at the
same time. Constantine’s personal conversion constituted no problem. But as Emperor
he was committed. He had to carry the burden of his exalted position in the Empire.
He was still a ‘Divine Caesar’. As Emperor, he was heavily involved in the traditions
of the Empire, as much as he actually endeavoured to disentangle himself. The
transfer of the Imperial residence to a new City, away from the memories of the old
pagan Rome, was a spectacular symbol of this noble effort.”476…

Constantine’s actions at the very end can also be seen as a kind of final sermon and
testament in symbolical language. After his baptism he put off the imperial purple,
never to put it on again – for the kingdoms of this world pass away, never to return.
But then he put on the shining white baptismal robe, never to take it off again – for
the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world, abides forever…

476 Florovsky, op. cit., p. 73.

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 32. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (1) THE
HIERARCHICAL PRINCIPLE

The Constantinian revolution was multifaceted and gradual, continuing for

centuries after Constantine’s death. But it changed by no means everything. The
hierarchical principle that was so characteristic of Old Rome, both republican and
imperial, according to which “individuals might rise to greatness, ancient families
might decline, yet through it all the faith in hierarchy endured unchanging”477,
remained unchanged in the New Rome. Constantine was no democrat, and by
abolishing the tetrarchy he reasserted one-man-rule, while society as a whole
remained patriarchal. The real change was in the idea that the State and its prosperity
were no longer the highest values. For above the State was the Church, and the State
existed in order to serve the Church, not vice-versa.

The hierarchical principle remained unchanged because it was fully in accordance

with Christian teaching. For the Apostles did not only preach obedience to the
emperor: they extended the hierarchical principle to every level of society. Thus "be
subject for the Lord's sake," says St. Peter, "to every human institution, whether it be
to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do
wrong and praise those who do right..." (I Peter 2.13).

This included even the institution of slavery: “Servants, be subject to your masters
with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward” (I Peter 2.18).
St. Paul told his disciple, Onesimus, a slave, to return to his master, and said: “Let as
many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour,
that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed. And those who have
believing masters must not despise them because they are brethren, but rather do
them service” (I Timothy 6.1-2). True, the freeing of slaves was considered a good
deed, and St. Gregory of Nyssa said to his flock, several of whom were slave-owners:
“If God does not enslave what is free, then who is he that sets his own power above
God’s?”478 But Christians never aimed at social revolution, but rather the gradual and
peaceful renewal of the social fabric from within.

Following the Apostles, the Holy Fathers asserted that the hierarchical principle is
natural, God-given and superior to any other principle of government. In developing
this thought, they adopted the originally pagan idea that the earthly king is the image
of the Heavenly King, purifying it of the tendency, so natural to pagan thought, of
identifying the earthly and the Heavenly, the image and its archetype. Earthly kings
could and should be icons of the Heavenly King, and were to be venerated as such;
but they were not god-kings, not objects of worship.

Thus Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea wrote of St. Constantine: "The kingdom with
which he is invested is an image of the heavenly one. He looks up to see the archetypal
pattern and guides those whom he rules below in accordance with that pattern.”

477 Holland, Rubicon, London: Abacus, 2003, p. 25.
478 St. Gregory, Fourth Commentary on Ecclesiastes, in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London:

Abacus, 2012, p. 436.

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 “The ruler of the whole world is the Word of God, Who is in everything visible and
invisible. From this all-embracing Reason the Emperor is rational, from this Wisdom
he is wise, from participation in this Divinity he is good, from communion with this
Righteousness he is righteous, in accordance with the idea of this Moderation he is
moderate, from the reception of this highest Power he is courageous. In all justice one
must call a true Emperor him who has formed his soul with royal virtues, according
to the image of the Highest Kingdom”.479 “Bearing the image of the heavenly empire,
with his eyes fixed on high, he rules the lives of mortals after that original pattern with
the strength draw from an imitation of God’s monarchy. The example of monarchical
rule there is a source of strength to him. This is something granted to man alone of the
creatures of the earth by the universal King. The basic principle of kingly authority is
the establishment of a single source of authority to which everything is subject.
Monarchy is superior to every other constitution and form of government. For
polyarchy, where everyone competes on equal terms, is really anarchy and discord.
This is why there is one God, not two or three or even more. Polytheism is strictly
atheism. There is one King, and His Word and royal law are one.”480

This idea was supported by the fourth-century Fathers. Thus St. Basil the Great
wrote: “Even the king of the birds is not elected by the majority because the temerity
of the people often nominates for leader the worst one; nor does it receive its power
by lot, because the unwise chance of the lot frequently hands over power to the last;
nor in accordance with hereditary succession481, because those living in luxury and
flattery are also less competent and untaught in any virtue; but according to nature
one holds the first place over all, both in its size and appearance and meek
disposition."482 And St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “The three most ancient
opinions about God are atheism (or anarchy), polytheism (or polyarchy), and
monotheism (or monarchy). The children of Greece played with the first two; let us
leave them to their games. For anarchy is disorder: and polyarchy implies factious
division, and therefore anarchy and disorder. Both these lead in the same direction –
to disorder; and disorder leads to disintegration; for disorder is the prelude to
disintegration. What we honour is monarchy…”483

Again, St. John Chrysostom wrote: “Equality is known to produce strife. Therefore
God allowed the human race to be a monarchy, not a democracy. But the family is
constructed in a similar way to an army, with the husband holding the rank of
monarch, the wife as general and the children also given stations of command.”484

479 Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.
480 Eusebius, Oration in Honour of Constantine.
481 Still, the hereditary principle was popular. Before becoming emperor, St. Constantine was kept

under surveillance ”in order to prevent a dynastic principle replacing the meritocracy of the Tetrarchs’
government” (Aaron P. Johnson, Eusebius, London: Tauris, 2014, p. 7).
482 St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 8. In accordance with Roman conceptions, St. Basil did not believe

that monarchical power had to be hereditary. The concept of the virtue of hereditary succession was
developed later.
483 St. Gregory, Sermon 29, 2. Cf. Sermon 3, 2.
484 St. John Chrysostom, Homily 34 on I Corinthians, 7.

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 And St. Isidore of Pelusium wrote: “After pointing to the order of submission of
some to others established everywhere by God in the lives of rational and irrational
creatures, concludes therefrom: ‘Therefore we are entitled to say that… power, that is,
royal leadership and authority, is established by God.”485

Over four centuries later St. Theodore the Studite generalized the principle as
follows: "There is one Lord and Giver of the Law, as it is written: one authority and
one Divine principle over all. This single principle is the source of all wisdom,
goodness and good order. It extends over every creature that has received its
beginning from the goodness of God… It is given to one man only… to construct rules
of life in accordance with the likeness of God. For the divine Moses in his description
of the origin of the world that comes from the mouth of God, cites the word: 'Let us
create man in accordance with Our image and likeness' (Genesis 1.26). Hence the
establishment among men of every dominion and every authority, especially in the
Churches of God: one patriarch in a patriarchate, one metropolitan in a metropolia,
one bishop in a bishopric, one abbot in a monastery, and in secular life, if you want to
listen, one king, one regimental commander, one captain on a ship. And if one will
did not rule in all this, there would be no law and order in anything, and it would not
be for the best, for a multiplicity of wills destroys everything."486

The principle of one-man rule was greatly strengthened by the idea that the fount
of all secular law in the empire was the emperor himself. This did not mean, however,
that the emperor’s rule was completely arbitrary. He had to obey both the Church and
his own laws. Thus St. Ambrose of Milan told the Emperor Theodosius the Great that
he had to respect and bind himself by the laws he himself promulgated, or he risked
great dangers in the civil sphere: "And how, O Emperor, are we to settle a matter on
which you have already declared your judgment, and have even promulgated laws,
so that it is not open to any one to judge otherwise? But when you laid down this law
for others, you laid it down for yourself as well. For the Emperor is the first to keep
the laws which he passes…"487

From the time of Justinian in the sixth century we come across the idea that the
emperor is “the living law”, the law personified. This, as we shall see, did not mean that
the emperor was also to govern the Church. But it did mean that in Greco-Roman
antiquity and the Middle Ages, right down to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the
idea was firmly established that all true power, whether in Church or State, came from
above, from God, being mediated through either the one-man ruler of the Empire or
the collegial leadership of the Church (in each diocese of which, however, the bishop
was king). And this idea was passed down without distortion to the Third Rome,
Russia.

485 St. Isidore, in Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, in Richard Betts and Vyacheslav Marchenko,
Dukhovnik Tsarskoj Sem’i: Svyatitel’ Feofan Poltavskij (The Spiritual Father of the Royal Family: Holy
Hierarch Theophan of Poltava), Moscow: Balaam Society of America, 1994, p. 213.
486 St. Theodore, The Philokalia, volume IV, p. 93; in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia

(The Russian Ideology), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 46-47.

487 St. Ambrose, Epistle 21, 9.

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 Thus Professor I.M. Andreyev has characterized the three forms of statehood as
follows: “Of the three forms of state power – monarchy, democracy and despotism –
strictly speaking, only the first (monarchy) is based on a religious-ethical principle,
the second (democracy) is based on an a-religious-ethical principle, and the third
(despotism) is based on an anti-religious (satanic) principle.”488

488Andreyev, “Pomazannik Bozhij” (“The Anointed of God”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way),
1951, p. 129.

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 33. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (2) THE EMPEROR IN
THE CHURCH

Rome was now, not the persecutor, but the protector, of the Christian people. So
Constantine tried to conform his legislation to Christian principles, introducing
several decrees protecting Christian piety, such as: “on the abolition of pagan games
(314), on the liberation of the Christian clergy from civil obligations and church lands
from additional taxes (313-315), on the abolition of crucifixion as a means of capital
punishment (315), on the abolition of the branding of criminals (315), against the Jews
who rose up against the Church (315), on the liberation of slaves at church gatherings
without special formalities (316), on forbidding private persons from offering
sacrifices to idols and divining at home (319), on the annulment of laws against
celibacy (320), on the celebration of Sunday throughout the Empire (321), on the right
of bishops to be appeal judges (321), on banning the forcible compulsion of Christians
to take part in pagan festivals (322), on the banning of gladiatorial games (325), on
allowing Christians to take up senior government posts (325), on the building of
Christian churches and the banning in them of statues and images of the emperor
(325).”489

The decree on absolving the clergy from holding civic office is particularly
interesting: “[The clergy] shall not be drawn away by any deviation and sacrifice from
the worship that is due to the Divinity, but shall devote themselves without
interference to their own law… for it seems that rendering the greatest possible service
to the Deity, they most benefit the state.”490 Some would see in this a cynical attempt
to exploit the Deity in the interests of the emperor. But a more reasonable
interpretation is that Constantine was already feeling his way to a doctrine of the
symphony of powers, in which the emperor helps the Church as her defender and
“the bishop of those outside the Church”, while the Church helps the emperor
through her prayers and advice.

“What must have really shocked traditional Romans,” writes Peter Salway, “was
Constantine’s transfer to the Church of certain powers that had always been the
prerogative of Roman magistrates. Even Constantine’s own praetorian prefect,
himself a Christian, was not sure that he had understood the emperor correctly when
Constantine decided that either party in a legal action could have the case transferred
out of the ordinary courts to the local bishop – and that, if necessary, the secular
authorities were required to enforce the judgement. This extraordinary ecclesiastical
privilege did not, admittedly, last, but it sheds an interesting light on how
revolutionary Constantine was prepared to be.”491

Apart from legislation, Constantine helped to standardize certain important

aspects of Christian life.

489 Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
490 Quoted in Charles Freeman, “The Emperor’s State of Grace”, History Today, vol. 51 (1), January, 2001,

p. 11.
491 Salway, A History of Roman Britain, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 249-250.

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 Thus at the First Ecumenical Council in 325 the principles of the calculation of the
date of Pascha were agreed, an issue that had caused much controversy in the past
and would continue to do so in the future.

Again, Daniel F. Lieuwen writes: “Emperor Constantine’s order for fifty copies of
the Scripture may have been important in the process of finalizing the form of the
New Testament canon. While their exact content is not certain, some surmise that
these copies may have contained the 27 books of the final New Testament canon. The
canons of the council of Laodicea (c. 363) accepted all the books of the final canon
except the Apocalypse. The final list of canonical books of the New Testament that
exactly matches our own, having neither more nor fewer books, was contained in St.
Athanasius’ Paschal Epistle of 367.”492

Constantine gave to the Church the full honour due her as an institution founded
by the One True God and the Body of the God-Man Himself. The Church was
understood to be higher than any human institution, not excluding the Empire itself.
Constantine understood that the Christian faith was not to be honoured for the sake
of the empire, or in submission to the empire, but that the empire existed for the sake
of the faith and was to be submitted to it. One of the most powerful rulers in history,
who exercised absolute political control over the whole of the ancient Roman empire,
and did not shrink from waging war against, and executing, his political opponents,
Constantine nevertheless deferred to the Church in all things spiritual. That deferral,
that recognition that there were limits to his power laid down by God and His Holy
Church, made Constantine a true autocrat rather than a despot or tyrant.

As Edward Cutts writes: “The merit of Constantine’s relations with the Church lies
in what he abstained from doing, as much as in what he did. It was a proof of the
highest genius in the Emperor… to realize as he did the position of the Church as an
imperium in imperio; to appreciate as he did the true relations of the Emperor to the
Church; and to take his line as he did, not shrinking from initiative and intervention,
yet so rarely overstepping the due limits of his prerogative. It is not pretended, indeed,
that Constantine’s history is free from infringements of these right relations, but such
exceptions are very few; and it is, on the whole, very remarkable that the true relations
which ought to regulate the co-ordinate action of Church and State were so
immediately and fully established, and on the whole so scrupulously observed, as
they were by the first Christian Emperor.”493

This was most clearly illustrated at the First Ecumenical Council in 325, when the
emperor took part in the proceedings only at the request of the bishops (318 in
number, the same number as the servants of Abraham in his battle against the
Babylonian kings), and did not sit on a royal throne, but on a little stool somewhat
apart from the bishops.494 He did not vote with the bishops, let alone impose his will
on them. As Leithart writes, “Constantine did not dominate the council. He did not

492 Lieuwen, “The Holy Bible: Its Birth and Growth in the Church of Christ” Living Orthodoxy, May-
June, 2003, p. 14.
493 Cutts, Constantine the Great, London: SPCA, 1881, pp. 160-161.
494 Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky, “The First Ecumenical Council”, Orthodox Life, vol. 34, N 6,

November-December, 1984, p. 9.

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formulate the final creed, nor did he sign off on it – being, again, an unbaptized non-
bishop. It is difficult, however, to believe that the bishops could have come to such a
thoroughgoing conclusion [the defeat of Arianism, with only two bishops rejecting
the agreement] without his political skill and strength of personality…”495

When he addressed the Council Constantine demonstrated his sincere belief that
the internal peace and prosperity of the Church was even more important that the
external peace and prosperity of the Empire: “Now that we, with the help of God the
Saviour, have destroyed the tyranny of the atheists who entered into open war with
us, may the evil spirit not dare to attack our holy Faith with his cunning devices. I say
to you from the depths of my heart: the internal differences in the Church of God that
I see before my eyes have plunged me into profound sorrow... Servants of the God of
peace, regenerate amidst us that spirit of love which it is your duty to instil in others,
destroy the seeds of all quarrels.”496 Again, to the Fathers who did not attend the
Council he wrote: “That which has been established in accordance with the God-
inspired decision of so many and such holy Bishops we shall accept with joy as the
command of God; for everything that is established at the Holy Councils of Bishops
must be ascribed to the Divine will.”

Indeed, so obedient was he to the Church that, as I.I. Sokolov writes, “at the First
Ecumenical Council, according to the witness of the historian Rufinus, the Emperor
Constantine said: ‘God has made you priests and given you the power the judge my
peoples and me myself. Therefore it is just that I should submit to your verdict. The
thought has never entered my mind to be judge over you.’”497

Constantine saw himself as the instrument whereby God replaced the false
religions with the true: “With such impiety pervading the human race, and the State
threatened with destruction, what relief did God devise?… I myself was the
instrument He chose… Thus, beginning at the remote Ocean of Britain, where the sun
sinks beneath the horizon in obedience to the law of nature, with God’s help I
banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the
human race, enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of
God’s holy laws.”498

It is necessary to emphasize that whatever Constantine did for the Church he did,
not as arbitrary expressions of his imperial will, but in obedience to the commission of the
Church. Thus the Fathers of the First Council welcomed the Emperor as follows:
"Blessed is God, Who has chosen you as king of the earth, having by your hand
destroyed the worship of idols and through you bestowed peace upon the hearts of
the faithful... On this teaching of the Trinity, your Majesty, is established the greatness
of your piety. Preserve it for us whole and unshaken, so that none of the heretics,
having penetrated into the Church, might subject our faith to mockery... Your Majesty,

495 Leithart, op. cit., p. 170.
496 St. Constantine, in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia (The Russian Ideology), St.

Petersburg, 1992, p. 71.

497 Sokolov, Lektsii po Istorii Greko-Vostochnoj tserkvi (Lectures on the History of the Greek-Eastern

Church), St. Petersburg, 1914, p. 15.

498 Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, II, 28.

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command that Arius should depart from his error and rise no longer against the
apostolic teaching. Or if he remains obstinate in his impiety, drive him out of the
Orthodox Church."

As Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes, "this is a clear recognition of the divine

election of Constantine as the external defender of the Church, who is obliged to work
with her in preserving the right faith, and in correspondence with the conciliar
sentence is empowered to drive heretics out of the Church."499

This very hands-on approach to religion of St. Constantine was inherited by his
successors. It was not always helpful, as during the reigns of the Arian and Iconoclast
emperors; but the Orthodox Emperors played a vital role in helping the Church to
uphold the true faith and eliminate heresy by convening the Ecumenical Councils and
enforcing their decrees. They accepted the principle, most clearly expounded by the
Gallic saint Vincent of Lerins, that the truth is “that which has always, everywhere
and by all [Christians] been believed” since apostolic times; in other words, all
innovations in faith or morality must be false and must be rejected in council.

The Orthodox Emperors, being sons of the Church, accepted this principle, and in
general upheld it in their relations with the Church. In 381 the Second Ecumenical
Council was convened at Constantinople during the reign of St. Theodosius the Great.
The Creed drawn up at Nicaea was completed by the addition of articles on the
Divinity of the Holy Spirit and the Church, becoming the official statement of faith of
the True Church from henceforth. The Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431
forbade any addition to, or subtraction from, its wording. The later Councils did not
change the Creed, but made further definitions to combat further heretical
interpretations of its articles. Thus the Third Ecumenical Council anathematized
Nestorianism, which alleged that the Divine and Human natures of Christ were
united only by a moral, and not by a personal, bond, so that the Virgin Mary could be
called the Mother of Christ only, and not the Mother of God as the Church maintains.
Again, the Fourth and Fifth Ecumenical Councils of 451 and 553 condemned various
varieties of Monophysitism, which alleged that Christ was not fully man (the opposite
error to Arianism). Thus the Fourth Council, held at Chalcedon, declared that “our
Lord Jesus Christ is one single and same Son, Who is perfect according to Divinity and
perfect according to humanity, truly God and truly man, composed of a reasonable
soul and a body, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity and
consubstantial with us according to humanity, completely like us except for sin. He
was begotten by the Father before all ages according to His divinity and, in these latter
days, He was born for us and for our salvation of Mary the Virgin, the Mother of God,
according to His humanity; one single and same Christ, Lord, only begotten, known
in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without
separation; the division of natures is in no way suppressed by their union, but rather
the properties of each are retained and united in one single person and single
hypostasis. He is neither separated not divided in two persons, but He is a single and
same only-begotten Son, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

499 A. Tuskarev, Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve (The Church on the State), Staritsa, 1992, p. 75.

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 The Sixth Ecumenical Council of 680-81 condemned Monothelitism, which alleged
that Christ had only one will. And the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787 condemned
Iconoclasm, which forbade the veneration of icons as if they were idols. The Seventh
Council forms a fitting conclusion to the series of Councils concerned with
Christological and Trinitarian heresies insofar as Iconoclasm attacked the Incarnation
of Christ by denying the ability of Spirit to penetrate and sanctify matter (specifically,
the matter of icons, but by inference also the matter of Christ's Body).

The Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787) are the seven pillars upon which the
Church is built (cf. Proverbs 9.1), and every Orthodox Christian is obliged to accept
their Divine authority. In them, and in the Local Councils held until the fall of the
Empire, all the main dogmas of the Church – on the Holy Trinity, on the two Natures
and Wills of Christ, on the Holy Spirit, and on the Divine Energies – were elaborated.
Their significance was indicated by the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs in 1848:
"Our faith received its beginning not from men or through a man, but through the
revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1.12), which the divine Apostles preached, which
the Ecumenical Councils confirmed, which great and wise teachers passed on by
succession to the whole inhabited world, and which the martyrs sealed with their own
blood. We will hold to this confession, which we have received in purity from so many
men, and will reject every innovation as an inspiration of the devil."

The most famous definition of the relationship between Constantine and the
Church is to be found in two passages from Eusebius’ Life, which speak of him as “like
a common bishop” and “like a bishop of those outside”.

The first passage is as follows: “Like a common bishop established by God, he

reunited the ministers of God in synods. He did not disdain to be present at their
activities and to sit with them, participating in their episcopal deliberations, and
arbitrating for everyone the peace of God… Then, he did not fail to give his support
to those whom he saw were bending to the better opinion and leaning towards
equilibrium and consensus, showing how much joy the common accord of all gave
him, while he turned away from the indocile…”

In the second passage the emperor receives the bishops and says that he, too, is a
bishop: “But you, you are bishops whose jurisdiction is within the Church: I also am
a bishop, ordained by God to oversee those outside the Church.” Eusebius
immediately explains that Constantine’s “bishopric” here consisted, not in liturgical
priestly acts, but in “overseeing all the subjects of the empire” and leading them
towards piety.500

The word translated “overseeing” [epeskopei] here has the same root as the word
for “bishop” [episkopoς], thereby underlining the commonality of functions. So the
emperor was not really a bishop, but only like a bishop - in both his missionary and in
his supervisory roles. And he excelled in both. Thus, on the one hand, he responded

500 Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, I, 44; IV, 24.

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vigorously to St. Nina’s request that he send bishops and priests to help her
missionary work in Georgia. Again, on hearing that the Christians were being
persecuted in Persia he threatened to go to war with that state. On the other hand, he
convened numerous councils of bishops to settle doctrinal disputes throughout the
empire – in particular, those caused by the Donatists in Africa and the Meletians in
Egypt and, above all, the empire-wide contagion caused by Arius.

The emperor’s quasi-episcopal role can perhaps be best described as that of the focus
of unity for the Church on earth. Not that having this role within the Church meant
that he thought himself to have power over the Church. When the Donatists appealed
to him against the judgement of the bishops, he said: “What mad presumption! They
turn heavenly things into earthly, appealing to me as if the matter was of a civic
nature.” And on the decision of the Council of Arles (314) he said: “The bishops’
decision should be looked upon as though the Lord Himself had been sitting in
judgement.”

Constantine cared desperately that the bishops should achieve unity, and was
deeply frustrated at every sign of disunity. Thus on hearing of the Donatist heresy he
said: “Until now I cannot be completely calm until all my subjects are united in
brotherly unity and offer to the All-holy God the true worship that is prescribed by
the Catholic Church”. And at the opening of the First Ecumenical Council, convened
to judge the heresy of Arius, he said: “I hold any sedition within the Church of Christ
to be as formidable as any war or battle, and even more difficult to bring to an end. I
am consequently more opposed to it than to anything else…”

The bishops understood Constantine’s sincere veneration for the Church; so when
St. Athanasius was condemned by a council at Tyre, and appealed to the emperor, he
was not asking the secular power to overthrow the decision of the ecclesiastical power,
as the Donatists thought earlier in the reign, but was rather calling on a son of the
Church (albeit not yet baptized) to defend the decision of the Holy Fathers against
heretics. Even his most important and valuable contribution to the Council of Nicaea,
his suggestion of the term homoousios, “consubstantial”, to describe the relationship
between the Father and the Son was probably made in collaboration with Bishops
Ossius and Alexander.501

The emperor as focus of unity was especially needed when the Church was afflicted
by problems affecting the whole Church. Such, for example, were the problems of
Arianism and the Church calendar, both of which were resolved at the First
Ecumenical Council, but which continued to be contested. Since the Church herself,
contrary to the assertions of the Roman Catholics, lacks a “bishop of bishops” with
ecumenical jurisdiction, only the emperor can carry out this coordinating function. He
alone can compel bishops from all parts of the empire to meet in Synods, and remain
there until decisions sre agreed upon. And he alone can then see that these decisions
are put into practice…

501 Leithart, op. cit., p. 170.

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 As Meyendorff writes, “unity, universality and order, these essential elements of
the pax romana, were now inseparable from the interests and responsibilities of the
universal Christian Church. The Roman emperor could not care any longer for the
Empire without also being concerned with the unity, universality and good order of
the Church as well: a divided Church would also mean a divided Empire. Of course,
the internal affairs of the Church were cared for by the bishop… but each bishop was
in charge of his local community only: the early Church did not have a central
administration preoccupied, in a permanent and institutional way, with universal
unity. The emperor’s responsibility was recognized immediately, precisely on this
universal level. This implied, in particular, his competence in organizing provincial
groupings of bishops, granting them facilities to gather in synods and to resolve issues
of common concern.”502

The pagan absolutist system of government had concentrated all power, both
political and religious, in the hands of one man. Thus in Rome the emperor was also
the first priest, the pontifex maximus. Constantine did not renounce this title (the
Emperor Gratian later did.) As we have seen, however, he renounced any claims to
lord it over the Church, as did the Emperor Theodosius the Great, who decreed that
bishops should be tried only in ecclesiastical courts. And the fourth-century Fathers
vigorously opposed any such attempt on the part of his successors.

And yet this did not mean that they wished the emperor to play no part at all in
Church affairs. On the contrary: they expected him to pass laws that would benefit the
Church, convene Church Councils to resolve disputes and condemn heretics, and give
the force of secular law to the decisions of those Councils. Such a role was clearly
incompatible with the complete separation of Church and State as that is understood
today; in fact, it inevitably gave the emperor a considerable importance and influence
in Church affairs.

The question, then, arises: did the emperor exercise any priestly functions? He was
certainly set above the rest of the laity. As Paul Stephenson writes, he “was permitted
to pass between the realms of the secular and the sacred. In later centuries, when the
Byzantine emperor entered the cathedral church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople
on the major feasts of the Christian calendar, he removed his crown, signifying his
earthly dominion. Once and briefly during the liturgical entrance, unlike any other
layman, the emperor was permitted to enter the sanctuary, led by the patriarch, to kiss
the altar cloth. Afterwards, this area was off limits to him…”503

Nevertheless, the emperor was set above other laymen in the sacrament of royal
anointing. Now the visible sacrament of anointing did not exist in Constantine’s time.
However, the Church has always believed that he received the invisible anointing of
the Holy Spirit: “Thou wast the image of a new David, receiving the horn of royal
anointing over thy head; for with the oil of the Spirit hath the transcendent Word and
Lord anointed thee, O glorious one.”504

502 Meyendorff, op cit., p. 33.
503 Stephenson, Constantine. Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor, London: Quercus, 2009, p. 255.
504 Menaion, May 21, Mattins for the feast of St. Constantine, sedalen.

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 In time, the emperor came to exercise a more than purely administrative role in the
Church. This was necessitated, in the fifth century, by the decline in quality of the
Church hierarchy, and the increasing influence of heretical teachings such as
Nestorianism and Monophysitism. As the century wore on, and the chaos caused by
the heretics increased, the emperors were called upon to take a more active role in
Church affairs. Nor did the Church have any objection to this – so long as the Emperor
was Orthodox. Some “interference” by them was even sanctioned by Canon 93 (96) of
the Council of Carthage in the year 419: “It behoves the gracious clemency of their
Majesties to take measures that the Catholic Church, which has begotten them as
worshippers of Christ in her womb, and has nourished them with the strong meat of
the faith, should by their forethought be defended, lest violent men, taking advantage
of the times of religious excitement, should by fear overcome a weak people, whom
by arguments they were not able to pervert”.

As an ancient epitome of this canon puts it: “The Emperors who were born in the
true religion and were educated in the faith, ought to stretch forth a helping hand to
the Churches. For the military band overthrew the dire conspiracy which was
threatening Paul.”505

That the Emperor, as well as the hierarchs, was required to defend the faith can be
seen in the life of St. Hypatius of Rufinianus: “When Nestorius had left for Ephesus,
and the [Third Ecumenical] Council had assembled, on the day when he should be
deposed, Saint Hypatius saw in a vision that an angel of the Lord took hold of Saint
John the Apostle, and led him to the most pious Emperor [Theodosius II] and said to
him, ‘Say to the Emperor: “Pronounce your sentence against Nestorius”.’ And he,
having heard this, pronounced it. Saint Hypatius made note of this day, and it was
verified that Nestorius was deposed on that very day…”506

Emperors had to intervene when heretics became violent – as when the heretic
Dioscuros murdered St. Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople. Thus the officials of
Emperor Theodosius II played a major role in the Third Ecumenical Council. And it
was the decisive intervention of the Emperors Marcian and Pulcheria that made
possible the convening of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451 that anathematized
the Monophysite heresy. For, as Marcian said at the Council: “When by the decree of
God we were elected to the kingdom, then amidst the very many needs of the State,
there was no matter that occupied us more than that the true and Orthodox faith,
which is holy and pure, should remain in the souls of all without doubts”.507

St. Isidore of Pelusium believed that some interference by the emperors was needed
in view of the sorry state of the priesthood: “The present hierarchs, by not acting in
the same way as their predecessors, do not receive the same as they; but undertaking
the opposite to them, they themselves experience the opposite. It would be surprising

505 The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Eerdmans edition, pp. 488, 489.
506 Holy Transfiguration Monastery, “The Seat of Moses”, quoted in The Life of our Holy Father Maximus

the Confessor, Boston, 1982, p. 65.

507 St. Marcian, quoted in Archbishop Seraphim, op. cit., p. 71.

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if, while doing nothing similar to their ancestors, they enjoyed the same honour as
they. In those days, when the kings fell into sin they became chaste again, but now
this does not happen even with laymen. In ancient times the priesthood corrected the
royal power when it sinned, but now it awaits instructions from it; not because it has
lost its own dignity, but because that dignity has been entrusted to those who are not
similar to those who lived in the time of our ancestors. Formerly, when those who had
lived an evangelical and apostolic life were crowned with the priesthood, the
priesthood was fearful by right for the royal power; but now the royal power is fearful
to the priesthood. However, it is better to say, not ‘priesthood’, but those who have
the appearance of doing the priestly work, while by their actions they insult the
priesthood. That is why it seems to me that the royal power is acting justly.”508 It was
acting justly, in Isidore’s view, because “although there is a very great difference
between the priesthood and the kingdom (the former is the soul, the latter – the body),
nevertheless they strive for one and the same goal, that is, the salvation of citizens”.509

St. Leo, Pope of Rome, welcomed the interference of the emperors. Thus to the
Emperor Theodosius II he wrote that he had “not only the soul of an Emperor, but
also the soul of a priest”. And to the Emperor Marcian he wished “the palm of the
priesthood as well as the emperor’s crown”.510 Again he wrote to Emperor Leo I: “You
must unceasingly remember that Royal power has been entrusted to you, not only for
administering the world, but also and in particular to rule the Church”.511

However, St. Leo, one of the most powerful hierarchs in the Church’s history, could
not have meant this “rule” over the Church to be understood literally, but rather in
the sense of active intervention when necessary and with the blessing of the Church.
(When the emperors fell into heresy, the popes reverted to a more assertive posture in
relation to them, as we shall see.) At such times, when the majority of bishops were
betraying the truth, the pious emperors stood out as the representatives of the laity,
which, as the Eastern Patriarchs were to declare in their encyclical of the year 1848, is
the guardian of the truth of the Church. At such times they were indeed higher than
the clergy, if not by the grace they had received, at any rate in view of the fact that the
clergy had forsaken their vocation and trampled on the grace they had received. At
such times, they were images of the Heavenly King, their vocation being, like His, to
witness to the truth. For as the King of kings said to Pilate: “You say that I am a king.
For that I was born, and for that I came into the world, to witness to the truth” (John
18.37).

For, as Gilbert Dagron points out, “the emperor could not remain neutral. He was
the guarantor and often the principal architect of the unity of the Church. Thus the
Orthodox or heretical council unanimously celebrated the sovereign ‘guarded by God’
by giving him without niggardliness the title of ‘teacher of the faith’, ‘new Paul’, ‘equal
to the apostles, illumined like the bishops by the Holy Spirit’. At the end of the fourth
session of the council held in Constantinople in 536, the bishops expressed the

508 St. Isidore, Tvorenia (Works), Moscow, 1860, vol. 3, pp. 400, 410.
509 St. Isidore, quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, vol. I, p. 244.
510 J. Meyendorff, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996,

p. 11.
511 St. Leo, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 73.

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conviction of all in declaring that, ‘under an Orthodox emperor’, the Empire had
nothing and nobody to fear; and Patriarch Menas concluded: ‘It is fitting that nothing
of that which is debated in the holy Church should be decided against the advice and
order [of the emperor]’.”512

It is in this context that one has to understand the highly rhetorical expressions
applied to the rulers. “The distinction between the two powers was never as clearly
formulated as when there was a disagreement between them. When there was
concord or the hope of harmony, the celebration or hope of unity carried the day.
Nobody found anything wrong when the synod that condemned the heretic Eutyches
in Constantinople in 448 acclaimed Theodosius II with the words: ‘Great is the faith
of the emperors! Many years to the guardians of the faith! Many years to the pious
emperor, the emperor-bishop (tw arcierei basilei).’ The whole world is equally
agreed, a little later at the Council of Chalcedon, in acclaiming Marcian as ‘priest and
emperor’, at the same time as ‘restorer of the Church, teacher of the faith, New
Constantine, New Paul and New David’. At the same time Pope Leo congratulated
Theodosius II, and then Marcian, on the sacerdotalis industria, on the sacerdotalis anima,
and on the sacerdotalis palma with which God had rewarded them, and he declared to
Leo I that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit in matters of the faith. Except during
periods of tension, the adjective sacerdotalis was part of the formula of the pontifical
chancellery for letters addressed to the emperors of Constantinople. The composers
of elegies were not behindhand, in the West as in the East. Procopius of Gaza
underlined that Anastasius had been elected to be a bishop before being named
emperor, and that he reunited in himself ‘that which is most precious among men, the
apparatus of an emperor and the thought of a priest’; Ennodius of Pavia (473-521)
proclaimed Theodoric to be ‘prince and priest’; Venantius Fortunatus, in the second
half of the 6th century, called Childebert I ‘Melchisedech noster, merito rex atque sacerdos’;
towards 645 an anonymous panegyric characterised Clotaire I as quasi sacerdos;
Paulinus, bishop of Aquilea, in 794 encouraged Charlemagne to be ‘Dominus et pater,
rex et sacerdos’. To justify the canonisation of a king, they said that he had been led
during his reign acsi bonus sacerdos. We are in the domain of rhetoric, but that does not
mean that they could say anything and break the taboos. Even if the words have a
metaphorical and incantatory meaning, even if their association distilled a small dose
of provocation, there was nothing abnormal in affirming that the ideal emperor was
also a priest.”513

The coronation ceremony made the emperor into a quasi-priest. Thus Sir Steven
Runciman writes: “When Diocletian instituted a coronation ceremony it was
performed by the senior lay minister; and the first Christian Emperors continued the
practice. Theodosius II, for example, was crowned by the prefect of the City of
Constantinople. But at his successor Marcian’s coronation the Patriarch was
present514; and Marcian’s successor Leo I was certainly crowned by the Patriarch. The
Patriarch was by now the official with the highest precedence after the Emperor; but

512 Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996.
513 Dagron, op. cit., pp. 314-315.
514 According to Alexander Dvorkin, the crowning of Marcian and Pulcheria “was the first in history to

be carried out in church” (Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of
the Universal Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 292).

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his intervention turned the coronation into a religious ceremony. In the course of it
the Emperor underwent a sort of ordination; he received charismatic powers.
Henceforward the Imperial Palace was known as the Sacred Palace. Its ceremonies
were liturgical ceremonies, in which he placed the double role of God’s representative
on earth and representative of the People before God, a symbol both of God and of
the Divine Incarnation. The acclamations to which he was entitled stressed his
position. On Christmas Eve he was addressed in a prayer that begged Christ would
‘move all nations throughout the universe to offer tribute to Your Majesty, as the Magi
offered presents to Christ’. The Whitsun [Pentecost] hymns declare that the Holy
Ghost descends in fiery tongues on to the Imperial head. At the same time the
Emperor paid homage to God in the name of the Christian commonwealth. In the
words of the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogennitus it was through the Palace
ceremonies that ‘the Imperial power can be exercised with due rhythm and order and
the Empire can thus represent the harmony and movement of the universe as it stems
from the Creator’. The Byzantines fervently believed in this interpretation of the
Emperor’s position. It did not prevent them from seeking to depose an Emperor
whom they thought unworthy or ungodly. His sanctity then might not preserve him
from a violent death. It was the symbol, not necessarily the person, that they
revered…”515

Nevertheless, the Empire and the Priesthood remained separate principles in the
Byzantine understanding; they were both from God, and were meant to work in
“symphony” to the glory of God, as the Emperor Justinian proclaimed in his famous
Novella 6. But the autonomy of the two realms continued. Moreover, so important was
the independence of the Church seen that its violation was regarded as a sure sign of
the coming of the Antichrist. For if the Orthodox Emperor is “he who restrains the
coming” of the Antichrist, then the combining of the two principles in one person is
the surest sign that he or his forerunner has already come….

In the last analysis, however, it is not the Church that depends on the Empire, but
the Empire on the Church. For it is the Church that blesses the State, not the State the
Church; for “without all contradiction, the less is blessed of the better” (Hebrews 7.7).
And the Church depends on her hierarchs’ preserving the correct confession of faith
through the prayers of all the faithful in both the Heavenly and the Earthly Church.

We see an instructive illustration of this in the Life of St. Leo the Great, Pope of
Rome: “In the course of the debates with the heretics [at the Council of Chalcedon in
451], doubts concerning the truth arose in the hearts of many; whereupon the holy
fathers commanded that the Tome of Leo be read. This letter originally was sent by
the Pope to Saint Flavian, the martyred Patriarch of Constantinople, when the latter
convened a synod in the eastern capital to anathematize the unbelievers. It is said that
the holy chief Apostle Peter himself edited the document. Thus, we read in The
Spiritual Meadow, written by Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem: ‘Abba Menas, superior of
Salam, a coenobium near Alexandria, related that the heard this from Eulogius,
Patriarch of Alexandria: “While staying in Constantinople, I was a guest in the house
of my lord Gregory, archdeacon of the Church of Rome, a truly illustrious and

515 Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 58-59.

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virtuous man [St. Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome]. He told me a story recorded in
the archives of the Roman Church about the most blessed and Most Holy Pope Leo.
He said that Leo wrote a letter to Saint Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople, condemning
the impious Eutyches and Nestorius, and put it on the tomb of Peter, the chief Apostle.
Then he fasted, prayed, and kept vigils, begging the preeminent Apostle, “If I, as a
man, have in this letter erred in any way or failed to explain the truth fully, do thou,
to whom this Church and episcopal throne were entrusted, set it right.” Forty days
later the Apostle appeared while Leo was praying. He said, “I have read your letter
and corrected it.” The Pope took the epistle from the blessed Peter’s tomb, opened it,
and found that it had been amended by the Apostle’s hand.”’…

“’While I was synkellos of Eulogius, the holy Patriarch of Alexandria, I saw in a

dream a radiant man of venerable appearance. He commanded, “Announce me to
Patriarch Eulogius.” “Who are you, my lord?” I asked. He replied, “I am Leo, Pope of
Rome.” I told Eulogius, “The most blessed and Most Holy Leo, Primate of the Roman
Church, wishes to pay his respects.” Patriarch Eulogius rushed to meet the saint. The
two men prayed, then exchanged a kiss and sat. The divine Leo asked Eulogius, “Do
you know why I am here?” “No,” answered the holy Patriarch. “I have come to thank
you,” said Leo, “because you have stoutly defended the letter I wrote my brother,
Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople, refuting the impious Nestorian and Eutychian
heresies. You have understood my teaching well and proclaimed it fearlessly, thereby
silencing the misbelievers. Know, brother, that you have gratified not me alone by
your godly zeal and labor, but the chief Apostle Peter as well, for he read my epistle
and corrected it. Above all you have pleased Christ our God, Who is Truth Itself,
preached by us.” I had the dream not once or twice, but three times. Convinced by
this, I related it to Saint Eulogius. He wept, stretched out his hands to heaven, and
said, “I thank Thee, O Master Christ our God, that Thou hast vouchsafed me, the
unworthy, to proclaim Thy truth. In Thy great and ineffable compassion and by the
intercessions of Thy servants Peter and Leo, Thou has deigned to accept my feeble
efforts as Thou didst the widow’s mites.”’”516

An important issue in Church-State relations was the question whether, and in

what circumstances, the Church could disobey the State. In general, obedience was
considered not obligatory if the king was a tyrant; but even a true king could be defied
if he tried to enforce the transgression of God’s law. Thus St. Basil the Great wrote: “If
‘the heart of the king is in the hands of God’ (Proverbs 21.1), then he is saved, not by
force of arms, but by the guidance of God. But not everyone is in the hands of God,
but only he who is worthy of the name of king. Some have defined kingly power as
lawful dominion or sovereignty over all, without being subject to sin.” And again:
“The difference between a tyrant and a king is that the tyrant strives in every way to
carry out his own will. But the king does good to those whom he rules.”517

516 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, volume VI: February, House
Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 2003, pp. 207, 208.
517 St. Basil, quoted in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second

Coming), Moscow, 1998, pp. 66, 102.

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 This definition seems very strict. For what Roman emperor always did good to
those whom he ruled? By this definition almost all the emperors were in fact tyrants…
However, we can bring St. Basil’s definition more into line with how the Christians
actually regarded the emperors if we make two important distinctions. The first is
between the personal evil of many of the emperors, on the one hand, and the goodness
of the institution that they maintained and incarnated, on the other. And the second
is between the status of the pagan emperors before Constantine, on the one hand, and
the status of the pagan or heretical emperors after Constantine, on the other.

As St. John Chrysostom said, commenting on Romans 13.1: “Is every ruler, then,
elected by God? This I do not say, he [Paul] answers. Nor am I now speaking about
individual rulers, but about the thing in itself. For that there should be rulers, and
some rule and others be ruled, and that all things should not just be carried on in one
confusion, the people swaying like waves in this direction and that; this, I say, is the
work of God’s wisdom. Hence he does not say, ‘for there is no ruler but of God’, but
it is the thing [monarchical power as such] he speaks of, and says, ‘there is no power
but of God’.”518

And again he writes: “Is every ruler elected by God to the throne he occupies? Is
every emperor, king, and prince chosen by rule? If so, is every law and decree
promulgated by a ruler to be regarded as good, and thus to be obeyed without
question? The answer to all these questions is, no. God has ordained that every society
should have rulers, whose task it is to maintain order, so that people may live in peace.
God allows rulers to employ soldiers, whose task it is to capture and imprison those
who violate social order. Thus God will bless and guide any ruler and any soldier who
acts according to these principles. But many rulers abuse their authority by amassing
huge wealth for themselves at the expense of their people, by unjustly punishing those
who dare to speak against their evil, and by making unjust wars against neighbors.
Such rulers have not been elected by God, but rather have usurped the position that a
righteous ruler should occupy. And if their laws are wrong, we should not obey them.
The supreme authority in all matters is not the law of the land, but the law of God;
and if one conflicts with the other, we must obey God’s law.”519

Rulers like Julian the Apostate, according to the Fathers, were not established by
God, but were allowed to ascend the throne by Him in order to punish the people. As
St. Isidore of Pelusium wrote: “If some evildoer unlawfully seizes power, we do not
say that he is established by God, but we say that he is permitted, either in order to spit
out all his craftiness, or in order to chasten those for whom cruelty is necessary, as the
king of Babylon chastened the Jews."520 Again. St. Jerome said: “He often permits
wicked kings to arise in order that they may in their wickedness punish the
wicked.”521

518 St. Chrysostom, Homily 23 on Romans, 1.
519 St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply.
520 St. Isidore, Letter 6 to Dionysius.
521 St. Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, 2.21.

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 As for obedience to true rulers, the principle was the same in the post-
Constantinian and post-Julian era as in the pre-Constantinian era. As St. Basil the
Great put it: “It is right to submit to higher authority whenever a command of God is
not violated thereby.”522 Again, Blessed Theodoret of Cyr wrote: “Paul does not incite
us to obey even if we are being constrained to impiety...”523

Perhaps the most famous example of the Church refusing to obey the State was
provided by St. John Chrysostom in his relations with the Empress Eudoxia. In 403 a
silver statue of the empress was erected in Constantinople, before which the public
games were performed. “These,” writes Socrates Scholasticus, “John regarded as an
insult offered to the Church, and having regained his ordinary freedom and keenness
of tongue [after his first exile], he employed his tongue against those who did these
things… The empress once more applied his expression to herself as indicating
marked contempt towards her own person: she therefore endeavoured to procure the
convocation of another council of bishops against him. When John became aware of
this, he delivered in the church that celebrated oration beginning with: ‘Again
Herodias raves, again she is troubled, again she dances, and again she desires to
receive John’s head on a platter’.”524

The Fathers opposed any emperor all imperial transgressions of the Law of God.
For, as St. Basil wrote: “The Emperors must defend the decrees of God”.525 And St.
Gregory the Theologian wrote: “The law of Christ submits you to our power and our
judgement. For we also rule, and our power is higher than yours. In fact, must the
spirit bow before matter, the heavenly before the earthly?”526 And St. John
Chrysostom wrote: “The priesthood is as far above the kingdom as the spirit is above
the body. The king rules the body, but the priest – the king, which is why the king
bows his head before the finger of the priest.”527 “The Church is not the sphere of
Caesar, but of God. The decrees of the State authorities in matters of religion cannot
have ecclesiastical significance. Only the will of God can be the source of Church law.
He who bears the diadem is no better than the last citizen when he must be reproached
and punished. Ecclesiastical authority must stand firmly for its rights if the State
authorities interfere in its sphere. It must know that the boundaries of royal power do
not coincide with those of the priesthood, and the latter is greater than the former.”528
This teaching came to be embodied in the 30th Apostolic Canon, which defrocked any
cleric who had obtained his post with the help of the secular authorities. Again, in the
Apostolic Constitutions we read: “The king occupies himself only with military matters,
worrying about war and peace, so as to preserve the body, while the bishop covers
the priesthood of God, protecting both body and soul from danger. Thus the
priesthood surpasses the kingdom as much as the soul surpasses the body, for it binds
and looses those worthy of punishment and forgiveness.”529

522 St. Basil, The Morals, Rule 79 (Cap. 1).
523 Blessed Theodoret, P.G. 66, col. 864, commenting on Romans 13.5.
524 Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, VI, 18.
525 St. Basil, The Morals, Rule 79.
526 St. Gregory, Sermon 17.
527 St. Chrysostom, On the Priesthood.
528 St. John Chrysostom, quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, p. 68.
529 Apostolic Constitutions, XI, 34.

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 Perhaps the most striking and instructive example of the boldness of the fourth-
century Christian hierarchs even against Orthodox emperors was provided by St.
Ambrose of Milan. His views on Church-State relations were squarely in the tradition
of the Eastern Fathers: “The Emperor is not above the Church, but in the Church,” he
wrote. “If one reads the Scriptures, one sees that it is bishops who judge Emperors.”530
And again: “The tribute that belongs to Caesar is not to be denied. The Church,
however, is God’s, and it must not be pledged to Caesar, for God’s temple cannot be
a right of Caesar. That this is said with sentiments of respect for the emperor no man
can deny. And what is there more full of respect than that the emperor be styled a son
of the Church? And when he is called such, he is called such without sin, because it is
a compliment to be called such. For the Emperor is in the Church, not above the
Church, and far from refusing the Church’s help, a good emperor seeks it.”531

Now in 390, a riot took place in Thessalonica that led to the murder of several
magistrates. In his anger on hearing the news, the Emperor Theodosius ordered the
execution of the perpetrators. But there was no trial, and many innocents were killed,
perhaps as many as seven thousand. “News of this lamentable calamity,” writes
Theodoret, “reached Ambrose. The emperor on his arrival at Milan wished according
to custom to enter the church. Ambrose met him outside the outer porch and forbade
him to step over the sacred threshold. ‘You seem, sir, not to know,’ said he, ‘the
magnitude of the bloody deed that has been done. Your rage has subsided, but your
reason has not yet recognized the character of the deed. Peradventure your Imperial
power prevents your recognizing the sin, and power stands in the light of reason. We
must however know how our nature passes away and is subject to death; we must
know the ancestral dust from which we sprang, and to which we are swiftly returning.
We must not because we are dazzled by the sheen of the purple fail to see the
weakness of the body that it robes. You are a sovereign, sir; of men of like nature with
your own, and who are in truth your fellow slaves; for there is one Lord and Sovereign
of mankind, Creator of the universe. With what eyes then will you look on the temple
of our common Lord – with what feet will you tread that holy threshold, how will you
stretch forth your hands still dripping with the blood of unjust slaughter? How in such
hands will you receive the all-holy Body of the Lord? How will you who in rage
unrighteously poured forth so much blood lift to your lips the precious Blood?
Begone. Attempt not to add another crime to that which you have committed. Submit
to the restriction to which God the Lord of all agrees that you be sentenced. He will
be your physician, He will give you health.’

“Educated as he had been in the sacred oracles, Theodosius knew clearly what
belonged to priests and what to emperors. He therefore bowed to the rebuke of
Ambrose, and retired sighing and weeping to the palace. After a considerable time,
when eight months had passed, the festival of our Saviour’s birth came round and the
emperor sat in his palace shedding a storm of tears…” 532

530 St. Ambrose, in Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Phoenix, 1997, p. 156.
531 St. Ambrose, Sermon against Auxentius, 35, 36.
532 Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, V, 17, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, pp. 143-144.

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 34. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (3) THE STATE,
CULTURE AND MONASTICISM

The early Christians ascribed to the Roman empire a vital eschatological role: that
of postponing the coming of the Antichrist. The coming of the Antichrist was to take
place shortly before the Second Coming of Christ, which many Christians thought
would be very soon. But St. Paul wrote: “Do not be shaken or troubled, either by spirit
or by word or by letter, as if from us, as thought the Day of Christ had come. Let no
one deceive you by any means, for that Day will not come unless the falling away
comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and
exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits as God
in the temple of God, showing himself to be God” (II Thessalonians 2.2-4).

In other words, the Day of Christ is not just around the corner. Some important
events have to take place first – specifically, the coming of the Antichrist. Moreover,
the Antichrist will not come before another very important event takes place – the fall
of the Roman empire, or monarchical power in general. For this is how the Holy
Fathers interpreted the words: “He who now restrains will do so until he is taken out
of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume
with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His Coming” (II
Thessalonians 2.7-8). Roman, or monarchical power is that which “restrains” the
coming of the Antichrist. When that is “removed”, then the Antichrist will appear –
and only then will Christ come in glory to destroy him and judge the living and the
dead.

And so “there is also another and a greater necessity,” writes Tertullian, “for our
offering prayer on behalf of the emperors as also for the whole state of the empire, …
since we know that by the prosperity of the Roman empire the mighty power
impending on the whole world and threatening the very close of the age with frightful
calamities shall be delayed. And as we are loath to suffer these things, while we pray
for their postponement we favour the stability of Rome - nay, we pray for the complete
stability of the empire and for Roman interests in general. For we know that the
mighty shock impending over the whole earth – in fact, the very end of all things
threatening dreadful woes – is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman
empire.”533

“The subject here,” writes Sordi, “was the interpretation given to the famous
passage from the second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2.6-7) on the obstacle, whether
a person or an object, which impedes the coming of the Anti-Christ. Without
attempting to interpret this mysterious passage, the fact remains that all Christian
writers, up to and including Lactantius, Ambrose and Augustine, identified this
restraining presence with the Roman empire, either as an institution or as an ideology.
Through their conviction that the Roman empire would last as long as the world
(Tertullian Ad Scapulam 2) the early Christians actually renewed and appropriated as

533 Tertullian, Apologeticum, 32.1.

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their own the concept of Roma aeterna. ‘While we pray to delay the end’ – it is Tertullian
speaking (Apologeticum 32.1) – ‘we are helping Rome to last forever’.”534

St. John Chrysostom expressed the patristic consensus on “he that restraineth”:
“Some say that this is the grace of the Holy Spirit, but others the Roman rule, to which
I much rather accede. Why? Because if he meant to say the Spirit, he would not have
spoken obscurely, but plainly, that even now the grace of the Spirit, that is the gifts of
grace, withhold him… If he were about come when the gifts of grace cease, he ought
now to have come, for they have long ceased. But he said this of the Roman rule,…
speaking covertly and darkly, not wishing to bring upon himself superfluous enmities
and senseless danger.535 He says, ‘Only there is the one who restraineth now, until he
should be taken out of the midst’; that is, whenever the Roman empire is taken out of
the way, then shall he come. For as long as there is fear of the empire, no one will

534 Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 173. Tertullian also writes:
“The Christian is hostile to nobody, least of all to the emperor, whom… he wishes well, with the whole
Roman empire, so long as the world shall last, for so long as it shall last (Ad Scapulum 2). Again
Lactantius writes: “It is apparent that the world is destined to end immediately. The only evidence to
diminish our fear is the fact that the city of Rome continues to flourish. But once this city, which is the
veritable capital of the world, falls and there is nothing in its place but ruins, as the Sibyls predict, who
can doubt that the end will have arrived both for humanity and for the entire world?… The Sibyls
openly speak of Rome being destined to perish. Hystaspes also, who was a very ancient king of the
Medes,… predicted long before that the empire and name of Rome should be effaced from the globe…
But how this shall come to pass I shall explain… In the first place, the empire shall be parceled out, and
the supreme authority being dissipated and broken up shall be lessened,… until ten kings exist all
together;… these… shall squander everything and impair and consume… The very fact proclaims the
fall and destruction to be near, except that so long as Rome is safe it seems that nothing of this need be
feared. But when indeed that head of the world shall fall and the assault begin that the Sibyls speak of
coming to pass, who can doubt that the end has already come?… That is the city that has hitherto
upheld all things, and we should pray and beseech the God of heaven, if indeed his decrees and
mandates can be postponed, that that detested tyrant may not come sooner than we think” (Institutes
VII, 15, 16, 25). And pseudo-Ephraim writes: “When the kingdom of the Romans shall begin to be
consumed by the sword, then the advent of the evil one is at hand… And already is the kingdom of
the Romans swept away, and the empire of the Christians is delivered unto God and the Father, and
when the kingdom of the Romans shall begin to be consumed then shall come the consummation” (1,
5). See W. Bousset, The Antichrist Legend, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 124-125. St. Ambrose of Milan
also believed that the fall of Rome would bring in the Antichrist.
535 For he could have been accused of preparing the fall of Rome, aeterna et invicta, which would have

given them an excuse for persecuting the Christians on the same basis as they persecuted the Jews – as
political revolutionaries. (V.M.). Cf. Patriarch Nikon of Moscow: “It is necessary to investigate: who is
he who restrains, and why does Paul speak about him unclearly? What hinders his appearance? Some
say – the grace of the Holy Spirit, others – Roman power. I agree with the latter. For if Paul had meant
the Holy Spirit, then he would have said so clearly. But he [the antichrist] was bound to come when the
gifts of the Holy Spirit should become scarce, they have already become scarce a long time ago. But if
he is speaking of Roman power, then he had a reason for concealment, for he did not want to draw
from the Empire persecution on the Christians as if they were people living and working for the
destruction of the Empire. That is why he does not speak so clearly, although he definitely indicates
that he will be revealed at the fitting time. For ‘the mystery of iniquity is already at work’, he says. By
this he understands Nero, as an image of the antichrist, for he wanted people to worship him as god.
… When he who restrains now will be taken away, that is, when Roman power will be destroyed, he
will come, that is, as long as there is fear of this power nobody will introduce anarchy and will want to
seize for himself all power, both human and Divine. For, just as earlier the Median power was
destroyed by the Babylonian, and the Babylonian by the Persian, and the Persian by the Macedonian,
and the Macedonian by the Roman, so this last will be destroyed by the antichrist, and he by Christ...”
(in Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, part 2, pp. 48-49).

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willingly exalt himself. But when that is dissolved, he will attack the anarchy, and
endeavour to seize upon the sovereignty both of man and of God.”536

It follows that the early Christians, far from believing that political power and the
fabric of Roman civilization was superfluous, were highly motivated to preserve it in
being. For when that fabric collapsed, the Antichrist would come… So, while it was
true that the Christians placed no ultimate, permanent value on Roman civilization, -
“for here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13.14) - they
were by no means its enemies. And this attitude did not change fundamentally after
the Christianization of the empire. If the Christians had been loyal to the empire when
it was pagan, so much the more were they loyal to it when it became Christian.

Fr. Georges Florovsky has described this antimony well. “The Early Christians,” he
writes, “were often suspected and accused of civic indifference, and even of morbid
‘misanthropy’, odium generis humani, - which should probably be contrasted with the
alleged ‘philanthropy’ of the Roman Empire. The charge was not without substance.
In his famous reply to Celsus, Origen was ready to admit the charge. Yet, what else
could Christians have done, he asked. In every city, he explained, ‘we have another
system of allegiance’, allo systema tes patridos (Contra Celsum, VIII.75). Along with the
civil community there was in every city another community, the local Church. And
she was for Christians their true home, or their ‘fatherland’, and not their actual
‘native city’. The anonymous writer of the admirable ‘Letter to Diognetus’, written
probably in the early years of the second century, elaborated this point with an elegant
precision. Christians do not dwell in cities of their own, nor do they differ from the
rest of men in speech and customs. ‘Yet, while they dwell in the cities of Greeks and
Barbarians, as the lot of each is cast, the structure of their own polity is peculiar and
paradoxical… Every foreign land is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a
foreign land… Their conversation is on the earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.’
There was no passion in this attitude, no hostility, and no actual retirement from daily
life. But there was a strong note of spiritual estrangement: ‘and every fatherland is a
foreign land.’ It was coupled, however, with an acute sense of responsibility. Christians
were confined in the world, ‘kept’ there as in a prison; but they also ‘kept the world
together,’ just as the soul holds the body together. Moreover, this was precisely the
task allotted to Christians by God, ‘which it is unlawful to decline’ (Ad Diognetum, 5,
6). Christians might stay in their native cities, and faithfully perform their daily duties.
But they were unable to give their full allegiance to any polity of this world, because
their true commitment was elsewhere….”537

The other-worldliness of Christianity – the fact that is “in” the world without being
“of” it – was especially emphasized by monasticism, which emerged as an organized
institution in the fourth century that defied worldly conventions, choosing the
uncultivated desert over Roman city life. The monks truly had no earthly fatherland;

536 St. Chrysostom, Homily 4 on II Thessalonians.
537 Florovsky, “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont,

Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 68- 69.

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they lived wholly in anticipation of the Kingdom to come. However, though
supremely unworldly, they were not revolutionaries in a political sense; they
remained loyal to the Roman Empire and its Orthodox Christian emperors, and cared
about its prosperity. Holy monks such as Anthony the Great or Sabbas the Sanctified
would leave their deserts in order to defend the faith or give counsel to the emperors
when the Empire was in spiritual or material danger.538

Now the basic principles of monasticism were not new, being simply the
uncompromising practice of the Gospel commandments. From the beginning, during
the apostolic period, as during the pagan persecutions, there had been Christian men
and women living essentially monastic lives. But as a large-scale, semi-
institutionalized movement involving flight from the main inhabited centres into the
desert, monasticism may be said to date from the fourth century, and in particular

538 ‘Never did Anthony associate with any schismatic sect, he was altogether wonderful in faith and
religious, for he never held communion with the Meletian schismatics, knowing their wickedness and
apostasy from the beginning; nor did he have any friendly dealings with the Manichaeans or any other
heretics; or, if he did interact with them, it was only to offer advice to them that they should repent of
their heresy and change to piety. For he thought and asserted that interactions with these heretics was
harmful and destructive to the soul.
“In the same manner also he loathed the heresy of the Arians, and exhorted everyone to neither to
approach them nor to hold their erroneous belief. And once, when certain Arian madmen came to him,
when he had questioned them and learned their impiety, he drove them from the mountain, saying
that their words were worse than the poison of serpents.
“And once also the Arians lyingly claimed that Anthony’s opinions were the same as theirs, and so
he became displeased and angry against them. Then being summoned by the Bishops and all the
brethren to return to Alexandria, Anthony descended from the mountain, and having entered the city,
he denounced the Arians, declaring that their belief was the final heresy that would herald the coming
of the Antichrist.
“And he taught the people that the Son of God was not a created being, neither had He come into
being from non-existence, but that He was the Eternal Word and of the same essence of the Father. And
therefore it was impious to say, 'there was a time when He was not,' for the Word was always co-eternal
with the Father. Therefore, we should have no fellowship with the most impious Arians. For there is
no communion between light and darkness. For you are good Christians, but they, when they say that
the Son of the Father, the Word of God, is a created being, are no different than the Pagans, since they
worship that which is created, rather than God the Creator. But believe that the creation itself is angry
with them because they number the Creator, the Lord of all, by whom all things came into being, with
those things which were created.
“It is impossible to convey the degree to which this great man’s words strengthened people’s faith.
All of the people rejoiced when they heard this anti-Christian heresy being anathematized by such a
Pillar of the Church. At that time no one, of any age or of either sex, remained at home. I am not
speaking just of the Christians; but the Pagans as well, and even the priests of idols came rushing to the
Church, saying, ‘We beg to see the man of God!’ This is how everyone referred to him. They crowded
around him, eager just to touch the hem of his garment, in the belief that merely touching it would
benefit them greatly.
“How many people were freed from the devil’s grip and from many different illnesses! How many
spoils were snatched from the idols! How many people were saved from Pagan error and returned to
Christ’s flock! The number of those who converted from the superstition of the idols was greater than
the number of converts one would normally see in a year.
“And what is more, that when his attendants turned the crowd away as it surged forward, because
they thought that he would find such a large number of people to be a nuisance, he told them calmly,
‘Surely this gathering is no larger than the hosts of demons? Surely this crowd of followers is no more
numerous than the army of those of whom I wrestled with on the mountain?’” (The Life of St. Anthony,
by St. Athanasius the Great, Ch. 68-70)

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from the lives of the first well-known hermit, St. Anthony, and the first organizer of
coenobia, St. Pachomius.539 A similar role was played in the West by St. Martin of
Tours…

The major centre of fourth-century monasticism was Egypt, and this location in
itself tells us much about the nature of the movement. First, Egypt was, with Babylon,
the world-centre of pagan religions and demonic enchantment of all kinds. However,
there was a tradition that when Christ as a child had entered Egypt all the idols of the
nation had fallen down, and the monks saw themselves as following in Christ's
footsteps. Therefore they deliberately set out for the desert and the graveyards where
the demons were thought to dwell in the greatest numbers, and there, having driven
out the passions from their own souls first, they exorcised the demons by mighty feats
of prayer and fasting.

Secondly, the climate and ecology of the Egyptian desert was extremely severe, and
life was hard even for those who had no other purpose than to earn their living. But
the monks drastically limited themselves even in those material consolations that
were available. In this way they practised the Gospel commandments relating to
poverty, chastity, obedience and self-denial in all things, translating them into the
terse philosophy of the desert: "Give your blood, and receive the Spirit."

Thirdly, with a few exceptions (such as the Roman St. Arsenius), the Egyptian
monks were of Coptic peasant stock, usually illiterate, with no part in that rich Greco-
Roman civilization which the conversion of St. Constantine was opening up to
Christian influence. And yet so striking were their spiritual attainments that well-
educated Christians from the West, such as Saints John Cassian, Jerome and Melanie,
as well as from the East, such as Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and
John Chrysostom, came to them as to their teachers in Christian philosophy. In this
way the Egyptian monks demonstrated both the possibilities of the royal priesthood
of the laity (monasticism was essentially a lay movement), and reasserted a truth
which was in danger of being lost as many wise and mighty men of the world entered
the Church - the truth, namely, that lack of formal education is no barrier to the
attainment of Christian wisdom, and that "God hath chosen the foolish things of the
world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are mighty,... that no flesh should glory in His presence"
(I Corinthians 1.27-29).

Fourthly, these visitors from abroad took back with them the lessons they had
learned in Egypt and applied them with astonishing success in their homelands, so
that monasticism spread into the deserts of Palestine, Syria and Cappadocia, Gaul,
Wales and Ireland. The Egyptian monks themselves rarely left their desert, but the
reports of their exploits (especially St. Athanasius' Life of Antony) fired the
imaginations of Christians with the desire to imitate them. Thus long after Egyptian
monasticism had succumbed to Monophysitism and Islam, its principles were still

539 Even earlier than Pachomius, St. Chariton, who came to maturity in the third century, had organized
three great lavras in the Judaean wilderness. But Pachomius was the first to provide a rule of coenobitic
life, given to him by an angel.

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being practised far to the west and north. Moreover, by the second half of the
millenium the spiritual wisdom of the Egyptian monks had been combined in an
exceedingly fruitful union with the more secular wisdom of the Greco-Roman world,
so that the English monks in Germany and Scandinavia, or the Greek monks in the
Balkans and Russia, brought with them not only the Faith but also the rudiments of
education (in the case of Saints Cyril and Methodius' mission to the Slavs, even the
alphabet). Thus monasticism became the major missionary and civilizing force
throughout the rural areas of Europe and the Middle East, and even the urban
households of the bishops were as often as not both monastic communities and
schools of learning.

Fifthly, the Egyptian monks took a leading part in the doctrinal disputes, the most
famous example being St. Anthony's journey to Alexandria to support St. Athanasius
against the Arians. This demonstrated that the Faith was the concern not only of
bishops and kings, but also of the humblest layman. This was a truth that towards the
end of the first millennium began to be lost in the West, where the sacramental
hierarchy of the clergy, led by the increasingly despotic papacy, was tending to
replace completely the royal priesthood of the laity and the charismatic authority of
the Spirit-bearing monks...

How did the Church relate to the culture of the Roman Empire, both in the sense
of the basic beliefs of the peoples of the empire, and in the sense of the material
trappings of civilization?

As regards beliefs, the Christians made every effort to find common ground with
the pagan philosophies around them while not sacrificing their own distinctive faith.
The first example of this reaching out we see in St. Paul’s dialogue with the Greek
philosophers at the Areopagus in Athens, when he undertook to explain to them who
was the “unknown god” they worshipped. The concepts of natural law and conscience
(συνειδεσις) that he employed especially in Romans were Stoic in origin, although
there were antecedents in the Jewish Scriptures – in, for example, Jeremiah’s speaking
of God implanting a law in men’s minds and hearts that would be the basis of a new
covenant (Jeremiah 31.33). For the triumph of Constantine entailed not only a change
of regime and religion, but also, in consequence of the latter, a change of culture. The
new culture was a fusion of all that was best of the cultures of Greece, Rome and Israel.
It would become in time the high culture of Byzantium, its art and music and
architecture, the mother-culture of the whole of Christian Europe, whose imprint has
not been erased even now, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Now the Lord says nothing directly about culture. Indirectly, however, He makes
it clear that high culture does not constitute part of “the one thing necessary” for
salvation. For He was incarnate in one of the least cultured regions of the Roman
empire, and deliberately chose uneducated fishermen to be His apostles. The Jews
looked down on uncultured Galilee: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
(John 1.46). And yet it was from the fishermen of Galilee that true enlightenment came
to the world…

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 The most educated of the apostles was St. Paul, who came from the Greek city of
Tarsus and was trained in the law by great rabbinic teachers such as Gamaliel. And
yet, while freely acknowledging his debt to Greek philosophy, he, too, says nothing
directly about culture. Evidently, he felt that it was not essential for salvation, noting
that not many highly cultured, educated or powerful people were being saved. “For
you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world
to put to shame the wise,… that no flesh should glory in His presence” (I Corinthians
1.26-27, 29).

The fact that the treasures of faith were given to the uncultured fishermen and not
to the cultured philosophers was celebrated in one of the highest works of Byzantine
literary culture, the Akathist to the Mother of God:

Rejoice, thou who showest philosophers to be fools!

Rejoice, thou who exposest the learned as irrational!
Rejoice, for the clever critics have made fools of themselves!
Rejoice, for the writers of myths have withered away!
Rejoice, thou who didst rend the webs of the Athenians!
Rejoice, thou who didst fill the nets of the fisherman!

The attitude of the Byzantines to pagan Hellenistic culture was ambiguous. On the
one hand, they were proud of their Greek heritage, and delighted in seeing “seeds of
the Word” in pagan culture. On the other hand, insofar as the roots of culture lie in
religion, - the word “culture” comes from cultus, “religious worship”, - and insofar as
the religion of the Greco-Roman world was pagan, and linked with such immoral
activities as temple prostitution, the preachers of the Christian faith could not be
simply indifferent to the culture around them.

As Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, we find a definitely negative attitude towards the
music, painting and especially the rhetorical art of their time in such early Christian
writers as Tertullian and Origen. For “the whole of the culture of that time was built,
defined and penetrated by a false faith. One has to recognize that some historical
forms of culture are incompatible with the Christian attitude to life, and must be
avoided or cast out.”540 Thus Tertullian said: “What has Athens to do with
Jerusalem?”, and the martyrs destroyed the pagan temples because they were not
“cultural monuments”, but witnessed to false religion. The modern attitude of valuing
them for their aesthetic beauty or “cultural value” was unknown to the early Fathers.

Indeed, insofar as the old pagan culture had a demonic influence on backsliding
Christians, it was not only not encouraged but even destroyed. We see this most
clearly in the oldest and most tenacious of the pagan cultures, the Egyptian, which
had survived more or less intact after being conquered by Persian, Greek and Roman
rulers, but did not survive the coming of Christianity. The tenacity of the old faith is
clearly seen in Cleopatra, the last of the Greek rulers of Egypt, who behaved like an

540 Florovsky, “Vera i Kul’tura” (Faith and Culture) in Vera i Kul’tura, St. Petersburg, 2002, p. 664.

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old-fashioned pharaoh, building temples in the old style dedicated to the old gods,
and suffering a thoroughly Egyptian death at the bite of an asp, the old Egyptian
symbol of eternity. But when the Christians came to Egypt, the statues of the old gods
were defaced and the hieroglyphs – the language of the ancient pagan priesthood –
were destroyed. The last known pagan temple, which is found in the far south of the
country, contains the last known hieroglyph dating to 394 AD…541

However, it is possible to dissociate a work of art’s original religious meaning from

its aesthetic value and the elements of truth it contains. Indeed, this is part of what
was involved in the fusion of Christianity and Hellenism that began in the fourth
century. The forms of ancient Hellenistic culture – its philosophical concepts, artistic
conventions and architectural shapes – were dissociated from their original content
and context in the worship of false gods and turned to the service of the true God.

Thus St. Basil the Great wrote a work entitled How one benefits from Greek knowledge,
which showed the spiritual benefits to be gained from reading, for example, Homer
from a Christian point of view. Similarly, St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “We have
upheld from pagan education whatever constitutes an investigation and theory of
what is true; but whatever leads to the demons, to deceit and the abyss of destruction,
we have cast aside. Nevertheless, everything, even the deceptions, is useful for our
piety, because by their weakness they help us to strengthen our own teaching.
Knowledge, therefore, is not something that we must oppose because there are some
who like to say so.”542

Again, the old forms could be transfigured by grace. Thus ancient Egyptian
portraiture was transformed into the iconography that we see today in St. Catherine’s
monastery in Sinai; while the architecture of such buildings as the Pantheon in Old
Rome was transfigured out of all recognition into such supremely beautiful buildings
as the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in New Rome. The resulting synthesis was the
glorious civilization of Byzantium, the cradle civilization and culture of the whole of
Christendom, East and West, for the first millennium of Christian history. This
creation of a Christian culture to replace the old pagan culture was not only not a
matter of indifference to the Church, but a task of the greatest importance for her. For
whether we understand “culture” in the narrow sense of “a position or orientation of
individual people or human groups whereby we distinguish ‘civilized’ from
‘primitive’ society”, or in the broader sense of “a system of values”543, all men living
in society live in a culture of some kind, and this culture inescapably influences their
thoughts and feelings for better or for worse.

Culture counts because it influences faith – just as faith influences culture. So the
formation of the culture of Christian Byzantium was not, as Fr. Georges Florovsky
writes, “what historians of the 19th century usually called ‘the Hellenization of
Christianity’, but rather the conversion of Hellenism. And why should Hellenism not

541 Consequently, the understanding of the hieroglyph language was lost until the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone in 1799.
542 St. Gregory, P.G. 36: 508-509.
543 Florovsky, op. cit., p. 652.

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be converted? After all, the acceptance of Hellenism by Christians was not simply a
servile perception of an undigested pagan heritage. It was the conversion of the
Hellenistic mind and heart to Christ.”

“In fact, this is what happened: Hellenism was cut through with the sword of the
Christian Revelation and thereby completely polarized. We must call Origen and
Augustine Hellenists. But it is completely obvious that this is another type of
Hellenism than we find in Plotinus or Julian. Of all Julian’s directives the Christians
hated most of all was the one that forbade their preaching of the arts and sciences.
This was in reality a belated attempt to exclude Christians from the building up of
civilization, to separate ancient culture from Christian influence. In the eyes of the
Cappadocian Fathers this was the main question. St. Gregory the Theologian lingered
on it for a long time in his sermons against Julian. St. Basil the Great considered it
necessary to write an address ‘to young people about how they could draw benefit
from Hellenistic literature’. Two centuries later, Justinian excluded all non-Christians
from scholarly and educational activity and closed the pagan schools. There was no
hostility to ‘Hellenism’ in this measure. Nor was it an interruption of tradition. The
traditions were preserved, and even with love, but they were being drawn into a
process of Christian reinterpretation. This is the essence of Byzantine culture. It was
the acceptance of the postulates of culture and their re-evaluation. The majestic church
of the Holy Wisdom, the pre-eternal Word, the great church of the Constantinopolitan
Sophia, remains forever a living symbol of this cultural achievement.”544

There is no obvious correlation between culture and sanctity. Many of the early
Christians and martyrs were uneducated slaves, and there was very little specifically
Christian art before the fourth century. Nevertheless, it is clear that the great culture
of Byzantium, which built on and incorporated and transfigured the best of the earlier
pagan Hellenistic culture, greatly facilitated the survival of Christianity down the
ages. As we shall see, the beauty of Byzantine culture was a major factor in the
conversion of St. Vladimir, the baptizer of Russia. In this sense Christian culture was
necessary in the same way that Christian statehood was: as a bulwark defending the
Church from the outside. We see this most clearly in theology: the theological
achievements of the Ecumenical Councils, and the refutation of the heresies that arose
at that time, would have been very difficult without the sophisticated philosophical
language and culture that the Greeks inherited from Plato and Aristotle. But nobody
suggested that mastery of Byzantine art and philosophy was necessary to salvation.
And so in a general way, we can see that a decline in piety is accompanied by a decline
in culture. This is particularly clear in Western culture, which declines sharply from
the Carolingian period in the late eighth century. However, this is by no means a
universal rule: some of the greatest products of Byzantine culture were produced in
what Sir Steven Runciman called “the Last Byzantine Renaissance” - the period from
1261 to 1453 that was in general (and in spite of the hesychast saints) a period of
religious decline.

544Florovsky, “Khristianstvo i Tsivilizatsia” (Christianity and Civilization), in Vera i Kul’tura, St.
Petersburg, 2002, pp. 642-643.

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 35. THE HERETICAL AND PAGAN REACTIONS

After the great spiritual triumph of St. Constantine’s conversion and the
legalization of Orthodoxy, it was inevitable that Satan, the envier of all good, should
strike back. “Under Emperor Constantine the Great,” writes St. Nikolai Velimirovič,
“the Church acquired freedom, but the struggle did not come to an end. The Emperor
Constantine’s edict brought joy to the whole Christian world, like a resurrection after
a three-hundred-year-old crucifixion. Bishops and priests were released from prison,
confessors were freed from their chains, those sentenced to death and condemned for
the faith were pardoned, and the Gospel began to be preached, not in a whisper, but
at full voice.

“But people met the joy of freedom in different ways. Some accepted it as a gift of
God and a reason for a new glorification of God. Others understood freedom as the
possibility of free thinking and lack of restraint of the tongue. And a third group - as
general permissiveness in the expression of their carnal desires. And so a struggle
broke out between the first and the second and third groups…”545

“When the great Constantine was killed,” writes St. Demetrius of Rostov, “killed
in Nicomedia through the wiles of his enemies, who secretly poisoned him, his
decease was foretold by the appearance of a comet. He left three sons, the eldest of
whom was named Constantine after his father; the second, Constantius, after his
grandfather; and the third, Constans. The brothers inherited the throne of their father
and divided the Empire into three parts. Constantine, the eldest brother, took upper
Gaul beyond the Alps, Anglia and the lands of Britain, Germany, Spain, and so forth.
Constans, the youngest brother, took lower Gaul, which is in Italy, Rome itself, Sicily,
Illyricum, and Africa. The middle brother Constantius,… took Constantinople, Egypt,
and the lands of the East as far as Persia; but soon thereafter he came to rule his
brothers’ portions as well. The elder brother Constantine died in battle, and Constans,
the younger brother was slain while hunting by a general in his armies, Magnentius,
and his fellow conspirators. Later Magnentius was himself put to death by
Constantius, the remaining brother, who became ruler over the East and the West. It
was during his reign [in 351] that the sign of the holy Cross wondrously appeared in
the sky above Jerusalem at the third hour of the day on the very feast of Pentecost,
shining more brightly than the rays of the sun. According to Cyril, the Patriarch of
Jerusalem, who wrote to the Emperor Constantius to tell him of this wonder, the cross
reached from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives.

“At the very beginning of his reign, Constantius slew his father’s enemies. He put
to death Constantius, the brother of Constantine the Great, father of Gallus and Julian,
and he also killed Annibalianus and Dalmatus, the younger brothers of his father, the
great Constantine. Since he had no heir and neither of his brothers remained alive,
after many years on the throne, he resolved to make one of his relatives his associate
and helper. He summoned his cousin Gallus, who was twenty-five years of age, the
son of his father’s brother and Julian’s brothers, and made him his co-ruler. To

545Velimirovič, “Zhatva Tret’ia” (The Third Harvest), in Dusha Serbii (The Soul of Serbia), Moscow,
2006, pp. 63-65.

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strengthen the bonds of trust with him, he wed his sister Constantia to Gallus. He then
sent him to the East to defend the Empire against the Persians, for Gallus was brave
and had already proved himself a successful general, having fought Magnentius and
Vetanio and utterly defeated them.

“At that time Julian began to envy his brother’s imperial rank and took up the study
of sorcery and every demonic art. He secretly renounced Christ and began to sacrifice
to the demons, but he hid his apostasy, for he feared the Emperor Constantius and his
brother Gallus and knew that if they learned of his impiety they would punish him.
Therefore he remained a Christian in name alone, for he was altogether under the
power of the demons, to whom he surrendered himself in the hope that they might
help him become Emperor…”546

Unfortunately, the State that had given the Church freedom now, under
Constantine’s successors, began to persecute her again… Constantius became a despot
and a heretic, rejecting the Divinity of Christ in favour of the Arian heresy…

As we have seen, the Church did not believe that the State should be obeyed in all
circumstances. The Holy Apostles and Martyrs before Constantine believed, on the
one hand, that the emperor’s power was established by God and should be obeyed
whenever possible, and on the other hand, that he should be disobeyed if he
commanded something contrary to God’s commandments. No authority, whether
political or ecclesiastical, should be listened to if it contradicted the supreme authority,
which is God. As the Apostles said to the Jewish Sanhedrin: “Whether it is right in the
sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge” (Acts 4.19).

According to Protestant writers, the triumph of the Cross under Constantine was
not a real triumph, but a tragedy; for the Church entered into a union with the State
that made her a slave of the Emperors. However, this is simply not true: the fourth-
century Fathers showed a heroic independence even in relation to the most Christian
of the Emperors when the purity of the faith was at stake. While entering willingly
into a “symphony of powers” between Church and State for the sake of the huge
benefits to the Church that that symphony afforded, they were uncompromisingly
firm when the Emperors betrayed the faith.

And most of the emperors in the fifty-year period between St. Constantine the Great
and St. Theodosius the Great did just that: they betrayed and persecuted the Orthodox
Faith. Thus when Constantius apostasized from Orthodoxy and converted to “semi-
Arianism”, St. Athanasius, who had previously addressed him as “very pious”, a
“worshipper of God”, “beloved of God” and a successor of David and Solomon, now
denounced him as “patron of impiety and Emperor of heresy,… godless, unholy,.. this
modern Ahab, this second Belshazzar”, like Pharaoh, worse than Pilate and a
forerunner of the Antichrist.547 Again, St. Hilary of Poitiers wrote to Constantius: “You

546 St. Demetrius, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Co.: Chrysostom Press,
2000, volume II: October, pp. 287-288.
547 St. Athanasius, in J. Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St.

Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 36. In his History of the Arians (77) Athanasius also calls him “’the
abomination of desolation’ spoken of by Daniel”.

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are fighting against God, you are raging against the Church, you are persecuting the
saints, you hate the preachers of Christ, you are annulling religion; you are a tyrant
no longer only in the human, but in the divine sphere… You lyingly declare yourself
a Christian, but are a new enemy of Christ. You are a precursor of Antichrist.”548

Constantius showed his despotism at the Council of Milan in 355, when he imposed
the Arian bishop Auxentius on the Milanese, saying: “My will is law”. To which St.
Osius of Cordoba, replied: “Stop, I beseech you. Remember that you are a mortal man,
fear the Day of Judgement, preserve yourself pure for that. Do not interfere in matters
that are essentially ecclesiastical and do not give us orders about them, but rather
accept teaching from us. God has entrusted you with the Empire, and to us He has
entrusted the affairs of the Church. And just as one who seizes for himself your power
contradicts the institution of God, so fear lest you, in taking into your own hands the
affairs of the Church, do not become guilty of a serious offence. As it is written, give
to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. We are not permitted to exercise
an earthly role; and you, Sire, are not authorised to burn incense.”

At about this time, the Persian King Shapur started to kill the Christian clergy,
confiscate church property and raze the churches to the ground. He told St. Simeon,
Bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, that if he worshipped the sun, he would receive
every honour and gift. But if he refused, Christianity in Persia would be utterly
destroyed. In reply, St. Simeon not only refused to worship the sun but also refused
to recognize the king by bowing to him. This omission of his previous respect for the
king’s authority was noticed and questioned by the King. St. Simeon replied: "Before
I bowed down to you, giving you honour as a king, but now I come being brought to
deny my God and Faith. It is not good for me to bow before an enemy of my God!"
The King then threatened to destroy the Church in his kingdom… He brought in about
one hundred priests and about one thousand other Christians and killed them before
the saint’s eyes. The saint encouraged them to hope in eternal life. And after everyone
had been killed, he himself was martyred.549

This shows that the Fathers and Martyrs of the Church recognized the authority of
kings and emperors only so long as they did not persecute the Church of God. At the
same time, non-recognition – that is, recognition of the power as tyrannical - did not
necessarily mean rebellion. Thus the Fathers did not counsel physical rebellion against
heretical emperors such as Constantius, but only spiritual resistance.

“By the end of the 4th century,” writes Riassophore Monk Adrian, “Persian power
held sway once again in the Caucasus. Subjugated by the fire-worshipping
Zoroastrians, the Orthodox inhabitants faced their first trial as a Christian nation – to
convert to the religion of the conquerors or face persecution, torture, or even death.
The Georgians remained steadfast in the Faith, producing their nation’s first martyrs
during this period: the Protomartyr Razhden and the Royal Martyr Queen
Shushanik.550

548 F.W. Farrar, The Lives of the Fathers, Edinburgh, 1889, vol. I, p. 617.
549 St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, April 17.
550 Riassophore Monk Adrian, op. cit., p. 18.

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 *

When Julian the Apostate (361-363) came to the throne, the passive resistance of
Christians offered to his predecessors (as to the Persian kings) turned into active, if
not physical, attempts to have him removed. For he was a uniquely evil phenomenon.
A baptized Christian who had studied with Saints Basil the Great and Gregory the
Theologian in Athens, in 351 he secretly renounced Christ, and when he became
emperor immediately tried to turn the empire back to paganism.

“Ammianus Marcellinus gives us more details: ‘[He] directed in plain and

unvarnished terms that the temples should be opened, sacrifices brought to the altars,
and the worship of the old gods restored. To make this ordinance more effective, he
summoned to the palace the Christian bishops who were far from being of one mind,
together with their flocks, who were no less divided by schism, and warned them in
polite terms to lay aside their differences and allow every man to practice his belief
without hindrance.’

“Requiring the bishops to espouse religious toleration was a classic exampled of

‘divide and conquer’: ‘His motive in insisting on this was that he knew that toleration
would intensify their divisions and henceforth he would no longer have to fear
unanimous public opinion.’”551

Julian mocked the selfless behaviour of Christians during epidemics: He wrote that,
“the recent Christian growth was caused by their ‘moral character, even if pretended’
and by their ‘benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead.'” In a
letter to another idolatrous priest, he wrote, “The impious Galileans (Christians)
support not only their poor, but ours as well; everyone can see that our people lack
aid from us.”552

Another act of Julian’s that elicited particular horror was his allowing the Jews to
return to Jerusalem, and helping them to rebuild the Temple… By a miracle of God
the rebuilding of the Temple was stopped. St. Gregory the Theologian tells how the
Jews enthusiastically set about the rebuilding. But “suddenly they were driven from
their work by a violent earthquake and whirlwind, and they rushed together for
refuge to a neighbouring church… There are some who say that the church doors were
closed against them by an invisible hand although these doors had been wide open a
moment before… It is, moreover, affirmed and believed by all that as they strove to
force their way in by violence, the fire, which burst from the foundation of the Temple,
met and stopped them; some it burnt and destroyed, others it injured seriously… But
the most wonderful thing was that a light, as of a cross within a circle, appeared in the
heavens… and the mark of the cross was impressed on their garments… a mark which
in art and elegance surpassed all painting and embroidery.” 553

551 Kershaw, op. cit., pp. 334-335.
552 https://asceticexperience.com/portfolio/christians-during-pandemic/?fbclid=IwAR1-
7axYW0kFxFXHXeI7eKTS2RpGgJZgBWiD7qK2WdeBii4_VakAwJHFPK8.
553 St. Gregory, in Marjorie Strachey, Saints and Sinners of the Fourth Century, London: William Kimber,

1958, p. 78). St. Ambrose of Milan and the fifth-century Church historians Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret

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 But if Julian had succeeded, then, wondered the Christians, what would have
prevented him from sitting in the Temple as God – that is, from becoming the
Antichrist himself? The Lord had prophesied that not one stone would be left on
another in the Temple. That had not happened yet. But suppose Julian fulfilled the
prophecy by rebuilding the Temple? Would he not be the Antichrist?And so it is from
this time, as Gilbert Dagron points out, “that the face of each emperor or empress is
scrutinized to try and recognize in it the characteristic traits of the Antichrist or of the
sovereigns, good or bad, who precede his coming…”554

It is instructive to consider how Julian died… Julian had killed the envoys of the
Persian king Shapur - Manuel, Savel and Ishmael - for their refusal to worship idols.
The Persian king Alamundar prepared an army against Julian to avenge their death.
So Julian set off for Mesopotamia to meet him.555 On his way, he stopped in Ancyra,
where St. Basil (not Basil the Great) defied him. “Basil was brought before him and
the emperor tried to persuade him to abandon his faith in Christ, promising him
honors and riches. Basil answered the emperor; ‘I believe in my Christ, Whom you
denied and Who gave you this earthly kingdom; but, that will be taken away from
you, shortly. Have you no shame of the sacred altar under which you were saved
when they sought to kill you as an eight year old child? That is why this temporary
kingdom will be taken from you shortly and your body will not be buried when your
soul is violently wrested from you in bitter pains.’ Basil was tortured and killed for
Christ.”556

Julian went on to Antioch, where he reinstituted paganism and killed more

Christians. Then, as we read in the Life of St. Julian the Hermit of Mesopotamia
(October 18), the believers asked St. Julian to pray that he should be overthrown. St.
Julian prayed for this for ten days, and then heard a voice from heaven: “The unclean
and abominable beast has perished.” And it was true: the Apostate had perished in
the war.557

and Rufinus all confirm St. Gregory’s story. St. Nikolai Velimirovič adds that St. Cyril, Archbishop of
Jerusalem, was also praying against the Jews’ plans. “And there was a terrible earthquake, that
destroyed not only the new building but also the old stones that were still in place beneath the earth.
And so the words of the Lord came true: “Not one stone shall remain on another’ (Prologue from Ochrid,
March 18, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, Part I, 1985, p. 299).
554 Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Paris : Gallimard, 1996, p. 167.
555 St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, June 17.
556 St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, March 22.
557 St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, October 18. But it was not only St. Julian’s prayers that

effected it. The Mother of God, St. Basil the Great and St. Mercurius the Great Martyr were also involved
in this critical moment of Church history. Thus when St. Basil heard that Julian’s army was returning
from the expedition against the Persians, “he gathered together the multitude of Christians, with
women and children, and commanded them that they should keep a fast of three days. Afterward, with
the faithful, he ascended the summit of the mountain of Caesarea [in Cappadocia] that is named
Didymon (Twin), because it has two peaks. On that mountain was also the Church of the Most Holy
Theotokos. It was there that the Christians betook themselves, entreating and beseeching with a contrite
heart the only compassionate God and His most pure Mother, that the will of the impious emperor
[Julian the Apostate] might be changed. While the saint stood with the people in prayer, he was counted
worthy of a vision. He beheld a multitude of heavenly host encircling the mountain. In the midst of
them, he beheld a certain Woman enthroned with great glory. She uttered to the angels standing by,

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 A mysterious warrior had appeared to Julian and thrust him through; his last
words were: “Galilean [Christ], you have conquered!” St. Basil’s friend, St. Gregory
the Theologian, rejoiced at the news of his death: “I call to spiritual rejoicing all those
who constantly remained in fasting, in mourning and prayer, and by day and by night
besought deliverance from the sorrows that surrounded us and found a reliable
healing from the evils in unshakeable hope… What hoards of weapons, what myriads
of men could have produced what our prayers and the will of God produced?”

Gregory called Julian not only an “apostate”, but also “universal enemy” and
“general murderer”, a traitor to Romanity as well as to Christianity, explicitly denying
that his was a power from God and therefore requiring obedience: “What demon
instilled this thought in you? If every authority were acknowledged as sacred by the
very fact of its existence, Christ the Savior would not have called Herod ‘that fox’. The
Church would not hitherto have denounced ungodly rulers who defended heresies
and persecuted Orthodoxy. Of course, if one judges an authority on the basis of its
outward power, and not on its inner, moral worthiness, one may easily bow down to
the beast, i.e. the Antichrist, ‘whose coming will be with all power and lying wonders’
(II Thessalonians 2.9), to whom ‘power was given… over all kindred, and tongues,
and nations. And all that dwelt upon the earth shall worship him, whose names were
not written in the book of life of the Lamb’ (Revelation 13.7-8).” 558

What made Julian the Apostate so terrible in the eyes of the Holy Fathers was
precisely the fact that he was an apostate, a Christian emperor who then reverted to
paganism.

Moreover, Julian was the first – and last – of the Byzantine emperors who trampled
on the memory and legitimacy of St. Constantine, declaring that he “insolently
usurped the throne”. For, as he said to the holy Great-Martyr Artemius, Governor of
Egypt, whom, before torturing to death, he accused of murdering his brother: “If you
do this [sacrifice to Apollo], I will free you of all guilt for my brother’s death and honor
you with a higher and more honorable rank than you held before. I will make you

‘Call Mercurius to me, so that he might go and slay Julian, the enemy of my Son.’ It then was made
manifest to Saint Basil that the Martyr Mercurius came. After he had taken up his weapons, he received
his order from the Woman, who was the most holy Theotokos, and he quickly took leave…
“After he beheld the vision, straightway, the saint descended with certain of the clergy into the city,
where the Church of the holy Great Martyr Mercurius is situated. Within the church were to be found
the precious relics of the martyr and his weapons, which were honored by the Christians. One hundred
years had passed since the reigns of Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus, and Valerian, when the martyr lived
and contested for Christ by his martyrdom in Caesarea. Upon entering those sacred precincts, Saint
Basil could find neither the relics nor the martyr's weapons. He questioned the skevophylax [warden
and keeper of the vessels] of the church to learn what happened to them. But he, not knowing the
matter, solemnly replied that he knew nothing. The saint then came to know both that the vision was
true, and that during that same night, the 26th of June, in the year 363, the ungodly emperor was slain.”
(The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, January 1, Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, 2003;
Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, III, 19)
558 St. Gregory, First Word against Julian, 35; Second Word against Julian, 26.

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high priest of the great gods and patriarch of all the priests in the whole world. I shall
call you my father, and you will be second only to me in my Empire. You know,
Artemius, that it was out of jealousy that Constantius slew my brother Gallus, for my
family, rather than Constantine’s, ought to have inherited the throne. My father
Constantius was the son of my grandfather Constantius by the daughter of Masimian,
while Constantine was the son of Helena, a baseborn woman. Moreover, my
grandfather was not yet Caesar when Helen bore Constantine, while my father was
born after my grandfather had attained that rank. But Constantine insolently usurped
the throne and shed the blood of his own relatives…”559

If, as Paul Magdalino suggests, “each emperor’s accession was a conscious act of
renewal of the imperial order instituted by Constantine the Great,” and “the idea of
each new ruler as a new Constantine was implicit in the dynastic succession
established by the founder of Constantinople”560, then Julian’s rejection of Constantine
was clearly a rejection of the imperial order as such. In this sense Julian was an anti-
emperor as well as an anti-christ.

That this is how the Byzantines looked at it is suggested by what happened at the
death of Julian and the accession of the Christian Emperor Jovian in 363: “Themistus
assured the people of the city that what they were getting, after Constantine’s son
Constantius and Constantine’s nephew Julian, was nothing less than a reincarnation
of Constantine himself.”561 Jovian’s being a “new Constantine” was a guarantee that
he represented a return to the old order and the true, Christian Romanity (Romanitas,
Ρωµειοσυνη). From this time new Byzantine emperors were often hailed as new
Constantines, as were the Christian kings of the junior members of the Christian
commonwealth of nations from England to Georgia.

After Julian, nobody believed that all emperors were established by God. The
principle of monarchical power was good and from God – that was what St. Paul
meant when he said that “all authority is from God” in Romans 13.1. But St. Paul had
specified what he meant by “power” by saying that the king was “a servant of God
for good”, to reward the good and punish the evildoers. This could not apply to rulers
such as Julian. They were not kings or authorities, but rebels and tyrants.

The fifteen years after the death of the Emperor Jovian in 363 were a very difficult
time for the Orthodox Church as Arian emperors persecuted the faith and suffered
disastrous defeats at the hands of barbarians. Thus in 378 Valens, the Arian emperor
of the East, was killed and his army overwhelmed at Adrianople, in accordance with
the prophecy of St. Isaac of the Dalmatian monastery.562

559 St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, October 20, p. 294.
560 Magdalino (ed.), New Constantines: the Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th-13th Centuries,

Aldershot: Variorum, 1994, pp. 2, 3.

561 Magdalino, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
562 “Isaac, a hermit somewhere in the East, heard of the persecution, left the desert and went to

Constantinople to encourage the faithful and denounce the heretics. Valens arrived in the north at that
very time with his army, to meet the Goths who had come down from the Danube into Thrace. Isaac

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 There was confusion in the Church, and the emergence of different “jurisdictions”
not in communion with each other, as the faithful struggled to discern which of the
bishops was truly Catholic (or Orthodox, as we would say today). It became essential
to cleave to the right-believing bishops and flee the heretical ones. St. Basil the Great,
archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, bewailed the confusion, but himself became a
standard-bearer of Orthodoxy to whom many rallied. As Fr. George Florovsky
observes, “In questions concerning faith, the people must judge his teaching. The duty
of obedience ceases to exert power when the bishop departs from the catholic standard
and in such cases the people have the right to condemn and even depose him.”563

St. Basil wrote in 376: “Only one offense is now vigorously punished: an accurate
observance of our fathers' traditions. For this cause, the pious are driven from their
countries and transported into the deserts. The people are in lamentation… Joy and
spiritual cheerfulness are no more; our feasts are turned into mourning; our houses of
prayer are shut up; our altars are deprived of spiritual worship. No longer are there
Christians assembling, teachers presiding, saving instructions, celebrations, hymns by
night, or that blessed exultation of souls, which arises from communion and
fellowship of spiritual gifts… The ears of the simple are led astray, and have become
accustomed to heretical profaneness. The infants of the Church are fed on the words
of impiety. For what can they do? Baptisms are in Arian hands; the care of travellers,
visitation of the sick, consolation of mourners; succours of the distressed... Which all,
being performed by them, become a bond to the people... so that in a little while, even
though liberty be granted us, no hope will remain that they, who are encompassed by
so lasting a deceit, should be brought back again to the acknowledgment of the
truth.“564

Again he wrote: “I exhort you, therefore, not to faint in your afflictions, but to be
revived by God’s love, and to add daily to your zeal knowing that in you ought to be
preserved that remnant of true religion which the Lord will find when He cometh on
the earth. Even if bishops are driven from their Churches, be not dismayed. If traitors
have arisen from among the very clergy themselves, let not this undermine your
confidence in God. We are saved not by names, but by mind and purpose, and genuine
love toward our Creator. Bethink you how in the attack against our Lord, high priests

went out and stood before him, saying: ‘Open the churches of those of the true faith, O Emperor, and
God will bless thy path.’ But the Emperor turned a deaf ear to the elder and went on his way. Isaac
spoke out before the Emperor on the next day also, repeating his warning, and the Emperor almost
hearkened to him, but one of his advisors, a follower of the Arian heresy, thwarted him. Isaac spoke
before the Emperor again on the third day, seizing the Emperor’s horse by the bridle and pleading with
him to grant freedom to the Church of God to escape divine punishment by acceding to his request.
The enraged Emperor ordered that the elder be thrown into a waste place full of thorns and mud, but
three angels appeared and pulled him out of the swamp. St Isaac appeared before the Emperor on the
fourth day, and foretold a terrible death if he did not give the Orthodox freedom: ‘I tell thee, my
Emperor, that thou shalt lead the troops out upon the barbarians, but thou shalt not be able to withstand
the. Thou shalt flee before them, but shalt thyself be taken captive and burned alive.’ And so it all came
to pass…” (St. Nikolai Velimirovič, Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1985, vol. I, May
30, p. 240).
563 Florovsky, Themes in Orthodox Theology, Athens 1989, p. 207 (in Greek)
564 St. Basil the Great, Letter 243, to the Bishops of Italy and Gaul

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and scribes and elders devised the plot, and how few of the people were found really
receiving the word. Remember that it is not the multitude who are being saved, but
the elect of God. Be not then affrighted at the great multitude of the people who are
carried hither and thither by winds like the waters of the sea. If but one would be
saved, like Lot at Sodom, he ought to abide in right judgment, keeping his hope in
Christ unshaken, for the Lord will not forsake His holy ones. Salute all the brethren in
Christ from me. Pray earnestly for my miserable soul.”565

Something of the fierceness of the Church struggle of the time is conveyed by St.
Hilary of Poitiers, a great champion of Orthodoxy against Arianism, who wrote:
“Since the Nicene Council, we have done nothing but rewrite creeds. While we fight
about words, inquire about novelties, take advantage of ambiguities, criticize authors,
fight on party questions, have difficulties in agreeing, and prepare to anathematize
each other, there is scarcely a man who belongs to Christ. Take, for example, last year’s
creed, what alteration is there not in it already? First, we have a creed which bids us
not to use the Nicene ‘consubstantial’; then comes another, which decrees and
preaches it; next, the third excuses the word ‘substance’, as adopted by the Fathers in
their simplicity; lastly, the fourth, which instead of excusing, condemns. We
determine creeds by the year or the month, we change our own determinations, we
prohibit our changes, we anathematize our prohibitions. Thus, we either condemn
others in our own persons, or ourselves in the instance of others, while we bite and
devour one another, and are like to be consumed one of another.”566

And yet for the Christian there was no alternative to the struggle over creeds and
bishops. For, as St. Basil the Great said, “In the Church] one must get to the bottom of
the problems, so as to eradicate the sickness from its very root.”567 And St. John
Chrysostom said: “A want of zeal in small matters is the cause of all our calamities;
and because slight errors escape fitting correction, greater ones creep in.”568

565 - St. Basil the Great, Epistle 257, To the Monks Harassed by Arians.
566 St. Hilary, Ad Const. ii, 4, 5; quoted by Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston in his “Statement on Grace,

March, 2003”. St. Hilary’s younger contemporary, St. Basil the Great, spoke still more eloquently of the
confusion and internecine strife of the Churches in his time (On the Holy Spirit, 30).
567 St. Basil the Great, Letter 156.
568 St. John Chrysostom, Homily 1 on Galatians.

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 36. EMPEROR THEODOSIUS THE GREAT

However, deliverance was on its way: in January, 379, the western emperor Gratian
raised a Spanish general, Theodosius the Great, to the throne of the East. He restored
order politically by making peace with the Persians, and signing a treaty with the
Goths, giving them land in Illyricum and Thrace in exchange for military service (as a
separate national contingent) in the Roman Army. This was later considered a fateful
innovation in Roman policy in relation to the barbarians. But for the time being it
worked…

Theodosius’ most important actions related to the Faith. In February, 380 he banned
overt paganism, and in 381 he convened the Second Ecumenical Council at
Constantinople under the presidency, first, of St. Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch,
and then, after his death, of St. Gregory the Theologian, Archbishop of
Constantinople. However, St. Gregory retired, and St. Nectarius took his place as
archbishop and president of the Council. When Theodosius was not yet emperor, and
had not yet met St. Meletius, we read in his Life, “Meletius appeared to the General in
a dream and invested him with the imperial mantle and crown. On awakening,
Theodosius related everything to a servant and pondered on its meaning…. [When
the bishops arrived at the palace for the Council], the ruler studied their faces and at
once recognized Meletius. Ignoring the others, Theodosius fell prostrate before the
saint. Like a devoted son long separated from his father, the Emperor kissed Meletius’
hands, shoulders, eyes, lips and head. He publicly related his dream and accorded the
man of God greater honour than any other hierarch.”569

The Council completed the Nicene Creed (it should really be called the Nicene-
Constantinopolitan Creed), and clearly condemned, not only Arianism, which denied
the Divinity of Christ, but also Macedonianism, which denied the Divinity of the Holy
Spirit. Meanwhile, Gratian, the de facto emperor of the West (the de jure emperor,
Valentian II, was his very young half-brother and under his guardianship) removed
the altar to Victory from the Senate and renounced the office of Pontifex Maximus,
thereby breaking the last link of the Orthodox Empire with the pagan religion and
senatorial establishment of Old Rome.

However, the enemies of the Faith now made a last bid for power through political
schism. It began, as Stephen Kershaw writes, when “the Roman army in Britain, which
was manfully fighting off barbarian attacks from the north, rebelled and elevated
Magnus Maximus (‘Great the Greatest’), who was probably the Dux Britanniarum, to
the purple. In later times, he entered Welsh legend570 in the story of Mabinogion and
The Dream of Macsen Wledig, and prior to his departure to mainland Europe he seems
to have minted coins at Londinium [London], which depicted a winged Victory
hovering over the two Emperors (of which he was going to be the Western one). When
he crossed over into Gaul, Gratian was deserted by his troops (led by his general

569 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom
Press, 2003, vol. 6, February 12, p. 153
570 He had a very pious Welsh wife, Helena, who is mentioned as serving St. Martin of Tours in Sulpicius

Severus’ Life of Martin, and may be the titular saint of the church on Lundy island in the Bristol Channel.

301
Maerobaudes) at Paris (recently named as such after the Gallic Parisii tribe) and fled
to Lugdunum [Lyons]. There he was betrayed by the governor and killed on 25
August.

“Magnus Maximus and Theodosius I had some things in common: both were
Spaniards, and both were highly orthodox. Magnus Maximus assumed control over
Britain, Gaul and Spain from his capital at Treveri [Trier] for the next five years, and
began negotiations with Theodosius I and Valentinian iI, who was currently at
Mediolanum [Milan], to try to get them to recognize him as their colleague.
Theodosius I did not recognize Magnus Maximus as co-Augustus, but Valentinian, or
more correctly Bishop Ambrose, who was acting on Valentinian II’s behalf, dug his
heels in. Magnus Maximus’ terms would have relegated Valentinian II to the junior
side of a father/son relationship, and the arrangement was clearly unacceptable to his
advisers. The only solution would be a military one.

“In 387 Magnus Maximus invaded northern Italy. His success forced Valentinian
II, accompanied by his mother Justina and sister Gallia, to head east to Thessalonica.
This presented Theodosius I with a dilemma he could not shirk. Should he keep faith
with Magnus Maximus, who was stronger than Valentinian II, Nicene and Spanish,
or should he support his family, despite the fact that Valentinian II was very much
under the thumb of Justina, who was not just an Arian, but also even prepared to court
pagans and African Donatists to bolster her son’s position? To some surprise, he chose
the family option. Zosimus explained why: Theodosius I had recently lost his first wife
Aelia Flacilla, who had been a model of Christian piety and charity. Justina now
offered him her daughter Gallia, who was extremely attractive on two counts: (1) she
was stunningly beautiful; (2) she was (convolutedly) related to Constantine the Great.
He double allure was too much for Theodosius I, particularly when Justina promised
that her family would become orthodox. So he marched against Magnus Maximus.
His onslaught was so unexpectedly swift that he caught Magnus Maximus completely
unprepared. Having won victories in the Balkans, he descended on Apuleia, where
Magnus Maximus was captured and executed on 27 August 388.

“Theodosius I, who now ruled both East and West, installed himself at
Mediolanum [Milan] until mid-391. Maximus’ family and close associates wer duly
put to the sword, but the defeated soldiers were integrated into Theodosius I’s armies.
The obelisk of Theodosius I now in the Hippodrome at Istanbul partly celebrates his
victory over Magnus Maximus and its base has relief carvings showing him,
Valentinian II, and his two sons Arcadius and Honorius. For now, Arcadius
represented him as Augustus of the East, while Valentinian II was reinstated at Treveri
[Trier] under the watchful eye of the Frankish Magister Militum Arbogast…”571

But in 392 Valentinian was found hanged in Vienne.572 “Arbogast said it was
suicide, but others suspected foul play. Certainly the swift appointment of a Christian

571Kershaw, op. cit., pp. 356-358.
572 The Catholic Encyclopaedia, in its entry on St. Ambrose, writes: “The murder of his youthful
ward, Valentinian II, which happened in Gaul, May, 393, just as Ambrose was crossing the Alps
to baptize him plunged the Saint into deep affliction. His eulogy delivered at Milan is singularly tender;
he courageously described him as a martyr baptized in his own

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but pagan-sympathetic rhetorician called Flavius Eugenius as his successor has a
whiff of conspiracy about it, and the new Augustus had the backing of many Senators.
Theodosius I knew that this was not only a threat to him, but, by association, to
Christianity itself. He rejected all of Eugenius’ efforts to secure his recognition, and
made the situation clear by elevating hi younger son Honorius to the rank of
Augustus, before mobilizing a formidable army to take on the usurper in 392.”573

Thornton writes: “The sudden appearance of Eugenius and Arbogast in Italy

sparked hopes for a pagan revival. Indeed, this is what was attempted. Eugenius
permitted the pagan altar of Victory to be returned to the Senate chamber and ‘temples
were rapidly restored and rededicated, festivals punctually celebrated, sacrifices
correctly performed and the mystery cults revived… At Ostia the temple of Hercules
was rebuilt. Furthermore, Arbogast boasted that he would soon stable his horses in
the cathedral of the Christians.

“Saint Theodosios, at first reluctant to go to war over the elevation of Eugenius,

could not ignore the implications of this direct challenge to his authority and to
Christianity. Both sides prepared for war. Saint Theodosios accompanied his army on
the march north-west, through Illyricum, to seize the Alpine passes. Then, at a river
the Romans called ‘Frigidum’, now the Vipava in Slovenia, the two armies met. Prior
to leaving, Saint Theodosios had consulted an Egyptian Monk, Saint John of
Lycopolis, who prophesied that the Christian army would win a great victory after
much bloodshed, but that Saint Theodosios would die in Italy.

“The battle commenced on September 5, 394, with a frenzied assault by the

Christians. Huge numbers perished and, by the close of the day, the Christians were
thrown back. Eugenius was delighted, assuming that he had won, while there was
deep gloom in the Christian camp. Saint Theodosios spent the night in prayer, and
had a vision of Saints John and Philip, ‘who bade him take courage’. The following
day, the assault was renewed. However, this time Almighty God intervened.
Accompanying the Christian army was a wind of cyclone strength, blowing towards
the enemy. The forces of Eugenius and Arbogast were blinded by great clouds of dust
and their arrows and spears were deflected back towards themselves. It became nearly
impossible for the infantry to hold on to its shields in the fierce wind, which pushed
them back, while the same wind, catching the backs of the shields of the Christians,
pulled them forward into the fray. The enemy line broke and Eugenius was captured,
and later executed for treason and apostasy. Arbogast fled into the mountains and,
after a few days, overwhelmed with despair, committed suicide. Saint Theodosius
entered Italy in triumph.

blood.” (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01383c.htm) Again, he said: “I hear you lamenting
because he had not received the sacrament of Baptism. Tell me, what else could we have, except the
will to it, the asking for it? He too had just now this desire; and after he came into Italy it was begun,
and a short time ago he signified that he wished to be baptized by me. Did he, then, not have the grace
which he desired? Did he not have what he eagerly sought? Certainly, because he already sought it, he
received it. What else does it mean: Whatever just man shall be overtaken by death, his soul shall be at
rest (Wisdom of Solomon 4:7).” (Sympathy at the Death of Valentinian, 51)
573 Kershaw, op. cit., pp. 359-360.

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 “Since the contest had been seen on both sides as a battle between the God of the
Christians against the old gods of Rome, the effect on pagan opinion was devastating.
Clearly the God of the Christians had decided the victor by direct intervention and
many pagans, as a result, were immediately converted to the banner of Christ…”574

St. Theodosius died in Milan in 395, the last ruler of a united and Orthodox Roman
empire extending from Britain to the borders of Persia… After him, the decline from
this peak of piety and power would be steep… T.S. Brown writes: “Following
Theodosius’ death in 395 a critical stage in the transformation of the Roman world
occurred with the division of the empire between his sons Honorius (West) and
Arcadius (East). While the myth of imperial unity was maintained, tension grew
between the two courts. The Eastern empire remained relatively powerful as a result
of its greater wealth and population and its relative immunity from barbarian
pressure and the dangerous influence which German mercenaries exercised in the
West. Christianity became strongly entrenched, and, despite bitter Christological
controversies, served to reinforce imperial authority by treating the empire as an
instrument of divine policy. In the West, however, fundamental economic and social
weaknesses were aggravated by court intrigues, the self-interest of the senatorial elite
and frequent revolts by usurpers. While Roman administration, society and culture
remained resilient at the highest levels, the decentralization of the pars occidentalis was
reflected in the growth of non-Roman cultures (as in Britain and North Africa) and the
rise of local political allegiances (as in Gaul) even before the full effects of the barbarian
migrations were felt in the fifth century.”575

574 Thornton, op. cit., pp. 400-401.
575 Brown, in Angus Mackay and David Ditchburn (eds.), Atlas of Medieval Europe, London and New

York: Routledge, 1997, p. 7.

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 37. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (4) RELIGIOUS
TOLERATION

The pagan Roman emperors had been in general tolerant of religion. This was for
reasons of political expediency – a multi-ethnic and multi-faith population is more
easily controlled if all its faiths are respected and legalized. Another motive was
superstition. After all, calculated the ruler, the god of this people is more likely to help
me if I do not persecute his people… And so in Imperial Rome before Constantine
periods of persecution were intermittent and generally short-lived, and directed
exclusively at Christians. As Perez Zagorin writes, Rome “was tolerant in practice in
permitting the existence of many diverse religious cults, provided their votaries also
complied with the worship of the divine emperor as part of the state religion. Unlike
Christianity and Judaism, Roman religion had no sacred scriptures and did not
depend on any creed, dogmas, or ethical principles. It consisted very largely of
participation in cult acts connected with the worship of various deities and spirits that
protected the Roman state and were associated with public, family, and domestic life.
At nearly all stages of their history the Romans were willing to accept foreign cults
and practices; this de facto religious pluralism is entirely attributable to the
polytheistic character of Roman religion and had nothing to do with principles of
values sanctioning religious toleration, a concept unknown to Roman society or law
and never debated by Roman philosophers or political writers.”576

Christianity introduced a new complexity to the question of religious toleration.

On the one hand, the Christians, like the Jews, rejected the idea of a multiplicity of
gods, and insisted that there was only one name by which men could be saved – that
of the One True God, Jesus Christ. This position did not logically imply that Christians
wanted to persecute people of other faiths. But the “exclusivism” of Christianity, then
as now, was perceived by the pagan-ecumenist majority, whether sincerely or
insincerely, as a threat to themselves. On the other hand, the Christians set no value
on the forcible conversion of people to the Faith: man, being in the image of God, was
free, and could come to God only by his own free will. As the Christian lawyer
Tertullian put it: “It does not belong to religion to force people to religion, since it must
be accepted voluntarily.”577 In his Barring of Heretics (ca. 200) Tertullian insisted on the
truth of Christianity and declared that heretics could not be called Christians.
Nevertheless, he was “opposed to compulsion in religion and stated in other works
that ‘to do away with freedom of religion [libertas religionis]’ was wrong. While
Christians, he said, worship the one God and pagans worship demons, both ‘human
and natural law’ ordain that ‘each person may worship whatever he wishes’.”578

However, Tertullian was writing at a time when the Church, as a persecuted

minority, clearly benefited from religious toleration. What if the Church herself were
to gain political power? After all, the Old Testament Kings were required by God to
defend the faith of the people as their first duty, and the prophets constantly reminded
them that they would be judged by God in accordance with their fulfilment or non-

576 Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 4.
577 Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, 2.
578 Zagorin, op. cit., p. 21.

305
fulfilment of this duty. This same duty was taken very seriously by the first Christian
emperor, St. Constantine.

However, through the Edict of Milan of 312 and in accordance with the teaching of
his tutor Lactantius, he professed and practiced a policy of religious toleration. For, as
he declared: “It is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality voluntarily,
another to compel others to do it likewise through fear of punishment.”579

While not hiding his Christianity, and characterizing paganism as “superstition”,

he did not ban it. Thus in 324, just after defeating Licinius and taking control of the
Eastern provinces, he wrote: “I wish, for the common good of the empire and of all
men, that Thy people should be in peace and remain exempt from troubles. May those
who are in error joyfully receive the enjoyment of the same peace and tranquillity as
the believers, for the sweetness of concord will have the power to correct them also
and lead them on the right path.” In addition to allowing the pagans to practise their
religion, Constantine never excluded them “from the administration of the State: one
finds them among the praetorian prefects, the prefects of Rome, the ministers and
even the entourage of the Emperor.”580

In his last years, however, Constantine steadily increased the pressure on the
enemies of the faith: by 324 pagan sacrifices had been banned, heresy was illegal,
homosexuals were burned at the stake, and the official religion of the Empire was
Orthodoxy. Constantine also defended the Christians against the Jews. He released all
slaves whom the Jews had dared to circumcise, and those Jews who killed their co-
religionists for converting to Christianity were executed.581

Nevertheless, the bark of the earliest Christian emperors was worse than their bite,
and many of their decrees were not executed by local governors. But they had a long-
term effect. By the 350s pagan sacrifices were rare. “Heretics were exiled, and Arius’s
books were burned, just as the anti-Christian treatise of Porphyry was destroyed by
imperial order. Constantine’s religious policy created an ‘atmosphere’ of hostility to
heresy as much as to paganism.”582

579 Lactantius, in Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 637.
580 Pierre Maraval, “La Louve et la Croix” (The She-Wolf and the Cross), Histoire (Le Figaro), 8, June-

July, 2013, p. 63. Timothy Barnes writes: “Constantine allowed pagans to retain their beliefs, even to
build new sacred edifices. But he allowed them to worship their traditional gods only in the Christian
sense of that word, not according to the traditional forms hallowed by antiquity. The emperor made
the distinction underlying his policy explicit when he answered a petition from the Umbrian town of
Hispellum requesting permission to build a temple of the Gens Flavia. Constantine granted the request
but specified that the shrine dedicated to the imperial family must never be ‘polluted by the deceits of
any contagious superstition’. From 324 onwards Constantine constantly evinced official disapproval of
the sacrifices and other cultic acts which constituted the essence of Greco-Roman paganism:
Christianity was now the established religion of the Roman Empire and its ruler, and paganism should
now conform to Christian patterns of religious observance.” (op. cit, pp. 212-213)
581 L.A. Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of

History), Moscow, 1997, p. 340.

582 Leithart, op. cit., p. 130.

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 But Leithart raises the question: “If religion was a matter of free will, why did
Constantine so vigorously oppose paganism in his decrees, letters and speeches, and
how could he justify any restrictions on religion at all? If Constantine thought that
religion should be free, what was he doing forbidding sacrifice?

“Elizabeth Digeser offers terminology and categories that help make sense of
Constantine’s policies. She distinguishes forbearance from toleration, and tolerance
from ‘concord’. Forbearance is a pragmatic policy, not guided by moral or political
principle. Forbearance might change to persecution if political conditions change. The
periods of [pagan] Roman acceptance of Christianity were periods of forbearance.
Toleration is ‘disapproval or disagreement coupled with an unwillingness to take
action against those viewed with disfavor in the interest of some moral or political
principle.’ This principle could arise, as for Lactantius, from a theory concerning the
nature of religion, or, alternatively, from a theory about human nature or about the
limits of state power. By this definition, toleration does not involve an idea of the
equality of all viewpoints but the opposite. Toleration assumes disapproval of certain
religious expressions but refrains for principled reasons from using state power to
suppress the disapproved religion. Beyond toleration, Digeser introduces the category
of ‘concord’: ‘(1) its attitude of forbearance is dictated by some moral, political, or even
religious principle and (2) it expects that by treating its dissenters with forbearance it
is creating conditions under which they will ultimately change their behavior to
conform to what the state accepts.’ These three strategies of religious policy build on
one another: toleration assumes forbearance on principle, it expects that the
forbearance will have the ultimate outcome of unity if not complete uniformity.”583

After Constantine’s death, his successor Constantius redirected the state towards
hostility against Orthodoxy, and Julian the Apostate tried forcibly to turn the clock
back to paganism. However, Orthodoxy returned under the Emperor Jovian in 363,
and by the end of the fourth century, all paganism and heresy had been outlawed by
Theodosius I, who declared: “It is our pleasure that all nations that are governed by
our clemency should steadfastly adhere to the religion which was taught by St. Peter
to the Romans, which faithful tradition has preserved and which is not professed by
the Pontiff Damasus and by Bishop Peter of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness.
According to the discipline of the Apostles, and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us
believe in the sole Deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, under an equal
majesty and a pious Trinity. We authorize the followers of this doctrine to assume the
title of Catholic Christians; and as we judge that all others are extravagant madmen,
we brand them with the infamous name of heretics, and declare that their conventicles
shall no longer usurp the respectable appellation of churches: these are to be visited
first by divine vengeance, and secondly by the stroke of our own authority, which we
have received in accordance with the will of heaven.”584

As Perez Zagorin writes, Theodosius “proscribed various heresies by name,

ordered the confiscation of churches and private houses where heretics met for
worship, and deprived them of the right to make wills or receive inheritances. In the

583 Liethart, op. cit., pp. 139-140.
584 Norwich, op. cit., pp. 117-118.

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case of certain heretical sects [the Manichaeans] he commanded that their members
be hunted down and executed. In his attempt to enforce uniformity of belief he also
instituted legislation against paganism, including a comprehensive enactment in 395
forbidding anyone of whatever rank of dignity to sacrifice to or worship ‘senseless
images’ constructed ‘by human hands’, on pain of heavy fines and other penalties. He
was likewise the first emperor to impose penalties on Christians who profaned their
baptism by reverting to paganism.

“… All subjects were expected to be worshippers in this [the One, Holy, Catholic
and Apostolic] Church; and in addition to the spiritual and political authority its
bishops wielded, it had the power of the state at its disposal to enforce its faith against
heretics. The practical toleration and religious pluralism that had formerly been the
Roman custom no longer existed. The change that took place is epitomised in an
appeal made in 384 by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus – a Roman senator, orator, and
prefect of Rome, and a defender of paganism – to the emperors Theodosius I and
Valentinian II to restore the altar of the goddess victory to the Senate House (it had
been removed by imperial decree after standing there for over 350 years, since the
reign of the emperor Augustus at the beginning of the first century). Speaking in the
name of the proscribed ancient religion of Rome, Symmachus declared that ‘each
nation has its own gods and peculiar rites. The Great Mystery cannot be approached
by one avenue alone… Leave us the symbol on which our oaths of allegiance have
been sworn for so many generations. Leave us the system which has given prosperity
to the State.’ His plea was of no avail, however, for the cross of Christ had conquered
the Roman Empire, and the altar of Victory remained banished and abandoned.”585

“In practice,” writes Protopresbyter James Thornton, “the religious edicts of

Theodosios were never implemented in a comprehensive fashion, since, as historian
A.H.M. Jones remarks, ‘there were too many pagans or sympathizers with paganism
for that’, and pagans continued to hold to their religious beliefs, albeit with some
measure of discretion to avoid unpleasantness.

“Pagan belief, by itself, was not proscribed or persecuted, nor was the open
profession of that belief. Paganism, in the cities especially, thenceforth became more a
private philosophical outlook, without a public cult…. [It] remained a significant force
for some time, continuing ‘overtly in some places for several generations, and secretly
for some centuries.’ Yet, it clearly was a dying movement.”586

Fr. John Meyendorff agrees: “It is clear that practical considerations often dictated
tolerance towards large and influential groups of heretics. This was the case of the
Gothic troops, predominantly Arian, on which the emperor had frequently to relay
for his security, and of the various Gothic rulers, who conquered the Western regions
of the empire and were not only invested with imperial court title but also remained
diplomatic partners until the reconquest of the West by Justinian. The empire was also

585 Zagorin, op. cit., pp. 23, 24. However, Hill argues that it was not Theodosius’ measures but
Justinian’s persecution in the sixth century that was “the first really thorough attempt on the part of
the Roman authorities to stamp out paganism, and the first time that the various laws against paganism
were seriously enforced” (op. cit., p. 301).
586 Thornton, op. cit., pp. 398-399.

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forced to exercise moderation and use diplomacy with the opponents of the council of
Chalcedon (451), who constituted at least half of the population of the East. The
numerically small, but intellectually influential group of Nestorians was not as
fortunate. After its condemnation by the council of 451, it began a long history of
survival, and also missionary expansion throughout Asia.”587

Judaism was also given some toleration. As Meyendorff writes, “If Roman imperial
law eventually [under Theodosius I] prohibited paganism, it continued to offer
limited protection to the Jews. Not only was their cultic freedom guaranteed, but the
disaffectation of synagogues was forbidden and their personnel – like the Christian
clergy – were exempt of civil and personal charges. Arbitrary violence against Jews
was punishable by law. However, since the very beginning of the Christian empire,
drastic measures had been taken against Jewish proselytizing among Christians, and
baptism of Jews was encouraged. Conversion of Christians to Judaism was prohibited,
and Jews molesting a convert to Christianity were to be burnt at the stake…. They
were not to own Christian slaves, and were deprived of legal protection if they
showed disrespect to Christianity. They were also excluded from the army, the civil
services and the legal profession. It does not seem, however, that – before the reign of
Heraclius (610-641) – forcible baptisms of Jews were practiced within the Empire, as
they began to occur in the barbarian Christian states of the West after the fifth century.
The sect of the Samaritans enjoyed a status similar to that of orthodox Jews until the
big Samaritan rebellions in Palestine under Justinian, which led to their forcible
suppression.”588

However, the Church remained implacably opposed to Talmudic Judaism as the

religion most implacably opposed to Christianity and insofar as the Jews, being in
possession of the Holy Scriptures, had less excuse than any for not believing in Christ.
Thus St. John Chrysostom writes: "Since there are some who think of the synagogue
as a holy place, I must say a few words to them. Why do you reverence that place?
Must you not despise it, hold it in abomination, run away from it? They answer that
the Law and the books of the prophets are kept there. What is this? Will any place
where these books are be a holy place? By no means! This is the reason above all others
why I hate the synagogue and abhor it. They have the prophets but do not believe
them; they read the sacred writings but reject their witness-and this is a mark of men
guilty of the greatest outrage."589

The early Christian emperors of the fourth century used the death penalty against
very few categories of heretics. For example, in the late 340s the Donatist Marculus
was executed, and in 384 Bishop Priscillian of Avila was executed on a charge of
sorcery.590 Following St. Paul’s assertion that the emperor, as God’s minister, does not
wield the sword in vain (Romans 13.4), the Church never condemned the death
penalty in all circumstances. However, from the early fifth century, and sometimes
even earlier, Church writers rejected the idea of killing people for their faith. Thus the

587 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir Seminary Press,
1989, pp. 16-17.
588 Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 15-16.
589 St. John Chrysostom, Homily 5, 5.2; Against the Jews.
590 Jonathan Hill, Christianity: The First 400 Years, Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2013, pp. 233, 294.

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Church historian Socrates said: ”It is not the custom of the Orthodox Church to
persecute”.591 And St. Athanasius the Great said: “It is a characteristic of [true]
religion not to force but to persuade.”592 “Christians are called to freedom (Galatians
5.13), and every religious act of conscious Christians must bear on itself the mark of
freedom. The ancient Christian writer Lactantius demonstrated that religion exists
only where there is freedom, and disappears where freedom has disappeared, and
that it is necessary to defend the truth with words and not with blows (verbis, non
verberibus).593 ‘The mystery of salvation,’ writes St. Gregory the Theologian, ‘is for
those who desire it, not for those who are compelled’. The 108th canon of the Council
of Carthage cites the law of Honorius that ‘everyone accepts the exploit of Christianity
by his free choice’, and Zonaras in his interpretation of this canon writes: ‘Virtue must
be chosen, and not forced, not involuntary, but voluntary… for that which exists by
necessity and violence is not firm and constant’.”594

In practice, degrees of coercion were applied. Thus St. Amphilochius of Iconium, a

close friend of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory the Theologian, “begged the
Emperor Theodosius to send impenitent Arians into exile. The Emperor refused – such
an edict would be too severe. Shortly after this Theodosius raised his small son
Arcadius to the imperial throne, and sat by his side to receive his court. Amphilochius
was among those waiting on the Emperor. He approached the throne and saluted
Theodosius, but ignored Arcadius. ‘The Emperor, thinking this neglect was due to
forgetfulness, commanded Arcadius to approach and salute his son. “Sir,” said he,
“the honour I have paid to you is enough.” Theodosius was indignant at this
discourtesy, and said, “Dishonour done to my son is a rudeness done to me.” “You
see, sir, “ returned Amphilochius, “that you do not allow your son to be dishonoured,
and are bitterly angry with those who are rude to him. God too abominates those who
blaspheme the Only begotten Son, and hates them as ungrateful to their Saviour and
Benefactor.” Theodosius immediately saw the point of the analogy, and issued the
Edict of Banishment forthwith.’”595

St. John Chrysostom (+407) preached non-violence to heretics: “Christians above

all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force… It is necessary to
make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted
us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God
gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.”596

St. John interpreted the parable of the wheat and the tares to mean that the heretics
(the tares) should not be killed. But they were to be resisted in other ways. “As we can
see from the many occurrences of the phrase ‘stop the mouths of the heretics’ in his

591 Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, VII, 3.
592 St. Athanasius, Against the Arians, 67; P.G. 25, p. 773.
593 Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 19.
594 S.V. Troitsky, Khristianskaia Philosophia Braka (The Christian Philosophy of Marriage), Paris: YMCA

Press, p. 207.
595 Margaret Strachey, Saints and Sinners of the Fourth Century, London: William Kimber, 1958, pp.

151=152.
596 St. John Chrysostom, quoted by Fr. Antonious Henein, orthodox-tradition@egroups.com, 8 August,

2000.

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writings, St. John showed not the slightest indulgence towards false teachings; indeed,
much of his life as a preacher was devoted to combating such heretics as the
Eunomians, the Judaizers, and the Manichaeans. However, he was resolutely opposed
to the use of violence by the authorities to subdue heretics. And it is this reservation
of his that must be carefully understood, if one is to grasp what may seem to be a
contradictory view of heretics. He knew from pastoral experience that heretics were
far more likely to be turned aside from their errors by prayer: ‘And if you pray for the
Heathens, you ought of course to pray for Heretics also, for we are to pray for all men,
and not to persecute. And this is good also for another reason, as we are partakers of
the same nature, and God commands and accepts benevolence towards one another’
(Homilies on the First Epistle to St. Timothy, 7). Near the end of this homily on the
dangers of anathematizing others, he says that ‘we must anathematize heretical
doctrines and refute impious teachings, from whomsoever we have received them,
but show mercy to the men who advocate them and pray for their salvation.’ In other
words, we must love the heretic, but hate the heresy.”597

However, it may be wondered whether St. John’s words should be interpreted as

an absolute ban on any kind of coercion in any circumstances. For there were other
prominent and holy Christians contemporary with him who did approve of some
measure of coercion in some circumstances. In particular, there was the question of
the rights of the Christian emperor. If the Church as an institution or individual
Christians could only persuade, not coerce, was it not the task of the emperor to
coerce, or at any rate limit the activity of those who refused to be persuaded?

Zeal against heretics was, of course, not the exclusive preserve of the emperors and
bishops. The lay Christians of Alexandria and the monks of Egypt were famous (and,
in some cases, notorious) for their zeal. In general, however, as we have seen, the
Church was against the execution of heretics. And when some rare executions did take
place, there was a negative reaction. Thus when St. Martin of Tours (+397) signed the
decision of a Synod condemning the Spanish heretic Priscillian and handing him over
to the Emperor for execution, he felt the reproaches of his conscience, and never again
attended a Synod of Bishops. St. Ambrose of Milan and Pope Siricus of Rome also
protested the execution.598

However, we cannot say that the execution of heretics is absolutely forbidden by

Orthodoxy… In the Lives of the Saints we find a few instances of saints - even of saints
who were not secular rulers - blessing the execution of heretics, even executing
evildoers themselves. Thus in The Acts of the Apostles we read how the Apostle Peter
in effect executed Ananias and Sapphira. Again, the Apostles Peter and Paul by their
prayers brought about the death of Simon Magus. Again, as we have seen, St. Basil
the Great prayed for, and obtained, the death of Julian the Apostate (by the sword of
St. Mercurius the Great Martyr). And the holy hierarchs Patrick of Ireland and Leo of
Catania in effect executed particularly stubborn perverters of the people.599

597 Hieromonk Patapios, “On Caution regarding Anathematization”, Orthodox Tradition, January, 2000,
p. 22.
598 Hill, op. cit., pp. 294-295.
599 See St. Leo’s life in St. Demetrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, February 20.

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 In a very few cases, therefore, coercion was employed, not in order to convert the
heretics – for conviction is not born through coercion – but in order to prevent the
young and the weak-minded from losing the saving confession of the faith through
their machinations; for, as the Lord Himself said, “Whoever causes one of these little
ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung
around his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18.6).

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 38. ST. AUGUSTINE ON THE DONATISTS AND PELAGIANS

Probably none of the early Fathers exercised himself more over the question of
religious freedom than St. Augustine, the famous bishop of Hippo, whose influence
on western theology was deep and long-lasting. In recent years there has been much
controversy over Augustine’s views on various subjects in Orthodox circles; and his
views do not always reflect “the consensus of the Fathers”. But of his essential
Orthodoxy - he was called “holy” at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, - there can be no
doubt.

Augustine was baptized by St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, whose rigorous attitude
towards heretics and schismatics probably influenced him. Let us briefly examine his
position.

In 388 some Christians burned down the synagogue in Callinicum on the

Euphrates. The Emperor Theodosius the Great ordered its rebuilding at the
Christians’ expense. However, St. Ambrose wrote to him: “When a report was made
by the military Count of the East that a synagogue had been burnt down, and that this
was done at the instigation of the bishop, you gave command that the others should
be punished, and the synagogue be rebuilt by the bishop himself… The bishop’s
account ought to have been waited for, for priests are the calmers of disturbances, and
anxious for peace, except when even they are moved by some offence against God, or
insult to the Church. Let us suppose that the bishop burned down the synagogue… It
will evidently be necessary for him to take back his act or become a martyr. Both the
one and the other are foreign to your rule: if he turns out to be a hero, then fear lest he
end his life in martyrdom; but if he turns out to be unworthy, then fear lest you
become the cause of his fall, for the seducer bears the greater responsibility. And what
if others are cowardly and agree to construct the synagogue? Then… you can write on
the front of the building: ‘This temple of impiety was built on contributions taken from
Christians’. You are motivated by considerations of public order. But what is the order
from on high? Religion was always bound to have the main significance in the State,
which is why the severity of the laws must be modified here. Remember Julian, who
wanted to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem: the builders were then burned by the fire
of God. Do you not take fright at what happened then?… And how many temples did
the Jews not burn down under Julian at Gaza, Askalon, Beirut and other places? You
did not take revenge for the churches, but now you take revenge for the
synagogue!”600 “What is more important,” he asked, “the parade of discipline or the
cause of religion? The maintenance of civil law is secondary to religious interest.” 601

Ambrose refused to celebrate the Liturgy until the imperial decree had been
revoked. Theodosius backed down…

The “Ambrosean” position may be tentatively formulated as follows. On the one

hand, in relation to those outside her the Church can herself adopt no coercive
measures; she can do no more than reason, plead and threaten with God’s justice at

600 St. Ambrose, Letter 40, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 69.
601 Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 164.

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the Last Judgement. Her only means of “coercion”, if it can be called that, is the
excommunication of unrepentant Christians from her fold. On the other hand, the
Church blesses the Christian State to use other, more physical means of coercion
against those over whom she has no more influence. For the emperor “wields not the
sword in vain” (Romans 13.4) and is “the bishop of those outside the Church” (St.
Constantine’s phrase). The purpose of this is not to convert; for only persuasion can
convert, and as St. Basil the Great says, “by violence you can frighten me, but cannot
persuade me”. But there are other legitimate and Christian purposes for coercion:
justice against evildoers, the restriction of their influence, and, especially, the
protection of the young and weak in mind who might lose their souls through
listening to a heretic… But even St. Ambrose never advocated the execution of heretics
or Jews simply because they believed wrongly. And, as we have seen, he opposed the
execution of the Spanish bishop Priscillian.

Perez Zagorin writes: “Augustine carried on a long theological combat with three
formidable heresies, Manichaeanism, Pelagianism, and Donatism. Among his
writings against the last of these and its followers, the Donatists, he left an invaluable
record of his reflections on the justification of coercion against heretics to enforce
religious truth. At the time he became bishop of Hippo, Donatism, which took its
name from one of its first leaders, Donatus, bishop of Carthage, had already existed
in North Africa for more than eighty years and had undergone considerable
persecution. Originating in the early fourth century in an ecclesiastical controversy
over a bishop who had [allegedly] compromised with paganism during the
persecution by the emperor Diocletian and was therefore considered a betrayer of the
faith, the Donatists formed a schismatic and rival church with its own clergy. Rigorists
who believed in a church composed exclusively of the holy, they maintained that an
unworthy priest could not perform a valid sacrament. By insisting on the rebaptism
of converts, the Donatist church declared its rejection of the sacramental character of
Catholic baptism. To some extent Donatism represented an expression of social
protest against the profane world as a domain ruled by Satan. Its more extreme
advocates, a fanatical fringe of zealots and ascetics known as Circumcellions, sought
a martyr’s death by any means, including suicide; they gathered as bands of
marauding peasants who attacked estates and committed other acts of violence. As a
self-described church of martyrs, the Donatists condemned the alliance between
Catholicism and the Roman authorities as a renunciation of Christ in favour of Caesar,
and their bishop Donatus was reported to have said, ‘What has the Emperor to do
with the Church?’ In the course of its history Donatism became a considerable
movement, although it remained largely confined to North Africa.

“In his numerous writings against this heresy, one of Augustine’s constant aims
was to persuade its followers by means of reason and arguments to abandon their
errors and return to the Catholic Church. He did his best to refute its doctrines in a
number of treatises and at first opposed any use of coercion against these heretics. A
lost work of 397 repudiated coercion, and in an undated letter to a Donatist
churchman he wrote: “I do not intend that anyone should be forced into the Catholic
communion against his will. On the contrary, it is my aim that the truth may be

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revealed to all who are in error and that… with the help of God, it may be made
manifest so as to induce all to follow and embrace it of their own accord.’ To several
Donatists he wrote in around 398 that those who maintain a false and perverted
opinion but without ‘obstinate ill will’ – and especially those ‘who have not originated
their error by bold presumption’ but received it from their parents or others, and who
see truth with a readiness to be corrected when they have found it – are not to be
included among heretics. The heretic himself, however, ‘swollen with hateful pride
and with the assertion of evil contradiction, is to be avoided like a mad man’.

“Nevertheless, Augustine eventually reversed his position and decided to endorse

coercion. Looking back at this development some years later, he said that at first he
had believed that no one should be forced into the unity of Christ, and that the Church
should rely only on speaking, reasoning, and persuasion ‘for fear of making pretended
Catholics out of those whom we knew as open heretics’. But then proven facts caused
him to give up this opinion when he saw Donatists in his own city ‘converted to
Catholic unity by the fear of imperial laws’ and those in other cities recalled by the
same means. Reclaimed Donatists, he contended, were now grateful that ‘fear of the
laws promulgated by temporal rulers who serve the Lord in fear has been so
beneficial’ to them.

“We first learn of Augustine’s change of mind in the treatise he wrote (ca. 400) as a
reply to a letter by the Donatist bishop Parmenian, a leading spokesman of the
movement. In this work he justified the intervention of the imperial government
against the Donatists by making Saint Paul’s theology of the state, as the apostle
outlined it in the thirteenth chapter of his letter to the Romans (Romans 13.1-7). There
Paul instructed Christians to be obedient to the higher powers as the minister
ordained by God and armed with the sword for the repression of evildoers. In the
light of this apostolic teaching, Augustine insisted that the emperors and the political
authorities had the God-given right and duty to crush the sacrilege and schism of the
Donatists, since they were as obligated to repress a false and evil religion as to prevent
the crime of pagan idolatry. He further pointed out that the Donatists were guilty of
many cruelties and had themselves appealed to the emperors in the past against the
dissidents in their own church. Denying that those of them condemned to death were
martyrs, he described them instead as killers of souls and, because of their violence,
often killers of bodies.

“One of the arguments he put forward in defense of force in this work was his
interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the tares in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 13.24-
30). This famous text was destined to be cited often during subsequent centuries in
discussions of toleration and persecution, and to occupy a prominent place in the
tolerationist controversies of the era of the Protestant Reformation. The parable first
likens the kingdom of heaven to a good see and then relates how a man sowed good
seed in the ground, whereupon his enemy came in the night and planted tares, or
weeds, there as well. When the wheat appeared, so did the tares. The man’s servants
asked their master if they should pull up the tares, but he forbade them lest they also
uproot the wheat. He ordered that both should be left to grow until the harvest, and
then the reapers would remove and burn the tares and gather the wheat into the barn.
The parable’s point would seem to be that good people and sinners alike should be

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allowed to await the Last Judgement to receive their due, when God would reward
the good with the kingdom of heaven and punish the bad with the flames of hell.
Augustine, however, drew from it a very different lesson: if the bad seed is known, it
should be uprooted. According to his explanation, the only reason the master left the
tares to grow until the harvest was the fear that uprooting them sooner would harm
the grain. When this fear does not exist because it is evident which is the good seed,
and when someone’s crime is notorious and so execrable that it is indefensible, then it
is right to use severe discipline against it, for the more perversity is corrected, the more
carefully charity is safeguarded. With the help of this interpretation, which reversed
the parable’s meaning, Augustine was able not only to justify the Roman
government’s repression of the Donatists but to provide a wider reason for religious
persecution by the civil authorities.

“Augustine elaborated his position in favour of coercion in religion in a number of

letters. In a lengthy epistle to the Donatist Vincent, he argued for the utility of coercion
in inducing fear that can bring those who are subject to it to the right way of thinking.
Maintaining that people could be changed for the better through the influence of fear,
he concluded that ‘when the saving doctrine is added to useful fear’, then ‘the light of
truth’ can drive out ‘the darkness of error’. To reinforce this view, he quoted the
parable of the feast in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 14. 21-23), another of the texts that
was to figure prominently in future tolerationist controversy. In this parable, a man
prepared a great feast to which he invited many guests who failed to appear. After
summoning from the city the poor, blind, and lame to come and eat, he found that
room still remained, so he ordered his servants to ‘go out into the highways and
hedges, and compel them to come in [compelle intrare in the Latin Vulgate], that My
house may be filled’. ‘Do you think,’ Augustine asked in a comment on this passage,
‘that no one should be forced to do right, when you read that the master of the house
said to his servants, “Whomever you find, compel them to come in”’. He referred also
to the example of the conversion of the apostle Paul, who ‘was forced by the great
violence of Christ’s compulsion to acknowledge and hold the truth’ (Acts 9.3-18). The
main point, he claimed, was not whether anyone was forced to do something, but
whether the purpose of doing so was right or wrong. While no one could be made
good against his will, the fear of punishment could persuade a person to repudiate a
false doctrine and embrace the truth he had previously denied, as had happened to
many Donatists who had thankfully become Catholics and now detested their
diabolical separation.

“In dealing with heresy, Augustine thus laid great stress on what might be called
the pedagogy of fear to effect a change of heart. He did not see coercion and free will
as opposites in religious choice but claimed that fear plays a part in spontaneous acts
of the will and may serve a good end. In one of his most important statements on the
subject, contained in a letter of 417 to Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, he
propounded a distinction between two kinds of persecution. ‘[T]here is an unjust
persecution,’ he said, ‘which the wicked inflict on the Church of Christ, and … a just
persecution which the Church of Christ inflicts on the wicked.’ The Church persecutes
from love, the Donatists from hatred; the Church in order to correct error, the
Donatists to hurl men into error. While the Church strives to save the Donatists from
perdition, the latter in their fury kill Catholics to feed their passion for cruelty.

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Augustine was convinced that the coercion of heretics was therefore a great mercy
because it rescued them from lying demons so that they could be healed in the
Catholic fold. He rejected the objection of those who said that the apostles had never
called upon the kings of the earth to enforce religion, since in the apostles’ time there
had been no Christian emperor to whom they could appeal. It was necessary and
right, however, for kings to forbid and restrain with religious severity actions contrary
to God’s commandments, and to serve God by sanctioning laws that commanded
goodness and prohibited its opposite.

“While admitting that it was better to lead people to the worship of God by
teaching than to force them through fear of suffering, Augustine nevertheless averred
that the latter way could not be neglected. Experience proved, he claimed, that for
many heretics it had been a blessing to be driven out by fear of bodily pain to undergo
instruction in the truth and then follow up with actions what they had learned in
words. Schismatics, he noted, protested that men have freedom to believe or not to
believe, and that Christ never used force on anyone. To this objection he countered
with his previous argument that Christ had first compelled Paul to cease his
persecution of the Christian Church by striking him blind at his conversion and only
then taught him. ‘It is a wonderful thing,’ he said, ‘how he [Paul] who came to the
gospel under the compulsion of bodily suffering labored more in the gospel than all
the others who were called by words alone.’ Once again he drew on the injunction
compelle intrare in the Gospel of Luke to affirm that the Catholic Church was in accord
with God when it compelled heretics and schismatics to come in. In other letters he
denied that the ‘evil will’ should be left to its freedom, and cited not only this same
parable and the example of Christ’s compulsion of Paul, but also God’s restraint of the
Israelites from doing evil and compelling them to enter the land of promise (Exodus
15.22-27), as proof of the Church’s justice in using coercion.

“Although after his change of mind Augustine consistently approved the policy of
subjecting heretics to coercion, he never desired that they should be killed. In writing
to Donatists, he often stated that he and his brethren loved them and acted for their
good, and that if they hated the Catholic Church, it was because ‘we do not allow you
to go astray and be lost’. Donatists had been subject to previous imperial legislation
against heresy, but between 405 and 410 the emperor Honorius decreed a number of
heavy penalties against them that put them outside the protection of the law for their
seditious actions; he ordered their heresy to be put down in ‘blood and
proscription’.602 Augustine frequently interceded with the Roman authorities to spare
their lives. In 408 he wrote to the proconsul of Africa urging Christian clemency and
praying that though heretics [should] be made to feel the effect of the laws against
them, they should not be put to death, despite deserving the extreme punishment, in
the hope that they might be converted. To another high official he pleaded in behalf

602“In January 412 Emperor Honorius officially banned Donatism. The members of the sect had to pay
fines, whose amount was determined by their social and property status, and the clergy were exiled,
while their church property was confiscated. The Berber Donatists organized a series of final bloody
attacks on Catholic churches, and Augustine recognized that the problem of insincere conversions was
not as serious as he previously thought” (Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslanoj Tserkvi, p.
262) (V.M.).

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of some Donatists tried for murder and other violent acts that they should be deprived
of their freedom but not executed that they might have the chance to repent.

“Although repression weakened Donatism, it failed to eliminate this deeply rooted

heresy, which survived until the later seventh century when the Islamic conquest of
North Africa destroyed every form of Christianity in this region. In the course of his
career, Augustine, who was not only an outstanding thinker but a man of keen and
sensitive conscience, wrestled strenuously with the problem of heresy and the
achievement of Catholic unity by the use of coercion… ‘Pride’, he once wrote, ‘is the
mother of all heretics,’ and fear could break down this pride and thus act as an
auxiliary in the process of conversion. Whether the heretic was really sincere in
professing a change of mind under the threat of bodily pain was a question that could
best be left to God. Augustine certainly did not recommend the death penalty for
heretics but strove tirelessly to save their souls from eternal perdition. He supported
their repression by the Roman imperial government in the hope of restoring them to
the Catholic Church, and because, as he said in a letter to some Donatists, ‘nothing
can cause more complete death to the soul than freedom to disseminate error’.”603

But if freedom to disseminate error should be restricted, this did not mean that the
truth could be known in any other mode than in freedom. For, as St. Maximus the
Confessor said, “the mystery of salvation is for those who desire it, not for those who
are being coerced”.604 And again he said: "I do not want heretics to be tortured, and I
do not rejoice in their misfortunes, God forbid! I counsel you to do good attentively
and fervently to all men and that all believers should be everything for those in need.
But at the same time I say: one must not help heretics and confirm them in their mad
beliefs. Here it is necessary to be sharp and irreconcilable. For I do not call it love, but
hatred, and a falling away from Divine love, when someone confirms heretics in their
error to the inescapable destruction of these people."

It is in the fifth century that the beginning of the schism between Eastern and
Western Christianity, which had such huge consequences for the history of the world,
are discernible. We see it in the pretensions to universal leadership that the Roman
see begins to have. We also see it in certain doctrinal controversies in which East and
West may not have diverged fundamentally, but which betray different approaches
to dogma that were to become more significant over time. The most important of these
controversies was over the teaching on free will and grace by the British monk
Pelagius, who arrived in Rome in about 380 and in 416 published his main heretical
work, ”On Free Will”. He was opposed particularly by St. Augustine, Bishop of
Hippo, and his teaching was condemned by several local councils in East and West,
as also by the Third Ecumenical Council in 431.

“In about 411,” writes Alexander Dvorkin, “when Augustine was absent from his
city, there arrived there a prominent refugee from Rome. He set off for Palestine and

603 Zagorin, op. cit., pp. 26-32, 33.
604 St. Maximus, P.G. 90.880.

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wanted to pay a respectful visit to the noted African bishop. This was the British monk
Pelagius, who lived for several years in Rome and acquired there significant
popularity as a moralist and spiritual director. He did not succeed in meeting
Augustine and departed. After visiting many countries Pelagius settled in Jerusalem,
where, unlike Blessed Jerome, he had the most heartfelt good relations with the local
clergy: soon a significant group of his spiritual children and followers was gathered.
However, his friend, the lawyer Celestine, remained in Carthage; his eloquent defence
of the views of Pelagius and criticism of the teaching of Augustine soon created a
veritable storm in Africa.

“Pelagius, who was distinguished by the strictness of his life and demanded the
same of his disciples, had many followers who set off after him to Palestine. They had
to live in accordance with the commandments of God, study the Scriptures, give away
their property and strive for holiness. Pelagius sincerely sorrowed over the morals of
high Roman society, which took a very light-minded attitude to the challenge of the
Gospel. He was profoundly disgusted by the Manichaean-pessimistic view of human
nature, which, as it seemed to him, was penetrating more and more into the Church.
At that time a commentary on the epistles of St. Paul by an unknown author were
widespread in Rome. From the words of St. Paul in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to
the Romans (verse 12): ‘Therefore, as by one man sin came into the world, and through
sin death, so death has passed to all men because in him all have sinned’ – the author
of the commentary concluded that we have all sinned together in Adam, and not that
the passing of sin to Adam’s descendants meant that the souls of men come from their
parents, just as do their bodies…

“All this was exceptionally distasteful to Pelagius, who wrote his own commentary
on the epistles of St. Paul in which he affirmed that we sin voluntarily by imitating the
fall of Adam, being corrupted by our external environment and the consequent
mistakes that weaken our will. In trying to express his point of view, Pelagius went so
far as to deny that original sin is inherited, and affirmed that death is a natural
property of man, and that the sin of Adam changed nothing in the nature of man and
that man can be saved without the help of God. Grace is necessary only to point out
the way. Human nature is neutral; neither good nor evil is intrinsic to it. Sin is rooted
only in our own will. New-born babies are not bearers of evil and sin – we can call
them only potentially sinful. From here it is easy to draw the conclusion that the
baptism of children is senseless. For justice’s sake we must say that Pelagius himself
never drew this conclusion, but replied to direct questions that Christ’s words that
nobody who is not born from on high (i.e. who is unbaptized) can enter the Kingdom
of Heaven, apply to children. But, continued Pelagius, it would be absurd to suppose
that the merciful Lord could sentence innocent children to hell: probably there must
be a third place that they go to.

“Blessed Augustine replied that flesh begets flesh. The reason for this is lust, of
which we are all guilty. Sexual relations, said Augustine, are in principle sin, which
can only in part be softened by the intention of begetting a child in a lawful marriage.

“In the beginning Augustine wrote very polite letters to Pelagius, refuting his
theories, but gradually the polemic became heated. Oil was added to the fire by

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Jerome, when Pelagius was careless enough to make critical remarks about Jerome’s
very Origenist interpretations of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians. It was then
that Jerome called Pelagius ‘a fat dog, whose belly is stuffed with Scottish [or Irish]
porridge’.

“In 415 Augustine sent Pelagius his young friend from Spain, Orosius. He, on the
advice of Jerome, publicly declared in Jerusalem that the doctrines of Pelagius had
been condemned as heretical at an African council: in them, he said, original sin and
man’s need of grace were denied. This stirred up a veritable storm in Palestine, where
Pelagius enjoyed great popularity and authority. A council was convened in
Jerusalem that justified Pelagius. But in the same year another council was convened
in Lydda, at which Pelagius, after elucidating his position, was forced to make
significant concessions.

“However, after studying a stenogram of the council, Augustine found Pelagius’

repentance incomplete and insincere. He convened his own council in Carthage, at
which Pelagianism, in spite of all the concessions made by its founder, was again
condemned.

“Then Pelagius appealed to Rome to Pope Zosimas (417-419), and he, deeply
impressed by the lofty moral standards of the Pelagians and their unfeigned reverence
for the apostolic see, wrote to the Africans that they had apparently paid heed to a
distorted exposition of Pelagius’ teaching, and that in fact he was completely
Orthodox. Africa literally exploded. The Pope was frightened by this reaction and
wavered in his decision, while Augustine, using his authority at the
[Western]emperor’s court in Ravenna, obtained, on 30 April 418, an imperial edict on
the expulsion of the Pelagians from Rome as presenting a threat to public peace. Under
this pressure the Pope gave in and published an official condemnation of Pelagius and
Celestine.”605

In 419 a Council at Carthage condemned the heresy, reaffirming Augustine’s

teaching on original sin; its canons have passed into the Canon Law of the Eastern
Orthodox Church. Pope Celestine also condemned it; and in 431 he urged the bishops
of Gaul to remain loyal to the teaching of St. Augustine.606 Such an exhortation was
deemed necessary because Marseille in Gaul was the home of an influential disciple
of St. John Chrysostom, St. John Cassian. In his balanced and insightful criticism of St.
Augustine’s attack on Pelagianism, in which he quoted abundantly from the Holy
Scriptures but without mentioning Augustine or Pelagius by name, St. John insisted
on the synergetic cooperation of God’s grace and man’s free will. For “these things are
mixed together and fused so indistinguishably that which is dependent on which is a
great question as far as many people are concerned – that is, whether God has mercy
on us because we manifest the beginnings of a good will, or we acquire the beginnings
of a good will because God is merciful. For many who hold to one of these alternatives

605Dvorkin, op. cit., pp. 264-266.
606St. Photius the Great writes: "In the letter of Celestine, bishop of Rome, to Nestorius the same heretics
are condemned. Celestine also wrote to the bishops of Gaul in defence of the teaching of St. Augustine
and against those who were emboldened to speak rashly by the licence allowed to the heresy."
(Biblioteca, 53)

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and assert it more freely than is right have fallen into different self-contradictory
errors…. These two things – that is, the grace of God and free will – certainly seem
mutually opposed to one another, but both are in accord, and we understand that we
must accept them both in like manner because of our religion, lest by removing one of
them from the human being we seen to contravene the rule of the Church’s faith. For
when God sees us turning in order to will what is good, He comes to us, directs us,
and strengthens us… On the other hand, if He sees us unwilling or growing
lukewarm, He brings to our hearts salutary exhortations by which a good will may be
either repaired or formed in us.”607

Other critics of Augustine’s approach included Abbot Valentinus of Hadrumetium,

a daughter-foundation of Hippo, who wrote to Augustine warning him “against
going to the opposite extreme and thus wholly denying the freedom of the will”.608
Now Augustine did not deny the existence of free will.609 But there is no doubt that
some of his expressions, taken out of context, could suggest such an extreme.

Later Orthodox Western councils such as the Council of Orange (529) confirmed
Augustine’s position while not condemning St. John Cassian’s. Moreover, they
confirmed his teaching on the inheritance of original sin.

Thus Canons One and Two of the Council of Orange declare: “1. If anyone denies
that it is the whole man, that is, both body and soul, that was "changed for the worse"
through the offense of Adam's sin, but believes that the freedom of the soul remains
unimpaired and that only the body is subject to corruption, he is deceived by the error
of Pelagius and contradicts the scripture which says, "The soul that sins shall die"
(Ezekiel 18:20); and, "Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to anyone as
obedient slaves, you are the slaves of the one whom you obey?" (Romans 6.26); and,
"For whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved" (II Peter 2:19).

“2. If anyone asserts that Adam's sin affected him alone and not his descendants
also, or at least if he declares that it is only the death of the body which is the
punishment for sin, and not also that sin, which is the death of the soul, passed
through one man to the whole human race, he does injustice to God and contradicts
the Apostle, who says, "Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and
death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned" (Romans
5:12).

607 St. John Cassian, Conference XIII, New York: Newman Press, 1997, pp. 476, 477-478.
608 F. Van Der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, London: Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 125.
609 Thus: “Who commits sin by an act which he could by no means avoid? If sin had been committed, it

could have been avoided” (On Free Will, III, xviii, 50). Again, Fr. Seraphim Rose writes:: “When it was
objected to him that ‘it is by his own fault that anyone deserts the faith, when he yields and consents to
the temptation which is the cause of his desertion of the faith’ (as against the teaching that God
determines a man to desert the faith), Augustine found it necessary to make no reply except: ‘Who denies
it?’ (On the Gift of Perseverance, ch. 46).” Again, he writes: “It is our part to believe and to will and His
part to give to those who believe and will the ability to do good works through the Holy Spirit”. A
perfect statement of the Orthodox doctrine of synergy!

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 The Council concludes: "...we must, under the blessing of God, preach and believe
as follows. The sin of the first man has so impaired and weakened free will that no
one thereafter can either love God as he ought or believe in God or do good for God's
sake, unless the grace of divine mercy has preceded him. We therefore believe that the
glorious faith which was given to Abel the righteous, and Noah, and Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob, and to all the saints of old, and which the Apostle Paul commends in
extolling them (Hebrews 11), was not given through natural goodness as it was before
to Adam, but was bestowed by the grace of God.

“And we know and also believe that even after the coming of our Lord this grace
is not to be found in the free will of all who desire to be baptized, but is bestowed by
the kindness of Christ, as has already been frequently stated and as the Apostle Paul
declares, "For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not
only believe in him but also suffer for his sake" (Philippians 1:29). And again, "He who
began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ"
(Philippians 1:6). And again, "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and it
is not your own doing, it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). And as the Apostle says
of himself, "I have obtained mercy to be faithful" (1 Corinthians 7:25, cf. 1 Timothy
1:13). He did not say, "because I was faithful," but "to be faithful." And again, "What
have you that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). And again, "Every good
endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of
lights" (James 1:17). And again, "No one can receive anything except what is given
him from heaven" (John 3:27). There are innumerable passages of Holy Scripture
which can be quoted to prove the case for grace, but they have been omitted for the
sake of brevity, because further examples will not really be of use where few are
deemed sufficient.

“According to the catholic faith we also believe that after grace has been received
through baptism, all baptized persons have the ability and responsibility, if they
desire to labor faithfully, to perform with the aid and cooperation of Christ what is of
essential importance in regard to the salvation of their soul. We not only do not believe
that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter
abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are
anathema. We also believe and confess to our benefit that in every good work it is not
we who take the initiative and are then assisted through the mercy of God, but God
himself first inspires in us both faith in him and love for him without any previous
good works of our own that deserve reward, so that we may both faithfully seek the
sacrament of baptism, and after baptism be able by his help to do what is pleasing to
him. We must therefore most evidently believe that the praiseworthy faith of the thief
whom the Lord called to his home in paradise, and of Cornelius the centurion, to
whom the angel of the Lord was sent, and of Zacchaeus, who was worthy to receive
the Lord himself, was not a natural endowment but a gift of God's kindness."

However, while defeated on the continent, the heresy of Pelagius continued to

thrive in Pelagius’ homeland of Britain, and in 429 the Gallic bishop, St. Germanus of
Auxerre, who was the trainer and instructor of a whole generation of British monks
and hierarchs, was invited by the British Orthodox to come to England and help them
combat the heresy. He defeated the heresy in council, and even helped the British

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soldiers to organize a victory over the pagan Saxon invaders by teaching them to shout
“Alleluia” at a critical moment (he had been a Roman general before accepting the
tonsure).610 In 447 he came again, accompanied by St. Lupus of Troyes, and perhaps
also by St. Patrick, the British-born apostle of Ireland.611

But the heresy lingered on, especially, probably, in the upper classes of British
society612, and at some time between 545 and 569 the British Church convened a
Council at Llandewi Brefi in Wales to refute the heretics, as told by Rhigyfarch in the
eleventh century: “Since even after St. Germanus’s second visit of help the Pelagian
heresy was recovering its vigour and obstinacy, implanting the poison of a deadly
serpent in the innermost regions of our country, a general synod is assembled of all
the bishops of Britain. In addition to a gathering of 118 bishops, there was present an
innumerable multitude of priests, abbots, clergy of other ranks, kings, princes, lay men
and women, so that the very great host covered all the places round about. The
bishops confer amongst themselves, saying: ‘The multitude present is too great to
enable, not only a voice, but even the sound of a trumpet to reach the ears of them all.
Almost the entire throng will be untouched by our preaching, and will return home,
taking with them the infection of the heresy.’ Consequently, it is arranged to preach
to the people in the following manner. A mound of garments was to be erected on
some rising ground, and one at a time was to preach, standing upon it. Whoever
should be endowed with such a gift of preaching that his discourse reached the ears
of all that were furthest, he, by common consent, should be made metropolitan and
archbishop. Thereupon, a place called Brevi is selected, a lofty mound of garments is
erected, and they preach with all their might. But their words scarcely reach those that
are nearest, it is as though their throats seem constricted; the people await the Word,
but the largest portion does not hear it. One after another endeavours to expound, but
they fail utterly. A great crisis arises; and they fear that the people will return home
with the heresy uncrushed. ‘We have preached,’ said they, ‘but we do not convince;
consequently our labour is rendered useless.’ Then arose one of the bishops, named
Paulinus, with whom aforetime, holy Dewi the bishop had studied; ‘There is one,’ said
he, ‘who has been made a bishop by the patriarch613, who has not attended our synod;
a man of eloquence, full of grace, experienced in religion, an associate of angels, a man
to be loved, attractive in countenance, magnificent in appearance, six feet in stature.
Him I advise you to summon here.’

“Messengers are immediately dispatched, who come to the holy bishop, and
announce the reason for their coming. But the holy bishop declined, saying: ‘Let no
man tempt me. Who am I to succeed where those have failed? I know my own

610 The saint’s military help was much appreciated by the Britons, who in 446 appealed to the Roman
leader Flavius Aetius: “The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us back to the barbarians,
death comes by one means or another: we are either slaughtered or drowned.”
611 See “Svyatitel’ Patrikij, Prosvetitel’ Irlandii”, Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, December, 1999, p. 5.
612 In their debates with St. Germanus, the Pelagians are described as “men of obvious wealth”

(Constantius of Lyons, Life of Germanus, 3.14).

613 The Patriarch of Jerusalem (probably Elias), who had consecrated David and his companions Teilo

and Paternus on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The patriarch gave David a portable altar as a gift. Today,
a very ancient square stone object inscribed with crosses, which could perhaps have served as an altar,
can be found today in St. David’s cathedral under a large icon of the Prophet Elias.

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insignificance. Go in peace.’ A second and a third time messengers are sent, but not
even then did he consent. Finally, the holiest and the most upright men are sent, the
brethren, Daniel [Bishop of Bangor in North Wales] and Dubricius [Archbishop of
Llandaff]. But the holy bishop Dewi, foreseeing it with prophetic spirit, said to the
brethren: ‘This day, my brethren, very holy men are visiting us. Welcome them
joyfully, and for their meal procure fish in addition to bread and water.’ The brethren
arrive, exchange mutual greetings and converse about holy things. Food is placed on
the table, but they insist that they will never eat a meal in his monastery unless he
returns to the synod along with them. To this the saint replied: ‘I cannot refuse you;
proceed with your meal, we will go together to the synod. But then, I am unable to
preach there: I will give you some help, little though it be, with my prayers.’

“So setting forth, they reach the neighbourhood of the synod, and lo, they heard a
wailing and lamentation. Said the saint to his companions; ‘I will go to the scene of
this great lamentation.’ But his companions said in reply; ‘But let us go to the
assembly, lest our delaying grieve those who await us.’ The man of God approached
the place of the mourning; and lo, there a bereaved mother was keeping watch over
the body of a youth, to whom, with barbaric uncouthness, she had given a lengthy
name. He comforted and raised the mother, consoling and encouraging her; but she,
having heard of his fame, flung herself forward at his feet, begging him with cries of
entreaty to take pity on her. Filled with compassion for human weakness, he
approached the body of the dead boy, whose face he watered with his tears. At length,
the limbs grew warm, the soul returned, and the body quivered. He took hold of the
boy’s hand and restored him to his mother. But she, her sorrowful weeping turned
into tears of joy, then said; ‘I believed that my son was dead; let him henceforth live
to God and to you.’ The holy man accepted the boy, laid on his shoulder the Gospel-
book which he always carried in his bosom, and made him go with him to the synod.
That boy, afterwards, while life lasted, lived a holy life.

“He then enters the synod; the company of bishops is glad, the multitude is joyful,
the whole assembly exults. He is asked to preach, and does not decline the synod’s
decision. They bid him ascend the mound piled up with garments; and, in the sight of
all, a snow-white dove from heaven settled on his shoulder, and remained there as
long as he preached. Whilst he preached, with a loud voice, heard equally by those
who were nearest and those who were furthest, the ground beneath him grew higher,
rising to a hill; and, stationed on its summit, visible to all as though standing on a lofty
mountain, he raised his voice until it rang like a trumpet: on the summit of that hill a
church is situated. The heresy is expelled, the faith is confirmed in sound hearts, all
are of one accord, and thanks are rendered to God and St. David.”614

*

614Rhigyfarch’s Life of St. David, chapters 49-52. Shortly after this Council, says Rhigyfarch, there was
another Council, called the Synod of Victory, which “reaffirmed the decisions of its predecessor”. The
records of these Councils were written down by St. David, but had been lost by the eleventh century.
However, from a Breton manuscript we do have seven disciplinary canons attributed to a West British
Synod, and another sixteen to “another Council of the Victory of Light [Luci]”. It is likely that these
Councils are the same as those led by St. David (A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical
Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869, 1964, vol. I, pp. 116-120

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 Some modernist twentieth-century Orthodox theologians, such as Fr. John
Romanides, have concluded, from Augustine’s writings on free will and other issues,
that he is the fount and source of all the heresies of the West. This is unjust. Augustine
was called “holy” at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and St. Photius the Great
“embraced” him spiritually (while accepting that he may have erred at times).615

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the largely uncritical acclaim in which

Augustine came to be held in the West, while not in itself sufficient to create the
schism, became one of the main reasons why eastern and western theology diverged
during the Middle Ages and the Reformation. Thus the Roman Catholics labelled St.
John Cassian a “semi-Pelagian”, that is, “semi-heretical”, and Calvin’s doctrine of
predestination may be construed as a misinterpretation of St. Augustine’s writings on
free will. Calvin believed that all human beings are assigned by God in a completely
arbitrary manner to two categories: the saved and the damned, and that there is
nothing that any man can do to take himself out of one category and into the other.
“Predestination” for him meant “predetermination” and fatalism; and it involved the
denial of the place of freewill in our salvation. Such an error could have been avoided
by a reading of St. John Cassian’s more balanced discussion of the subject.

615“If [these]... Fathers [like Augustine] had spoken in opposition when the debated question was
brought before them and had fought it contentiously and had maintained their opinion and had
persevered in this false teaching, and when convicted of it held to their doctrine unto death, then they
would necessarily be rejected together with the error of their mind. But if they spoke badly or, for some
reason not known to us, deviated from the right path, but no question was put to them nor did anyone
challenge them to learn the truth, we admit them to the list of the Fathers, as if they had not said it –
because of their righteousness of life and distinguished virtues and their faith, faultless in other
respects. We do not, however, follow their teaching in which they stray from the path of truth... We,
though, who know that some of our Holy Fathers and teachers strayed from the Faith of true dogmas,
do not take as doctrine those areas in which they strayed, but we embrace the men. So also in the case
of any who are charged with teaching that the Spirit proceeds from the Son, we do not admit what is
opposed to the word of the Lord, but we do not cast them from the rank of the Fathers. ”(P.G. 102, 813)

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 39. THE FALL OF OLD ROME

Pelagius’ heresy was elicited in part by the horror he experienced at the

luxuriousness of the Romans. His reaction to Roman morals may have been
misguided, but the wrath of God was about to visit the corrupt capital - which,
however, was still great in material terms. “Itineraries of the city from just a few
decades prior to Alaric’s arrival tell us that Rome had 2 main markets, 2 colossal
statues, 2 circuses, 2 amphitheatres, 3 theatres, 4 gladiator schools, 5 artificial lakes for
mock sea battles, 6 obelisks, 8 bridges, 10 basilicas, 11 forums, 11 public baths, 19
aqueducts, 22 equestrian statues, 28 libraries, 29 avenues, 36 marble arches, 37 gates,
46 brothels, 74 ivory statues of gods, 80 gold statues of gods, 144 public latrines, 254
bakeries, 290 warehouses, 423 neighbourhoods, each with its own temple, 856 private
bath houses, 1,790 houses, 2,300 oil sellers, and 46,602 blocks of flats.”616

God’s instruments of wrath were the Germanic tribes coming from the north,
especially the Goths. In 376 the Goths, fleeing from the Huns, crossed the River
Danube into the Eastern Roman Empire. In 378, in accordance with a prophecy of St.
Isaac of the Dalmatian monastery, they killed the Emperor Valens and destroyed his
army at Hadrianopolis (Adrianople). However, Constantinople itself, its eastern
provinces protected from invasion by the Bosphorus and the Roman navy, held out
against the barbarians. Valens’s successor, St. Theodosius the Great, made peace with
them, giving them what is now Bulgaria, with their own laws and rulers, in exchange
for providing troops for the imperial army and a cash subsidy.

In 394, the Goths under their new leader Alaric joined with the imperial army led
by St. Theodosius and his favourite general, the half-Vandal Stilicho, to defeat the
pagan usurper Eugenius. Soon after, Theodosius died and Alaric proceeded to ravage
central Greece. Then, in 401, he turned west. The next year, Stilicho managed to stop
him at the battle of Pollenia near Turin. Alaric and his Goths then withdrew to Epirus
in Greece, while the Western Emperor Honorius (393-423) moved his capital from
Milan to Ravenna for greater security. But in 407, having spent a year in Albania
without receiving any confirmation of his alliance with Stilicho, Alaric marched into
Noricum (Austria), demanding a large tribute.

Stilicho advised Honorius to pay part of the tribute. However, “a Roman senator
named Lampadius complained that paying off Alaric was not peace but servitude. His
outburst was the beginning of the end for Stilicho. As the gold was raised and paid,
his enemies at the Ravenna court poisoned Emperor Honorius against him, claiming
that Stilicho, whose Germanic origins made him suspect in Roman eyes, had secret
dynastic ambitions for his young son. Late Roman regime change was anything but
pretty. In August 408 AD Stilicho was beheaded in a Ravenna church and all his close
associates, including his son, were killed. Worse, his death provoked a wave of anti-
barbarian feeling across Italy, as Roman troops massacred the families of Germanic
soldiers whom Stilicho had recruited…”617

616 Kneale, op. cit., p. 38.
617 Matthew Kneale, Rome. A History in Seven Sackings, London: Simon Schuster, 2017, p. 35.

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 This in turn led to thousands of Goths deserting the army for Alaric, who ravaged
Italy, besieged Rome and demanded a vast tribute in gold and silver, including the
famous statue of Valour or Fortitude, the symbol of Roman might. “This being
destroyed,” writes Zosimas, “all that remained of the Roman valour and intrepidity
was totally extinguished”.

But Alaric was a reluctant avenger; he was not really disposed to destroy Rome.
What he was still seeking was a settlement whereby the Goths would be the third
main nation of the empire after the Romans and the Greeks. But Honorius, though
completely at the mercy of the Goths, would not cooperate. So, on August 24, 410,
after a prolonged siege that led some of the besieged to cannibalism, Alaric entered
Rome and sacked it. However, he “had given strict orders to limit bloodshed. Orosius,
writing while the memory of the sack was still fresh, reported that Alaric ‘gave orders
that all those who had taken refuge in sacred places, especially in the basilica of the
holy Apostles Peter and Paul, should be permitted to remain inviolate and
unmolested.’ There were a few fires, but the city was hardly damaged.’”618 As Simon
Jenkins writes: “Despite gruesome reports of devastation, reliable sources speak of the
Goths’ ‘remarkable clemency’. Wealth was certainly stolen, but few houses were
destroyed.”619

Nevertheless, the population of the City, which had been about 800,000 at the time
of the sack, had been reduced by starvation and other causes to a little more than
400,000 by the year 419.620 And the psychological impact was great. Blessed Jerome
wrote from Bethlehem: “At the news my speech failed me, and sobs choked the words
that I was dictating. She has been captured – the City by whom the whole world had
once been taken captive.” 621 Indeed, for patriotic West Romans like Jerome, the fall of
the City of Old Rome was equivalent to the fall of the whole of humanity: “The flame
of the world has been extinguished and in the destruction of a single city, the whole
human race has perished!” 622

Tertullian had said: “In the Emperor we reverence the judgement of God, Who has
set him over the nations”623. It followed that the fall of the western emperor had to
express the reversal of God’s judgement, His guilty verdict against the Romans, at any
rate in the West.

(In the East, in Constantinople, while the Goths occupied many important posts in
the army and in the government bureaucracy, their influence was better controlled.
This may have been due to the prayers of St. John Chrysostom, who until his death in
407, supported the Orthodox Goths while firmly opposing those Arian Goths who
tried to take control of churches in the City.624)

618 Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Barbarians, London: BBC Books, 2006, p. 145.
619 Jenkins, A Short History of Europe, London: Viking, 2018, p. 40.
620 Kneale, op. cit., p. 79.
621 St. Jerome, Letter 127, P.L. 22, col. 1094.
622 St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, prologue.
623 Tertullian, Apologeticum, 32.
624 A.S. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, University of Wisconsin Press, 1952, vol. 1, pp. 94-95.

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 The Holy Fathers in East and West had somewhat different attitudes to the tragedy.
In the eastern half of the empire, They emphasised heavenly patriotism, the patriotism
of the City whose “Builder and Maker is God” (Hebrews 10.10) over any earthly
patriotism, even Roman patriotism; for “here we have no continuing city, but seek one
to come” (Hebrews 13.14). Thus St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople,
wrote: “If you are a Christian, no earthly city is yours….

“Though we may gain possession of the whole world, we are withal but strangers
and sojourners in it all.

“We are enrolled in heaven: our citizenship is there! Let us not, after the manner of
little children, despise things that are great, and admire those which are little!

“Not our city’s greatness, but virtue of soul is our ornament and defence.

“If you suppose dignity to belong to a city, think how many persons must partake
in this dignity, who are whoremongers, effeminate, depraved and full of ten thousand
evil things, and in the end despise such an honour!

“But that City above is not of this kind; for it is impossible that he can be a partaker
of it, who has not exhibited every virtue.”625

The pagans were quick to come forward with their own explanation of the fall of
Rome: Rome had fallen because she had deserted her gods. They pointed out that it
was precisely since the ban on pagan practices imposed by Theodosius the Great in
380 that the barbarians had begun to overwhelm the empire.

To refute this notion, and to show that the disasters suffered by the empire were
allowed by God to chasten and purify His people, St. Augustine wrote the first five
books of The City of God, written shortly after Alaric’s sack of Rome. “God’s
providence,” he wrote, “constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals
of mankind, as it also uses such afflictions to train men in a righteous and laudable
way of life. It removes to a better state those whose life is approved, or keeps them in
this world for further service.”626

In the second part of the work, he describes the origin, history and final destiny of
two Cities - the City of God, which is holy and destined for eternal bliss, and the City
of Man, which is sinful and destined for the eternal fire. The Roman Empire, like the
Church herself of which it is the ally, contains citizens of both Cities, both wheat and
tares. When the state is ruled by a truly Christian ruler, like Theodosius the Great, one
can see “a faint shadowy resemblance between the Roman Empire and the Heavenly
City”; which is why one must obey the law and render one’s patriotic and civic duty
to the State.

625 St. John Chrysostom, On the Statues.
626 St. Augustine, The City of God, I, 1.

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 However, this view was juxtaposed, in Augustine’s thought, with a more radical,
apolitical and even anti-political view. Thus at one point he calls Rome a “second
Babylon”.627 He points out that there was always a demonic element at the heart of
the Roman state, which has not been eliminated even now. The sin of fratricide –
Romulus’ murder of Remus – lay at the very root of the Roman state, just as sin and
fratricide – Cain’s murder of Abel – lay at the beginning of the history of fallen
humanity. Therefore it should not surprise us that the Roman Empire should decline
and fall. “If heaven and earth are to pass away, why is it surprising if at some time the
state is going to come to an end? If what God has made will one day vanish, then
surely what Romulus made will disappear much sooner.”

“As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days’ course, what does it matter
under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not
force him to impious and wicked acts?”628

It is the Jerusalem above that is our real Fatherland, not Rome here below.

Augustine’s purpose was to wean men away from trust in political institutions,
whether pagan or Christian, to trust in God alone. Christian rulers were, of course,
better than pagan ones. But politics in general was suspect. The empire had been built
up through wars, many of them quite unjust. And yet “without justice what are
governments but bands of brigands?”629 It was not that Augustine was not a loyal
Roman citizen, but the fall of Old Rome contributed to an atmosphere of introspection
and self-criticism that sought explanations for the fall in sin, both at the individual
and at the collective level. Thus Augustine distanced himself from a too close
identification of Romanitas (Romanness) and Christianitas (Christianity). As F. van der
Meer interprets his thought: “Compared with Christianity, what significance was
there in things, admittedly good in themselves, like the order, unity and authority of
the Roman Empire?…”630

And yet the Pax Romana was of great value. Alaric recognized that, which is why he
had tried to come to an accommodation with Rome, and, failing that, limit the damage
he did to the eternal city. In 409, very late in the day, the city started to issue coins
with the inscription INVICTA ROMA AETERNA (“Invincible, Eternal Rome”). Even
more respectful was his successor and brother-in-law, Ataulf: “To begin with, I
ardently desired to efface the very name of the Romans and to transform the Roman
Empire into a Gothic Empire. Romania, as it is commonly called, would have become
Gothia; Ataulf would have replaced Caesar Augustus. But long experience taught me
that the unruly barbarism of the Goths was incompatible with the laws. Now, without
laws there is no state. I therefore decided rather to aspire to the glory of restoring the
fame of Rome in all its integrity, and of increasing it by means of the Gothic strength.
I hope to go down to posterity as the restorer of Rome, since it is not possible that I
should be its supplanter.”631

627 St. Augustine, The City of God, XVIII, 2.
628 St. Augustine, The City of God, V, 17.
629 St. Augustine, The City of God, IV, 4.
630 Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, London: Sheed and Ward, 1961, p. 584.
631 Ataulf, in Grant, op. cit., p. 127.

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 Arnaulf’s respect for Roman law was widely shared. The Romans attached
enormous importance to their law as the necessary instrument of the Roman peace. As
Peter Heather writes, “Roman imperial state ideology had long since identified the
existence of written law as the single factor which distinguished the Roman world as
a higher order of divinely inspired human society, far superior to that of any known
or conceivable neighbour.”632

Again, in the second preface to his Judicial Code the Emperor Justinian wrote: “The
maintenance of the integrity of the government depends upon two things, namely, the
force of arms and the observance of the laws: and, for this reason, the fortunate race
of the Romans obtained power and precedence over all other nations in former times,
and will do so forever, if God should be propitious; since each of these has ever
required the aid of the other, for, as military affairs are rendered secure by the laws,
so also are the laws preserved by force of arms.”

The Goths bought in to this vision, to the extent of seeing themselves as restorers,
rather than supplanters, of Rome, and the upholders of her laws.

Nevertheless, Rome declined quickly after Alaric’s invasion. The devastation

wrought by the Goths in Italy had been so great that Honorius was forced twice to
remit four-fifths of the tax revenues from the devastated provinces, thereby
weakening the empire still more. Moreover, more and more barbarian groups
occupied more and more of the taxable agricultural land in other parts of the empire.
Meanwhile Honorius faced rebellions by usurpers in Britain and Gaul (Constantine
III and Jovinian), in Spain (Maximus) and in Africa (Heraclian), which weakened him
still more.633 “In just five decades,” writes Niall Ferguson, “the population of Rome
itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century –
inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle – shows that the
benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.”634

The last notable victory of the West Romans took place at the bloody battle of the
Catalaunian Plains in eastern France in 451, when the fearsome Attila the Hun was
defeated for the first time by a Roman-barbarian coalition led by the Roman general
Aetius and the Visigothic King Theodoric.635 When, undaunted, Attila invaded Italy
again the next year, he was dissuaded from sacking Rome only by an eloquent
embassy of Pope Leo I to him at Mantua in 452 and a vision of Saints Peter and Paul,
who appeared in a vision with St. Leo and threatened the Hun with death. Having
turned away from Rome, he died a sudden and ignoble death in 453.636

632 Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, London: Pan Books, 2013, p. 118.
633 Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 44.
634 Ferguson, “Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edges of Chaos”, Foreign Affairs, March-April,

2010, pp. 27-28.

635 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KMHlGxm9K8.
636 Patrick Howarth, Attila, London: Robinson, 2001, p. 132. After St. Leo had obtained all his requests

from Attila, the Hun’s followers asked him why he had surrendered to “a single, unarmed Roman”.

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 But that was the last victory of the Western empire. In 455 a Vandal fleet under
Gaiseric captured and sacked Rome, taking the Emperor Valentinian’s wife and
daughters back to Carthage. The Eastern Emperor tried and failed to recapture
Carthage from the Vandals in 468. Between 455 and 476 no less than eight men were
raised to the throne of the Western Empire and then deposed by a Germanic
commander called Ricimer. Finally, as Jenkins writes, “in 475 a Roman official named
Orestes, who had served in Attila’s retinue, seized power in Ravenna, and appointed
his fifteen-year-old son Romulus as emperor, giving the boy the impressive name of
Romulus Augustulus [‘little Augustus’]. There seems no limit to the agonies fathers
visit on their sons. The following year the boy was ousted by a Roman soldier of
Germanic origin, Flavius Odoacer, who did not bother with emperorship but took the
title king of Italy with his capital in Ravenna.”637 And yet most significant of all were
Odoacer’s words on refusing to take the imperial crown for himself in imitation of so
many usurper-emperors before him: “there was no need of a divided rule,” he said;
“one, shared emperor was sufficient for both [Eastern and Western] territories”. And
then he sent the imperial cloak and diadem to the Eastern Emperor Zeno…

Old Rome died for many reasons, not the least of which was the contemptuous
manner in which the last Christian emperors were treated by their foremost subjects.
For God does not allow His anointed ones to be mocked, and takes away the gift of
Orthodox kingship from the people that is not worthy of it. For “royalty,” wrote
Edward Gibbon, “was familiar to the barbarians, and the submissive people of Italy
was prepared to obey without a murmur, the authority which he [Odoacer] should
condescend to exercise as the viceregent of the emperor of the West. But Odoacer had
resolved to abolish that useless and expensive office, and such is the weight of antique
prejudice, that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the extreme
facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus was made the instrument of his
own disgrace; he signified his resignation to the senate; and that assembly, in their last
act of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of freedom and the forms
of the constitution. An epistle was addressed, by their unanimous decree, to the
emperor Zeno, the son-in-law and successor of Leo, who had lately been restored,
after a short rebellion, to the Byzantine throne. They solemnly disclaim ‘the necessity,
or even the wish, of continuing any longer the Imperial succession in Italy; since, in
their opinion, the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect, at the
same time, both the East and the West. In their own name, and in the name of the
people, they consent that the seat of universal empire shall be transferred from Rome
to Constantinople; and they basely renounce the right of choosing their master, the
only vestige that yet remained of the authority that had given laws to the world. The
republic’ (they repeat the name without a blush) ‘might safely confide in the civil and
military virtues of Odoacer; and they humbly request that the emperor would invest
him with the title of Patrician; and the administration of the diocese of Italy.’ The
deputies of the senate were received at Constantinople with some marks of

“Apparently, you could not see the two men from heaven, one standing to the right of the Pope, the
other to the left. They held bared swords and threatened to kill me if I disobeyed God’s prelate,” replied
Attila (in St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.:
Chrysostom Press, vol. 6, February 18, 2003, p. 2006).
637 Jenkins, A Short History of Europe, p. 42.

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displeasure and indignation: and when they were admitted to the audience of Zeno,
he sorely reproached them with their treatment of the two emperors, Anthemius
[whom Ricimer beheaded in a Roman church] and Nepos [the de jure emperor who
was likewise assassinated several years later]638, whom the East had successively
granted to the prayers of Italy. ‘The first’ (continued he) ‘you have murdered; the
second you have expelled: but the second is still alive, and whilst he lives he is your
lawful sovereign.’ But the prudent Zeno soon deserted the hopeless cause of his
abdicated colleague. His vanity was gratified by the title of sole emperor, and by the
statues erected in his honour in the several quarters of Rome; he entertained a friendly,
though ambiguous, correspondence with the patrician Odoacer; and he gratefully
accepted the Imperial ensigns; the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace, which
the barbarian was not unwilling to remove from the sight of the people…”639

The old empire of Old Rome was dead, long live the new empire of New Rome!640

St. Augustine believed Old Rome had not been destroyed, only chastized. By this
tribulation God was purifying the Roman nation, as He had purified Israel in Old
Testament times; for “God’s Providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten
the corrupt morals of mankind”.641 Rome would emerge from this period of affliction
cleansed and better able to carry out her civilising mission in the world…

But the catastrophe of 410 did not produce the regeneration of Rome that
Augustine had hoped for; nor the later ones of the 450s and the 470s. If it was still true
at the beginning of the century that Rome was being chastized, not destroyed, by the
end it had to be admitted that the disease was more serious and chronic than
Augustine had recognised… For the sad fact was that Old Rome was still not profiting
from the opportunity presented by the conversion of St. Constantine to regenerate
herself. She remained throughout the fifth century in a situation of spiritual and
political crisis not dissimilar to that in the time of Diocletian.

It was not the Emperors that were to blame: although there were no really
distinguished Emperors after Theodosius the Great, they remained Orthodox. The
burdens they imposed on the people were not imposed willingly, but because of the
desperate situation of the empire. They failed because Roman society was divided
both against itself and against her non-Roman subjects and foederati - and a divided
house cannot stand...

The situation was especially grave in the army. “From the time of Constantine,”
according to Nigel Rodgers, “Germans came to dominate the best regiments, the
Palatini. After the disaster at Adrianople in AD 378, whole peoples of dubious loyalty,
like the Visigoths, were enrolled in the Roman armies. If barbarians never accepted

638 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Nepos
639 Gibbon, op. cit. pp. 282-283.
640 Heather, op. cit., p. xiii.
641 St. Augustine, The City of God, I, 1.

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Rome’s draconian discipline, Roman troops also rejected it. Vegetius, writing c. AD
400, lamented the decline of the old discipline, which had once made the Roman
soldier so effective. Even worse, Roman armies too often fought each other.”642

The senatorial class had much to lose from the empire’s fall. But, snobbish and
immensely rich, they did little to defend it. As a visitor to Rome remarked, they did
not want to serve the State, “preferring to enjoy their property at leisure”.643 Cicero
once said that the two prerequisites for happiness were a good library and a fragrant
garden. But he had been prepared to fight – and die – for what he saw was in the
interests of the state. Such a sense of civic duty appears to have disappeared from his
fifth-century successors.

“In spite of frequent lip-service to the romantic concept of Eternal Rome,” writes
Grant, “many noblemen were not prepared to lift a finger to save it… They also
undermined the state in a very active fashion. For of all the obstacles to efficient and
honest administration, they were the worst. They forcibly ejected collectors of taxes,
harboured deserters and brigands, and repeatedly took the law into their own
hands… They often remained hostile to the Emperor, and estranged from his advisers.
For a long time many were pagans while their ruler was Christian.”644

The free poor of Rome did not come far behind the senators in corruption,
continually wanting “bread and circuses”. In 391 the Syrian monk Telemachus tried
to stop a gladiatorial fight in a Roman amphitheatre, and was stoned to death by the
crowd. Impressed, the Emperor Honorius abolished the circuses and gladiatorial
contests on January 1, 404. But in spite of that, writes Grant, “a hundred and seventy-
five days of the year were given up to public shows, as opposed to a mere hundred
and thirty-five two centuries earlier; moreover the fabric of the Colosseum was
restored as late as 438. It is also true that in the mid-fourth century 300,000 Romans
held bread tickets which entitled them to draw free rations from the government; and
even a century later, when the population of the city had greatly diminished, there
were still 120,000 recipients of these free supplies. Certainly, the population of Rome
was largely parasitic, living on pay-outs. However, the city proletariat played little
active part in the course of events that brought the later Roman Empire to a halt.

“It was, on the other hand, the ‘free’ poor of the rural countryside upon whom the
government, struggling to raise money for the army, imposed the full rigours and
terrors of taxation. Although technically still distinguishable from slaves, they were
no better off and perhaps worse off, since they often found themselves driven into
total destitution. Between these rustic poor and the government, the relationship was
that of oppressed and oppressor, of foe and foe.

“This is perhaps the greatest of all the disunities that afflicted the Western Empire.
The state and the unprivileged bulk of its rural subjects were set against each other in
a destructive and suicidal disharmony, which played a very large and direct part in

642 Rodgers, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, London: Lorenz Books, 2004, p. 248.
643 Grant, op. cit., p. 74.
644 Grant, op. cit., pp. 75, 76, 78.

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the downfall that followed. It was because of this rift that the taxes that were needed
to pay the army could not be raised. And because they could not be raised, the Empire
failed to find defenders, and collapsed.”645

As Christopher Dawson writes: “It was literally Rome that killed Rome. The great
cosmopolitan city of gold and marble, the successor of Alexandria and Antioch, had
nothing in common with the old capital and rural Latin state. It served no social
function, it was an end in itself, and its population drawn from every nation under
heaven existed mainly to draw their Government doles, and to attend the free
spectacles with which the Government provided them. It was a vast useless burden
on the back of the empire which broke at last under the increasing strain.”646

It might reasonably be thought that nationalism would be one of the disunities that
brought about the fall of Rome. But, as we have seen, the Romans had successfully
created a kind of Roman imperial nationalism, which many of the nations of the
empire imbibed, thanks to the generous bestowal of Roman citizenship and the
extensive advantages that citizenship brought. Local nationalisms were simply
destroyed first by cruelty (conquest) and then by kindness (the bestowal of Roman
citizenship).

The spread of the Christian faith contributed greatly to the weakness of tribal and
provincial nationalisms in the Roman Empire. For, as Saint Augustine wrote in his
commentary on Galatians 3:28-29: “Within that faith there is no difference between
Jews and Greeks, neither between slaves and free, nor between male and female.
Inasmuch as all possess the faith, they are all one in Christ Jesus. And if this is achieved
by the faith that makes you walk in holiness for this life, how much greater perfection
and abundance will the vision itself make when we see you face to face? (Cf 1Co 13,12)
Although now we have the firstfruits of the Spirit that is life mercy to the justice of
faith, as the body is still dead because of sin (Cf Rm 8,23.10), the difference based on
nationality, social status or sex, has already been eliminated from the unity founded
on faith, but still it remains in mortal existence. Moreover, its ordering must be
maintained in the course of this life. The apostles send it, who give extremely healthy
norms about how they should coexist, according to their different race, Jews and
Greeks; according to their different social status, masters and slaves, and according to
their different sex, husbands and wives, or according to any other differentiated
situation that may occur. The same Lord did the same beforehand, who said: Give to
Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God (Mt 22,21). Some are
the norms that we keep within the unity of the faith eliminating all differences, and
others that we observe, as people on the way, in the ordering of this life, so that it is
not an object of blasphemy, neither the name of God nor his doctrine.”

Professor Mary Beard has argued that the main cause of the rise of Rome to mastery
over the ancient world was her ability to co-opt the conquered peoples as fellow
citizens and then send them out to fight for an empire in which they now had a big
stake. Rome won her empire, then, through sheer weight of numbers; she was simply

645 Grant, op. cit., p. 60.
646 Dawson, Progress and Decay.

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able to put more men in the field at any one time than any of her rivals.647 Only in
Judaea and Britain did nationalisms arise, leading to rebellion and bloodshed. But
both rebellions were crushed by – “boots on the ground”. Indeed, as David Gilmour
writes, “The empire collapsed in the fifth century for many reasons, both internal and
external, but nationalistic opposition to Roman hegemony was not one of them. The
subject people were not fighting for liberation or self-determination. Most of them,
like the British, who had valued the beata tranquillitas of Roman peace, wanted the
empire to survive…”648 If we accept this thesis, then we can put forward an analogous
thesis for the fall of the empire – namely, that Rome fell when she began to stop
respecting and co-opting her conquered peoples, but began to despise them, and so
lost reliable, loyal “boots on the ground”. One of the greatest and most enduring
legacies of Roman civilization was the principle that every citizen is equal before the
law, whatever his nationality or faith. This was no empty principle, as we see as early
as the career of St. Paul, who, though a member of the despised race of the Jews, was
able to win a trial in Rome because he was a Roman citizen. But by the fifth century
this principle was no longer being applied; universalism had given way to a new kind
of tribalism, anti-Germanism. And this in spite of the fact that the official religion of
Rome was now Christianity, the most universalist of faiths.

By the time of the first sack of Rome, the gulf between the Romans and the (mainly
Germanic) barbarians was becoming too great. The barbarians settled in the empire
through necessity in order to escape the hordes that pressed on them from the east,
and seized their lands. They did not (usually) want to destroy it; as we have seen, as
often as not, such leaders as Alaric and Ataulf admired and wanted to emulate it. But
the Romans themselves were not interested in converting or integrating them. Empire
had gone to their heads; they despised the German hordes. Thus the Christian poet
Prudentius, who had once declared that the peoples of the empire were “equals and
bound by a single name”, now despised the barbarians:

As beasts from men, as dumb from those who speak,

As from the good who God’s commandments seek,
Differ the foolish heathen, so Rome stands
Alone in pride above barbarian lands.649

In the last analysis it was this pride, a kind of racial snobbery, more than any purely
political or economic or military factors, that destroyed Old Rome. It may be regarded
as a compensatory mechanism making up for a sense of imperial and national failure.
It was the less excusable in Old Rome in that several of Rome’s greatest emperors,
both pagan and Christian, had come from the provinces: insistence on racial “purity”
was not in the Roman tradition.

Old Rome ceased to be the universal ruler when she abandoned her own tradition
of universalism, transmuted now into a higher Christian universalism. By refusing to
come to terms with Alaric because he was a Goth, although he was a (heretical)

647 Beard, “Why Rome Ruled the World”, BBC History Magazine, April, 2016, pp. 32-36.
648 Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy, London: Penguin, 2012, p. 49.
649 Prudentius, in Grant, op. cit., p. 132.

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Christian and was not seeking to destroy Rome but only find a place for his people
within her empire, the Romans provoked the first sack of Rome in 410, and made later,
still more catastrophic sacks inevitable.

Not all Romans were so proud, of course: churchmen such as the Italian St.
Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, the priest Orosius of Braga (who fled to Hippo from the
Vandals) and the Gallic priest Salvian of Marseilles, were hopeful that a new Romano-
Germanic order could be constructed.

After all, as St. Augustine and his disciple Prosper of Aquitaine also pointed out,
the fall of Rome was the manifestation not only of God’s wrath against the Romans,
but also of His mercy towards the barbarians; it created an unprecedented
opportunity for them to come, see and be conquered by the Roman Christian
civilization and faith that they encountered and into which so many of them were
baptized. For as Orosius wrote: “It would seem that the mercy of God ought to be
praised and glorified in that so many [barbarian] nations are receiving, even at the
cost of our own weakening, a knowledge of the truth which they never could have
had but for this opportunity.”650

Again, Prosper of Aquitaine wrote: "The very armies that exhaust the world help
on the work of Christian grace. How many indeed who in the quiet of peacetime
delayed to receive the sacrament of baptism, were compelled by fear of close danger
to hasten to the water of regeneration, and were suddenly forced by threatening terror
to fulfil a duty which a peaceful exhortation failed to bring home to their slow and
tepid souls? Some sons of the Church, made prisoners by the enemy, changed their
masters into servants of the Gospel, and by teaching them the faith they became the
superiors of their own wartime lords. Again, some foreign pagans, whilst serving in
the Roman armies, were able to learn the faith in our country, when in their own lands
they could not have known it; they returned to their homes instructed in the Christian
religion. Thus nothing can prevent God's grace from accomplishing His will... For all
who at any time will be called and will enter into the Kingdom of God, have been
marked out in the adoption which preceded all times. And just as none of the infidels
is counted among the elect, so none of the God-fearing is excluded from the blessed.
For in fact God's prescience, which is infallible, cannot lose any of the members that
make up the fullness of the Body of Christ."651

Unfortunately, the Goths had been converted to Arianism rather than Orthodox
Christianity, in spite of the intense efforts of St. John Chrysostom (+407) to draw them
to the truth faith. However, they had the truly Orthodox examples of the Gothic
Martyrs Sabbas (+372) and Nicetas (+378), and the very early translation of the Bible
into the Gothic language by Ulfilas, to inspire and instruct them. This showed that a
real conversion of the barbarians to the truth was possible; they had already shown a
desire for Romanitas, and could be persuaded to accept true Christianitas also.652 And
in the sixth century most of them were converted to Orthodoxy.

650 Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, VII, 41.
651 Prosper, The Call of the Nations, II, 33.
652 J.W.C. Wand, A History of the Early Church to A.D.500, London: Methuen, 1982, pp. 181-184.

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 And so, while the Western Empire died, Christian Romanitas continued to live in
the West. Although the Antichrist took its place temporarily in the sense that pagan
and heretical rulers took the place of Orthodox ones, under the rubble of the old
empire new kingdoms were arising that were to restore Orthodoxy and reincarnate
the spirit of Christian Rome, uniting both Romans and barbarians in the One, Holy
and Catholic Church.

As Peter Heather writes, “new rulers at the head of politically reasonably coherent
bodies of military manpower, which had within living memory originated from
beyond the imperial frontier, were now masters of the bulk of the old Roman west.
Alongside Odoacar [in Italy], Anglo-Saxon kings controlled most of central and
southern Britain, their Frankish counterparts ran northern and eastern Gaul,
Visigothic monarchs controlled south-western Gaul and Spain, Burgundian dynasts
the Rhone valley, and the richest lands of Roman North Africa were in the hands of
the Vandalic Hasding dynasty. Groups from the old north-central zone of Europe as
it had stood at the birth of Christ thus generated a huge revolution on Roman soil,
replacing the old monolithic empire with a series of successor states.”653

These “Dark Ages” were dark only in the sense of a sharp decline in the level of
their material culture. From a Christian point of view, however, it was a radiant age
of sanctity. For whole new peoples were brought to the light of the true faith. As
Dawson writes, “To the secular historian, the early Middle Ages must inevitably still
appear as the Dark Ages, as ages of barbarism, without secular culture or literature,
given up to unintelligible disputes on incomprehensible dogmas… But to the Catholic
[that is, Orthodox-Catholic] they are not dark as much as ages of dawn, for they
witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of [Western] Christian
civilization, and the creation of Christian art and Catholic [Orthodox] liturgy. Above
all, they were the Age of the Monks…”654

The memory of Old Rome and her achievement did not die; it was to remain
profoundly influential for many centuries to come. And if she could no longer be
called aeterna et invicta, there continued to be great native Romans, such as St. Gregory
the Great, who remained passionately attached to bringing the glorious traditions of
Rome – both Old and New – to the unenlightened barbarians.

Even the twentieth-century atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell concluded: “The

problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining
the solidity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine’s City of God…”655
Solidity and idealism… What modern polity, founded on democratic principles, has
these qualities?

653 Heather, op. cit., p. xvii.
654 Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity, London, 1932, pp.

xvii-xviii.
655 Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 515.

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 Indeed, the influence of Rome may go still deeper. T.S. Eliot said: “We are all, so
far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire, and
time has not yet proved Virgil wrong.”656 And according to the Brazilian philosopher
Olavo de Carvalho, “Western political history might be easily summarized as the
history of the struggles for the right of succeeding the Roman Empire. … The Roman
Empire seems to float over the Western mind like the ghost of an illustrious departed
who refuses to die; of someone who, acting over the spirit of the living with a
subconscious obsession, possesses their lives as if they were tools for his own
resurrection…”657

656 Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World”, in On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber & Faber, 1959, p. 13.
657 Carvalho, O Jardim das Aflicoes (The Garden of Afflictions), 3rd ed., Campinas, Brazil: VIDE Editorial,

2015, pp. 266, 269.

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 40. THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The fall of Old Rome created a vacuum in political authority in the West which the
Eastern Emperors before Justinian were unable to fill and which the Germanic Arian
kings only partially filled. Into this vacuum stepped the Popes… There was nobody
and nothing else that could fill the vacuum; for the Church was the only institution
that survived the fall intact; and without the Church there could be no Christian state
and no truly Christian civilization. Therefore it was not pride, but necessity, that
compelled the Popes to take a prominent political role. The question was: how would
they relate to New Rome, on the one hand, and to the new western kingdoms that had
arisen on the ruins of Old Rome, on the other?

Another, closely related question was: how would the Church of Rome relate to the
other Churches both of the East and of the West? That the Roman papacy was in some
sense the first or most senior of the Churches had been acknowledged in both East
and West for centuries. However, the basis and nature of this primacy was understood
differently in East and West.

In the West, Rome was seen as as “the see of Peter”, or “the apostolic see”, on the
basis of the fact that Peter had died and was buried in Rome, and especially on the
basis of Christ’s words to him: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My
Church” (Matthew 16.18), which supposedly gave both Peter and the bishops of Rome
a pre-eminence over the whole of the Church worldwide (in spite of the fact that,
immediately after uttering these words, the Lord gave Peter a fearsome rebuke: «Get
thee behind Me, Satan»). Thus Pope Damasus (+384) based his claim “exclusively on
his being the direct successor of St. Peter and so the rightful heir of the promises made
to him by Christ”.658 Later popes came to have a quasi-mystical belief that the apostle
lived and spoke through them; so that just as the Lord had bestowed the apostolate
on Peter, so the Roman Popes, acting as his successive reincarnations, as it were, were
the source of the episcopate of the whole of the rest of the Church.

In the East, on the other hand, the primacy of Rome was recognized on the basis of
Rome’s socio-political importance, her status as the capital city of the empire – and no
more. When that status passed to the New Rome of Constantinople, the primacy of
honour, in eastern eyes, also passed to the New Rome. Apostolic succession was
given, not to Peter alone, but to all the apostles. “The remaining apostles,” wrote St.
Cyprian of Carthage (who was, of course, a western bishop), “were necessarily also
that which Peter was, endowed with an equal partnership both of honour and of
power… The episcopate is one, an individual share in which individual bishops hold
as owners of a common property.”659

Nor was Peter, strictly spreaking even the Bishop of Rome, but an apostle – and
apostles, unlike bishops, do not have territorially defined jurisdictions. The first
bishop of Rome was St. Linus, who was not even ordained by St. Peter, but by St. Paul.
Nor was Peter the founder only of the Church of Rome: the Church of Antioch was

658 J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1977, p. 35.
659 St. Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church, 4, 5.

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also founded by him – together with St. Paul (a parchment affirming that and signed
by both the apostles still exists). In any case, if any Church has the primacy by virtue
of the excellency of its founder, it is the Church of Jerusalem, which was by the Lord
Himself. And yet neither East nor West considered that Jerusalem, while being
undoubtedly “the mother of the Churches”, had the primacy, let alone universal
jurisdiction over the others…

“It is undeniable,” writes Fr. John Meyendorff, that, in the first half of the fifth
century, the bishop of Rome enjoyed a strong de facto authority in helping to solve
doctrinal and disciplinary disputes. This authority was recognized in some ways both
in the East and in the West, but it had not formally been defined in any conciliar
decree. Only the canons of the local council of Sardica (343) gave clerics dissatisfied
with the disciplinary judgement of their own metropolitans the right to request in
Rome the establishment of a new tribunal of neighbouring bishops. According to these
canons, the role of Rome was therefore to assure correct procedure within existing
structures of local churches, as defined in Nicaea, and not to issue personal judgement.
The division of the empire into Eastern and Western parts after Constantine’s death
(337) contributed to the pope’s prestige. Alone among the major leaders of the Church,
he was out of direct reach of the powerful emperor of Constantinople, and the much
weaker Western emperor were not really in a position to control him. In any case in
476, the Western empire collapsed. It is therefore, primarily against imperial
interventions in ecclesiastical affairs that Eastern bishops sought and cherished the
support of the Roman bishops. That appeals to the pope were primarily caused by
such political factor – and not necessarily by Roman prestige as such – is shown by
the fact that letters were usually addressed not only to the Roman pop, but to several
major bishops in the West. For instance, in 382, the Eastern bishops gathered in
Constantinople wrote a collective letter ‘to the honored and revered brothers and
concelebrants Damasus (of Rome), Ambrose (of Milan), Britto, Valerian, Acholius,
Anemius, Basil, and the other holy bishops gathered in the great city of Rome’ calling
them to unity with the council of 381 and urging them to abandon their support to the
small, ‘old Nicaean’ church of Paulinus in Antioch. The Easterners clearly did not
consider Rome as the sole and ultimate criterion of communion, but appreciated the
pope’s – and his colleagues’ – eventual support in solving the ecclesiastical situation
in the East. Similarly, St. John Chrysostom, exiled in 404, appealed not only to pope
Innocent, but also to Venerius of Milan and Chromatius of Aquileia. In such appeals,
the name of the Roman bishop always appears first, but this obvious sign of priority
never excludes the authority of others.”660

And so, continues Meyendorff, “the ecclesiastical authority of some churches,

including that of Rome, reflects historical realities, not a divine command. It is
conditioned by the orthodox faith of the incumbent, and is controlled by the consensus
of the whole Church. This concept does not deny the particular role of the apostle
Peter and his martyrdom in Rome; but his ministry is seen, following Cyprian as being
fulfilled by each bishop in his community, not by the Roman bishop alone.”661

660 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwoord, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1989, pp. 59-60.
661 Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 63.

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 *

The overweening ambitions of the bishop of Rome were contested not only in the
East, but also in Gaul by St. Hilary of Arles, and in North Africa. Thus while the
authority of Pope Innocent I was welcomed in 417 by St. Augustine and other bishops
in their struggle against Pelagianism, there was a reaction the next year, when an
African council formally forbade “appeals beyond the sea”, that is, to Rome.
“Furthermore, writing to pope Celestine in 420, the Africans proclaimed what
amounted to a formal denial of any ‘divine’ privilege of Rome. ‘Who will believe,’
they stated, ‘that our God could inspire justice in the iniquiries of one man only (i.e.
the pope) and refuse it to innumerable bishops gathered in council?’’’662

Nevertheless, by the middle of the fifth century, the quasi-mystical attitude

towards the papal see was entrenched even in the minds of the western emperors.
Thus in 445 Emperor Valentinian III declared in his Constitution: “We are convinced
that the only defence for us and for our Empire is in the favour of the God of heaven:
and in order to deserve this favour it is our first care to support the Christian faith and
its venerable religion. Therefore, inasmuch as the pre-eminence of the Apostolic See
is assured by the merit of St. Peter, the first of the bishops, by the leading position of
the city of Rome and also by the authority of the Holy Synod, let not presumption
strive to attempt anything contrary to the authority of that See.” 663

On June 6, 446, the emperor gave St. Leo the Great (440-461) a rescript recognizing
his authority over all the western provinces, which persuaded St. Hilary of Arles to
submit to his authority. In the same year, St. Leo reproached Archbishop Anastasius
of Thessalonica for the way in which he had treated one of his metropolitan bishops
and wrote: "The care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter's one
seat, and nothing anywhere should be separated from its Head." Leo claimed that
while the Bishop of Rome had “the plenitude of power”, plenitudo potestatis, other
bishops had only part of it, pars sollicitudinis.664

It has to be said that, in spite of this incipient papism, the high reputation of the
Church of Rome was well-deserved at this time, as Popes Celestine and Leo played
important roles in the struggle against the heresies of Nestorianism and
Monophysitism during the period of the Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils (in
431 and 451 respectively). Thus when Nestorius, the new patriarch of Constantinople,
preached that Mary was not the Mother of God (Theotokos) but only of the man Jesus,
thereby casting doubt on the real union of the Divine and human natures in one
Person, St. Celestine accepted Nestorius’ appeal to the Roman see – but supported the
Orthodox St. Cyril of Alexandria rather than the heretic Nestorius, who was
anathematized at the Third Council. Again, when Eutyches and Dioscurus preached
the opposite heresy of Monophysitism, which cast doubt on the reality of Christ’s

662 Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 63.
663 Henry Bettenson and Christopher Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University

Press, third edition, 1999, pp. 24-25.

664 St. Leo, Letter 14, 1.

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human nature after the resurrection, it was the reading of the Tome of St. Leo at the
Fourth Council that was recognized, even by the eastern delegates, as “the voice of
Peter”, for it established the Orthodox confession that Christ is one Person in two
natures, unconfused but undivided.

On the other hand, the record of the emperors was mixed. Thus Theodosius II,
though a pious man, convened the heretical council of Ephesus in 449, which involved
violence against the Orthodox bishops and the death of St. Flavius, Archbishop of
Constantinople. For this it was labelled latrocinium, a “robbers’ council”, by Leo. But
Theodosius recovered, and his successors Marcian and Pulcheria were champions of
Orthodoxy.

However, Leo’s attitude to the other Churches was sometimes not collegiate or
conciliar, but hierarchical and authoritarian. Thus he gave his legates to the Fourth
Ecumenical Council strict instructions that, as legates of the see of St. Peter, they
should preside over the Council, and that his Tome should be read at the beginning
and be presented as the fully sufficient expression of the Orthodox position, without
the need for any further discussion or debate.

This was not in fact as arrogant as it sounded; for Leo already had a heavenly
witness to the truth of his dogmatic position. According to his Life, St. Leo wrote his
Tome and then “put it on the tomb of Peter, the chief Apostle. Then he fasted, prayed,
and kept vigil, begging the preeminent Apostle, ‘if I, as a man, have in this letter erred
in any way or failed to explain the truth fully, do thou, to whom this Church and
episcopal throne were entrusted, set it right.’ Forty days later the Apostle appeared
while Leo was praying. He said, ‘I have read your letter and corrected it.’ The Pope
took the epistle from the blessed Peter’s tomb, opened it, and found that it had been
amended by the Apostle’s hand.” 665 Therefore the eastern legates were right – literally
so – to call the Tomos of St. Leo “the voice of Peter”.

Nevertheless, the Eastern delegates were also right in believing in Catholicity and
conciliarity, and that it was unacceptable to accept the popes’ “imprimatur” as the end
of all argument. (After all, few popes had the holiness of St. Leo.) So Leo’s legates were
not allowed to preside at the Council, and his Tome was read only at the end, when it
was subjected to searching scrutiny.

There was another problem. At the fourth session of the Council, the Roman legate
Paschalius spoke of Pope Leo as “the bishop of all the churches”. The easterners
ignored this, but they could not ignore the westerners’ rejection of Canon 28 of the
Council, which gave Constantinople second place after Old Rome on account of her
position as the imperial city of the Empire. The legates considered this a “humiliation
of the apostolic see” in their presence.666

665 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, vol. 6: February, House Springs,
Mo.: Chrysostom Press, 2003, p. 207.
666 See Dvorkin, op. cit., pp. 299, 309.

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 Was Canon 28 an essentially political decision, or an ecclesiastical decision shaped
by political realities? For Rome it did not matter; the distinction was in any case over-
subtle. The important thing for her was that her quasi-imperial dignity had been
insulted. So Leo refused to accept it. And all his successors followed his lead… From
now on, the other Churches, if they wanted to have relations with the Roman Church,
would have to deal with her tactfully, not just as a Church, but as a quasi-empire, which
was taking the place of the Roman Empire that was now slowly expiring (in the West,
if not in the East)…

In any case, St. Leo was too tactful, too Orthodox and too genuinely concerned for
the welfare of the Church as a whole, to make a big issue out of Canon 28.667 While it
remained a subject of disagreement between the Eastern and Western Churches, it did
not lead to a break in communion. However, as the see of Constantinople grew in
power and influence, the Popes renewed their attacks on it. Thus towards the end of
the century Pope Gelasius (492-496) saw no reason why Constantinople should be
exalted in this way. After all, he wrote to the bishops of Dardania, it was “not even a
metropolis”!668

Now the West had always been anxious to stress the independence of the Church
in relation to the Empire. This was quite natural in view of the fact that the Roman
Church had suffered so many martydoms at the hands of the pagan Roman emperors;
after centuries of persecution, she valued her spiritual freedom. But this meant that,
while she did not reject the friendship of her former enemy, she needed to define their
relationship very clearly: the Divine and the eternal must not be confused with the
merely human and ephemeral.

St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (+397), which in his time had become the political
capital of the West, had made a good first attempt at clarity on this point when writing
to Emperor Theodosius I: “The tribute that belongs to Caesar is not to be denied. The
Church, however, is God’s, and it must not be pledged to Caesar; for God’s temple
cannot be a right of Caesar. That this is said with sentiments of respect for the emperor
no man can deny. And what is more full of respect than that the emperor be styled a
son of the Church? And when he is called such, he is called such without sin, because
it is a compliment to be called such. For the emperor is in the Church, not over the
Church, and far from refusing the Church’s help, a good emperor seeks it.”669

Although St. Theodosius was definitely “a good emperor”, Ambrose reproached

him with great boldness when he sinned. In 390 the emperor ordered troops to
retaliate when a mob killed the governor of Thessalonica. 7000 were killed. St.
Ambrose excommunicated the emperor, who accepted his penance with tears and
great humility. The outcome of this confrontation was good for both Church and State.

667 However, in relation to Western sees that he considered within his own patriarchate, he could be
mor severe. Thus when St. Hilary, Archbishop of Arles, disputed his jurisdiction over the Gallican see
of Besancon, Leo cast him into prison in Rome for his protest. Hilary died in 449 out of communion
with Rome (Dvorkin, op. cit., p. 369).
668 Abbé Vladimir Guettée, The Papacy, New York: Minos, 1866, p. 198.
669 St. Ambrose, Sermon against Auxentius, 35.

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For the Church had demonstrated her spiritual freedom and her courage in defending
what was God’s, while the State had demonstrated true Christian humility and
wisdom in submitting the actions of Caesar to the spiritual judgement of the Church.

But the outcome was less good in other cases, when the emperor behaved less
admirably. Thus Valentinian III killed his best general Aetius in the same way and for
the same reason (suspected sedition) that is predecessor Empero Honorius had killed
his best general, Stilicho, two generations before. It did not look good for the State…
A few years later, St. Leo went to Attila the Hun and succeeded in turning him away
from Rome, gaining great prestige for the Church in the process. Again, it did not look
good for the State… So it is with pardonable exaggeration that Terry Jones and Alan
Ereira write that, as a result of Leo’s successful embassy, “the Church was now, it
would be said, the true power in Rome, the replacement for military authority…”670

Not that the Church wanted to humilate the State. St. Leo was feeling his way to a
correct formulation of the Church-State relationship. He would probably have agreed
with Justinian’s classic formulation of a “symphony of powers” between Church and
State, and also with his slogan: “One Faith, One Church, One Empire”. After all, it
filled well into his grandiose conception of the universal role of the Roman Church.
But it is not difficult to see the dangers of comparing the structure of the Church to
the structure of the Empire. For one might be tempted to think: just as the Roman
Empire is universal and ruled by a single man, so the Catholic – that is, the Roman -
Church, as a parallel institution to the Empire, is universal and should be ruled by a
single man. And that man has to be the Pope, since he represents St. Peter…

In Pope Gelasius we see the beginnings of a characteristically “western”

understanding of Church-State relations that placed particular emphasis on the
Church’s independence from the State. Thus he rejected the comparison, common in
the East, between the Emperor and Melchizedek. This comparison might be valid in
some respects, but not if it meant that a mortal man could combine the roles of king
and priest in the manner of Melchizedek. Thus “before the coming of Christ,” wrote
Gelasius, “there existed people… who were, according to what sacred history tells us,
at the same time both kings and priests, such as Melchizedek. This example was
followed in his domain by the devil, who always, in a tyrannical spirit, claims for his
own that which is fitting for divine worship, to the extent that the pagan emperors
were also called pontiffs. But when there came He Who was in truth both King and
Priest, from that time the emperor ceased to give himself the name of pontiff and the
pontiff to lay claim to the royal pomp. For, although we say that the members of
Christ, the true King and Priest, have, by reason of their participation in the glorious
nature, received both the one and the other dignity through the sacred generosity [of
Christ], so that they are at the same time ‘a royal and a priestly race’, nevertheless
Christ, remembering the weakness of men..., has divided the spheres of the two
powers by means of a distinction of duties and callings..., desiring that His own
[children] should be guarded by grace-filled humility and should not once again
become victims of human pride. So that the Christian emperors need the pontiffs for
eternal life and the pontiffs conform to the imperial laws as regards the course of

670 Jones and Ereira, Barbarians, London: BBC Books, 2006, p. 280.

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temporal things. Thus spiritual activities have been separated from carnal activities….
He who is entrusted with secular matters should not appear to preside over divine
things, so that the modesty of the two orders should be respected…. ”671

“There are two powers,” Gelasius wrote to the emperor, “which for the most part
control this world, the sacred authority of priests and the might of kings. Of these two
the office of the priests is the greater inasmuch as they must give account even for
kings to the Lord at the Divine Judgement. You know that although by your rank you
stand at the head of the human race, you nevertheless bend your will before the
leaders of Divine affairs, you turn to them in matters relating to your salvation, and
you receive the heavenly sacraments from them. You know, consequently, that in
matters of the faith you must submit to their lawful decisions and must not lord it
over them – not submit them to your will, but be yourself guided by their
judgements.” But “in matters touching public order, the Church hierarchs know that
the emperor’s power has been sent down on you from above, and are themselves
obedient to your laws, for they fear to be shown as opponents of your will in worldly
affairs.”672

Gelasius’ rejection of the comparison with Melchizedek was also influenced, as

Dagron points out, by St. Augustine’s The City of God, “in which, during his exegesis
of Melchisedek, Augustine affirms that from now on Christ is the only Mediator
between God and men, the only One to have put on the eternal priesthood. In the time
of Israel, the earthly kingdom ‘was a type of’ the spiritual kingdom, but since the
Incarnation the City of God has found its King once and for all. The break is a sharp
one: before the coming of Christ a royal priesthood is possible whether by Divine
economy (Melchisedek) or by diabolical counterfeit (the Roman imperator-pontifex
maximus); after the coming of Christ this very notion is lanced with illegitimacy; the
regale sacerdotium has devolved to the Son of God and by extension to the Christians
as a whole… A true Christian emperor is not a Roman emperor converted or faithful
to Christianity, or an emperor who could draw a new legitimacy from Old Testament
models, but an emperor whose power has been in part confiscated by Christ and
whose competence has been modified by the installation of Christianity, who will
have to adopt the pose of humility before the new wielders of spiritual power, who
will be constantly suspected of belonging to ‘the earthly City’, of remaining pagan or
of identifying himself through pride with the Antichrist.”673

However, as Dagron points out, this was very much a western perspective: the
easterners’ attaching a quasi-priestly character to the figure of the emperor (but
without the sacramental functions of the priesthood) smacked, to western minds, of
dangerously Hellenistic ideas of divine kingship. Leo sometimes ascribed to the
emperor a quasi-priestly character, as when he complimented Marcian and Pulcheria,
the saviours of Chalcedon, in this way. But this was not natural to the western way of
thinking. It was Leo thinking as an easterner!

671 Gelasius, Tractatus IV; translated from Dagron, op. cit., pp. 190-191.
672 Gelasius, quoted in Fomin S. and Fomina T., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the

Second Coming), Moscow, 1998, vol. I, p. 74.

673 Dagron, op. cit., p. 191.

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 41. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT AND THE UNITY OF THE FAITH

“In Byzantium,” writes Ivan Ilyin, “the monarchy was considered, theoretically
and practically, elective. The right to the throne was possessed by every free person. The
presupposition was that the king was elected by the senate and the people; but the
senate had been turned into an empty sound, while the people was not organized.
There could not be any law of succession to the throne. A plotter who succeeded in
ensuring the cooperation of the army and getting possession of the palace was
recognized by the officials, and the rebel turned out to be king. Thus Justinian the
Great (527-565) was elected as the Byzantine emperor by the leaders of the king’s
bodyguards.”674

When Justinian ascended the throne, he set about trying to reunite the Christian
world. For his great dream, as Protopresbyter James Thornton writes, “was to restore
the Empire’s lost Western provinces. Previous rulers had sacrificed these territories,
when they became threatened by the onslaughts of barbarian tribes, for the sake of the
defense of the far more important and far wealthier East. But Saint Justinian’s
thoughts hearkened back to the time of Saint Constantine I and Theodosius I, when
the Empire stretched from the British Isles to the Euphrates… That Roman lands
should have fallen into the hands of heretics and barbarians was, to the Saint’s mind,
an affront to God’s will. It is also true, as the historian Charles Diehl (1859-1944)
writes, that in principle Byzantine Emperors never admitted to any loss of territory. It
is true that lands were lost to various barbarian incursions; but, to the Byzantine way
of thinking, these lands were simply being temporarily administered by another local
ruler on behalf of the Emperor. It was Constantinople’s right to reassert outright
control when it served the sovereign’s pleasure.”675

Now large parts of the Christian world had seceded from the Empire for religious
as well as political or military reasons. Thus Old Rome was in schism from
Constantinople because of the Monophysitism of the Emperor Anastasius; while most
of the Semitic and Coptic parts of the Eastern Empire had fallen into Monophysitism
or Nestorianism. And so Justinian pursued his aim in two ways: in the West, through
war and a mixture of concessions and pressure on the papacy, and in the East, by
intensive theological negotiations with the heretics (led by himself), including Church
Councils.

In relation to Old Rome he was largely successful: in relation to the Monophysites

in the East - less so. This was partly owing to the fact that his wife Theodora secretly
supported the Monophysites. Thus when the great ascetic and wonderworker St.
Sabbas of Palestine visited Constantinople, the following incident took place: -

674 Ilyin, “O Monarkhii i Respublike” (On Monarchy and Republianism), Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected
Works), Moscow, 1994, p. 430.
675 Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens, Belmont, Mass.: Institute, for Byzantine and

Modern Greek Studies, 2013, pp. 251-252.

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 “Justinian requested the elder to bless the Empress Theodora, who, when she saw
the godly Sabbas, also bowed low before him, saying: ‘Pray, Father, that I may be
granted to bear children!’

“’May God the Master of all, preserve your empire,’ replied the elder.

“Said the Empress, ‘Pray to God for me, Father, that He loose the bonds of my
barrenness and permit me to conceive a son.’

“The elder answered, ‘May the God of glory preserve the Empire in the Orthodox
faith and grant you victory over adversaries.’

“The empress then asked the elder a third time to pray that she be loosed from
barrenness, only to receive a similar answer. Because of this she was deeply troubled.
As the godly one was leaving, the monks who were with him asked, ‘Father, why did
you not show the Empress compassion and agree to pray as she asked?’

“’Believe me, Fathers,’ replied the elder, ‘her womb shall never bear fruit. It is not
the will of the Lord that she be permitted to nurse an heir on the teaching of [the
Monophysite heretic] Severus, or that such a child should grow up to reign and
trouble the Church of Christ even more than did [the heretical Emperor]
Anastasius.’”676

Nevertheless, there was a union, albeit fleeting, between the five ancient
patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; and this
union in one Church under one right-believing Emperor was a great achievement.
There can be little doubt that the person most instrumental in achieving this union
was the emperor himself: if the five patriarchates represented the five senses of the
Body of Christ on earth, then the head in which they all adhered on earth was the
emperor. It was through him, therefore, that the ideal of “One Faith, One Church, One
Empire” was achieved.At the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) all the patriarchates
except Rome agreed on condemning the heretical “Three Chapters”. (Also
anathematized was Origen and his teaching that all will be saved.) Only Pope Vigilius
of Rome refused, whereupon he (but not the Roman patriarchate as a whole) was
excommunicated; and in its final definition the Council condemned the budding
papist heresy that one bishop was above the judgement of his fellow bishops. Pope
Vigilius repented of his opposition six months later and was restored to communion
with the Church. This condemnation of papism was accepted by all subsequent popes
until the eleventh century.677

This unity was not achieved without some pressure, especially on the Roman
patriarchate. Thus when the Orthodox Pope Agapetus arrived in Constantinople,
Justinian said to him: “I shall either force you to agree with us, or else I shall send you

676St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom
Press, 2000, vol. IV: December, p. 121.
677 “Condamnation de la papauté par le Ve Concile Œcuménique”, February 19, 2019,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_73BEFBJWPo&fbclid=IwAR2WFDOGA6sMIA1w9ZiETOqg2
DzEkt2Q6bMph4Xduh7MkYdLH0lece9n12U.

347
into exile.” Whereupon the Pope replied: “I wished to come to the most Christian of
all emperors, Justinian, and I have found now a Diocletian; however, I fear not your
threats.”678

Nevertheless, it is clear that the Lord gave to the Emperor Justinian the same power,
not only to convene an ecumenical council, but also to appoint its president, as He
gave to the Emperors Constantine the Great and Theodosius the Great in the fourth
century, and Emperors Theodosius II, Marcian and Pulcheria in the fifth century.
According to the Life of Eutychios written by Eustratios the Presbyter, in 552 Justinian
went to the church of the Apostle Peter in Athyra in Thrace to participate in the
procession for its feast on September 5th. St. Euthychios was also there. Eustratios
records the emperor’s account of a vision he had there: "He declared that, while asleep
in the church of Saint Peter, the head of the Apostles, in Athyra – he was there to
perform the procession – he also had a divine vision concerning Eutychios; for he said
that he had seen the head of the Apostles clearly pointing to the great Eutychios, and
saying: 'Make him become your bishop'."

St. Eutychios went on to become patriarch of Constantinople, and then convened

the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in 553.679

As Fr. John Meyendorff writes: “Without denying the dangers and the abuses of
imperial power, which occurred in particular instances, the system as such, which
been created by Theodosius I and Justinian, did not deprive the Church of its ability
to define dogma through conciliarity. But conciliarity presupposed the existence of a
mechanism making consensus possible and effective. Local churches needed to be
grouped into provinces and patriarchates, and patriarchates were to act together to
reach an agreement valid for all. The empire provided the universal Church with such
a mechanism…”680

More precisely, it was the person of the emperor that provided such a mechanism.
For since Constantine’s time, it was the emperor who acted as the focus of unity of
quarrelling Christians. The importance of this function was recognized by all. In
consequence, as L.A. Tikhomirov points out, even when an emperor tried to impose
heresy on the Church, “this was a struggle that did not besmirch the Church and State
power as institutions. In this struggle he acted as a member of the Church, in the name
of Church truth, albeit mistakenly understood. This battle was not about the
relationship between the Church and the State and did not lead to its interruption, nor
to the seeking of any other kind of principles of mutual relationship. As regards the
direct conflicts between Church and State power, they arose only for particular
reasons, only between given persons, and also did not relate to the principle of the
mutual relationship itself.”681

678 Pope Agapetus, in A.A. Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, Milwaukee: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 151.
679 https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2014/09/commemoration-of-appearance-of-apostle.html.
680 Meyendorff, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, p.

291.
681 L.A. Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992,

p. 162.

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 The emperor’s role as focus of unity in the Church was also displayed in the
initiatives he took to convert the barbarians in the Balkans and in Ethiopia, and create
bishoprics for them. Thus through Novella 11 (535) Justinian created a new
autocephalous Church named Justiniana Prima to conduct missions among the Slavs
who had recently invaded the Balkan Peninsula. This new Church subordinated the
bishops of Sophia and Riparian Dacia, Preslav, Dardania, and upper Moesia under the
new Archbishop in a territory that roughly comprised today’s former Yugoslavia,
Albania and Western Bulgaria. In Novella 131 (545), however, Justiniana Prima’s
territories were put back under the jurisdiction of the Roman Church after the Pope
protested that this new autocephaly was an infringement on his rights. Justiniana
Prima was closed in the seventh century. Nevertheless, its Metropolitans (of Philippi,
Thessalonica and Larisa) maintained their independence from Constantinople by
forming new bishoprics for the Slavic Diaspora.682

Some historians have been highly critical of Justinian’s western wars. Thus A.A.
Vasiliev writes: “From Justinian’s Roman point of view, his western campaigns are
comprehensible and natural, but from the point of view of the welfare of the Empire
they must be recognized as superfluous and pernicious. The gap between the East and
the West in the sixth century was already so great that the mere idea of uniting the
two was an anachronism. A real union was out of the question. The conquered
provinces could be retained by force only, and for this the Empire had neither power
nor means. Allured by his delusive dreams, Justinian failed to grasp the importance
of the eastern border and the eastern provinces, which embodied the really vital
interests of the Byzantine Empire. The western campaigns, displaying only the
personal will of the Emperor, could not bring about lasting results, and the plan of
restoring a united Roman Empire died with Justinian, though not forever. Meanwhile,
his general external policy brought about an extremely severe internal economic crisis
within the Empire.”683

However, this view is based on a serious misconception concerning both the aim
and the results of Justinian’s western Reconquista. Not only from a “Roman” point of
view, still less out of personal willfulness, but from a religious point of view first of
all, Justinian’s wars were fully justified. And their effects, though achieved at great
cost, were long-lasting. For they achieved the return of Italy to Orthodoxy – and through
Italy, the rest of the West. For after the wars, there could be no return of the West to the
Arianism of the Italian Ostrogothic and Spanish Visigothic kings; Orthodox Gaul was
confirmed in her Orthodoxy; from Italy and France (and Ireland) Anglo-Saxon
England, too, would become Orthodox; and from England Germany and Scandinavia
would become Orthodox. This meant that the whole of the West, until the Reformation
at least, confessed that Jesus Christ is both God and Man in the full, Chalcedonian
sense. As for the East, the majority of its population voluntarily rejected Chalcedon,
and has to this day remained outside the unity of faith established by Justinian even
in that part which did not accept Islam.

682 Alexander G. Dragas, “The Constantinople and Moscow Divide”, Theologia, December, 2017.
683 Vasiliev, A History of the Byzantine Empire, University of Wisconsin Press, 1952, vol. 1, p. 142.

349
 This is the triumph and the tragedy of Justinian’s reign. The triumph of reuniting
millions of lost souls to Christ in the West, and the tragedy of failing to unite further
millions to him in the East. But we must salute the grim determination of the emperor
who put the souls of millions above his own empire’s good, knowing that it profits a
man nothing if he gains the whole world but loses his soul…

The symbolic crown of Justinian’s attempts to unify the world in Christ was his
building of Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom and without a peer to
this day, uniting the vast space under the extraordinary dome in a marvelous way:
“Solomon, I have surpassed thee”, he said on beholding the completed building. He
was right – and it was the sheer celestial beauty of this building that converted the
envoys of St. Vladimir, the baptizer of Russia, to recommend Orthodoxy to their ruler
over five centuries later…

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 42. JUSTINIAN AND THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS

The other kind of unity created by Justinian was his codification of Roman law.
Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis (527-534) consisted of the Digest (or Pandects), the
Institutes and the Code, containing imperial constitutions which were supplemented
by Justinian’s own, new constitutions, called Novellae. The corpus therefore united the
old and new in one coherent body.

The Digest declared that law was “something all men ought to obey for many
reasons, and chiefly because every law is devised and given by God, but resolved on
by intelligent men, a means of correcting offences both intentional and unintentional,
a general agreement on the part of the community by which all those living therein
ought to order their lives. We may add that Chrysippus [said]: ‘Law is the king of all
things, both divine and human; it ought to be the controller, ruler and commander of
both the good and the bad’.”684

As Tom Holland writes: “If it was true, as Justinian ringingly declared, that ‘what
medicine is to disease, so laws are to public affairs’, then there was much that first
needed to be done before the emperor’s prescription could be applied to the sickening
world. The sheer scale and antiquity of the Roman people’s achievements in the field
of law had resulted in a legacy that was intimidatingly chequered. Justinian, however,
was hardly the man to duck such a challenge. His first step, only a few months into
his reign, was the appointment of a commission to harmonise the various unwieldy
collections of laws used by previous emperors, then, a year and a half late, he charged
a second commission with the even more daunting task of collecting the entire
stupendous body of private writings on Roman law. Complete constitutions had to be
revised, almost two thousand individual books called in and minutely sifted; tens of
thousands of excerpts made. The resulting codification, achieved in record time, was
so staggering that it appeared to many something more than human. Justinian himself
presented it proudly as a process of restoration; but there was something about it as
well of a revolution. ‘We have by means of old laws not only brought matters into a
better condition, but we have also promulgated new laws.’ The emperor saw no need
to conceal the fact. He was himself, as he declared, nomos empsychos – the ‘living law’.
Here, in this self-promotion, was the ultimate refinement of what generations of
emperors had been working to achieve. Henceforward, the rules by which the Roman
people lived and were bound were to have just the single fountainhead: the emperor
himself, enthroned in his palatial citadel. No wonder, then, that Justinian should have
sought, not merely to impose his stamp upon the long centuries of Roman legal
achievement, but also prescribe where and how that achievement should be taught.
Private law schools were definitively banned. No teachers were to be licensed, save
for those directly sanctioned by the state. Now, more than ever, the whole world was
to be administered from the centre, from the palace of Constantinople.”685

684 R.H.C. Davis, op. cit., p. 310.
685 Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2012, pp. 159-160.

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 “The dominant political message of the Corpus iuris,” writes Joseph Canning, “is a
theocratic one. The emperor derives his power from God: in the constitution Deo
auctore, at the beginning of the Digest Justinian describes himself as ‘at God’s
command governing our empire, which has been entrusted to us by heavenly
majesty’. The divine source of imperial authority is constantly reiterated in the Code
and Novels. ‘At divine command we took up the imperial insignia.’ The emperor’s
laws are sacred (sacrae or sanctissimae), thus reflecting the Christianising of his pagan
role as pontifex maximus. They are, furthermore, of everlasting effect: Justinian decreed
that his codification was to be valid ‘forever’ (in omne aevum). It is, therefore, his will
alone which constitutes law; ‘what has pleased the princeps has the force of law’ (quod
principi placuit legis habet vigorem). He is thus no less than the living law’ (lex animata),
an application of the Hellenistic concept of the ruler as nomos empsychos: ‘Let the
imperial rank be exempted from all our provisions [in this constitution], because God
has subjected the laws themselves to the emperor, by sending him as a living law to
men’. He is in short not bound by the law, but ‘freed from the laws’ (legibus solutus).
This famous phrase indicates that the emperor is above human law: he is not subjected
to the laws which derive from his own universal authority. This formulation laid the
foundations for the elaboration of the concept of absolute power in the late Middle
Ages.

“On the other hand there are also in the Corpus iuris statements which indicate the
possession of authority by the Roman people. The historical outline of Roman law in
D.1.2.2 includes a brief sketch of the republican period, and republican sources of law
are treated in D.1.1.17 and Inst. 1.2, 3-5. The most fundamental question, however,
concerns the origin of the imperial power itself: reference is made to the so-called lex
regia or ‘royal law’, whereby the Roman people transferred its power and authority to
the emperor. The meaning of these references to the lex regia has been hotly debated
by historians. One school of thought has seen it as an ex post facto legal construction to
justify the transition from the republic to the empire. Such a law never in fact existed,
but was postulated by later classical jurists to explain the transfer of sovereignty from
the Roman people to the first princeps, Augustus, a device, in short, to legitimize the
imperial power. The other view identifies the lex regia with the legis de imperio by which
the popular assembly gave power to each emperor at the beginning of his reign… The
most likely interpretation is that the lex regia was indeed a later and classical juristic
construction adopted by Justinian himself as having been genuinely enacted as a
law…

“Whatever the truth about the lex regia, its significance for political thought was
that it expressed the idea that that the emperor’s power derived from the people, and
thus provided a model for the popular source of governmental power to be elaborated
later in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The lex regia raised a
fundamental problem concerning the origins of authority, because its inclusion in the
Corpus iuris meant that both divine and popular sources of rulership coexisted. These
two sources could be seen as mutually exclusive, and the Corpus iuris itself does
nothing to solve the problem. At the time of Justinian the conception of the divine
origin of imperial power overwhelmed any idea that the people were in any
meaningful sense the source of authority; the only echo of such an ultimately
republican idea was to be found in the acclamation of a new emperor by the senate,

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army and people. Such acclamation either sufficed as a form of election after the death
of an emperor or, as was more normal in Byzantine history, or confirmed the already
co-opted choice of the previous incumbent. Either way, popular acclamation only
served to declare the divine choice of an emperor whose power came from God
directly…”686

In this connection the famous Sixth Novella (535) is especially important: "The
greatest gifts given by God to men by His supreme kindness are the priesthood and
the empire, of which the first serves the things of God and the second rules the things
of men and assumes the burden of care for them. Both proceed from one source and
adorn the life of man. Nothing therefore will be so greatly desired by the emperors
than the honour of the priests, since they always pray to God about both these very
things. For if the first is without reproach and adorned with faithfulness to God, and
the other adorns the state entrusted to it rightly and competently, a good symphony
will exist, which will offer everything that is useful for the human race. We therefore
have the greatest care concerning the true dogmas of God and concerning the honour
of the priests…, because through this the greatest good things will be given by God –
both those things that we already have will be made firm and those things which we
do not have yet we shall acquire. Everything will go well if the principle of the matter
is right and pleasing to God. We believe that this will come to pass if the holy canons
are observed, which have been handed down to us by the apostles, those inspectors
and ministers of God worthy of praise and veneration, and which have been
preserved and explained." The unity of the two powers was also emphasized in the
Seventh Novella (2, 1), according to which the goods of the Church, though in principle
inalienable, could be the object of transactions with the emperor. “For the difference
between the priesthood (ierwsύnh) and the empire (basileia) is small, as it is between
the sacred goods and the goods that are common to the community.”687

It should be noted that in this formulation of the principle of the “symphony of

powers” both the priesthood and the empire are said to “proceed from the same
source”, that is, God. This has the very important consequence that the normal and
natural relationship between the two powers is one of harmony, not rivalry and
division. If some of the early Fathers, in both East and West, tended to emphasize the
separation and distinctness of the powers rather than their unity from and under God.
This was a natural result of the friction between the Church and the pagan and
heretical emperors in the early centuries. However, now that unity in Orthodoxy had
been achieved the emphasis had to return to the common source and common end of
the two institutions. The unity of the Christian world under the Christian emperor
had as its foundation-stone this “symphony” between the emperor and the patriarch,
this symphony being grounded in their common origin in God. As the coronation
ceremony put it: “You were selected by divine decree for the security and exaltation
of the universe; you were joined to the people by God’s will. Almighty God has
blessed you and crowned you with His own hand.”688

686 Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 7-8, 9.
687 Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996, p. 313.
688 De Ceremoniis Aulae Byzantinae, 1:39; in Hughes, op. cit., p. 211.

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 Insofar as the symphony of powers existed, not only between two men, but
between two institutions, the priesthood and the empire, it went beyond the
relationship between emperor and patriarch. As Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes:
“Symphonicity in Church administration only began at the level of the Emperor and
Patriarch, and continued at the level of the bishop and eparch (who also received the
blessing of the Church for his service) and was completed at the level of the parish
priest and its founder. With such a deep ‘enchurchment’ from all sides of the life of
the Orthodox Empire, and the symphonicity of all levels of the Church-State pyramid,
the violations of symphony at the highest level were, while annoying, not especially
dangerous. The most important thing still remained the service of ‘him who restrains’,
which was carried out by the Orthodox Emperor in symphony with the whole Church,
and not only personally with the Patriarch. The decisive factor was the personal self-
consciousness of the Emperor and the activity based on that. Thus Justinian conceived
of himself completely as a Christian sovereign, and strove throughout the whole of
his life to make the whole world Christian. His symphony with the Patriarch was
desirable as a useful means towards that end, but it was not an end-in-itself. During
Justinian’s time five Patriarchates entered into the Empire, including the Roman, and
the Emperor did not establish ‘symphonic’ relations with all of them personally (as,
for example, with Pope Vigilius, who did not want to accept the decisions of the 5th
Ecumenical Council). But symphony with the whole Church did exist, and a proof of
this is provided by the 5th Ecumenical Council, which was convened through the
efforts of Justinian and accepted the dogmatic definitions against the heresies that he
presented; and by the multitude of saints who shone forth during his reign and who
related completely ‘symphonically’ to him (for example, St. Sabbas the Sanctified); and
by the general flourishing of Christian culture.”689

Thirdly, Justinian had in mind not any kind of harmony, but only a true
“symphony” or meeting of minds that comes from God. As I.N. Andrushkevich points
out, the word "symphony” [consonantia] here denotes much more than simple
agreement or concord. Church and State can agree in an evil way, for evil ends. True
symphony is possible only where both the Church “is without reproach and adorned
with faithfulness to God” and the State is ruled “rightly and competently” - that is, in
accordance with the commandments of God.690 Where these conditions are not met,
what we have, as A.V. Kartashev, the minister of religion under the Russian
Provisional Government, pointed out, “is no longer symphony, but cacophony”.691 Or,
preserving the Latin root of the words, we should call it he dissonance of powers…

Justinian himself, in his preface to the Novella, pointed out that, although he was an
Autocrat, he could not exercise dominion over the priesthood; he was obliged to allow
the priests to follow their own law, the Gospel and the Holy Canons. Thus did he
qualify the absolutist principle of Roman power, namely, that whatever is pleasing to
the emperor has the force of law with the words: unless it contradicts the holy canons. Again,

689 Alferov, “Ob uderzhanii i symphonii” (“On Restraining and Symphony”), http://www/monarhist-
spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Dionisy-1./htm, pp. 9-10.
690 Andrushkevich, “Doktrina sv. Imperatora Iustiniana Velikago” (“The Teaching of the holy Emperor

Justinian the Great”), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 4 (1529), February 15/28, 1995, pp. 4-12.
691 Kartashev, Vossozdanie Svyatoj Rusi (The Recreation of Holy Russia), Moscow, 1991, p. 83.

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in his Novella 131 he decreed: “The Church canons have the same force in the State as
the State laws: what is permitted or forbidden by the former is permitted or forbidden
by the latter. Therefore crimes against the former cannot be tolerated in the State
according to State legislation.” These Canons include those that forbid resort to the
secular power in Church matters: Canon 12 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council; Canons
11 and 12 of Antioch; and (later) Canon 3 of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
Nevertheless, it needs to be pointed out that, as we have seen, Justinian did not always
observe this restriction on his own power…

“As regards the judicial branch,” writes Fr. Alexis Nikolin, “coordinated action
presupposed not simply mutual complementation of the spheres of administration of
the ecclesiastical and secular courts, but, which is especially important, the
introduction into the activity of the latter of the moral-educational content inherent in
Christianity.

“In a single service to the work of God both the Church and the State constitute as
it were one whole, one organism – ‘unconfused’, but also ‘undivided’. In this lay the
fundamental difference between Orthodox ‘symphony’ and Latin ‘papocaesarism’
and Protestant ‘caesaropapism’.”692

Of course, the principle that the Church canons should automatically be considered
as State laws was not always carried out in practice, even in Justinian’s reign; and in
some spheres, as Nikolin points out, “The Christian Emperor received the ability to
reveal the content of the canon in his own way (in the interests of the State). Justinian’s
rule provides several confirmations of this. The rules for the election, conduct and
inter-relations of bishops, clergy and monks, for the punishment of clergy, and for
Church property were subjected to his reglamentation. Bishops received broad
powers in State affairs (more exactly, numerous State duties were imputed to them).

“Justinian’s rule was a rule in which the mutual relations of Church and State were
inbuilt, and which later lasted in Byzantium right up to the days of her fall, and which
were borrowed in the 10th century by Rus’. In the first place this related to the
principle: 'Ecclesiastical canons are State laws’. Moreover, the Christian direction of
Justinian’s reforms told on the content of the majority of juridical norms. This was
most vividly revealed in the resolutions of questions concerning the regulation of
individual spheres of Church life. Church communities were now provided with the
rights of a juridical person. In property questions they were given various privileges...

“A particular feature of Justinian’s reforms was that as a result of them State power
was transformed into a defender of the faith. This was most clearly revealed in the
establishment of restrictions on the juridical rights of citizens of the empire linked
with their confession of faith:

- Pagans and Jews were deprived of the right to occupy posts in state or societal
service, and were not able to possess Christian slaves;

692 Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Moscow, 1997, p. 17.

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 - Apostates, that is, people going over from Christianity to paganism or Judaism
were deprived of the right to compose wills and inherit, and likewise were not
able to be witnesses at trials;

- Heretics were not able to occupy posts in state or societal service; they were
deprived of the right of inheritance; they could make bequests… only to
Orthodox. There were even stricter measures adopted in relation to certain
sects.”693

Violations of the principle of the symphony of powers were rare if we exclude the
pressure Justinian sometimes exerted on heretical hierarchs, and episcopal elections.
In the latter, there was a contradiction between Justinian’s laws, which included the
leading laymen of the locality in the electoral body – an enactment that gave an avenue
for imperial influence on the elections through these laymen - and the custom of the
Church, according to which only bishops took part in the election. (De facto, however,
in all Orthodox kingdoms, there was one layman who took part in the election of
bishops – the emperor or king.) Conversely, the recruitment of bishops to undertake
secular duties was contrary to Apostolic Canon 81 insofar as it led to a secularization
of the episcopal calling. 694

The principle of the symphony of powers defining the relationship between Church
and State was so important, so fundamental, that when it clearly broke down in a
more general way - for the first time in the late twelfth century, and again in the late
fourteenth century - the City itself also fell…

Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes: “After the holy Emperor Justinian any
Christian monarch must confess, and reverently and unhypocritically believe that
‘Christian piety is the foundation of the strength of the empire’. For greater clarity let us
indicate an example. The Emperor Justinian himself, while paying great attention to
theology, Divine services and the building of churches, completely neglected the army
and the navy, which under him came to a state of decline. But for his unfeigned piety
and faith the Lord protected the empire from invasions and subjected to Justinian a
part of the barbarians. After him the iconoclast emperors Leo the Isaurian and
Constantine Copronymus were outstanding military commanders who reorganized
the army and repelled opponents (the Arabs and Bulgars) far from the empire. But the
heresy they introduced and their general impiety shook the foundations of Byzantium
from within and brought it to the verge of extinction. Therefore amongst the qualities
of an exemplary ruler his faith and piety occupy the first place. For the sake of these the
Lord protects his kingdom from many woes. His practical capabilities in raising national
life are already secondary.”695

693 Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 32-33, 34.
694 See Bishop Pierre L’Huillier, “Episcopal Elections in the Byzantine East: a few comments”, Eastern

Churches Review, vol. II, N 1, Spring, 1968, pp. 4-7, and The Church of the Ancient Councils, Crestwood,
NY; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, pp. 36-38, 40, 41.
695 Alferov, “Monarkhia i Khristianskoe Soznanie” (“The Monarchy and Christian Consciousness”),

http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr10/R10_11.htm, p. 7.

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 43. ST. GREGORY, ST. BENEDICT AND THE ORTHODOX WEST

Rome had suffered terribly during the Gothic Wars, changing hands several times
between the Goths and the Byzantines; at one point, it was completely empty for forty
days. Its buildings and institutions withered away; even the Senate had disappeared
by the end of the sixth century. However, one of the last Romans of senatorial rank,
St. Gregory the Great (590-604), was destined to restore its glory – not the vain glory
of the secular empire, but the spiritual glory of the Church… He bemoaned the
devastation, both physical and spiritual, in the wake of the Gothic Wars and the
invasion of the Lombards that followed them: “All of Europe is in the hands of the
barbarians… Cities have fallen, fortresses are in ruins… and idol worshipers persecute
and even kill the believers. And in the midst of all this, priests [bishops and patriarchs]
who should fall down in church courtyards in sackcloth and ashes in prayer, instead
run after empty titles"!

The “empty title” that most disgusted him was the Constantinopolitan patriarch’s
assumption of the title “universal bishop”…

As we have seen, the scepticism with regard to secular authority of such major
figures as St. Augustine and Pope Gelasius, together with the unparalleled prestige of
the Popes in the West, combined to introduce a new, specifically western exaltation of
ecclesiastical at the expense of imperial and regal power. Rome’s downgrading of the
power of the kings may also have had something to do with simple jealousy of Eastern
pre-eminence in the Church: apart from St. Leo’s important contribution to the Fourth
Ecumenical Council, the main theological debates in the Councils were carried out in
Greek by Eastern hierarchs. Rome even went so far once as to break communion with
Archbishop Acacius of Constantinople, although the East accepted the pope, rather
than the archbishop, as Orthodox. The pope insisted that “the apostolic see has always
kept the Orthodox faith unharmed”, and that “those who do not agree in everything
with the apostolic see” should not be commemorated. The Greeks did not agree with
this, but for the sake of unity they were prepared to condescend to papal pride. And
so the “Acacian schism” was ended when Patriarch John II of Constantinople accepted
the papist doctrinal formula of Pope Hormisdas - but only after cunningly adding the
phrase: “I proclaim that the see of the Apostle Peter and the see of this imperial city
are one”, thereby witnessing to the truth of St. Cyprian’s words that “the episcopate
is one” …696

Rome’s pretensions were dealt a further blow by the Emperor Justinian nearly forty
years later, when he forced Pope Vigilius to accept the condemnation, enshrined in
the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553, of the so-called “Three Chapters” (three heretical
passages from three essentially Orthodox writers), although this led to some western
councils – in Africa and Northern Italy (the so-called “Aquilean schism”) – breaking
communion with Vigilius. However, the fact that these western councils, and some
individual saints, felt able to break with the Pope shows that they did not consider
him to be infallible. Moreover, Vigilius’ penitential letter to Patriarch Eutyches of
Constantinople was an admission of his fallibility…

696 Dvorkin, op. cit., pp. 398, 399.

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 The independence of mind of Western churchmen in relation to the papacy at this
time is strikingly illustrated by the Irish St. Columbanus of Luxeuil, who wrote to
Pope Vigilius suggesting that he may have fallen into heresy. In that case, he
continued, those “who have always kept the Orthodox Faith, whoever these may be,
even if they seem to be your subordinates,… shall be your judges… And thus, even as
your honour is great in proportion to the dignity of your see, so great care is mindful
for you, lest you lose your dignity through some mistake. For power will be in your
hands just so long as your principles remain sound; for he is the appointed keybearer
of the Kingdom of Heaven, who opens by true knowledge to the worthy and shuts to
the unworthy; otherwise if he does the opposite, he shall be able neither to open nor
to shut.”

“For all we Irish,” as he said to another Pope, “inhabitants of the world’s edge, are
disciples of Saints Peter and Paul and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon
by the Holy Spirit, and we accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic
teaching; none has been a heretic, none a Judaizer, none a schismatic; but the Catholic
Faith, as it was delivered by you first, who are the successors of the holy apostles, has
been maintained unbroken.” 697

The tendency towards Papism was halted, at least temporarily, under Pope
Gregory I. An Old Roman aristocrat but also loyal subject of the Eastern Empire, he
believed in the primacy, but not universal sovereignty, of “the apostolic see”. He never
tried to override the rights of Local Churches, still less proclaim an infallible headship
over them. Indeed, in his vehement refusal (following the example of his predecessor,
Pelagius II) to accept the title of “universal bishop”, first offered by the Emperor
Maurice to St. John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, St. Gregory provided an
invaluable lesson to all subsequent Popes on the limits of their power and jurisdiction.
For he accused St. John of pride, and wrote to him that in accepting this title he was
“at enmity with that grace which was given to all [bishops] in common”. He reminded
him that the Fourth Ecumenical Council had offered the title of “universal” to the
Roman Pope as a mark of honour to St. Peter, but that none of the Popes had accepted
it, “lest by assuming a special distinction in the dignity of the episcopate, we should
seem to refuse it to all the brethren”.698

St. Gregory wrote to the Emperor concerning St. Peter: “He received the keys of the
celestial Kingdom; the power to bind and to loose was given to him; the care of all the
Church and the primacy were committed to him; and yet he did not call himself
universal Apostle. But that most holy man, John, my brother in the priesthood, would
fain assume the title of universal bishop. I can but exclaim, O tempora! O mores!”699

697 G.S.M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera, Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970, pp. 47, 49, 51,
39.
698 Guettée, op. cit., pp. 208, 211.
699 Guettée, op. cit., p. 213.

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 In another letter to Patriarchs Eulogius of Alexandria and Anastasius of Antioch,
he made the point that “if a Patriarch be called universal, this takes from all the others
the title of Patriarch”.700

And to Patriarch Cyriacus of Constantinople he wrote: “You must not consider this
same affair as unimportant; for, if we tolerate it, we corrupt the faith of the whole Church.
You know how many, not heretics only but heresiarchs, have arisen in the Church of
Constantinople. Not to speak of the injury done to your dignity, it cannot be denied
that if any one bishop be called universal, all the Church crumbles if that universal one
fall!!”701

Finally, in another letter to the Emperor, St. Gregory wrote: “I pray your Imperial
Piety to observe that there are some frivolous things that are inoffensive, but also some
others that are very hurtful. When Antichrist shall come and call himself God, it will
be in itself a perfectly frivolous thing, but a very pernicious one. If we only choose to
consider the number of syllables in this word, we find but two (De-us); but if we
conceive the weight of iniquity of this title, we shall find it enormous. I say it without
the least hesitation: whoever calls himself the universal bishop, or desires this title, is, by his
pride, THE PRECURSOR OF ANTICHRIST, because he thus attempts to raise himself
above the others. The error into which he falls springs from pride equal to that of
Antichrist; for as that wicked one wished to be regarded as exalted above other men,
like a god, so likewise whoever would be called sole bishop exalteth himself above the
others.”702

And so we find the heresy of Papism thoroughly refuted by one of the greatest of
the Popes. St. Gregory reaffirms the doctrine taught by St. Cyprian of Carthage and
the Orthodox East, that all bishops are essentially equal in grace, because the grace of
the episcopate is one, and the bishops receive their grace, not from one man or one
see, but from the episcopate as a whole. Consequently, the heresy that attempts to
create, as it were, a fourth level of the priesthood above that of bishop, in the form of
a universal bishop having sovereignty over all the others, undermines the ecclesiology
of the Church, and is a heresy of the Antichrist, who will also exalt himself above all…

While opposing the false idea of Church unity that was Papism, St. Gregory also
championed a positive ideal that, coming after Justinian’s military conquests and
restoration of Orthodoxy in the West, served to create a deeper unity, not only of the
West with the East, but also of the West within itself, in the union between the Western
nations – Italians, Gallic, Iberian, Anglo-Saxon – and the papacy. He did this in various
ways: through his own decrees, epistles to kings, bishops and laymen, and theological
works (especially the Pastoral Rule, Homilies on the Gospel and Morals on Job); through
his missionary activities (especially in relation to the Anglo-Saxons); in his liturgical
reforms (his Presanctified Liturgy is still celebrated by the Orthodox Church during
Great Lent); in his music (even if what is called “Gregorian Chant” probably originates
in the Carolingian age); and in his Dialogues (he is known in the East as “the

700 Guettée, op. cit., p. 217.
701 Guettée, op. cit., p. 223.
702
Guettée, op. cit., pp. 225-226.

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Dialogist”). The Dialogues are essentially a series of Lives of the Italian saints, of which
the most important and influential is the Life of the great monastic founder, St.
Benedict of Nurcia (+547), in the second Book.

Leonard von Matt and Stephan Hilpisch write: “After spending his patrimony in
founding six monasteries in Sicily and one in Rome, Gregory himself embraced the
monastic life. Pope Pelagius II employed him in the service of the Church so that, to
his great sorrow, Gregory was compelled to exchange contemplation for action; but at
heart he remained a monk and when, in 590, he was raised to the Chair of Peter – the
first monk to be thus honoured – he showed himself a true friend and patron of
monasticism. Devoted as he was to holy reading, prayer, contemplation and the
liturgy, Gregory was a monk on the papal throne. He issued a number of ordinances
for monasteries and assisted them in their poverty. But his most important work for
monasticism is his biography of St. Benedict…

“… It was the writing of the Rule that he regarded as the Saint’s greatest
achievement. He writes: ‘Among all the wonders which draw a shining halo around
Benedict even in this world, we must count his doctrine; for he has written a Rule for
monks which is conspicuous by reason of its moderation and the clarity of its
language. The teaching of this Rule is a key to the teacher’s life for he would not
demand from others what he had not practiced in his own person.’

“St. Gregory’s biography of St. Benedict has been of incalculable benefit to

Benedictine monasticism… St. Gregory’s encomium of St Benedict and his Rule
reached a wide audience and helped to decide the problem as to what Rule should be
adopted by the monks of the West.”703

The Rule was very important in helping to unite the Orthodox West and in
spreading it to new lands, such as Germany. By the end of the tenth century
Benedictine monasteries were everywhere, and most bishops were Benedictine
monks.

With the heresy of papism suppressed, at least temporarily, the West flourished
and the papacy itself rose to the peak of its real and not vain glory and power. But
important differences between East and West remained. One of them was the greater
legalism of the West.

«When the Roman Empire collapsed in the West,» writes Sir Steven Runciman, «the
Roman Church was left as the repository of Roman traditions and Roman law, as
opposed to the customs introduced by the barbarian rulers, but also of learning and
education. In the chaos of the invasions, with the former lay governors fleeng or
dispossessed, ecclesiastical officers were often called upon to take over the
administration of cities and whole districts. Moreover, when orderly government was
restored, there were for many centuries few literate men outside of ecclesiastical
ranks. Churchmen provided the lawyers and clerks on whom the lay rulers depended.
This all tended to give the Roman Church a legal outlook. The Papal chancery was

703 Von Matt and Hilpisch, Saint Benedict, London: Burn & Oates, 1961, pp. 143-144

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obliged to fill itself with trained lawyers, whose tastes began to dominate theology.
Roman theologians liked clear-cut definitions. The apophatic tradition, of which
Augustine had been so eminent an advocate, tended to give way to Scholastic tastes,
to the desire to turn theology into a systematized philosophy…»704

The five centuries or so that separate Popes Gregory I and Gregory VII constitute a
fascinating period in which the Orthodox Christian forms of political and ecclesiastical
life gradually succumbed to Papism in the West – but only after a fierce struggle
during which the Orthodox staged several “comebacks”, drawing on the inspired
example of Pope Gregory the Great, or, as he called himself, “the servant of the
servants of God”….

704 Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 6.

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IV. THE NEW CHRISTIAN NATIONS

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 44. THE SYMPHONY OF NATIONS

Can unity of faith and law create a unity of nations? Can we speak of a symphony
of nations as well as a symphony of powers? In order to answer these questions, we
first need to know to what extent, and in what sense, we can speak of nations in the
modern sense in the sixth century.

The most primitive form of nation, if it is not rather the embryo of nationhood, is
the single tribe. This became the primary form of national organization in Western
Europe during the devastating invasions of the Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth
century, which seriously disrupted Roman rule in the region. However, as Francis
Fukuyama writes, the Church had a no less “devastating impact on tribal organization
throughout Western Europe. The German, Norse, Magyar, and Slavic tribes saw their
kinship structures dissolve within two or three generations of their conversion to
Christianity.”705 This was in sharp contrast to China, India and the Middle East, where
tribal bonds continued to be strong, and it made possible the emergence of the larger
and more heterogeneous unit of the nation.

How did the Church effect this change? In the first place, membership of the
Church creates a higher and deeper unity than any ties based on kinship; and so to
the extent that the peoples became truly Christian, the family of the Church replaced
the family of the tribe, while the family of the nation became an intermediate link
between Church and tribe.

However, there were more specific ways in which Church law broke up the old
bonds. Thus Larry Siedentop points out that “by transferring religious authority from
the father to a separate priesthood, the Christian church removed the religious basis
of the paterfamilias. It curtailed the claims to authority of the family head, relaxing
[but not destroying] the ties of subordination that had previously bound its
members.”706

Again, building on the work of the social anthropologist Jack Goody, Fukuyama
points out that the Church “took a strong stand against four practices: marriages
between close kin, marriages to the widows of dead relatives (the so-called levirate),
the adoption of children, and divorce. The Venerable Bede, reporting on the efforts of
Pope Gregory I to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in the sixth century,
notes how Gregory explicitly condemned the tribe’s practices of marriage to close
relatives and the levirate. Later church edicts forbade concubinage, and promoted an
indissoluble, monogamous lifetime marriage bond between men and women…”

The practices banned by the Church were what Goody calls “‘strategies of heirship’
whereby kinship groups are able to keep property under the group’s control as it
passed down from one generation to another. Life expectancy in Europe and the
Mediterranean world of the time was less than thirty-five. The probability of a
couple’s producing a male heir who survived into adulthood and who could carry on

705 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. 239.
706 Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, London: Penguin, 2014, p. 116.

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the ancestral line was quite low. As a result, societies legitimated a wide range of
practices that allowed individuals to produce heirs. Concubinage has already been
discussed…; divorce can be seen as a form of serial concubinage in monogamous
societies. The levirate was practiced when a brother died before he produced children;
his wife’s marriage to a younger brother ensured that his property would remain
consolidated with that of his siblings. Cross-cousin marriage ensured that property
would remain in the hands of close family members.”707

The Church’s rules also enhanced the status of women, who were now allowed to
own property in their own names and dispose of it as they wished. We see the change
in Gaul, in the transition from Salic law (c. 510) to the Lex Ribuaria (c. 600). “Famously,
the former prohibits any female inheritance of ancestral land, while the latter relaxes
such restrictions.”708

Fukuyama expresses the somewhat cynical thought that the Church thereby
profited materially from these rules, because widows and property-owning Christians
who died without heirs often gave their land to the Church. However, it made sense
that a believing society should look to the Church rather than the tribe as its agent of
social security and endow it accordingly. And the Church certainly carried out this
role impressively in this period.

Not only at the social level, but also at the political level, the level of relationships
between states, the impact of Christianization was profound… The pagan Roman
empire had introduced the important idea that all Roman citizens, of whatever
nationality, were in some sense equal under the law. Building on that, the Church
proclaimed that all baptized Christians, of whatever nationality, were equal under the
law of Christ. Similarly, just as the pagan Roman empire had proclaimed that Rome
encompassed the whole oikoumene or “inhabited world”, so Christian Rome now saw
herself as encompassing the whole family of Christian nations under her paternal
leadership. As Sir Steven Runciman writes, “Ideally, it [the Empire] should embrace
all the peoples of the earth, who, ideally, should all be members of the one true
Christian Church, its own Orthodox Church.”709

“In Roman eyes,” as Dominic Lieven writes, “the Roman Empire was a universal
monarchy: it encompassed the whole globe, or at least all of it that was worth
bothering about. The barbarians beyond the empire’s wall they regarded in terms
somewhat similar to nineteenth-century European colonists’ view of ‘natives’. Their
only imperial neighbour, the Parthian empire, was considered by the Romans to be
‘an oriental despotism, a barbarian, braggart and motley nation’. As in every other
aspect of their culture, the Roman sense of universalism owed much to the Greeks.

707 Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 237-238. “The Church in its determination to place married couples, and not
ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society, had tamed the instinct of grasping
dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as
legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church:
‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip’” (Tom Holland, Dominion, London: Abacus,
2019, pp. 268-269).
708 Siedentop, op. cit., p. 142.
709 Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 1.

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Alexander had conquered virtually the whole of the known world and although his
empire was very short-lived the spread of Hellenistic culture was not. ‘The Greek
philosophers, in particular the Stoics, stressed the notion that all mankind formed one
community, partaking of universal reason… it was, indeed, the Greeks who from the
second century BC had regarded the Roman Empire and the universe (oikoumene) as
one… Ideas such as these made a deep impression on the minds of the political and
intellectual elite of Rome, and through their influence the two notions of orbis terrarum
and imperium came to be regarded in the first century as identical: from then on no
distinction was ever made between them.’

“The adoption in the fourth century of Christianity, a world religion which

recognized no ethnic or cultural borders, could only increase the Roman imperial
sense of universalism. In time Christian clergy undertook evangelizing missions
outside their polities’ borders, converting whole peoples to their religion and
therefore, in the end, to a great extent to their culture. This the rulers of imperial
[pagan] Rome had never conceived of…”710

And so, parallel to the concept of the symphony of powers, whose model was the
relationship between the two natures of Christ, there emerged the concept of the
symphony of nations, modeled on the father-son relationship. The Roman Emperor
was the father of a family of Christian rulers united, not by law, but by common
membership of the civilization of Christian Rome. Within this single Christian
commonwealth of nations there was, strictly speaking, only one Christian people, the
people of the Romans; and Greeks and Latins, Celts and Germans, Semites and Slavs
were all equally Romans, all equally members of the Roman commonwealth of nations
and sons of the Roman Emperor.

That is why the Greek-speaking Fathers spoke of themselves, not as Greeks (which
implied paganism), but as Romans.

As it was developed in succeeding centuries, writes I.P. Medvedev, “this doctrine

found practical expression in… a hierarchical system of States…The place of each
sovereign in this official, hierarchical gradation of all the princes of the world in
relation to the Byzantine Emperor was defined by kinship terms borrowed from the
terminology of family law: father-son-brother, but also friend… The use of kinship
terms by the Byzantine Emperor in addressing a foreign Sovereign was not a simple
metaphor or rhetoric, but a definite title which was given on the basis of a mutual
agreement, that is, bestowed by the Emperor… And so at the head of the oikoumene
was the Basileus Romanon, the Byzantine Emperor, the father of ‘the family of
sovereigns and peoples’. Closest of all ‘by kinship’ among the politically independent
sovereigns were certain Christian rulers of countries bordering on the Empire, for
example Armenia, Alania and Bulgaria; they were spiritual sons of the Byzantine
Emperor. Less close were the Christian masters of the Germans and French, who were
included in this ‘family of sovereigns and peoples’ with the rights of spiritual brothers
of the Emperor. After them came the friends, that is, independent sovereigns and
peoples who received this title by dint of a special agreement – the emir of Egypt and

710 Lieven, Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 9-10.

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the ruler of India, and later the Venetians, the king of England, etc. Finally, we must
name a large group of princes who were ranked, not according to degree of ‘kinship’,
but by dint of particularities of address and protocol – the small appanage
principalities of Armenia, Iberia, Abkhazia, the Italian cities, Moravia and Serbia
(group 1), and the appanage princes of Hungary and Rus’, the Khazar and Pecheneg
khans, etc. (group 2)…” 711

And so from Britain in the West to Georgia in the East to Ethiopia in the south "a
great number of peoples made up the autocracy but without any 'ethnic'
differentiation between them.

“The whole racial amalgam,” writes Fr. George Metallinos, “lived and moved in a
single civilization (apart from some particularities) - the Greek, and it had a single
cohesive spiritual power – Orthodoxy, which was at the same time the ideology of the
oikoumene - autocracy. The citizens of the autocracy were Romans politically, Greeks
culturally and Orthodox Christians spiritually. Through Orthodoxy the old
relationship of rulers and ruled was replaced by the sovereign bond of brotherhood.
Thus the ‘holy race’ of the New Testament (I Peter 2.9) became a reality as the 'race of
the Romans', that is, of the Orthodox citizens of the autocracy of the New Rome."712

This internationalism was underlined by the diverse nationalities of the emperors

themselves. Thus Constantine was a Roman, Theodosius I - a Spaniard, Zeno – a
Dacian (Romanian), Justinian I - an Illyrian or Thracian, Maurice and Heraclius -
Armenians and Leo the iconoclast – an Isaurian.

“Much suggests that for many centuries after the fall of the Western Roman empire,
there persisted within the western consciousness a sentiment that just as Christians
knew unity in the one body of Christ which was the universal ecclesia, so ideally they
should know it also in one body politic, a universal res publica. If one reason why this
did not find expression was the concrete reality of western political multiplicity,
another was the impossibility of conceiving any polity but the Roman empire as
having a legitimate claim to universality yet the impossibility also of recognizing in
the empire as it actually existed the universal res publica of the western vision. This
was a deadlock which could be broken only if the Roman empire were recast in a
satisfactory western mould. The speed and strength with which the imperial idea
came to be reasserted once western circumstances were propitious to such a recasting
[in the time of Charlemagne] are themselves the strongest argument that it had never
been banished but had simply lain dormant. Two things were necessary for its
reinvigoration and realization: first, the emergence of a western Grossreich …; second,
the inclusion within this polity of Rome…”713

711 Medvedev, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 138-139.
712 Metallinos, “Apo ti Romaiki oikoumenikotita ston Ethnistiko Patriotismo” (“From Roman

Universalism to Ethnic Patriotism”), Exodos, Athens, 1991, p. 38.

713 P.D. King, “The barbarian kingdoms”, in Cambridge History of Medieval Thought, c. 350 – c. 1450,

Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 144-145, 146.

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 In the struggle for the purity of the Orthodox teaching on the relationship between
the Church and the State, two forces were especially prominent: the papacy itself, and
the new national kingdoms of Western Europe. Until the reign of Charlemagne at
least, the relationship between these two forces was one of mutual respect and benefit.
The Popes, with rare exceptions, were by no means “papist” and dictatorial in relation
to the national kingdoms and their national synods of bishops, but provided a vital
source of unity, stability and enlightenment for the embryonic new nation-states and
Churches. In their turn, the kings and their bishops frequently travelled to Rome and
worked closely with the Popes, receiving instruction, books, relics, icons, chanters and
moral and spiritual support. Especially important in this struggle was the Orthodox
kingdom of the Franks.

The idea of a symphony of nations, of a single Christian Roman Empire extending

from the Atlantic to the Caspian, was a living spiritual reality, and one that endured
also in the West until at least the reign of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century.
However, it was only to be expected that such a wonderful ideal should have been
attacked by the enemy of mankind. His main weapons in the West as in the East were
political dissonance (war, rebellion) and ecclesiastical division (schism, heresy).

So let us look at how the ideal fared in reality in each of the major Christian nations
that emerged in the West after the fall of Old Rome.

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 45. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (1) VANDAL NORTH AFRICA

In the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire gradually disintegrated; and out
of its ruins several barbarian kingdoms composed of amalgamations of various
Germanic tribes came into existence. The questions that arose in relation to these
kingdoms were: What would be their relationship with the Roman Empire that still
existed in the East, in Constantinople? Was the Eastern Roman Empire now the only
legitimate political authority for those calling themselves Romans and living on the
former territories of the Roman empire? Or were the western barbarian kings also
legitimate powers, the legal successors of Rome in some sense?

Since its subjection in the third century BC, North Africa had been the bread-basket
of Rome. It was a highly Romanized and Christianized province, as is proved by the
numerous well-preserved archaeological remains that survive to this day. Moreover,
it gave birth to some of the most influential writers of Western Christendom, such as
Tertullian, St. Cyprian of Carthage and St. Augustine of Hippo. At the same time, it
was the birthplace of the most stubborn, violent and long-lasting schismatic
movement in the Early Church, Donatism. In spite of the heroic efforts of St.
Augustine, Donatism remained powerful; and in 429, North Africa became the object
of the wrath of God. The Vandals, the most anti-Roman and anti-Christian of all the
barbarian tribes, under their king, Genseric and in alliance with the Iranian tribe of
the Alans, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into the province. In 430 St. Augustine was
killed during the Vandal siege of Hippo. In 435 the Empire recognized Genseric’s
suzerainty over the whole region except Carthage. And in 439, after eight years of war,
he captured the capital also. St. Quodvultdeus, Metropolitan of Carthage, and many
of his flock, were exiled to the Neapolitan coastline. Genseric was an Arian who had
apostasized in his youth; he banished Orthodox priests who refused to perform the
Arian services and even sacked Rome herself in 455.714 In 484 his son Huneric, not
without some irony, used a Roman law of 412 directed against the Donatists to embark
on a savage persecution against the Orthodox Christians.

At that time the North African bishops under St. Eugenius, Archbishop of
Carthage, boldly confessed the Orthodox faith against the Arian Vandals. Thus he and
his bishops wrote: "We are enjoined by a royal command to provide an account of the
Catholic Faith which we hold. So we are setting out to indicate briefly the things that
we believe and proclaim, aware of our lack of ability but supported by Divine
Assistance. We recognize, then, that the first thing we must do is give an explanation
of the Unity of the Substance of the Father and the Son, which the Greeks call
'Homoousion'. Therefore: we acknowledge the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in
the Unity of the Divine Nature in such a way that we can say with a faithful confession
that the Father Subsists as a Distinct Person, and the Son Equally Exists in His Own
Person, and that the Holy Spirit retains the Distinctiveness of His Own Person, not
asserting that the Father is the same as the Son, nor confessing that the Son is the same
as the Father or the Holy Spirit, nor understanding the Holy Spirit in such a way that
He is the Father or the Son; but we believe the Unbegotten Father, and the Son
Begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit Proceeding from the Father, to be of One

714 Tim Newark, Warlords, London: Brockhampton Press, 1996, p. 323.

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Substance and Essence, because the Unbegotten Father and the Begotten Son and the
Holy Spirit Who Proceeds, have One Divine Nature in Common; nevertheless, there
are Three Distinct Persons."

The famous Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, overcoming his usual

scepticism, relates how, in 484, at the command of King Hunneric, Genseric’s son,
“four hundred and sixty-six Orthodox bishops assembled at Carthage; a banished to
the different part of Africa, exposed to the insults of their enemies, and carefully
deprived af all the comforts of life. The hardship of ten years’ exile must have reduced
their numbers and if they had complied with the law of Thrasimund, which
prohibited any episcopal consecrations, the Orthodox Church of Africa must have
expired with the lives of it actual members. They disobeyed; and their disobedience
was punished by a second exile of two hundred and twenty bishops into Sardinia,
where they languished fifteen years, till the accession of the gracious Hilderic. The
two islands were judiciously chosen by the malice of their Arian tyrants. Seneca, from
his own experience, has deplored and exaggerated the miserable state of Corsica, and
the plenty of Sardinia was overbalance by the unwholesome quality of the air.

“The zeal of Genseric and his successors for the conversion of the Catholics
[Orthodox] must have rendered them still more jealous to guard the purity of the
Vandal faith. Before the churches were finally shut, it was a crime to appear in a
barbarian dress; and those who presumed to neglect the royal mandate were rudely
dragged backwards by their long hair. The palatine officers, who refused to profess
the religion of their prince, were ignominiously stripped of their honours and
employment; banished to Sardinia and Sicily; or condemned to the servile labouts of
slaves and peasants in the fields of Utica. In the districts which had been peculiarly
allotted to the Vandals, the exercise of the Catholic worship was more strictly
prohibited; and severe penalties were denounced against the guilt both of the
missionary and the proselyte. By these arts the faith of the barbarians was preserved,
and their zeal was inflamed; and whenever their cavalry took the field, it was the
favourite amusement of the march to defile the churches and to insult the clergy of
the adverse faction.

“The citizens who had been educated in the luxury of the Roman province were
delivered, with exquisite cruelty, to the Moors of the desert. A venerable train of
bishops, ninety-six persons, whose guilt is not precisely ascertained, were torn from
their homes by the command of Hunneric. During the night they were confined, like
a herd of cattle, amidst their own ordure: during the day they pursued their march,
over the burning sands, and if they fainted under the heat and fatigue, they were
goaded or dragged till they expired in the hands of their tormentors. These unhappy
exiles, when they reached the Moorish huts, might excite the compassion of a people
whose native humanity was neither improved by reason nor corrupted by fanaticism:
but if they escaped the dangers, they were condemned to share the distress, of a
savage life.

“… Through the veil of fiction and declamation we can clearly perceive that the
Catholics, more especially under the reign of Hunneric, incurred the most cruel and
ignominious treatment. Respectable citizens, noble matrons, and consecrated virgins

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were stripped naked and raised in the air by pulleys, with a weight suspended at their
feet. In this painful attitude their naked bodies were torn with scourges, or burnt in
the most tender parts with red-hot plates of iron. The amputation of the ears, the nose,
the tongue, and the right hand was inflicted by the Arians; and although the precise
number cannot be defined, it is evident that many persons, among whom a bishop
and a proconsul may be named, were entitled to the crown of martyrdom. The same
honour has been ascribed to the memory of Count Sebastian, who professed the
Nicene creed with unshaken constancy; and Genseric might detest as a heretic the
brave and ambitious fugitive whom he dreaded as a rival.

“A new mode of conversion, which might subdue the feeble and alarm the
timorous, was employed by the Arian ministers. They imposed, by fraud or violence,
the rites of baptism; and punished the apostasy of the Catholics, if they disclaimed
this odious and profane ceremony, which violated the freedom of the will and the
unity of the sacrament. The hostile sects had formerly allowed the validity of each
other’s baptism; and the innovation, so fiercely maintained by the Vandals, can be
imputed only to the example and advice of the Donatists [who rejected the validity of
the True Church’s sacraments].

“The Arian clergy surpassed in religious cruelty the king and his Vandals; but they
were incapable of cultivating the spiritual vineyard which they were so desirous to
possess. A patriarch might seat himself on the throne of Carthage; some bishops, in
the principal cities, might usurp the place of their rivals; but the smallness of their
numbers, and their ignorance of the Latin language, disqualified the barbarians for
the ecclesiastical ministry of a great church; and the Africans, after the loss of their
Orthodox pastors, were deprived of the public exercise of Christianity.

“The [Roman] emperors were the natural protectors of the Homoousian

{Orthodox] docrine, and the faithful people of Africa, both as Romans and as
[Orthodox] Catholics, preferred their lawful sovereignty to the usurpation of the
barbarian heretics. During an interval of peace and friendship Hunneric restored the
cathedral of Carthage, at the intercession of Zeno, who reigned in the East, and of
Placida, his daughter and relict of emperors and the sister of the queen of the Vandals.
But this decent regard was of short duration, and the haughty tyrant displayed his
contempt for the religion of the empire by studiously arranging the bloody images of
persecution in all the principal streets through which the Roman ambassador must
pass in his way to the palace. An oath was required from the bishops who were
assembled at Carthage, that they would support the succession of his son Hilderic,
and that they would renounce all foreign or transmarine correspondence. This
engagement, consistent, as it should seem, with their moral and religious duties, was
refused by the more sagacious members of the assembly. Their refusal, faintly
coloured by the pretence that is unlawful for a Christian to swear, must provoke the
suspicions of a jealous tyrant.

“The historian who views this religious conflict with an impartial eye may
condescend to mention one preternatural event, which will edify the devout and
surprise the incredulous. Tipasa, a maritime colony of Mauritania, sixteen miles to the
east of Caesarea, had been distinguished in every age by the Orthodox zeal of its

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inhabitants. They had braved the fury of the Donatists; they resisted or eluded the
tyranny of the Arians. The town was deserted on the approach of a heretical bishop:
most of the inhabitants who could procure ships passed over to the coast of Spain; and
the unhappy remnant, refusing all communion with the usurper, still presumed to
hold their pious, but illegal, assemblies. Their disobedience exasperated the cruelty of
Hunneric. A military count was despatched from Carthage to Tipasa: he collected the
Catholics in the Forum, and, in the presence of the whole province, deprived the guilty
of their right hands and their tongues. But the holy confessors continued to speak
without tongues; and this miracle is attested by Victor, an African bishop, who
published an history of the persecution within two years after the event. ‘If anyone,’
says Victor, ‘should doubt of the truth, let him repair to Constantinople, and listen to
the clear and perfect language of Restitutus, the subdeacon, one of those glorious
sufferers, who is now lodged in the palace of the emperor Zeno, and is respected by
the devout empress.’ At Constantinople we are astonished to find a cool, a learned,
and an exceptional witness, without interest, and without passion. Aeneas of Gaza, a
Platonic philosopher, has accurately described his own observations on these African
sufferers. ‘I saw them myself: I heard them speak: I diligently inquired by what means
such and articulate voice could be formed without any organ of speech: I used my
eyes to examine the report of my ears: I opened their mouth, and saw that the whole
tongue had been completely torn away by the roots; an operation which the
physicians generally suppose to be mortal.’ The testimony of Aeneas of Gaza might
be confirmed by the superfluous evidence of the emperor Justinian, in a perpetual
edict of Count Marcellinus, in his Chronicle of the times; and of pope Gregory I, who
had resided at Constantinople as the minister of the Roman pontiff. They all lived
within the compass of a century, and they all appeal to their personal knowledge or
the public notoriety for the truth of a miracle which was repeated in several instances,
displayed on the greatest theatre of the world, and submitted during a series of year
to the calm examination of the senses. This supernatural gift of the African confessor,
who spoke without tongues, will command the assent of those only, who already
believe that their language was pure and Orthodox. But the stubborn mind of an
infidel is guarded by secret, incurable suspicion; and the Arian… who has solemnly
rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, will not be shaken by the most plausible evidence
of an Athanasian miracle.” 715

The Vandal kingdom of North Africa could never have been considered a
legitimate successor of Roman power because it was not only not Orthodox, but a
persecutor of the Orthodox. Its aggression can be explained in part, as Heather writes,
by the fact that it “had been carved out of the living body of a still very vital Western
Empire by the Vandal conquest of Carthage in 439, whereas all the other Western
successor states emerged both more slowly and more consensually, a generation or so
later, as the central Roman state gradually ran out of revenues and the capacity to
direct events. And since Catholicism [Orthodoxy] was unambiguously the religion of
the empire, Vandal monarchs tended to be highly hostile towards it, deliberately
fostering an alternate Christianity among the warriors who had put them in power.”716

715 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London: The Folio Society, 1788, 1986, vol. IV, pp.
111-114, 115-117.
716 Heather, op. cit., p. 138.

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 Nevertheless, although, as Terry Jones and Alan Ereira write, Genseric’s kingdom
was not part of Rome, and did not want to be, “in many ways Rome provided the
model for it. He installed his own people in place of Roman landlords (on a scaled that
did not happen anywhere else in Europe), but established an autocracy of nobles
rather than ruling through any tribal council. This was probably necessary because
the Vandals were no longer a single ethnic group: on the long journey that had
occupied Gaiseric’s [Genseric’s] life, they had become a mixture of Suevi, Visigoths,
Alans, Spaniards and probably many other peoples too. But his use of Roman norms
extended to minting coins based on Ravenna designs, making Latin the official
language (again possibly recognizing a situation that already existed, as the Vandals
and Alans spoke completely unrelated languages and may well have used Latin as
their lingua franca) and employing Roman engineers and architects.”717

Moreover, as Fr. Andrew Louth writes, “the barbarian kingdoms in the West were
eager to define themselves in Roman political terms”718; and if we leave aside the
Vandals’ persecution of the Church, we may admit that their political philosophy was
closely modeled on Christian Rome. Thus in Vandal North Africa we find, as P.D.
King writes, “a sovereign monarchy, Roman and Christian in its bases,” in which
“there is no trace of a popular assembly, of any other constitutional curb on the
exercise of the king’s will, or any area of activity exempt from royal control. As the
emperor wielded authority in religious matters, calling councils, deciding which creed
his subjects should follow, persecuting dissidents – for what could be more germane
to the public welfare than God’s propitiation by correct worship? – so did the Arian
Vandal king. Generic (d. 477) even established a permanent rule of succession, vesting
the crown in his house; here he went further than any emperor chose, or dared, to do.
A throne and the purple, witnessed for the 530s, will assuredly have appeared earlier,
as had the diadem. The king described himself in traditional imperial nomenclature,
as ‘Our Piety’ and ‘Our Clemency’, held himself to possess ‘majesty’ and was
addressed in reverential language customarily employed of the emperor. Instances of
imitatio imperii could easily be multiplied. Most significant, the ruler considered
heavenly authority to be the source of his own. God Himself had conceded his
dominions to him, said Huneric (d. 484); he held them ‘by divine favour’.

“The Vandal picture anticipates that eventually yielded by all the [western] regna
in numerous respects. But Huneric’s statements merit especial note as the vanguard
of a formidable army of testimony to the currency in the kingdoms of the belief that
the ruler was such by God’s fiat. At its roots lay the most fundamental of principles,
that all that existed or occurred terrestrially was ultimately traceable to the celestial
will, not to the intrinsic merits or unaided efforts of men… Like anything else, political
power existed by God’s will; and those who wielded it occupied their positions by His
favour. By Christ’s own witness (John 19.11), Pilate’s power against Him derived
‘from above’, and Paul’s statement in Romans 13.1 was unequivocal: ‘There is no
power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God’. When orthodox bishops
declared that ‘divine favour’ had ‘provided’ Theoderic (d. 526) – an Arian! – to govern

717 Terry and Ereira, Barbarians, London: BBC Books, 2006, p. 254.
718 Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 4.

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Italy, or a seventh-century Frankish formula attributed elevation to kingship to ‘divine
mercy’, or Ine of Wessex (d. 725) called himself king ‘mid Godes gife’, they were
operating with precisely the same notion expressed in the celebrated formula ‘king by
the grace of God’ which was to become part of the Carolingian royal intitulatio, for
gratia, ‘grace’, meant simply ‘favour’. Indeed, already the Lombard, Agilulf (590-616),
was ‘king by the grace of God’ and the Visigoth, Svinthila (621-31), brought to
kingship ‘by divine grace’. Nicely illustrative of the root-concept was Boniface’s
designation of Aethelbald of Mercia (d. 757) as ‘you whom not your own merits but
God’s abundant mercy constituted king and prince of many’…”719

In 530, the Orthodox King Hilderic was overthrown by the anti-Roman and anti-
Orthodox Gelimer. This gave the Emperor Justinian the excuse he needed, and in a
short six-month campaign (533-34) his general Belisarius, supported by the local
population, destroyed the Vandal kingdom and placed all the heretics under ban. As
he said, God “deemed it proper that the injuries of the Church should be avenged
through me”.720

719 King, op. cit., pp. 127-128.
720 Cod. Just. 1.27.1.1-2; in Heather, op. cit., p. 137.

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 46. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (2) OSTROGOTHIC ITALY

In north-western Europe, the impact of the invasions of the Germanic tribes was,
as we have seen, devastating. However, as John Julius Norwich writes, the situation
in south-western Europe from Spain through Southern France to Italy was that of “a
Roman land-owning aristocracy living comfortably on its estates, perfectly satisfied
with the status quo and doubtless grateful that the immense distance separating them
from Constantinople reduced imperial interference [expressed especially in the form
of heavy taxation] to the point of imperceptibility.”721

For the Romans of North Africa, it was clear where their loyalties lay: with Rome,
and not with their barbarian and heretical rulers. But for the Romans of Italy and Spain
the matter was less clear-cut. On the one hand, they remained socially, legally and
religiously separate from their Gothic rulers (“Ostrogothic”, that is, Eastern Gothic in
Italy, and “Visigothic”, that is, Western Gothic in Spain). But on the other hand, unlike
the Vandals the Goths did not, in general, persecute the Faith; they fostered Roman
culture, and allowed the Romans to follow their own laws.

The consciousness of Romanitas, of belonging to a single Roman nation in East and

West, survived the fall of Rome. “In reality,” write Fr. Patric Ranson and Laurent
Motte, “the barbarian invasions - Visigoth, Lombard, Vandal, Frank – in spite of their
violence, did not break this Roman national unity; at first they could do no more than
displace its visible centre: bypassing the Roman political structures, it was around the
Church that the vanquished people reassembled and it was the Church that then
exercised a true ethnarchy. It was with her that the barbarians had to do business; the
bishop was still freely elected by the faithful and the clergy; she was their interlocutor.
In Gaul, this ethnarchy was for a long time assumed by the bishop of Arles, a true
Roman capital that bore the name of Constantine, in Spain – by that of Cordoba, in
Italy by that of Rome…”722

The Ostrogothic rulers of Italy had a healthy respect for Rome and her traditions of
law and education. We have seen how much Ataulf, the son of Alaric, had respected
Romanitas. And after the last Western Emperor, Romulus, was deposed by the
Odoacer, he was not killed but given a respectable pension; while Odoacer, as David
Gilmour writes, “governed largely in accordance with Roman practice, and resided in
the Emperor’s palace in Ravenna, which had been the imperial capital since the
beginning of the century. Unfortunately he provoked the anger of the Byzantine
emperor, Zeno, who persuaded Theoderic, chief of the Ostrogoths, to abandon his
raids on the Balkans and instead invade Italy, where, having killed Odoacer, he would
be permitted to make himself king as a vassal of Constantinople.

721Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 253.
722 Ranson and Motte, introduction to Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale (The Fatal

Mystification), Lausanne: L’Age de l’Homme, 1987, p. 11.

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 “The reign of the new king began with a bloodbath and ended soon after the
execution of the philosopher Boethius, who wrote his celebrated The Consolation of
Philosophy while waiting in prison for his death. Yet for three decades Theodoric ruled
wisely and peacefully. He insisted on religious tolerance, refusing to favour either side
in the controversy over Arianism, the heresy that denied the full divinity of Christ,
and he managed to dissuade his victorious Goths from bullying the Roman
population. His was the last kingdom to extend over the whole of Italy for over 1,500
years, yet it was even more transient than other regimes of the age, disappearing
shortly after his death and leaving little visible trace apart from his imposingly
primitive mausoleum in Ravenna”723

Theoderic quite consciously modeled his rule on that of the Emperor in

Constantinople, where he had spent ten years as a child. In about 507 he wrote to the
Emperor Anastasius in Constantinople: “You are the fairest ornament of all realms;
you are the healthful defence of the whole world, to which all other rulers rightfully
look up with reverence, because they know that there is in you something which is
unlike all others: we above all, who by Divine help learned in your Republic the art of
governing Romans with equity. Our royalty is an imitation of yours, modeled on your
good purpose, a copy of the only Empire; and in so far as we follow you do we excel
all other nations.” 724

“Procopius, the main Byzantine historian of this era, describes Theoderic as

popular and dignified. The Gothic king, we are told, ‘was exceedingly careful to
observe justice, he preserved the laws on a sure basis, he protected the land and kept
it safe from the barbarians dwelling round about [but gave about a third of it to his
Goths], and attained the highest possible degree of wisdom and manliness.’ Though
in time Theoderic himself could be considered ‘in name a tyrant’, Procopius goes on,
‘in fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have distinguished themselves in this
office from the beginning.’”725

So pro-Roman was Theoderic that “in about 510, soon after he had taken over
control of a large part of southern Gaul from the Visigoths, [he] wrote to his new Gallic
subjects, describing his own rule as ‘Roman’ and regulated by law, and contrasting it
explicitly with the unregulated ‘barbarian’ rule of the Visigoths: ‘You who have been
restored to it after many years should gladly obey Roman customs… And therefore,
as men by God’s favour, recalled to ancient liberty, clothe yourself in the morals of the
toga, cast off barbarism, throw aside savagery of mind, for it is wrong for you, in my
just times, to live by alien ways.’ Only rarely, as with Theoderic’s moustache, does a
different reality show through – one that reveals the survival of a Gothic identity,
which, of course, the Romans would have had no hesitation in branding as
‘barbarian’.”726

723 Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy, London: Penguin, 2012, p. 50.
724 Theoderic, in Heather, op. cit., p. 3.
725 Colin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium, New York: Bantam Deli, 2007, p. 12.
726 Bryan Wayne-Perkins, The Fall of Rome, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 74-75.

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 What could be wrong with obeying a ruler who, though not a Roman, consciously
modeled himself on Rome? He was a heretic, yes; but he did not persecute the
Orthodox. And in any case, his formal overlord, the Emperor Anastasius, was also a
(Monophysite) heretic. So was there any reason why the Orthodox Christians of Italy
should not obey him, especially since that pillar of Orthodoxy, the Roman Pope,
recognized him.727

However, things changed after the ascension to the throne of the New Rome of the
strictly Orthodox Justin I, and then, after the death of King Theoderic, of his nephew,
the famous Justinian I, in 527… We have seen that Justinian wanted to reconquer the
West for Rome and Orthodoxy, and that he had found a clear casus belli for going to
war with the Vandals in their persecution of the Orthodox. Such a casus was more
difficult to find in relation to the religiously tolerant and pro-Roman Ostrogothic
kings. However, he found one in the murder of the pro-Roman Ostrogothic Queen
Amalasuntha (Theoderic’s daughter) in 534 by the new King Theodahad.

Led by the famous generals Belisarius and Nerses, Roman armies reconquered
Italy, and “the ancient and lesser Rome,” in Michael Psellus’ words, was returned to
the dominion of “the later, more powerful city”. A Byzantine governor ruled Northern
and Central Italy from Ravenna; Byzantine titles were lavished on the Roman
aristocracy; and the Pope commemorated the Emperor at the liturgy.728 Tactfully,
Patriarch John Kappadokes of Constantinople continued to recognize the primacy of
the see of Old Rome (which, however, he declared to be “one church” with the see of
New Rome),729 and Pope John II responded by exalting the emperor as high as any
western bishop had ever done: "'The King's heart is in the hand of God and He directs
it as He pleases' (Proverbs 21.1). There lies the foundation of your Empire and the
endurance of your rule. For the peace of the Church and the unity of religion raise
their originator to the highest place and sustain him there in happiness and peace.
God's power will never fail him who protects the Church against the evil and stain of
division, for it is written: 'When a righteous King sits on the throne, no evil will befall
him' (Proverbs 20:8)." 730

Italy was again Roman and Orthodox. The famous frescoes of Justinian and
Theodora in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, the former Ostrogothic capital, were
superimposed on the earlier frescoes of Theoderic, thereby commemorating the
restoration of Romanity. And although the wars had lasted a generation and been
exceedingly costly, and the north was soon (in 568-572) overrun by another Arian
Germanic race, the Lombards, the leaders of Roman society, such as Pope Gregory I,
were convinced it had all been worth it.

And yet after Justinian’s death, no ruler in continental Western Europe continued
to acknowledge the authority of the Roman Empire over himself (although they
sometimes used Byzantine titles such as “basileus”); and his ideology of “One Faith,

727 Heather, op. cit., p. 59.
728 Tom Holland, Millenium, London: Abacus Books, 2009, p. 19.
729 Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 214.
730 T.S. A. Gerostergios, Justinian the Great: the Emperor and Saint, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine

and Modern Greek Studies, 1982, p. 82.

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One Church, One Empire” began to weaken there, as it was already weakening in the
Monophysite East. Thus, as King writes, “no writer testifies to the currency of the old
ideology. Though this was still maintained by imperial subjects [in Italy], it could not
have carried its earlier conviction. It had been the closeness of correspondence
between universalist ideality and political, cultural and religious reality which had
endowed the former with the great strength of its grasp upon men’s minds. That
correspondence was now lacking, as Jordanes, writing in 551, acknowledged. To him,
the res publica (destined on Daniel’s authority to last until the end of the world) still
indeed held what it had once subjected (‘almost the entire earth’); but it did so, when
not actually, then – the word is an exquisite choice – ‘imaginarie’. Time served only to
widen the gap which had opened up. It is not clear that any western regnum
recognized imperial authority after Justinian, while the incongruity of identifying the
Christian world and the empire grew ever more patent. The calamitous reverses
suffered by the seventh-century empire at Muslim and pagan hands made matters
worse. Moreover, westerners were deeply alienated by the character, real or
perceived, of the contemporary empire. Fear and hostility on the political and military
fronts played a role, while in imperial Italy resentment at high taxation and
inadequate defence fuelled animosity towards what was seen as a foreign regime.
Throughout the west as a whole, indeed, the empire was regarded as essentially a
Greek affair… Closely related was enmity in the theological sphere; the age was full
of controversies which confirmed the widespread – and again traditional – western
distrust of easterners as intellectual conjurors, given to unorthodoxy. In turn the
theological disputes were bound up with the fundamental papal-imperial conflict,
usually latent but occasionally exploding into violent life; this and its concomitants,
including the ill-treatment of some popes by some emperors, brought further
hostility…”731

Yet none of this argues for repudiation of the universalist ideal; and the fact is that
this was never denied, even implicitly… The only exception to this rule, as we have
seen, was the Vandal kingdom of North Africa. But in Europe the ideal, though
battered, survived until Charlemagne…

T.S. Brown writes: “The invasion launched by war-bands of Lombard and other
peoples led by Alboin in 568 had a decisive effect on the map of Italy for centuries.
Much of the north was rapidly conquered, including Milan in 569 and Pavia in 572.
The inadequate Byzantine garrisons were thrown into disarray, Lombard raiding
parties penetrated into Tuscany and the Rome area and semi-autonomous duchies
were set up in the south at Spoleto and Benevento. Gradually the empire was able to
put up more effective resistance by exploiting Lombard divisions, bribing the Franks
to invade the Lombard kingdom, recruiting Lombard renegades as mercenaries and
concentrating authority in the hands of one military governor, known by 584 as the
exarch. By 603, when a truce was declared, the empire retained secure control of the
Rome and Ravenna areas, together with a corridor following the line of the Via

731 King, op. cit.

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Amerina through Umbria, and coastal enclaves around Venice, Genoa, Naples and
other southern cities.

“For much of the seventh century the frontier remained static, broken by King
Rothari’s capture of Genoa in 643 and the defeat of the Emperor Constans’ expedition
against Benevento in 663/ 4. As the empire became increasingly endangered by
threats in the east, more power within the Byzantine territories was exercised by the
local military garrisons and their leaders, and in the case of Rome by the pope. In the
Lombard kingdom dynastic instability did not prevent increasing prosperity and
adoption of Roman institutions. By c. 680 the Lombards had dropped their Arian and
pagan beliefs in favour of Catholic Christianity and secured recognition from the
empire. Gradually their pressure on the imperial provinces increased, as the Romans
became discontented with the religious and taxation policies of the eastern empire and
King Liutprand (712–44) attempted to unite the peninsula under Lombard rule.
Resistance to such a take-over was led by the popes, who remained essentially loyal
to Byzantium, but they were unable to gain any substantial aid from their imperial
‘protectors’. Following the Lombard Aistulf’s capture of Ravenna in 751, and threats
to Rome itself, Pope Stephen II obtained the intervention of the Frankish king Pepin
III, who defeated Aistulf and recognized sweeping papal claims over much of central
Italy (Donation of Pepin, 756). Threats were renewed by Aistulf’s successor Desiderius
against Pope Hadrian I, who called on Pepin’s son Charles to intervene in 773. In 774
Charles captured Pavia and became king of the Lombards. The Lombard kingdom
retained its distinctive social and governmental institutions and only gradually did an
influx of Frankish officials and an increase in the wealth and power of the Church take
place.

“The political map of Italy remained confused in the late eighth century. Benevento
(unlike its neighbour to the north, Spoleto) remained outside effective Frankish
control and became a principality and a centre of traditional Lombard legitimacy
under Desiderius’ son-in-law Arichis, often allying itself with Byzantium to preserve
its independence. The empire itself retained Sicily and its footholds in Calabria and
Apulia, together with the nominal allegiance of the maritime cities of Amalfi, Gaeta,
Naples and Venice. Its province of Istria fell to the Franks in the late eighth century.
The papacy’s claim to much of central Italy, including southern Tuscany, Spoleto, as
well as the duchy of Rome and the old Exarchate, was zealously propagated by
Lateran officials on the basis of the Donation of Constantine (a contemporary forgery)
as well as the vague promises of the Frankish kings. In no sense, however, did it
amount to a papal state. In many areas the papacy was more concerned with estates
and rights than overall jurisdiction, while in others the Franks were induced by bribes
or Realpolitik to leave power in the hands of local figures such as the archbishop of
Ravenna. Even in the duchy of Rome, the papacy’s authority was far from secure, as
was shown by the revolt against Pope Leo III (795–816), which led to the latter’s appeal
to Charles for aid and the Frankish king’s assumption of the imperial title in St Peter’s
on Christmas Day 800.”732

732
Brown, in Angus Mackay and David Ditchburn (eds.), Atlas of Medieval Europe, London and New
York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 16-18.

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 47. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (3) FRANKISH GAUL

T.S. Brown writes: “The collapse of the Rhine frontier in 406/7 had wide
repercussions. Britain saw its Roman garrison withdrawn and the assumption of
power by rival British chieftains until the Anglo- Saxon invasions in the late 440s. The
Burgundians were permitted to set up a kingdom on the upper Rhine in 413.
Transferred as federates to the Jura/Lake Geneva area in 443, they built up a
Romanized kingdom incorporating the Lyon and Vienne areas from 457. Along the
middle and lower Rhine groups of Franks became powerful and attacked cities such
as Cologne and Trier. In northern Gaul Roman rule was undermined by obscure
rivalries between usurping generals, Bretons, peasant rebels (Bagaudae), Alans and
the sub-Roman regimes of Aegidius and his son Syagrius based on Soissons (c. 456–
86). The long-term beneficiary of this power vacuum was the Salian Frank dynasty of
Childeric (d. 481) and his son Clovis, who gradually expanded from their original
centre of Tournai by conquering or allying themselves with rival bands of Franks,
including established laeti (soldier-farmers)…

“Most of south-west Gaul and the Visigoths were compelled to transfer their
political base to Spain, with their eventual capital at Toledo. The kingdom of their
Ostrogothic cousins fell into decline on Theoderic’s death as a result of dynastic
uncertainties and tension between pro- Roman and traditionalist elements. Two of the
initially powerful kingdoms were conquered in 533–4: the Burgundians’ territories in
south-east Gaul were incorporated by the Franks and Vandals…

“Although Clovis had extended the Merovingian kingdom over most of Gaul, for
much of the sixth and seventh centuries it was beset by the strife vividly chronicled
by the historian Gregory of Tours (d. 594). In 511 a complex division took place
between Clovis’ four sons, which hampered efficient royal administration. The
Burgundian kingdom was taken over in 534 and Provence in 536. Theudebert I (533–
48) expanded his territory east of the Rhine and even beyond the Alps, but this
overlordship collapsed after his death. The kingdom was then reunited under Clothar,
but partition between his four sons on his death in 561 soon led to civil war and an
increasing sense of identity within each Teilreich (part-kingdom).

“The murder of King Sigibert of Austrasia in 575 provoked bitter conflict. For
several decades the dominant force was Sigibert’s widow, the Visigoth Brunhilda, but
in 613 she was executed and the kingdom was reunited under Clothar II of Neustria
(584–629). His son Dagobert I (623– 38) proved the last effective Merovingian ruler, as
royal power was undermined by the alienation of rights and estates, the loss of
Byzantine subsidies and tribute from client peoples east of the Rhine and the growing
power of counts and other territorial magnates. Subsequent Merovingian ‘do-nothing
kings’ were incapable of ruling personally and power fell into the hands of aristocratic
factions led by the mayors of the palace, such as the Arnulfings, the hereditary mayors
of the palace of Austrasia. Under Pepin II this family capitalized on its powerful
following in the north-east and its alliance with the Church to become the dominant
force throughout the kingdom from 687. A serious revolt followed Pepin’s death in
714 but effective power over Neustria and the Merovingian puppet-kings was
restored by his illegitimate son Charles Martel (d. 741), who enhanced the power and

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prestige of his dynasty (the Carolingians) by his campaigns against Saxons, Alamans,
Thuringians and Bavarians and most famously by his defeat of an Arab invading force
at Poitiers in 733.

“The conflicts of the Merovingian period should not obscure its achievements. The
kingdom remained the most powerful force in the west as a result of its military
strength, its relatively centralized structures, a number of centres of religious and
cultural life, and the assimilation which occurred between a small Frankish elite and
Gallo-Roman elements prepared to adopt Frankish laws and customs.”733

Let us now turn to the religious allegiances in the region.

In the fifth century, for various reasons, of which the Arian Bishop Ulphilas’
translation of the Gospel into German was perhaps the most important, the great
majority of barbarians who now dominated Western Europe were Arian. Romanitas
was associated with Orthodox Christianity, and several Orthodox bishops in the old
Roman cities ably and courageously defended the faith of the Orthodox Romans while
remaining loyal politically to their barbarian and Arian political leaders. This was a
difficult juggling act; but, in contrast with North Africa, most of the Arian barbarian
rulers of Western Europe respected these Roman Orthodox bishops and did not
persecute them, which laid the foundations for the conversion of the whole of the West
to Orthodoxy (whereas North Africa fell to Islam).

Perhaps the only exception was the Visigothic King Euric (466-84), who
“suspended the exercise of ecclesiastical, or, at least, episcopal functions, and
punished popular bishops of Aquitaine with imprisonment, exile, and
confiscation.”734

As Chris Wickham writes, Euric “was the first major ruler of a ‘barbarian’ polity in
Gaul – the second in the empire after Geiseric – to have a fully autonomous political
practice, uninfluenced by any residual Roman loyalties. Between 471 and 476 he
expanded his power east to the Rhône (and beyond, into Provence), north to the Loire,
and south into Spain. The Goths had already been fighting in Spain since the later 450s
(initially on behalf of the emperor Avitus), but Euric organized a fully fledged
conquest there, which is ill-documented, but seems to have been complete (except for
a Suevic enclave in the north-west) by the time of his death. By far the best
documented of Euric’s conquests, though not the most important, was the Auvergne
in 471-5, because the bishop of its central city, Clermont, was the Roman senator
Sidonius Apollinarius. Sidonius, who was [Bishop] Avitus’ son-in-law, and had been
a leading lay official for both [Emperors] Majorian and Anthemius, ended his political
career besieged inside his home city, and we can see all the political changes of the
450s-470s through his eyes. A supporter of alliance with the Visigoths in the 450s, by

733 Brown, in Angus Mackay and David Ditchburn (eds.), Atlas of Medieval Europe, London and New
York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 9-10.
734 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 309.

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the late 460s Sidonius had become increasingly aware of the dangers involved, and
hostile to Roman officials who still dealt with them; then in the 470s we see him
despairing of any further help for Clermont, and contemptuous of the Italian envoys
who sacrificed the Auvergne so as to keep Provence under Roman control. By around
480, as he put it, ‘now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away… the only
token of nobility… will henceforth be a knowledge of letters’; the official hierarchy
had gone, only traditional Roman culture remained…”735

In Provence, the archiepiscopate of Arles was a bastion of Roman traditions, and

for a time played the role of a metropolitan centre on a par with Rome. Thus St. Hilary,
Archbishop of Arles (430-449) became “de facto head of the whole of the Gallican
Church and presided over Episcopal councils in Riez (429), Orange (441) and Bezons
(442).” Again, St. Caesarius of Arles (503-542) “fully restored relations with Rome
[after the quarrel between St. Leo and St. Hilary over papal jurisdiction]” and from
514 was invested “with the title of papal vicar over Gaul and Spain. He also succeeded
in establishing regular collaboration with the Gothic kings Alaric II of Toulouse
(whose power would eventually be suppressed by the Franks) and, especially,
Theodoric (508-526).” These kings represented a potential threat to the survival of
Christian Roman Gaul insofar as they were Arian. But they were tolerant of
Orthodoxy…

At the Council of Agde (506) Caesarius “introduced a series of disciplinary reforms

in the spirit of Romanitas (Romanity), which confirmed the independence of bishops
from the local civil and juridical authorities, proclaimed the inalienability of church
property, introduced disciplinary rules for clergy (including celibacy for the
priesthood) and established sacramental obligations for laymen (regular communion,
conditions for marriage, etc.).”736

It is to Orthodox Provence that we owe one of the best definitions of the criteria of
Orthodoxy. St. Vincent of Lerins (c. 445) wrote: “I have often then inquired earnestly
and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what
sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic
faith from the falsehood of heretical depravity; and I have always, and in almost every
instance, received an answer to this effect: That whether I or any one else should wish
to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound
and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief
in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of
the Catholic Church.

“But here some one perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and
sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join
with it the authority of the Church's interpretation? For this reason — because, owing
to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one
understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable
of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one

735 Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 87.
736 Dvorkin, op. cit., pp. 354, 359.

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way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another,
Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another,
lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great
intricacies of such various errors, that the rule for the right understanding of the
prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of
Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.

“Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we
hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly
and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing
declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow
universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one
faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if
we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously
held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself
we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of
almost all priests and doctors.”737

Another threat was originally posed by the pagan Clovis, second king of the
Franks, who in 486 defeated the last representative of Roman power at the Battle of
Soissons. However, in 496 he was converted to Orthodoxy under the influence of his
wife, St. Clothilde, and St. Remigius, Bishop of Rheims. “The queen asked Saint
Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, to summon Clovis secretly, urging him to introduce the
king to the word of salvation. And the bishop sent for him secretly and began to urge
him to believe in the true God, maker of heaven and earth, and to cease worshipping
idols, which could help neither themselves nor any one else. But the king said: ‘I gladly
hear you, most holy father; but there remains one thing: the people who follow me
cannot endure to abandon their gods; but I shall go and speak to them according to
your words.’ He met with his followers, but before he could speak the power of God
anticipated him, and all the people cried out together: ‘O pious king, we reject our
mortal gods, and we are ready to follow the immortal God whom Remigius preaches.’
This was reported to the bishop, who greatly rejoiced, and bade them get ready the
baptismal font. The squares were shaded with tapestried canopies, the churches
adorned with white curtains, the baptistery set in order, the aroma of incense spread,
candles of fragrant odour burned brightly, and the whole shrine of the baptistery was
filled with a divine fragrance: and the Lord gave such grace to those who stood by
that they thought they were placed amid the odours of paradise. And the king was
the first to ask to be baptized by the bishop. Another Constantine advanced to the
baptismal font, to terminate the disease of ancient leprosy and wash away with fresh
water the foul spots that had long been borne. And when he entered to be baptized,
the saint of God began with ready speech: ‘Gently bend your neck, Sigamber; worship
what you burned; burn what you worshipped.’ The holy bishop Remigius was a man
of excellent wisdom and especially trained in rhetorical studies, and of such
surpassing holiness that he equalled the miracles of Sylvester. For there is extant a
book of his life which tells that he raised a dead man. And so the king confessed the
all-powerful God in the Trinity, and was baptized in the name of the Father, Son and

737 St Vincent, Commonitory 2:4-6.

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Holy Spirit, and was anointed with the holy ointment with the sign of the cross of
Christ. And of his army more than 3000 were baptized. His sister also, Albofled, was
baptized, who not long after passed to the Lord. And when the king was in mourning
for her, the holy Remigius sent a letter of consolation which began in this way: ‘The
reason of your mourning pains me, and pains me greatly, that Albofled your sister, of
good memory, has passed away. But I can give you this comfort, that her departure
from the world was such that she ought to be envied rather than mourned.’ Another
sister also was converted, Lanthechild by name, who had fallen into the heresy of the
Arians, and she confessed that the Son and the holy Spirit were equal to the Father,
and was anointed.”738

Clovis’ baptism, together with the stunning victories that he won over the Arian
kings, was a tremendous boost to Gallic Romanitas. St. Avitus, Bishop of Vienne,
congratulated him on his baptism in terms that showed that he regarded Clovis’
kingdom as part of the Christian Roman Empire: “Let Greece rejoice in having chosen
our princeps”.739 Again, St. Gregory of Tours wrote that he received letters “from the
Emperor Anastasius to confer the consulate on him. In Saint Martin’s church he stood
clad in a purple tunic and the military mantle, and he crowned himself with a diadem.
He then rode out on his horse and with his own hand showered gold and silver coins
among the people present all the way from the doorway of Saint Martin’s church to
Tours cathedral. From that day on he was called Consul or Augustus.”740

Actually, since the Emperor Anastasius was a heretic, Clovis was the only major
Orthodox ruler on the continent at this time. Moreover, he consciously stressed the
continuity of his rule with that of Rome. As Fr. Andrew Louth writes: “Like most of
the barbarian kingdoms that appeared in the Western Roman Empire, [the Frankish
realms] inherited something of the administrative structure of the Roman Empire, and
could claim to rule as representative, in some way, of the true Roman emperor, who
resided in New Rome, Constantinople. This understanding was fictional in several
respects: the Roman or Byzantine emperor had no choice over his Merovingian
representative in Gaul and, although taxes were still being collected, the dynamics of
political society in the West were changing in the direction of a society ruled by
military warlords, who gave protection to those who lived in their domains and
rewarded their followers with booty from fighting amongst themselves, and further
afield, and who accepted the overlordship of the Merovingian kings. The fiction was
nevertheless significant, not least in the way it articulated political legitimacy in terms
of the ideals of the Roman Empire.”741

Clovis defeated the Arian Visigothic King Alaric II at Vouillé in 507. Then in 511
the Franks’ allies against the Visigoths, the Burgundians, were converted from
Arianism to Orthodoxy. And although the Arian Theoderic profited from the

738 St. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks.
739 St. Avitus, Letter 4; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 118.
740 St. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, II, 38, p. 154. During the coronation of the Russian

Tsars, too, the bystanders were showered with gold and silver, symbolizing the betrothal of the Tsar
with the State. See Fr. Nikita Chakirov (ed.), Tsarskie Koronatsii na Rusi (Imperial Coronations in Rus’),
New York: Russian Orthodox Youth Committee, 1971, p. 22.
741 Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, pp. 67-68.

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Visigoths’ defeat to incorporate their kingdom into his, the revival of Orthodoxy
continued as the Franks took Aquitaine. Then, in 518, the Monophysite Emperor
Anastasius, died, and was succeeded by the Orthodox Justin I, whose overlordship
was welcomed by King Sigismund of Burgundy: “Our homeland is a part of your
world, nor does my royal administration in any way reduce your sovereignty”.742 In
526 the Ostrogothic King Theoderic died, and his kingdom lost its hold on the
Visigoths and Vandals, leaving the Franks as the most powerful force in the West. The
Emperor Justinian confirmed the Franks in their dominion over the whole land
beyond the Alps.743 The Gallo-Romans worked with their Frankish king to create the
Merovingian Orthodox kingdom, the most glorious period in the history of France.

“Established at Paris, Clovis governed this kingdom by virtue of an agreement

concluded with the bishops of Gaul, according to which [Gallo-Roman] natives and
[Frankish] barbarians were to be on terms of equality… All free men bore the title of
Frank, had the same political status, and were eligible to the same offices. Besides,
each individual observed the law of the people among whom he belonged; the Gallo-
Roman lived according to their code, the barbarian according to the Salian or
Ripuarian law; in other words, the law was personal, not territorial. If there were any
privileges they belonged to the Gallo-Romans, who, in the beginning were the only
ones on whom the episcopal dignity was conferred. The king governed the provinces
through his counts, and had a considerable voice in the selection of the clergy. The
drawing up of the Salian Law (Lex Salica), which seems to date from the early part of
the reign of Clovis, and the Council of Orléans, convoked by him and held in the last
year of his reign, prove that the legislative activity of this king was not eclipsed by his
military energy.”744

Our main source for Frankish history, The History of the Franks by St. Gregory of
Tours, confirms this account. As Wickham writes, St. Gregory, “although of an
aristocratic Roman family, seems hardly aware the empire has gone at all; his
founding hero was Clovis, and all his loyalties Frankish.”745 Nowhere does he dispute
the legitimacy of Frankish rule; and the rebellions that take place are of Franks against
Franks rather than Gallo-Romans against Franks. One exception to this rule was the
attempt of Bishop Egidius of Rheims to kill King Childebert (V, 19). But St. Gregory
shows no sympathy for the bishop, and records his trial and exile by his fellow-
bishops without criticism. St. Gregory himself was elected to the episcopate
completely freely, with no interference by the king.746

“The Frankish kings,” writes John Julius Norwich, “immediately distinguishable

from their subjects by their shoulder-length blondish hair – said to represent the sun’s
rays – journeyed endlessly from one village to the next with their officials and their
men-at-arms, carrying with them their huge triple-sealed coffers of treasure…
Violence was never far away. For an example we have to look no further than Clovis’s

742 Sigismund, in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2013, p. 278.
743 Gibbon, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 339.
744 “New Advent” Catholic encyclopaedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06238a.htm
745 Wickham, op. cit., p. 200.
746 Abbot Odo, The Life of St. Gregory of Tours, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose in Vita Patrum, Platina,

Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1988, p. 45.

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son Chilperic, whom… Gregory of Tours dubbed ‘the Nero and Herod of his time’
and who took as his second wife Galswintha, daughter of the Visigothic King of Spain.
The marriage was not a success, and one morning Galswintha was found strangled in
her bed. This seems to have been the work of a serving-maid called Fredegund, who
had long been the king’s mistress and whom he married a short time later. Now it
happened that Galswintha had a sister, Brunhilda, who was the wife of Chilperic’s
brother Sigebert. The murder caused a series of fearsome wars between the two
brothers, until in 575, just when he had Chilperic at his mercy, Sigebert was murdered
by Fredegund. Chilperic lived on for another nine years – during which he introduced
eye-gouging as a new sort of punishment – before being stabbed to death in 584 by an
unknown assailant, probably one of Brunhilda’s men, but he was posthumously
avenged when his son Clothar II seized Brunhilda and had her lashed to the tail of a
horse, which was then sent off at a gallop.”747

In about 630, King Dagobert I expanded the kingdom to include Alsace, the Vosges
and the Ardennes, and made Paris his capital. He founded the church of Saint-Denis,
and was the first king to be buried there.

As in neighbouring England, this was a golden age in the production of many saints
of both sexes. As an example, let us take St. Bathild, an Anglo-Saxon slave-girl, was
sold into the household of the mayor of the Frankish imperial palace, Erchinoald, in
the first half of the seventh century. Being beautiful in body and humble and obedient
in soul, she quickly won the favour of the prince, and was nearly always in his
presence, even bringing him drinks in his bedroom. She also served the older women
in the household, washing their feet, dressing them and helping them in every way.

When Erchinoald's wife died, he wanted to marry the beautiful English virgin. But
she hid herself from him, and Erchinoald eventually took a different woman to be his
wife. Then Divine Providence, which raises the poor from the dung-hill, arranged that
Bathild should attract the attention of the King of France, Clovis II, and in the year 649
they were married. From this marriage three sons were born: Clotaire III, Childeric II
and Thierry III.

St. Bathild proved to be an exemplary queen. Using her influence, with the king
her husband, and with the help of Abbot Genesius (later Bishop of Lyons), she gave
great alms to the poor and to the churches of God. After the death of King Clovis in
657, she became regent of the kingdom during the minority of her son Clotaire. She
founded the monasteries of Corbie and Chelles, gave generous alms to many others,
and urged hierarchs and abbots to enforce the keeping of the monastic rules. She
supported the work of Saints Ouen and Leger, put an end to the simoniac buying of
offices in the Church, suppressed the slave-trade of which she herself had been a
victim, and redeemed many slaves. Indeed, through her work France may be
considered the first nation to have eliminated the slave trade. In the political sphere,
the Austrasians (living in north-eastern France Belgium and western Germany) were
persuaded to accept her son Childeric as their king, which led to the union of the
Franks and the Burgundians.

747 Norwich, France, A History from Gaul to De Gaulle, London: John Murray, 2018, p. 8.

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 However, in 667 a plot hatched by Bishop Sigebrandus, which caused her sons to
entertain unjust suspicions of her temporarily, led to her retirement to the monastery
of Chelles, near Paris. There she remained in obedience to Abbess Berthille until her
death, performing all the humblest tasks and displaying all the virtues to perfection.
After having a vision of the Mother of God, she died in 680, and there were many
miracles at her tomb.748

Gaul was the great success story of Romanity in the West. It remained loyal to
Constantinople, preserving both the faith and the political forms of Romanity more
closely than any other continental nation. As Janet Nelson writes, “the Franks were
distinguished by their Orthodoxy and by their kings’ determination to destroy
heresy.”749 And, as David Starkey writes, under the rule of Clovis and his successors,
“most aspects of sub-Roman society – the architecture, language, literature, manners
and, above all, Roman Christianity – continued to flourish in the most successful
regime since the fall of the Western Empire”.750

Thus the 6th century Byzantine lawyer, scholar, poet, and historian Agathias
Scholasticus writes in his Histories: "The Franks have a common frontier with Italy.
They may reasonably be identified with the people who in ancient times were called
'Germans'… Their system of government, administration and laws are modelled more
or less on the Roman pattern, apart from which they uphold similar standards with
regard to contracts, marriage, and religious observance. They are in fact all Christians
and adhere to the strictest Orthodoxy. They also have magistrates in their cities and
priests and celebrate the feasts in the same way as we do, and, for a barbarian people,
strike me as extremely well-bred and civilized and as practically the same as ourselves
except for their uncouth style of dress and peculiar language. I admire them for their
other attributes and especially for the spirit of justice and harmony that prevails
amongst them. Although on many occasions in the past and even during my own
lifetime their kingdom has been divided between three or more rulers they have never
yet waged war against one another or seen fit to stain their country's honour by the
slaughter of their kith and kin. And yet whenever great powers are seen to have
reached a state of parity, arrogant and uncompromising attitudes are inevitably
engendered and the logical outcome is rivalry, the lust for domination and a host of
other passions that constitute a fertile breeding-ground for unrest and dissension.
Nevertheless nothing of the kind occurs in their case no matter how many different
kingdoms they are split up into. In the rare event of some dispute arising between
their kings they draw themselves up ostensibly in battle-formation and with the
apparent object of deciding the issue by force of arms and then confront one another.
But once the main body of the army on either side has come face to face they
immediately lay aside all animosity, return to mutual understanding and enjoin their
leaders to settle their differences by arbitration, or failing that by placing their own
lives at stake in single combat. For it is not right, they say, or in keeping with ancestral
precedent for the common good to suffer injury and upheaval on account of some

748 See her Life in M.G.H. Scriptores rerum merov., ii, 475-508.
749 Nelson, King and Emperor. A New Life of Charlemagne, London: Allen Press, 2019, p. 16.
750 Starkey, Crown & Country, London: Harper, 2011, pp. 28-29.

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personal feud of theirs. The immediate result is that they break their ranks and lay
down their arms. Peace and quiet are restored, normal communications resumed, and
the horrors of war are forgotten. So law-abiding therefore and public spirited are the
subject classes and so docile and amendable to reason, when need be, are the masters.
It is for this reason that the basis of their power remains secure and their government
stable and that they have not lost any of their territory but have actually increased it
greatly. When justice and amity are second nature to a people then their state is
guaranteed happiness and stability and rendered impregnable to enemy attack. So,
living this virtuous life, the Franks rule over their own people and their neighbours,
the succession passing from father to son."751

751However, Gibbon considered Agathias’ enthusiasm “partial”; it could not “be sufficiently justified
by their domestic annals [i.e those of Gregory of Tours]”(op. cit., p. 339).

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 48. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (4) VISIGOTHIC SPAIN

In the fourth century Spain had been an important part of the Roman Empire,
producing such great Christians as St. Osius, bishop of Cordoba, and the Emperor
Theodosius I. Its recovery from the hands of the Arian Visigoths was therefore an
important part of Justinian’s strategy of reuniting the Empire. By the 550s the Roman
armies had carved out a province in the south-east of Iberia called Spania.

Now it might have been expected that the Roman inhabitants of the peninsula, who
constituted perhaps 90% of the population, would have risen up in support of the
Byzantines against their foreign rulers. However, many of the Hispano-Romans fled
inland from Cartagena when the Byzantines invaded, including even the most notable
Spaniard of the age, St. Leander, archbishop of Seville. As a result of this loyalty of the
Roman Spaniards to the Visigothic regime, the restoration of Orthodoxy in Spain came
about, neither through the might of Byzantine arms from without, nor through the
rebellion of Hispano-Romans from within, but through the conversion of the
Visigoths themselves.

It began, writes Protopresbyter James Thornton, in 568, when “Leovigild became

King. He is regarded by historians as ‘the greatest king of Visigothic Spain, pursuing
by dint of wars on all sides the unification of the peninsula and the consolidation of
the tottering royal authority.’ He was indeed surrounded by adversities, external and
internal.

“’There were the Suevi in the north-west,… the Basques in the Cantabrian
mountains, and the petty Hispano-Roman princes of the west-centre. There were the
Byzantines in the south and the aggressive Franks in the north. Internally there were
the discontented subject Catholics and, as hostile as any, the rival Visigothic nobles.’
Nonetheless, Leovigild triumphed over his enemies, or at least held them at bay,
although his methods were ruthless: ‘executions and confiscations were his method
of strenthening the monarchy: it seemed ferocious even to the Franks.’ And all the
while the King held stubbornly, even fanatically, to the Arian creed.

“Saint Hermenegild, Leogivild’s eldest son, thus Crown Prince and heir, married a
Frankish princess, Ingundis, in 579. Pressured by the Royal Court to convert to
Arianism, Ingundis adamantly refused [even when subjected to torture by the Queen
Mother Goisuntha]. Sent by Leogivild to Seville [as ruler], the Crown Prince there
came under the influence of Saint Leander... The Holy Bishop assisted Princess
Ingundis in convincing the young Prince of the truth of Orthodox Christianity, to
which holy faith he converted [along with several thousand Goths]. The King
responded violently, Saint Hermenegild then joining in a revolt against his father’s
savage rule.”752

Now Arianism was the national religion of the Goths: every Goth was required to
be Arian, just as every Roman was encouraged to remain Orthodox. Intermarriage

Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and
752

Modern Greek Studies, 2013, pp. 215-216.

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between the two sub-nations was illegal – but this was not so much a matter of faith,
as of national identity. The Goths did not try to convert the Romans because that
would have meant a confusion of the races, and they discouraged conversion by
insisting on the rebaptism of converts from Orthodoxy. Already, however, some
confusion was taking place through the Goths’ adoption of Roman manners and dress.
If they adopted the faith of the Romans as well, what would distinguish them from
their subjects?

And so, writes Scott, “in the political situation of the kingdom the transference of
the allegiance of the heir apparent from the Arian to the Catholic confession involved
and proclaimed a withdrawal of his allegiance to the king. This ecclesiastical defection
was necessarily accompanied by a political rebellion.”753 Indeed, as David Keys
writes, “Hermenegild’s conversion was a massive challenge to the political system as
a whole.”754

Thornton continues: “Leogivild at first tried to conciliate his rebellious subjects by

offering peace and tolerance to the Orthodox, even assembling a local synod of Arian
and Orthodox Bishops in Toledo. However, when the Orthodox refused to
compromise, the King ‘resorted to fierce persecution – banishment, death, and
confiscation – without gaining many converts thereby.’”755

However, the rebellion of Hermenegild, though aided by the Orthodox Sueves in

the north-west (they converted from Arianism to Orthodoxy in the 550s), and the
Byzantines in the south-east, was crushed by King Leogivild, while the Byzantine
general was bribed to stay in camp.756

“In 585, King Leogivild captured Seville, which he had besieged for two years. His
son, Saint Hermenegild, surrendered and was imprisoned. When, during his
captivity, he was visited by an Arian Bishop, who sought to obtain his repudiation of
Orthodoxy and return to the King’s religion, the Saint refused. He likewise refused
Communion from the hands of an Arian Priest, reminding the Priest that the reception
of Communion signifies (among other things) oneness of Faith. Since he would not
assent to Arianism, he of course refused to Commune with an Arian heretic.

“For King Leogivild, his son’s refusal to return to Arianism was the final straw. He
ordered Saint Hermenegild’s immediate execution. The Saint went to his death on
April 13, 585…”757

753 C.A.A. Scott, Ulfilas, Apostle of the Goths, Cambridge, 1885, p. 199; quoted in E.A. Thompson, The
Goths in Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 65-66.
754 Keys, Catastrophe, London: Arrow Books, 2000, p. 204.
755 Thornton, op. cit., p. 216.
756 St. Gregory of Tours wrote that Hermenegild “joined the party of the Emperor Tiberius, making

overtures to the Emperor’s army commander, who was then invading Spain”, but that “as soon as
Leovigild ordered his troops to advance Hermenegild found himself deserted by the Greeks” (History
of the Franks, V, 38).
757 Thornton, op. cit., p. 217.

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 Hermenegild was immediately hailed as a martyr by Pope St. Gregory, the writer
of his Life, while St. Gregory of Tours treated the war between the king and his son as
religious in essence. Moreover, his brother Rekhared, who became king after the death
of Leogivild, “commanded that the body of his elder brother, Saint Hermenegild, be
given all the honors due a martyr of Christ”.758 However, the Spanish sources, both
Gothic and Roman, speak of him as a rebel rather than a martyr. And “it seems
evident,” writes Aloysius Ziegler, “that the Spanish Church did not espouse the cause
of the Catholic [i.e. Orthodox] prince against his Arian father”759

So it is clear that those within and outside the country attached different priorities
to the purity of the faith, on the one hand, and the integrity of the kingdom, on the
other. For the Franks and the Italians (and the Orthodox of other nations who
inscribed St. Hermenegild’s name among the saints), the triumph of Orthodoxy
justified even the horrors of civil war. But the Spaniards, who, as St. Gregory of Tours
wrote, “had adopted this detestable custom of killing with the sword any of their
kings who did not please them, and of appointing as king whomsoever their fancy
lighted upon”760, preferred the peaceful status quo.

And yet putting the faith first bore rich fruit; for within a very few years, at the
great Council of Toledo in 589, the new king, Recared and the whole of the Gothic
nobility accepted Orthodoxy “Revolts led by Arian bishops blazed forth, and in 603,
the usurper, Witteric, murdered King Liuva II (Recared’s son and successor) and
briefly restored Arianism to official favor. But this was the heresy’s last gasp. With
Witteric’s assassination in 610 Arianism disppeared as a force in Spanish political and
ecclesiastical life.”761 Thus, as St. Demetrius of Rostov writes, “the fruit of the death of
this one man was life and Orthodoxy for all the people of Spain”.762

The Church’s glorification of St. Hermenegild established the principle that

legitimate political power was either Roman power, or that power which shared in the faith of
the Romans, Orthodoxy. A heterodox power could legitimately be overthrown as long
as the motive was the establishment or re-establishment of Orthodoxy. This did not
mean, however, that Christians were obliged to rebel against pagan or heterodox
régimes; for civil war is one of the worst of all evils and is to be undertaken only in
the most exceptional circumstances…

Led by the Church, Spain now entered a period of revival. The two law-codes, one
for the Romans and the other for the Visigoths, were fused into one.763 There were
frequent councils in which the king and the bishops took part, and at which an
extensive programme of legislation was enacted. “Gothic law” was clearly related to
the imperial code of Theodosius II; and although the Byzantine province of Spania
was reconquered in 628, “it is fairly clear that the late seventh-century Visigoths had

758 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom
Press, 2001, vol. III: November, p. 17.
759 Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain, Washington, D.C., 1930, p. 30.
760 St. Gregory, History of the Franks, III, 30.
761 Thornton, op. cit., p. 217.
762 St. Demetrius, op. cit., p. 17.
763 See Siedentop, op. cit., pp. 138-139.

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the contemporary Byzantine empire as a point of reference…, at least as a model for
ceremonial, and for a close identification between the episcopacy and the king.”764

But the kingship completely dominated the episcopate in Visigothic Spain. As King
writes, “nothing lay outside the purview of the king. Far from there being an
autonomous body, ‘the church’, authority over which belonged to others, society and
the church were conceptually equated. It was precisely because fact did not
correspond to idea that such savage action was taken against the Jews, whose presence
within the territorial but beyond the ideological confines of the kingdom affronted the
Christian, unitary premisses of the Visigothic standpoint. The king’s authority over
clerics and religious matters, inherent in his God-given responsibility for the health of
society, was fully accepted by the sacerdotium itself. Kings nominated bishops, judged
metropolitans, summoned councils, established agenda and confirmed rulings. They
even provided excommunication as a legal penalty.”765

Joseph Canning writes: “The king legislated in ecclesiastical matters, nominated

bishops and even excommunicated. The role of the clergy was to formulate and teach
the norms of Christian society, and that of the king to enforce them: as Isidore said, it
was the role of the temporal ruler to accomplish ‘through the terror of discipline’ what
the priest has failed to bring about ‘through the preaching of doctrine’. Although the
monarch himself was subject to the norms set forth by the episcopacy this did not
result in any right of resistance or deposition on the part of the clergy.”766

At the same time, the influence of the bishops was great. In 633, for example, the
Fourth Council of Toledo condemned the Visigothic King Suinthila as unjust and
faithless, and declared that he had already deprived himself of the kingship. However,
the king had already been removed by a Frankish army, and the nobles had already
elected a new king, Sisenand, before the convening of this Council, so it was not the
clergy who deposed the king in this case.

The bishops then proceeded to condemn rebellions against kings with an

extraordinarily powerful anathema! Led by St. Isidore of Seville, they “begged that
there should be no usurpations in Spain, no attempts to stir up rebellion, no plots
against the lives of the monarchs. In future, when a king died, his successor must be
appointed by the magnates of the whole kingdom sitting along with the bishops in a
common council. Three times the bishops repeated their awful anathema against
anyone who should conspire to break his oath of allegiance, or make an attempt on
the king’s life, or try to usurp the throne. Three times the anathema was read out to
the concourse with profound solemnity, and three times the notaries copied it into the
minutes. All the clergy and laymen present shouted out their agreement. Then the
bishops called upon Sisenand and his successors for ever to rule moderately and
mildly, with justice and piety, over the peoples entrusted to them by God. Any
successor of Sisenand’s who ruled harshly or oppressively would be anathema. After

764 Wickham, op. cit., p. 136. This is confirmed by Heather: the kings “drenched themselves in a Roman
and Christian sacrality, which determinedly echoed that of the emperors in Constantinople” (op. cit.,
p. 214).
765 King, op. cit., p. 144.
766 Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London: Routledge, 1996,pp. 26-27.

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this impressive scene the bishops condemned and sentenced Suinthila and his
family…”767

The Visigothic kings insisted on bringing the Church right into the process of civil
legislation, allowing bishops to take part in the election of kings.

Thus “the decisions of the council,” writes Ziegler, “had the strange character of
being partly civil and partly ecclesiastical, with the important distinction, however,
that the ecclesiastical as well as the civil had the force of statute law for all living within
the kingdom… It cannot be denied that the presence of the bishops at these councils
had the result of placing the legal code of Visigothic Spain on a philosophical basis
and of resting it on principles which expressed to a very large degree the social
doctrines of the Christian religion. The enactment of laws by the synod did not have
the necessary result of making the Church an integral or essential part of the civic
administration, but it did introduce into the laws principles of morality and justice
which must ultimately have resulted in the greatest benefit to all the people of
Spain…”768

There were two major blots on the Spanish Church. The first was that in a series of
Councils between 589 and 769 the heresy of the Filioque was asserted, at the same time
as fidelity to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (which does not contain the
Filioque) – a contradiction that the Fathers of these Councils do not seem to have been
aware of. That is why Charlemagne’s counsellor Alcuin, when writing against the
Filioque to the brothers of Lyons, called it “Hispanici erroris sectam (the sect of the
Spanish error).”769

The second major blot on the Spanish Church was its persecution of the Jews. As
Paul Johnson writes, “Jewish communities had prospered here under the Roman
empire and to some extent under the Byzantine rule, but under the Visigoth kings a
church-state policy of systematic anti-Semitism was pursued. A succession of royal
ecclesiastical councils at Toledo, brushing aside orthodox Christian policy, either
decreed the forcible baptism of the Jews or forbade circumcision, Jewish rites and
observance of the Sabbath and festivals. Throughout the seventh century, Jews were
flogged, executed, had their property confiscated, were subjected to ruinous taxes,
forbidden to trade and, at times, dragged to the baptismal font. Many were obliged to
accept Christianity, but continued privately to observe the Jewish laws. Thus the
secret Jew, later called the marrano, emerged into history – the source of endless
anxiety for Spain, for Spanish Christianity, and for Spanish Judaism.

“Hence when the Moslems invaded Spain in 711, the Jews helped them to overrun
it, often garrisoning captured cities behind the advancing Arab armies…”770

767 E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, pp. 174, 175.
768 Ziegler, op. cit., p. 54.
769 Cyriaque Lampryllos, La Mystification Fatale (The Fatal Mystification), Lausanne: L’Age de l’Homme,

1987, part I, p. 28.

770 Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1995, p. 177.

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 By 715, writes Holland, “Arab armies had long since swept far beyond the limits of
the crumbled empires ruled from Ctesiphon and the New Rome. In the East, they had
advance into the one-time kingdom of the Hephthalites, passing not only the
abandoned red wall of Gurgan but an even mightier barrier, the river Oxus: a natural
barrier to immense and fast flowing that the Arabs would come to define the whole
vastness of Central Asia simply as ‘Transoxania’. Meanwhile, in the West, with
Carthage and the long coastal strip of North Africa already subdued, they had crossed
the sea in pursuit of fresh conquests. In 711, a tiny Arab raiding party had landed on
Gibraltar. Within the course of only a few months, this venturesome war band had
succeeded in defeating the Visigoths in battle, killing their king and seizing their
capital of Toledo, deep in the vitals of Spain. An achievement such as this, secured on
the outermost edge of the world, appeared so astounding to the Arabs as to verge on
the fantastical…’771

The Arabs were stopped only Charles Martel, leader of the Franks, at the Battle of
Tours in 732. As Douglas Murray writes, “Martel’s victory is recognized for having
prevented the spread of Islam throughout Europe. Had his Frankish armies not
succeeded no other power in Europe could have stopped the Muslim armies from
conquering the continent. When those armies had crossed into Europe in 711 one of
their leaders, Tariq bin-Zayad, famously ordered their boats to be burnt, saying, ‘We
have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves, or we perish.’
Martel ensured that they perished and that other than having gained a foothold in
southern Spain, Islam would never progress further into Europe. As Edward Gibbon
famously wrote a millenium later, were it not for the victory of the man who became
known as ‘The Hammer’: ‘Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be
taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised
people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed,’ As Gibbon went on,
‘From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one
man.’

“Today’s visitor to the basilica in which Martel’s tomb sits may well wonder
whether he did indeed succeed – or at least reflect that after he succeeded his
descendants failed. To wander the district of Saint Denis today is to see a district more
resembling North Africa than France…”772

771 Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2013, p. 434.
772 Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 109-110.

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 49. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (5) CELTIC BRITAIN AND
IRELAND

It was not only in the Mediterranean provinces of France, Spain and Italy that the
consciousness of Romanity survived and re-established itself around the Church. The
distant province of Britain had reason to be more committed to the new order of
Christian Rome than any other for the simple reason that the first Christian Emperor,
Constantine the Great, had been proclaimed emperor for the first time precisely in
Britain773, and had taken the title Britannicus Maximus, “the greatest of the Britons”, in
315. However, in spite of some impressive architectural remains at Bath, York,
Wroxeter and Hadrian’s Wall, signs of Romanization are fewer in Britain than on the
continent even after four centuries of Roman rule. Romans writings about Britain
exhibit a certain antipathy towards this province. And the Britons retained, with the
Jews, the reputation of being the least assimilated people in the Empire.774

Perhaps for that reason Britain became the platform for several rebellions against
the central authorities in the late Empire, and why Britain became, in later ages, a
most fertile breeding-ground for innovation in political theory and practice. Thus in
350 a British officer called Magnentius donned the purple and was acclaimed by the
army at Autun, only to be defeated the next year. Again, in 383 Magnus Clemens
Maximus, leader of the army in Britain, seized power in the West and killed the
Western Emperor Gratian. Now Maximus, unlike Magnentius, was an Orthodox
Christian, a champion of the Church and a fine defender of the Western frontier
against the Germans. Moreover, his usurpation of the empire did not automatically
debar him from the throne: many emperors before and after came to the throne by the
same means. Nevertheless, he is consistently portrayed in the sources as a tyrant; and
Sulpicius Severus wrote of him that he was a man “whose whole life would have been
praiseworthy if he could have refused the crown illegally thrust upon him by a
mutinous army”.775

St. Ambrose of Milan rejected Maximus and remained loyal to Gratian’s co-
emperor Valentinian II (in spite of the fact that his mother, Justina, was an Arian and
his resolute enemy). He travelled to Trier in the winter of 383-4 to meet Maximus, but
refused to give him communion, warning him that “he must do penance for shedding
the blood of one who was his master [the Western Emperor Gratian] and… an
innocent man.” Maximus refused, and in 388 he was defeated and executed by the
Eastern Emperor Theodosius.776 And so, according to Paulinus, Maximus “laid down
in fear, like a woman, the realm that he had wickedly usurped, thereby
acknowledging that he had been merely the administrator, not the sovereign
[imperator] of the state.”777

773 In York. The place under York Minster where this hugely important event took place has now been
excavated by archaeologists.
774 Michael Jones, The End of Roman Britain, Cornell University Press, 1998.
775 Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues, I (2, VI).
776 Norwich, op. cit., pp. 109-111.
777 Paulinus, Life of St. Ambrose, chapter 19, in the translation by E.R. Hoare.

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 The way in which Ambrose could reject the British usurper Maximus, although his
credentials were as good as many a pagan emperor, was a tribute to the way in which
Christian Rome had transformed political thought in the ancient world. In early Rome
a “tyrant” was a man who seized power by force; and in Republican Rome tyrants
were those who, like Julius Caesar, imposed one-man rule on the true and only lawful
sovereigns – Senatus PopulusQue Romanorum, the senate and people of Rome. During
the first three centuries of the empire, many generals seized power by force and the
senate and the people were forced to accept their legitimacy. However, this changed
with the coming of St. Constantine, who became the source and model of all legitimate
emperors. Constantine, of course, had seized the empire by force; but he had done so
against anti-Christian tyrants and was therefore seen to have been acting with the
blessing of God. Now legitimate rulers would have to prove that they were in the
image of Constantine, both in their Orthodoxy and in their legitimate succession from
Constantine and his successors.

In the years 406-410, the ever-rebellious Army of Britain attempted to place the
“tyrants” Marcus, Gratian and Constantine III on the throne of the Western Empire.
Thus Gratian was given “a purple robe, a crown and a body-guard, just like an
emperor,” according to Zosimus.778 In 410 the Roman legions left Britain and the
British found themselves outside the Empire. As Procopius wrote: “The Romans never
succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time on under tyrants.”779
St. Gildas the Wise, writing in the 540s, blamed his countrymen, saying that they had
“ungratefully rebelled” against “Roman kings”, and had failed in their “loyalty to the
Roman Empire”.780 It is difficult to argue with that judgement: the British began as
they continued to be thereafter - innovators, even revolutionaries, in political theory
and practice… The land formerly known as “the Roman island” became, from the
beginning of the fifth century, “a province fertile in tyrants” (St. Jerome) 781, reverting
to the rebelliousness it had displayed under Carausius and Allectus in the late third
century.782

And yet the British themselves distinguished between true kings and tyrants in
their own land. Thus St. Patrick, the British apostle of Ireland, who considered himself
a Roman citizen, called the Scottish chieftain Coroticus a “tyrant” because he did not
fear God or His priests; “for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom [regnum]” he
would face God’s judgement on “wicked kings” [regibus].783 Patrick’s use of the terms
“king” and “tyrant” is not clear; his definition of the word “tyrant” seems to be a
mixture between the old, secular meaning of “usurper” and the newer, more religious,
Ambrosian meaning of “unjust or immoral person in authority”.

St. Gildas makes the distinction between kings and tyrants still clearer. Among past
rulers in Britain, Diocletian, Maximus, Marcus, Gratian, Constantine, Constans and
Vortigern were all “tyrants”. On the other hand, there had been legitimate rulers, such

778 Zosimus, New History, 6.2.
779 Procopius, The Vandal War, 3.2.38.
780 St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 4.1, 5.1, 15.1.
781 Christopher Snyder, An Age of Tyrants, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, chapters 2, 8 and 9.
782 Kevin Butcher, “The First British Empire”, BBC History Magazine, June, 2016.
783 St. Patrick, Letter to Coroticus, 21, 19.

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as Ambrosius Aurelianus, “a modest man, who alone of the Roman nation had been
left alive in the confusion of this troubled period… He provoked the cruel conquerors
[the Anglo-Saxons] to battle, and by the goodness of our Lord got the victory”. His
parents even “wore the purple”.784

And then, at the turn of the century, came the famous King Arthur. He won twelve
victories over the Saxons, fighting with a cross or icon of the Virgin Mary on his back,
and halted the pagan advance westwards for at least a generation, until his death in
519. David Miles writes: “It is possible that Artos/Arthur – ‘The Bear’ in Celtic, was
the signum, or nickname, of Aurelianus himself. A bearskin cloak would have been a
distinguishing element of his uniform as a Roman general.” 785 John Morris has
identified Arthur with Owain, king of the Welsh kingdom of Powys, who ruled from
the Roman city of Wroxeter (Virocinium), the only Romano-British city surviving in
the early sixth century. In any case, Arthur of Britain, with Clovis of France, was the
first great king of the post-Roman West, and became the stuff of innumerable
medieval legends.786

In general, however, Gildas was withering about the kings: “Britain has kings
[reges], but they are tyrants [tyrannos]; she has judges, but they are wicked. They often
plunder and terrorize the innocent; they defend and protect the guilty and thieving;
they have many wives, whores and adulteresses; they constantly swear false oaths,
they make vows, but almost at once tell lies; they wage wars, civil and unjust; they
chase thieves energetically all over the country, but love and reward the thieves who
sit with them at table; they distribute alms profusely, but pile up an immense
mountain of crime for all to see; they take their seats as judges, but rarely seek out the
rules of right judgement; they despise the harmless and humble, but exalt to the stars,
as far as they can, their military companions, bloody, proud and murderous men,
adulterers and enemies of God… They hang around the altars swearing oaths, then
shortly afterwards scorn them as though they were filthy stones…”787

Thus by the sixth century it looks as if the problem of formal legitimacy had been
solved, at least in the eyes of the Britons themselves. The kings Gildas were talking
about were both Christian and “anointed” – they had that link, at any rate, with the
anointed kings of Israel and Christian Rome. 788 But they did not fulfill their vows;
they were a terror to good works, but not to the evil – and by that criterion they were
not true authorities (Romans 13.3), being linked by Gildas rather with the tyrants of
old.

784 St. Gildas On the Ruin of Britain, 25. Bede interprets this to mean that they were “of royal race”.
785 Miles, The Tribes of Britain, London: Phoenix, 2006, p. 162.
786 Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (King Arthur: The True Story, London: Arrow, 1993) have made

an excellent case for the historicity of King Arthur.

787 St. Gildas On the Ruin of Britain, 27.
788 There is intriguing evidence that the Britons remained in contact with Christian Rome. In about 540

the Emperor Justinian was sending subsidies to the kingdom of Gwynedd. However, after the great
plague of 547, links between Britain and the East appear to have been cut off. See Michelle Ziegler,
“Emperor Justinian and the British Kings, c. 540”, Heavenfield,
https://hefenfelth.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/emperor-justinian-and-the-british-kings-c-540.

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 So the break with Rome was still keenly felt. Celtic Britain had many great monks
and hierarchs, but very few great, or even powerful, kings. And by the middle of the
sixth century there was little to link the Britons with their Roman heritage - with the
important exception of the Church, a Roman institution that was now stronger than
ever. Thus Simon Young writes that “in the west… there are various Celtic successor
states but those too have left Rome far behind them. No surprise there. The west had,
after all, always been the least Romanised part of Britannia and it was the very fact
that they had primitive tribal societies instead of sophisticated urban ones that
allowed the Celtic kingdoms to come through the storm in one piece. They were better
able to fight off the barbarians. Indeed, the only Roman thing that survived there was
Christianity – that had been the official religion of the later empire – and, closely
connected to Christianity, Latin writing…”789

Fr. Gregory Telepneff notes that “early Celtic monasticism was Byzantine in
character, i.e., a manifestation of the Eastern Orthodox Faith. The cultural hegemony
of the Roman Empire, which extended beyond its political borders, decisively shaped
the spiritual environment of ancient Hibernia [Ireland].”790

However, Telepneff also provides evidence of the strong influence of the Egyptian
Coptic Church on the Celts of the British Isles. And William Dalrymple has pointed
out a very close resemblance between a seventh-century rock-carving from Perthshire
depicting Saints Anthony and Paul of Egypt with an icon in St. Anthony’s monastery
in Egypt791, and cites the words of the seventh-century Antiphonary of the Irish
monastery of Bangor:

The house full of delight

Is built on the rock
And indeed the true vine
Transplanted out of Egypt.

“Moreover,” he continues, “the Egyptian ancestry of the Celtic Church was

acknowledged by contemporaries: in a letter to Charlemagne, the English scholar-
monk Alcuin described the Celtic Culdees as ‘pueri egyptiaci’, the children of the
Egyptians. Whether this implied direct contact between Coptic Egypt and Celtic
Ireland and Scotland is a matter of scholarly debate. Common sense suggests that it is
unlikely, yet a growing body of scholars think that that is exactly what Alcuin meant.
For there are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between
the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other Western Churches. In
both, the bishops wore crowns rather than mitres and held T-shaped Tau crosses
rather than crooks or crosiers. In both the hand-bell played a very prominent place in
ritual, so much so that in early Irish sculpture clerics are distinguished from lay
persons by placing a clochette in their hand. The same device performs a similar
function on Coptic stelae – yet bells of any sort are quite unknown in the dominant

789 Young, “Apocalypse then circa 410”, BBC History Magazine, March, 2010, p. 48.
790 Telepneff, The Egyptian Desert in the Irish Bogs, Etna, Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies,

1998, p. 70.
791 Stone depictions of these two saints are also common in the Isle of Man.

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Greek or Latin Churches until the tenth century at the earliest. Stranger still, the Celtic
wheel cross, the most common symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown
to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth century,
three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland.”792

The most important of the Celtic Churches turned out to be the Irish Church. Now
Ireland was almost entirely a pagan land. As Holland writes: “That the island had
been won for Christ was a miracle in itself. Roman rule had never reached its
shores.”793 St. Celestine the Pope had sent a Bishop Palladius to Ireland, but his
mission had failed. Ireland’s conversion to Christ in the fifth century was the work
largely of one man, St. Patrick. The son of a deacon and grandson of a priest in Wales
or Scotland, Patrick was captured by Irish pirates in his youth. But he escaped to
France, where he became a monk and a bishop. Instead of returning to his homeland,
however, he felt a call to preach to the Irish who had enslaved him. His Epistle to
Coroticus and autobiographical Confession are the earliest works of British literature,
and breathe the spirit of humility and Apostolic Christianity. In an astonishingly short
time he succeeded in planting monasteries for men and women throughout the island.
And within a few decades of his death Ireland was producing her own native saints,
such as the famous Abbess Brigid of Kildare (+522), “the Mary of the Gael”.

The Irish Church had certain characteristics that distinguished it from traditional
monasticism.

First, the abbots appear to have been more important than the bishops, not in the
sacramental sense but in terms of influence within the Church. Thus the many saints
of the period were almost all abbots and abbesses, and there is hardly a mention of an
Irish bishop after the death of St. Patrick. (An exception to this rule is Bishop Conleth,
who lived in St. Brigid’s monastery in Kildare.)

A possible explanation of this fact is that many, if not all the abbots were also
bishops, which is why the writers of the lives of the holy abbots did not think it
necessary to mention their episcopate. Certainly, it seems likely that St. Columba, the
Irish Apostle of Scotland (+597) was exercising an episcopal ministry when he
ordained the first Orthodox king of Scotland, Aidan Mor… Hieromonk Gorazd
(Vopatrny) of Charles University, Prague, has suggested that “bishops had a classical
leadership role in the Irish Church until approximately the thirties of the 6th century.
With the spread of monasticism the whole system of ecclesiastical control was
affected. Jurisdiction was exercised not only by bishops whether they were also abbots

792 Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain, London: HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 418-419.
Most recently, a papyrus has been founded attached to the cover of an early Irish psalter, which is
the first tangible proof of links between the Irish and Coptic Churches (Philip Kosloski, “Irish Worker
Discovers Ancient Manuscript that Links Irish Church to Egypt”, November 30, 2016,
http://aleteia.org/2016/11/30/irish-worker-discovers-ancient-manuscript-that-links-irish-church-to-
egypt/?utm_campaign=english_page&utm_medium=aleteia_en&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=
1480489892).
793 Holland, Dominion, London: Abacus, 2019, p. 156.

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or not, but also by abbots who were only priests. About one half of the main abbots
were bishops and about a half were priests.”794

Perhaps because many bishops were also abbots, the Irish Church appears to have
been administered on tribal, rather than territorial lines, with abbots ruling extended
“monastic families”. Thus St. Columba, who was a member of the royal family of the
Northern Irish tribe of Ui Neill, appears to have been the leader of the Ui Neill monks
throughout the island.

Secondly, there was a great emphasis in Ireland on learning - Irish history, classical
literature, and Greek, Latin and Holy Scripture. St. Columbanus of Luxeuil (+615), is
even thought to have known Hebrew… Some of the monasteries had schools attached
to them with thousands of scholars, such as that of St. Finian, Abbot of Clonard (+552).
Once St. Columba visited St. Finian, and was allowed by him to copy onto vellum
(cow’s skin) Jerome’s translation of the Holy Scriptures, which differed from the Old
Latin translation then in use in Ireland. Unfortunately, this led to a dispute between
the two saints over who owned the new manuscript that ended in an Irish Synod
exiling St. Columba from Ireland…

The copying of the Holy Scriptures led to the development of the unique
illuminated art of the Celtic Churches. Several illuminated Gospels from this period,
such as the Lindisfarne Gospel and the Book of Kells, are still in existence. A close
study of these Gospels reveals a third peculiarity of the Irish Church – its close cultural
connection with the Coptic Church of Egypt. Thus the interlacing pattern of the
illuminations in Irish manuscripts, as well as the way in which men and animals are
drawn, and even the pigments used in drawing them, have been traced to Coptic
Egypt, as have the architecture of Irish churches and the “beehive” construction of
Irish monastic cells.

Scholars have detected both Greek and Coptic influences on the language and
liturgical practices of the Irish. Thus the Great Doxology in Mattins in the Irish Church
followed the Greek practice exactly, and Greek words such as “Synaxis” and
“Archimandrite” were in common use. However, the Irish word for a deserted place
suitable for hesychasm, usually an uninhabited island, is disert, a Coptic term
translated as desert in modern English.

A third characteristic of the Irish Church was its zeal for missionary work. Now the
Irish distinguished between three kinds of monasticism: green, red and white. Green
monasticism was conventional asceticism, fasting and prayer. Red monasticism was
martyrdom for Christ’s sake. White monasticism was exile from one’s native land for
Christ’s sake and for the sake of the unbaptized pagans.

St. Columba was the first to undertake white monasticism, albeit involuntarily. He
and twelve monks settled on the Scottish island of Iona and proceeded to evangelize

794 Hieromonk Gorazd, private communication; John Ryan, Irish Monasticism.

399
the whole of North-Western Scotland.795 After him, St. Columbanus travelled from
Bangor in Ireland to France, Switzerland and Italy. Several of the monasteries founded
by him and his disciples are still in existence, such as St. Gall in Switzerland and
Bobbio in Italy. According to the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, “Over the sixth
and seventh centuries Ireland ‘exported’ about 115 holy men to Germany, forty-five
to France, forty-four to England, thirty-six to the territory of what is now Belgium,
twenty-five to Scotland, and thirteen to Italy.”796

We also know that there were Irish priests at one time in Iceland, and the ninth-
century Life of St. Brendan the Navigator suggests that he crossed the Atlantic many
centuries before Columbus. And indeed, archaeologists have claimed to find Celtic
inscriptions as far afield as Valaam in Russia, West Virginia and Newfoundland. Thus
the Irish monks were the first globalists in Christian history. They were at the same
time the most isolated and the most “Catholic”, in the sense of “universalist”, of
Christians…

But the greatest achievement of Irish mission was probably the re-evangelization
of Southern Scotland and Northern England, which had been conquered by the pagan
Angles and Saxons. A mission led by St. Aidan, the first bishop of Lindisfarne (+635),
set out from Iona and converted the North English kingdoms of Northumbria and
Deira. The whole region became culturally a province of the Scottish-Irish Church,

795 According to St. Adomnan’s Life of Columba (seventh century), they encountered the Loch Ness
monster on the way. St. Columba’s mission linked up with that of his friend St. Kentigern, bishop of
Glasgow, whose influence was felt as far as the Lake District in North-West England.
796 Le Goff, in Archpriest Vladislav Tsypin, “Irish Monasticism and the Paschal Controversy”, Orthodox

Christianity, March 30, 2018, http://orthochristian.com/111809.html.

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 50. THE WESTERN KINGDOMS: (6) ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

While the Celts were preserving the faith in the north and the west of the British
Isles, the south and east, the heart of the old Roman province of Britain, had been
overrun by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. By the end of the sixth century, Old Rome,
restored to ecclesiastical and political unity with New Rome, was recovering its power
and influence in the West. The crucial figure in this revival was Pope Gregory I – “the
Great”, as he is known in the West, “the Dialogist”, as he is known in the East. As well
as restoring the power and influence of the papacy throughout continental Western
Europe, he determined on recovering Britain, “the Roman island”, where the heirs of
Christian Rome had been exiled to the West or absorbed into the pagan Anglo-Saxon
settlements that dominated most of the island.797 In 597 he sent a band of 40 Roman
monks led by St. Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury, to England with the
specific task of restoring Roman-ness, Romanitas to what had been, and now definitely
was not, “the Roman island”.

In 597 St. Gregory sent a band of forty Roman monks, led, as we have seen, by St.
Augustine of Canterbury, to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons. The Roman
missionaries tried hard to reconstruct the few bridges that connected the land with its
Romano-British past, heading straight for the former Roman centres such as
Canterbury and York, London and Dorchester. Thus three churches in Kent were built
over late Roman mausoleums; the memory of the first British martyr Alban was
faithfully kept at Verulamium; and the first wooden church in York was built in the
middle of the vast Roman praetorium where St. Constantine had been hailed as
emperor in 306.798

Place-names in “eccles-“, coming from the Brittonic *ecles, “a church” (ultimately

from the Greek ecclesia), in some parts of Southern Scotland, the Midlands and East
Anglia probably indicate the continuity of church life there from Romano-British into
Anglo-Saxon times.799 In general, however, the missionaries found a virtual cultural
tabula rasa amid pagans who knew next to nothing about Rome.800 This makes the
enthusiastic embrace by the English of Romanitas, both in its religious and political
aspects, the more remarkable. Thus by the 680s the last English kingdom, Sussex, had
been converted to the faith. Thereafter references to paganism in the sources are
remarkably few.801

The enthusiasm of the English for Christianity may be explained by the fact that,
unlike the other Germanic tribes who, for generations before accepting the faith, had
been settled within the boundaries of the Empire, they were newcomers whose
conversion to Romanitas, the world of Roman Christendom, was the stronger in that it

797 Trefor Jones, The English Saints: East Anglia, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1999, pp. 13-21.
798 Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 8.
799 John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 70-71, 29-30.
800 “Augustine of Canterbury began his mission with an almost clean slate” (Blair, op. cit., p. 25).

Nevertheless, many Byzantine finds have been found by archaeologists in Anglo-Saxon England. See
Dr. Caitlin Green, “A Very Long Way from Home: Early Byzantine Finds at the Far Ends of the World”,
http://www.caitlingreen.org/2017/03/a-very-long-way-from-home.html?m=1, March 21, 2017.
801 Blair, op. cit., p. 168.

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was fresher, less hindered by historical hatreds. They had been called by God from
darkness into light by Pope Gregory and his disciples; and their gratitude to St.
Gregory, “the Apostle of the English”, was boundless. As we read in the earliest work
of English hagiography, a monk of Whitby’s Life of St. Gregory: “When all the apostles,
leading their Churches with them, and each of the teachers of separate races, present
them to the Lord on Judgement Day in accord with Gregory’s opinion, we believe he
will wondrously lead us, that is, the English nation, taught by him through the grace
of God, to the Lord.”802

From that time English men and women of all classes and conditions poured across
the Channel in a well-beaten path to the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome
(to whom almost all the English cathedrals were dedicated).803 English missionaries
such as St. Boniface of Germany and St. Willibrord of Holland worked as the legates
of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax known as “Peter’s Pence” was paid by the
English to the Roman see even during the Viking invasions, when it was the English
themselves who were in need of alms.

Of all the pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England in the sixth century, the one
most ready to accept the Christian Faith was undoubtedly that of Kent. Being nearest
to the continent, it already had considerable knowledge of, and intercourse with,
Frankish Christian civilization. Moreover, King Aethelbert was married to a Frankish
Christian princess, Bertha, who had brought with her a Frankish bishop, Liutprand.
So it was not with hostility that King Aethelbert received Augustine and his monks;
he gave them food, shelter, the freedom to preach and baptize, and a Romano-British
church dedicated to the Gallic St. Martin within the walls of his capital, Canterbury.
Soon the holy life of the Roman monks began to bear fruit. And the many miracles
they performed brought the king, too, to repentance and Holy Baptism, which took
place on the Feast of Pentecost, June 9, 597.804

The Roman monks were not simply renewing what had already been a most
important element in British history – the relationship with Rome: they were also
rekindling those elements of Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Christian
Autocracy which, while never completely destroyed by the Anglo-Saxon invasions,
were nevertheless in danger of being destroyed, at any rate in the east of the island.
They made “the Roman island” Roman again – if not part of the Roman Empire, at
least part of Romanitas. And while Britain always remained “different” because of its
long separation from the Roman Empire, it returned to its Roman roots with joy and
gratitude.

802 C.W. Jones, Saints’ Lives and Chronicles in Early England, Cornell, 1947.
803 A whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono” because of the large number of English
pilgrims it accommodated. Peter Llewellyn, (Rome in the Dark Ages, London: Constable, 1996, p. 254)
writes that, during the pontificate of Pope Pascal (early ninth century) “the English colony of the Borgo,
near St. Peter’s, which followed its native custom of building in wood, lost its houses in a disastrous
fire, the first of many to sweep the crowded quarter around the basilica. Pascal, roused at midnight,
hurried barefoot to the scene and supervised the fire-fighting operations himself; ever solicitous of
pilgrims, he granted the Saxon community estates and money for rebuilding, with woods for a supply
of timber.”
804 On the very same day, in the north-western Scottish island of Iona, Columba, perhaps the greatest

of the Celtic saints, died.

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 On November 16, 597, Augustine was consecrated to the episcopate in France by
Archbishop Virgilius of Arles and other French bishops with the blessing of Pope
Gregory, although another source indicates that he was probably consecrated by
bishops in the ecclesiastical provinces of Trier and Rheims. Then he returned to
Canterbury, where he was received with great joy by the king, who promptly gave
him his palace as a monastery and archiepiscopal residence. That Christmas more
than 10,000 Englishmen received Holy Baptism.

On receiving the news, St. Gregory wrote to St. Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria:
"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of goodwill, because a grain
of wheat, falling into the earth, has died that it might not reign in heaven alone - even
He by Whose death we live, by Whose weakness we are made strong, through Whose
love we seek in Britain for brethren whom we know not, by Whose gift we find them
whom without knowing we sought."

Augustine now cleansed the pagan temple in which the king had celebrated his
idolatrous rites, and rededicated it in the name of the holy Martyr Pancras. During the
first Liturgy there, the building was violently shaken as if by an earthquake, as the
devil struggled against his expulsion. The ground next to the church became the site
of the Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul. It was consecrated on Christmas Day, 605,
and from 611 it acquired stavropegial status as "the first-born and chief mother of
monasteries in England". From the time of St. Dunstan, who dedicated it anew in the
second half of the tenth century, it became known as St. Augustine's.

In 599 Augustine sent messengers to Rome to seek the answers to certain pastoral
questions from St. Gregory. These messengers were St. Laurence, later Augustine's
successor as archbishop, and St. Peter, first abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and
Paul. They came back in 601 with the answers to the questions and several more
missionaries, including Saints Mellitus, Justus and Paulinus.

David Starkey writes that “one of the first things Aethelbert did after his conversion
was to issue a Law Code, like Justinian and other Christian Roman emperors. But,
though the form is Roman, the content of the Code is wholly Anglo-Saxon and merely
sets down in writing the existing law of the folk in their own language, with the
necessary adaptations to their new Christian status. Indeed, the Code may be the first
document written in English and the story goes that Augustine himself had to devise
additional new letters of the alphabet in order to write Anglo-Saxon down. And it is
revered: at the top of the document, written in red, it reads: ‘These are the dooms
[judgements] that King Aethelbert fixed in Augustine’s days.’”805

Augustine made successful missionary journeys to Dorset and to Yorkshire, and

also made contact with the British bishops of Wales. On his return from the West, he
baptized King Sebert of Essex and consecrated St. Mellitus as bishop of Sebert's
capital, London. In the same year he consecrated St. Justus as bishop of Rochester.
Then just before his death he consecrated St. Laurence as his successor at Canterbury.

805 Starkey, op. cit., p. 32.

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These consecrations by a single bishop were blessed by St. Gregory as an exception to
the apostolic rule that bishops should be consecrated by no less than two bishops,
because of the fact that there were no other canonical bishops in Britain.

Having consolidated the Church in Kent, Augustine set off to bring the Gospel to
other parts of England. He was a very tall and strong man, and the miraculous signs
that accompanied him were similarly great. Thus near York he healed a beggar who
had been suffering from blindness and paralysis; he baptized vast numbers of people
in the River Swale in Yorkshire; and on leaving York he healed a leper.

From Yorkshire Augustine headed for Wales, in order to meet the British bishops
whose fathers had fled to there to escape the invasions of the pagan Anglo-Saxons.
Augustine had been given authority over the British bishops by St. Gregory; but the
task of uniting with the British did not prove to be easy. The first obstacle was that the
British, having suffered much from the Anglo-Saxons, were not willing to join with
Augustine in trying to convert them to the Faith. The second obstacle was that as a
result of their isolation from the Church on the continent, the British Church had
slipped into practices which were at variance with the apostolic traditions.

One of these was that they sometimes allowed Pascha to be celebrated on the 14th
day of Nisan, whereas the Council of Nicaea had decreed that it should never be
celebrated before the 15th. Another was that they performed the sacrament of Baptism
in an irregular (but unknown) manner. Augustine stipulated three conditions for
union: that the British should correct these two irregularities; and that they should
cooperate with him in converting the Saxons. However, the British refused to concede
any of these points. In particular, they refused to help in converting the Saxons, whom
Gildas had called “hateful to God and man”.

At length, Augustine suggested that they pray to God to reveal His will in the
following manner: "Let a sick person be brought near, and by whosoever's prayers he
will be healed, let the faith and works of that one be judged devout before God and
an example for men to follow." The British reluctantly agreed, and a blind Saxon was
brought before them. The British clergy tried, but failed to heal him. But through
Augustine's prayers he received recovery of his sight. The British were impressed, but
pleaded for time in which to discuss these questions with their elders before coming
to a decision.

Augustine travelled to his second meeting with the British accompanied by Saints
Mellitus and Justus. The British were represented by seven bishops and Abbot Dinoth
of the great monastery of Bangor, which had well over a thousand monks. Before the
meeting they had approached a hermit and asked him how they should answer
Augustine. He said that if Augustine rose when they entered, this showed that he was
humble and should be obeyed. If he did not rise, then they should not accede to him.
Therefore when Augustine did not rise at their entrance, the British became angry and
refused both to accept his stipulations and to acknowledge him as their archbishop.

As the meeting broke up, St. Augustine prophesied that since the British had
refused to cooperate in the conversion of the pagan English they would themselves be

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put to sword by the same English - a prophecy which was fulfilled a few years later
when the pagan King Aethelfrid of Northumbria defeated the British in battle at
Chester and killed 1200 of the monks of Bangor.

Now that the Welsh had refused to cooperate in converting the pagan Anglo-
Saxons, the mission field was left, on the one hand, to the Romans, who came from
the south and east and concentrated on the old Roman towns, and on the other hand,
to the Irish, who came from the north and west and concentrated on the country
districts. For the Irish did not have the Britons’ hatred of the English, and some had
been converted to the Roman-Byzantine Paschalion. One of those was the Holy Abbot
Cummian (+662), who in 634 wrote to the Abbot of a Scottish monastery with
considerable irony: “Rome is mistaken; Jerusalem is mistaken; Antioch is mistaken;
the whole world is mistaken; the British and Irish alone hold the truth!”

Hieromonk Enoch writes: “This is very similar to the language of St. Vincent of
Lerins in the Commonitory which appeals to all the ancient Apostolic Sees and tradition
of the consensus of the Fathers on these questions. St. Cummian does a number of
things. 1. He appeals to multiple Apostolic Sees and a universal tradition to determine
a disputed question. 2. Although St. Patrick had left instructions that, if an Irish Synod
could come to no conclusion on some disputed point, the matter was to be taken to
the See of Old Rome, we note that, this was not interpreted simply in the sense of
dictatorial fiat. It seems more to have been an issue of 'last resort'. 3. Even after the
letter from Old Rome in the 620s encouraging the acceptances of the Alexandrian
Paschal cycle, the Irish still held a Synod to discuss the issue. If it had simply all been
about the fiat of Rome, what was the point in holding a Synod? What's the point about
discussing it at the Synod with a debate? And, why didn't the Southern Irish
episcopate sever communion with the Irish in the North and Scotland, for supposedly
'disobeying' the Pope?”

The Roman and Irish missionaries met in the northern English kingdom of
Northumbria, which had been under the jurisdiction of the Scottish-Irish Church since
the days of St. Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne and his spiritual son, the Northumbrian
Martyr-King Oswald (+642). But here a problem arose; for King Oswy of Northumbria
had been baptised in the Irish Church, following the Celtic calendar, whereas his
queen had been baptised in the Roman Church, following the Roman calendar.
Displeased that he and his wife were feasting and fasting at different times, the king
convened a council of bishops in 664 from both the Roman and Irish traditions in the
monastery of Whitby. As a result of this council, it was decided that all the Christians
in the kingdom should follow the Roman calendar. A few years later, the Church of
England, led by her Greek archbishop, St. Theodore (+691), decreed that all Christians
who followed the Celtic calendar were schismatics.

The Synod of Whitby united the Celtic and Roman traditions in the British Isles. Its
decision on the calendar was accepted even by most of those Christians who had been
brought up in the Celtic traditions. Thus St. Chad, Bishop of Lichfield (+672),
consented to have his consecration corrected by St. Theodore, and St. Cuthbert, Bishop
of Lindisfarne (+687), whose body was completely incorrupt until the Protestant
Reformation, told his monks as he was dying: “Have no communion with those who

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err from the Catholic Faith, either by keeping Pascha at the wrong time, or by their
perverse life. And know and remember: if of the two evils you are compelled to choose
one, I would rather that you take up my bones, and leave these places, to live wherever
God may send you, than agree in any way with the wickedness of schismatics, and so
place a yoke upon your necks.”806

However, the Synod was rejected by the Welsh, who went into schism for a
century.807 Both the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Churches regarded them as schismatics.
As an Irish canon put it, “the Britons [of Wales] are… contrary to all men, separating
themselves both from the Roman way of life and the unity of the Church”.808

Again, St. Aldhelm of Sherborne, wrote about them: “Glorifying in the private
purity of their own way of life, they detest our communion to such a great extent that
they disdain equally to celebrate the Divine offices in church with us and to take
course of food at table for the sake of charity. Rather,.. they order the vessels and
flagons [used in common with clergy of the Roman Church] to be purified and purged
with grains of sandy gravel, or with the dusky cinders of ash.. Should any of us, I
mean Catholics, go to them for the purpose of habitation, they do not deign to admit
us to the company of their brotherhood until we have been compelled to spend the
space of forty days in penance… As Christ truly said: ‘Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees; because you make clean the outside of the cup and of the dish’.”809

As the English were absorbed into Christian Rome by the Roman missionaries, the
symbolism of Romanitas reappeared in the English land. Thus St. Gregory compared
the newly enlightened King Ethelbert of Kent to St. Constantine and Queen Bertha to
St. Helena, and according to Fr. Andrew Phillips they “had, it would seem, actually
emulated Constantine. Having made Canterbury over to the Church, they had moved
to Reculver, there to build a new palace. Reculver was their New Rome just as pagan
Byzantium had become the Christian city of New Rome, Constantinople.
Nevertheless, King Ethelbert had retained, symbolically, a royal mint in his ‘Old
Rome’ – symbolically, because it was his treasury, both spiritually and physically. The
coins he minted carried a design of Romulus and Remus and the wolf on the Capitol.
Ethelbert had entered Romanitas, becoming one of those numerous kings who owed
allegiance, albeit formal, to the Emperor in New Rome…”810

806 Through the efforts of St. Adomnan and St. Egbert, the great Scottish monastery of Iona eventually
accepted the Byzantine Paschalion in 716.
807 The Welsh Church remained in schism until Bishop Elbod of Bangor restored the northern Welsh to

unity in 768 (the southerners followed in 777). Iona was brought into line early in the eighth century
through the efforts of the holy Abbots Egbert and Adomnan. But the problem must have lingered on
for a while. For it is recorded that a Welsh delegation visited St. Methodius, patriarch of Constantinople
(+847) in order to discuss the calendar question…
808 Quoted in A.W. Haddan & W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain

and Ireland, Oxford: Clarendon, 1869, 1964, volume I, p. 122.

809 Aldhelm: The Prose Works, translated by Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren, Ipswich: Brewer, 1979,

p. 158. The Latin text is in Haddan & Stubbs, op. cit., pp. 202-203.
810 Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996, p. 15.

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 The Romanization of England was greatly aided by the appointment, in 668, of a
Greek from Tarsus, St. Theodore, as archbishop of Canterbury. He created a single
Church organization and body of canonical law, and convened Councils that formally
recognised the Ecumenical Councils and rejected the heresy of Monothelitism.
Bishops like SS. Wilfrid, Egwin and Aldhelm strengthened the links with Rome by
frequent trips there, and abbots like SS. Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid imported books,
icons and even the chief chanter of the Roman Church to make sure that even in the
furthest recesses of the north things were done as the Romans did them.

In Church-State relations, too, the English followed the Roman-Byzantine model.

Thus King Ethelbert and Archbishop Augustine (in Kent), King Oswald and Bishop
Aidan (in Northumbria), and King Cynegils and Bishop Birinus (in Wessex) enjoyed
“symphonic” relations.

A striking example of such “symphony” was to be found in eighth-century

Northumbria, where Archbishop Egbert ruled the Church while his brother Edbert
ruled the State:

So then Northumbria was prosperous,

When king and pontiff ruled in harmony,
One in the Church and one in government;
One wore the pall the Pope conferred on him,
And one the crown his fathers wore of old.
One brave and forceful, one devout and kind,
They kept their power in brotherly accord,
Each happy in the other’s sure accord.811

The acceptance of the symphonic pattern of Church-State relations in England may

well have been aided by the fact that sacral kingship was a traditional institution
among the Germanic tribes even before their conversion to Christianity. With the
coming of Christianity, writes Chaney, there was “a separation of royal functions, the
sacrificial-priestly role of the Germanic tribal monarch going to the Church hierarchy
and that of sacral protector remaining with the king. This separation of power
manifested itself not in the obliteration of the religious nature of kingship but in the
establishment of a sphere of action by and for the ecclesia apart… from that of the
regnum.”812

According to the liberal French Prime Minister François Guizot, this separation of
powers was the source and guarantor of one of the most fundamental principles of
Christian, and especially English Christian civilization, liberty of conscience. “The
separation of temporal and spiritual power is based upon the idea that physical force
has neither right nor influence over souls, over conviction, over truth. It flows from

811 Alcuin, On the Saints of the Church of York, 11.1250-283; in Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, York: Sessions
Book Trust, 1974
812 Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester University Press, 1970, p. 259.

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the distinction established between the world of thought and the world of action,
between the world of internal and that of external facts…”813

The English Church retained close links with Rome, and Canterbury never made
claims for autonomy in the manner of Arles or Ravenna. Nevertheless, the English
Church remained de facto independent of Rome administratively. Between 669 and
1050, according to Dvorkin, there were 376 episcopal ordinations in England, and not
one of them required papal intervention…814

813 Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin, 1997, p. 42.
814 Dvorkin, op. cit., p. 477. However, papal legates presided at the Council of Chelsea in 786.

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 51. THE WEST AND THE SACRAMENT OF ROYAL ANOINTING

The rite of royal anointing appears to have originated in the West, although it is
not certain where. According to one tradition, Clovis, first Christian king of the
Franks, received the sacrament (if it was not in fact the initiatory rite of chrismation)
in a miraculous fashion after his baptism by St. Remigius, Archbishop of Rheims, on
Christmas Day, 496: “When the moment came for anointing the newly-baptized King
with holy Chrism, the Bishop saw that it was lacking. Raising his eyes to Heaven, he
implored God to provide it, whereupon a white dove came down from Heaven with
a vial of miraculous oil.”815

Early in the sixth century the Italian archbishop Gregory anointed the first
Christian King of the South Arabian kingdom of Omir (or Himyar), Abraham, in the
presence of St. Elesbaan, king of Ethiopia: “Raising his eyes and mind and hands to
heaven, he prayed fervently and for a long time that God, Who knows the life and
thoughts of every man, should indicate to him the man who was worthy of the
kingdom. During the prayer of the archbishop, the invisible power of the Lord
suddenly raised a certain man by the name of Abraham into the air and placed him in
front of King Elesbaan. Everyone cried out in awe for a long time: ‘Lord, have mercy!’
The archbishop said: ‘Here is the man whom you demanded should be anointed to
the kingdom. Leave him here as king, we shall be of one mind with him, and God will
help us in everything.’ Great joy filled everyone on beholding the providence of God.
Then King Elesbaan took the man Abraham, who had been revealed by God, led him
to the temple of the All-Holy Trinity which was in the royal city of Afar, put the royal
purple on him and laid the diadem on his head. Then St. Gregory anointed him and
the bloodless Sacrifice was offered for the kings and all the people, and both kings
communicated in the Divine Mysteries from the hands of the archbishop…”816

It may be that royal anointing originated in Britain; for St. Gildas, referring to
events taking place in the fifth century, wrote: “Kings were anointed [Ungebantur] not
in God’s name, but as being crueller than the rest; before long, they would be killed,

815 The Synaxarion, Convent of the Annunciation of our Lady of Ormylia (Chalkidike), 1998, volume I,
October 1, p. 254. Harold Nicolson, tells the story as it was recounted some 300 years later: “On that
occasion there was such a crowd in church that the priest who arrived with the holy oil with which the
king was to be anointed was unable to push through the throng. The bishop, having no oil available,
paused; a state of embarrassed tension descended on the king and the congregation. At that moment a
dove fluttered into the cathedral bearing in its beak a lekythion or phial of scented oil brought straight
from heaven. It was with this sacred oil that Clovis was anointed and the lekythion was thereafter
preserved in a reliquary shaped like a dove. This precious relic, known as la sainte Ampoule, was
jealously preserved by succeeding Archbishops of Rheims, who insisted that no French monarch could
claim to have been properly anointed unless the ceremony were performed at Rheims and the oil of the
sainte Ampoule (which had the magic property of renewing itself at every coronation) poured over his
head and hands. Even Joan of Arc refused to recognise Charles VII as King of France and always
addressed him as Dauphin until he had been anointed at Rheims.” (Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1962, p. 23)
816 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs: Chrysostom

Press, 2000, vol. IV: December, pp. 364-392.

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with no enquiry into the truth, by those who had anointed them, and others still
crueller were chosen to replace them.”817

Not long after this, in 574, the Irish apostle of Scotland, St. Columba, consecrated
the first Orthodox King of Scotland, Aidan Mor, who was to become the ancestor of
all the Celtic kings of Scotland and, through James VI of Scotland and I of England, of
the present British royal family. 818 The seventh-century Abbots of Iona Cummineus
Albus and Adomnan both relate how, when the saint was staying “in the island of
Hymba [probably Jura], he was in an ecstasy of mind one night and saw an Angel of
the Lord who had been sent to him, and who held in his hand a glass book of the
Ordination of Kings. The venerable man received it from the Angel’s hand, and at his
command began to read it. And when he refused to ordain Aidan as king according
to the direction given to him in the book, because he loved his brother Iogenan more,
the Angel, suddenly stretching out his hand, struck the saint with a scourge, of which
the livid mark remained on his side all the days of his life, and he added these words,
saying: ‘Know thou for certain that I am sent to thee by God with this glass book, that
according to the words which thou hast read in it, thou mayest ordain Aidan to the
kingship – and if thou art not willing to obey this command, I shall strike thee again.’
When, then, this Angel of the Lord had appeared on three successive nights, having
in his hand that same glass book, and had pressed the same commands of the Lord
concerning the ordination of that king, the saint obeyed the Word of the Lord, and
sailed across to the isle of Iona where, as he had been commanded, he ordained Aidan
as king, Aidan having arrived there at the same time.”819

St. Columba then went with King Aidan to the Synod of Drumceatt in Ireland,
where the independence of Dalriada (that part of Western Scotland colonised by the
Irish) was agreed upon in exchange for a pledge of assistance to the mother country
in the event of invasion from abroad.

It is significant that these early examples of Christian kingmaking come from parts
of the world remote from the centres of Imperial power. Neither Ethiopia nor Scotland
had ever been part of the Roman Empire while Britain had fallen away from it.
Perhaps it was precisely here, where Romanitas was weakest or non-existent, that the
Church had to step in to supply political legitimacy through the sacrament, especially
since here a new dynasty in a new Christian land was being created, which required both
the blessing of the former rulers and a special act of the Church.

817 St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 21.4.
818 Lucy Menzies, Saint Columba of Iona, Felinfach: J.M.F. Books, 1920, 1992, p. 134; John Marsden, The

Illustrated Columcille, London: Macmillan, 1991, p. 145.

819 St. Adomnan of Iona, Life of Columba. St. Columba is usually described as an abbot, but he may also

have been a bishop. Hieromonk Gorazd (Vopatrny) of Charles University, Prague, has suggested, on
the basis of John Ryan’s Irish Monasticism, that “bishops had a classical leadership role in the Irish
Church until approximately the thirties of the 6th century. With the spread of monasticism the whole
system of ecclesiastical control was affected. Jurisdiction was exercised not only by bishops whether
they were also abbots or not, but also by abbots who were only priests. About one half of the main
abbots were bishops and about a half were priests.” (private communication, November 7, 2012)

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 In continental Europe, if we exclude the doubtful case of Clovis, the sacrament of
royal anointing first appeared in Spain. A possible reason for this is that Spain lacked
a stable monarchy, and the sacrament may have been seen as helping to supply
stability. Thus Collins writes that in the first half of the seventh century, “principles
by which legitimacy of any king could be judged, other than sheer success in holding
onto his throne against all comers, seem to be conspicuously lacking. Thus Witteric
had deposed and killed Liuva II in 603, Witteric had been murdered in 610, Sisebut’s
son Reccared II was probably deposed by Swinthila in 621, Swinthila was certainly
deposed by Sisenand in 631, Tulga by Chindaswinth in 642. Ephemeral kings, such as
Iudila, who managed to strike a few coins in Baetica and Lusitania in the early 630s,
also made their bids for power.”820

The only generally recognized authority that could introduce order into this chaos
was the Church. And so, probably toward the middle of the seventh century, the
Orthodox Church in Spain introduced the rite of royal anointing. From now on, kings
would not only be called “kings by the grace of God”, they would be seen to be such
by the visible bestowal of sacramental grace at the hands of the archbishop.

Moreover, paradoxically, it gave some kind of justification for the deposition of

kings. For, as King writes, “they never talked of deposition, and it was the fiction of
abdication to which they resorted when Svinthila was in fact toppled by revolt. The
introduction of the Old Testament rite of royal anointing, perhaps in 631 to make it
visibly and ceremonially clear that Svinthila’s usurping successor ruled by God’s
favour, confirmed and buttressed the loftiness of the monarchical status.”821

In 672 King Wamba was anointed by the archbishop of Toledo.822 The ceremony
was described by St. Julian of Toledo: “When he had arrived there, where he was to
receive the vexilla of the holy unction, in the praetorian church, that is to say the church
of Saints Peter and Paul, he stood resplendent in his regalia in front of the holy altar
and, as the custom is, recited the creed to the people. Next, on his bended knees the
oil of blessing was poured onto his head by the hand of the blessed bishop Quiricus,
and the strength of the benediction was made clear, for at once this sign of salvation
appeared. For suddenly from his head, where the oil had first been poured on, a kind
of vapour, similar to smoke, rose upon the form of a column, and from the very top of
this a bee was seen to spring forth, which sign was undoubtedly a portent of his future
good fortune.”823

It was probably from Spain that the rite of the anointing of kings was introduced
into France.824 And after Pope Stephen anointed the Frankish King Pepin in 754 the
rite became standard practice in kingmaking throughout the West. Thus in 781 Pepin’s

820 Roger Collins, “Julian of Toledo and the Royal Succession in Late Seventh-Century Spain”, in P.H.
Sawyer & I.N. Wood, Early Medieval Kingship, University of Leeds, 1979, p. 47.
821 King, op. cit., p. 144.
822 Wickham (op. cit., p. 130) regards this as a “novelty” introduced by Wamba himself.
823 St. Julian, in Collins, op cit., pp. 41-42.
824 Louth, op. cit., p. 68.

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successor, Charlemagne, had two of his sons anointed by Pope Hadrian as kings of
Aquitaine and Italy. And in 786 King Offa of Mercia had his son Egfrith anointed.

It was some time, however, before anointing came to be seen as constitutive of true
kingship. As in Rome and Byzantium, western kings who were raised to the throne
by election or acclamation only were not considered illegitimate; it was simply that
anointing added an extra authority and sacred character to the monarchy. The extra
authority and grace provided by the sacrament of anointing produced tangible results:
in Spain, Francia and England the introduction of anointing, accompanied by stern
conciliar warnings “not to touch the Lord’s Anointed”, led to a reduction in regicides
and rebellions and a strengthening of monarchical power. In Spain, this process came
to an abrupt end in 711, when most of the peninsula was conquered by the Arab
Muslims. In Western Francia (modern France), it was brought to an end towards the
end of the ninth century by the Vikings, in spite of the efforts of such champions of
royal power (and opponents of papal despotism) as Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims;
and France did not develop a powerful monarchy until the twelfth century. But in
Eastern Francia (modern Germany) and in England, the monarchy survived and put
down deep roots.

Janet Nelson writes: “If relatively many reigning Merovingians and no

Carolingians were assassinated, this can hardly be explained simply in terms of the
protective effect of anointing for the latter dynasty, at least in its earlier period. More
relevant here are such factors as the maintenance of a fairly restrictive form of royal
succession (and the Carolingians’ abandonment of polygamy must soon have
narrowed the circle of royals) and the growth of a clerically-fostered ideology of
Christian kingship.”825

However, all these factors were related. Once it became accepted that the Church
had an important part to play in kingmaking through the sacrament of anointing, it
also became natural for the Church to have a say in deciding who was the best
candidate for the throne, and then in administering a coronation-oath in which the
king swore to protect the Church...

Theoretically, too, the Church could refuse to sanction a king, and even lead the
people in rebellion if he did not rule rightly. Thus St. Isidore of Seville said: “You will
be king if you act rightly; if you do not, you will not be”, which contains a play on the
words rex, “king”, and recte, “rightly”,826 and an implicit threat on the part of the
Church to withhold recognition of the king in certain circumstances. Moreover, in the
Latin version of Justinian’s famous Sixth Novella, there is also a clear indication that,
for the symphony of powers to be effective, the king must rule rightly (recte).

Joseph Canning writes: “The specific contribution which the anointing rituals made
to the development of the idea of theocratic kingship appeared clearly in Hincmar’s
ordines. Anointing had become the constitutive element in the king-making process: it

825 Nelson, J.L. “Inauguration Rituals”, in Nelson, J.L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe,
London: Hambledon Press, 1986, p. 59.
826 St. Isidore, Etymologiae, 9.3.4, col. 342.

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was the bishops who as mediators of divine grace made the king. There was thus a
relative downgrading of other, traditional aspects of inauguration: the consent of the
great men of the kingdom, enthronement and the feast. The episcopal anointing
represented the third stage of the elaboration of the notion of kingship by the grace of
God, the first being the Pauline view that all rulership was divinely sanctioned, and
the second that the monarch derived his power directly from God. Anointing
transformed kingship into another, higher dimension, because such unction was
understood to be a sacrament. There was thereby involved a crucial change in the
meaning attributed to the ‘grace’ by which the medieval king ruled. Whereas
previously, gratia in this context meant ‘favour’, thus indicating the source of his
power (the possibly sacramental nature of eighth-century unction remains obscure),
now gratia also definitely signified ‘supernatural grace’ infused into the king through
the mediation of the bishops in order to enable him to perform his sacred ministry of
rulership over clergy and laity within his kingdom understood as a church in the
wider sense.”827

St. Constantine had called himself “the bishop of those outside”, his ministry being
understood as analogous to that of a bishop, but extending beyond the jurisdiction of
any bishop into the pagan world and therefore subject to the Church in a moral, but
not in a jurisdictional sense. In the West by the ninth century, however, when the
boundaries of the kingdom and the Church were almost coterminous, the king’s
ministry was seen as almost entirely within the Church, which perception was
reinforced by his anointing by the Church, and by the fact that the symbolism of the
rite, including the staff and ring and vestments, were almost identical to that of
episcopal consecration. This served to increase the king’s sacred character; but it also
enabled the Church to intervene more decisively both in the kingmaking process and
in the definition of what the king could and could not do, and, if necessary, in his
deposition…

There was a contractual element between Germanic kings and their subjects. Thus
“in 843 Charles the Bald swore to uphold the honour of both his clerical and lay fideles,
and the respective laws under which they lived, whereas they swore to sustain the
honour of the king”. And in 858 he promised “’like a faithful king’ to honour and
protect the persons and legal position of his fideles”.828 What was new from the ninth
century onwards was the increased role played by the Church in this process, both in
that protecting the Church’s rights was considered the most important part of the
king’s obligations and in that it was the Church that administered the coronation oath.
Also new was the hint, as we have seen, that the bishops might depose the king if he
broke his oath, as Charles the Bald implicitly admitted at his coronation in 869, when
he said that he could be expelled from his consecration “by no one, at least without
hearing and judgement by the bishops, by whose ministry I was consecrated king”.829

827 Canning, A History of Western Political Thought, 300-1450, London and New York: Routledge, 1996,
p. 55.
828 Canning, op. cit., p. 63.
829 Canning, op. cit., p. 59.

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 Now the fact that the king was anointed by the bishop did not mean that the king
was thereby subject to the bishop, any more than Christ’s baptism at the hands of St.
John the Baptist meant that He was subject to the Baptist.830 Nevertheless, the hint was
there, and in 833 Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, was in fact forced to abdicate
by his bishops, even though he had been anointed by the Pope himself. Again,
Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, “subjected more than one king to harsh criticism, to
penance and even to excommunication”831 As he put it in 881: “So much greater is the
responsibility of the priesthood in that they must render account in God’s judgement
even for the very kings of men, and by so much greater are the rank and prestige of
bishops than of kings because kings are consecrated to their kingship by bishops, but
bishops cannot be consecrated by kings.”832 Unlike later popes like Gregory VII,
Hincmar was not trying to weaken monarchy, but to strengthen and purify it; for he
saw that Christian society in his troubled age could not survive without the sacred
power of the anointed kings…

830 Archimandrite Pantaleimon, “On the Royal Martyrs”, Orthodox Life, vol. 31, N 4, July-August, 1981,
p. 22.
831 Janet Nelson, “Hincmar of Rheims: Kingship, Law and Liturgy”, in Politics and Ritual in Early

Medieval Europe, pp. 169-170.

832 Hincmar, in Janet Nelson, “National Synods, Kingship and Royal Anointing”, in Politics and Ritual

in Early Medieval Europe, p. 253.

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 52. ARMENIA AND GEORGIA

In the Eastern Empire religious differences were older and deeper than in the West,
and unity proved much more difficult to achieve…The degree of identity achieved by
Justinian between the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Empire was striking, but it
was not, of course, complete. Not only were there Roman citizens who were not
Orthodox, such as the Monophysite Copts and Syrians: there were also large bodies
of Orthodox that remained outside the bounds of the Empire – for example, the Celts
in the West, the Georgians in the East and the Arabs and Ethiopians in the South.
Moreover, friction continued between the nations of the Byzantine commonwealth.

Something similar to what we now call nationalism, but much more closely linked
to religious disputes, is certainly evident in antiquity. Cases in which national hatred
has been suspected to lie beneath religious separatism in the East are the Donatist
Berbers, the Nestorian Assyrians and Persians and the Monophysite Copts, Syrians
and Armenians.

Perhaps the clearest example is that of the Armenians, who lay claim, with some
justice, to having been the first Christian national state under their first king, Tiridates,
in the early fourth century. In the middle of the fifth century, in the wake of the
Emperor Marcian’s refusal to support an Armenian revolt against Persia, the
Armenian Church ignored and then rejected the Council of Chalcedon. From this time
it was alienated from Orthodoxy, but not completely from Romanity; permanent
estrangement between Armenia and its Orthodox neighbours did not take place until
after the Muslim conquest.

During the great doctrinal controversies of the fifth century, the newly converted
people of the Georgians remained faithful to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. In 482, under
King Vakhtang, they rebelled from the Persians and aligned themselves with the
Orthodox Byzantines.

“The holy and right-believing king Vakhtang I [446-502] ascended the throne of
Kartli at the age of fifteen. At that time Kartli was continually being invaded by the
Persians from the south and by the Ossetians from the north. The situation was no
better in western Georgia: the Byzantines had captured all the lands from Egrisi to
Tsikhegoji.

“After his coronation, the young King Vakhtang summoned his court and
addressed his dedicated servants with great wisdom. He said that the sorrowful
circumstances in which the nation had found itself were a manifestation of God’s
anger at the sins of the king and the people. He called upon everyone to struggle in
unity and selflessness on behalf of the Faith and motherland.

“King Vakhtang led a victorious campaign against the Ossetians, freed the captive
princess (his older sister), and signed several treaties with the Caucasian mountain
tribes to secure their cooperation in the struggle against foreign conquerors. Then he

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carried out another campaign in western Georgia, freed that region from the
Byzantines, reinforced the authority of King Gubaz, and returned in triumph to Kartli.

“King Vakhtang was remarkable in faith, wisdom, grace, virtue, and appearance
(he towered above all others at a stately seven feet ten inches). He spent many nights
in prayer and distributed alms to the poor, in this way dedicating his life to God. King
Vakhtang could fight tirelessly in battle. Vested in armor and fully armed, he could
carry a war-horse on his shoulders and climb from Mtskheta to the Armazi Fortress
in the mountains outside the city. On foot he could outrun a deer. The holy king was
judicious in politics, displayed great composure, and preserved a sense of calm even
when critical decisions needed to be made.

“On the brow of Vakhtang’s military helmet was depicted a wolf, and on the back,
a lion. Catching a glimpse of the helmet with the wolf and lion, the Persians would
cry out to one another: ‘Dar’ az gurgsar!’ (‘Beware of the wolf ’s head!’) This was the
source of King Vakhtang’s appellation Gorgasali.’

“During King Vakhtang’s reign the Georgian Church was first recognized as
autocephalous. When the holy king banished the pagan fire-worshippers from
Georgia, he also sent a certain Bishop Michael—who was inclined to the Monophysite
heresy, which had been planted in Georgia by the Persians—to Constantinople to be
tried by the patriarch. The bishop had disgracefully cursed the king and his army for
rising up against the Monophysites. In fact, he was so infuriated that when King
Vakhtang approached him to receive his blessing, he kicked him in the mouth and
broke several of his teeth.

“The patriarch of Constantinople subsequently defrocked Bishop Michael and sent

him to a monastery to repent.

“More importantly perhaps, the patriarch and the Byzantine emperor then sent to
the patriarch of Antioch several clergymen whom King Vakhtang had chosen for
consecration. In Antioch the patriarch consecrated twelve of these clergymen as
bishops and enthroned a certain Petre as the first Catholicos of Georgia.

“Vakhtang fulfilled the will of Holy King Mirian by founding the Georgian Holy
Cross Monastery in Jerusalem. In addition, he replaced a wooden church that had
been built in Mtskheta at the time of St. Nino with a church made of stone. During his
reign several new dioceses were founded. King Vakhtang built a cathedral in Nikozi
(Inner Kartli) and established a new diocese there, to which he translated the holy
relics of the Protomartyr Razhden.

“King Vakhtang built fortresses at Tukhari, Artanuji, and Akhiza; founded

monasteries in Klarjeti at Artanuji, Mere, Shindobi, and Akhiza; and established many
other strongholds, churches, and monasteries as well. He built a new royal residence
in Ujarma and laid the foundations of the new Georgian capital, Tbilisi. His political
creed consisted of three parts: an equal union of the Georgian Church with the
Byzantine Church, national independence, and the unity of the Church and nation.

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 “In the year 502 the sixty-year-old King Vakhtang was obliged to defend his
country for the last time. In a battle with the Persians he was fatally wounded when a
poisoned arrow pierced him under the arm. Before he died, King Vakhtang
summoned the clergy, his family and his court and urged them to be strong in the
Faith and to seek death for Christ’s sake in order to gain eternal glory.”

However, “by the time of Holy King Vakhtang’s repose, the country was again
embroiled in a struggle against the Persians, resulting in the division of eastern and
western Georgia between the Persians and the Byzantines. “833

Early in the sixth century, the Mother of God appeared to an ascetic living in the
desert of Syria called John of Zedazneni. She ordered him “to go with twelve disciples
to Georgia… in order to confirm Christianity there and also sow the seed of the
monastic tradition. After having appointed a replacement to guide the rest of his
disciples, he chose, under the guidance of an angel, twelve of them to accompany him:
Shio, David, Anthony, Thaddeus, Stephen, Isidore, Michael, Pyrrhus, Zenon, Jesse,
Joseph and Abibus. After having received the blessing of Saint Symeon the Younger
(521-97), they began their journey on foot, clad in tunics of skins and confiding
themselves to Providence for their subsistence. Arriving in Georgia, they were
welcomed by Archbishop Eulabius – who had been told of their coming by an angel
– in the presence of his clergy and of a large crowd. As soon as they had received the
primate’s blessing, Saint John began to speak the Georgian language, which had been
completely unknown to him, with ease. The Syrian monks immediately began
preaching, but it was mainly by their ascetic life and their charity that they showed
the people the model of evangelical perfection. The faithful came from the whole
countryside to be taught and blessed by the monks. The sick were brought to them,
and they healed them with their prayer. King Parsman VI (541-53) also visited them
frequently to ask their advice.

“The holy fathers visited all the places in which Saint Nino [the enlightener of
Georgia] had preached, feeling that she was alive at their side; they then prayed God
that He would show them where they could make a permanent foundation. The Lord
showed Saint John an inaccessible cave on Mount Zaden, some way from the capital
Mtskheta, and the other fathers built themselves huts of branches in the surroundings.
By his super-human fasts and night-long prayers, John succeeded in driving away the
demons that were infesting the area, which had formerly been consecrated to idol-
worship, and he shone with such light that the whole Church of Georgia was

833Riassophor Monk Adrian, in Archpriest Zakaria Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, Platina, Ca.:
St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006, pp. 19-20.
“All of Georgia mourned the passing of the king. His body was moved from the royal residence in
Ujarma to Mtskheta, to Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, which he had himself built. There he was buried with
great honor.
Some fifteen centuries later, with the blessing of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, an addition was built
onto the Sioni Patriarchal Cathedral in Holy King Vakhtang Gorgasali’s name, and a cathedral in his
honor was founded in the city of Rustavi.

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illumined from that mountain. Devout people opened a path through the forest that
covered the mountain, and crowds soon began to hurry to the saints to find grace and
heavenly consolation.

“Some time later, Archbishop Eulabius went to Mount Zaden and chose Abibus
and Jesse for consecration to the sees of Dtzikatni and Nekressi, which had just became
vacant. Abibus’ diocese was later occupied by the Persians, who tried to force the
Christians to worship fire. The holy Bishop then ran forward, threw water on the
sacred fire and put it out. The furious Persians seized him, beat him savagely and
stoned him. Saint Jesse was seen to be an extraordinary wonder-worker, and he
changed the course of a river with his pastoral staff.

“On Mount Zaden, many candidates for the monastic life presented themselves to
Saint John, and the desert became a veritable monastic city. One night, the All-Holy
appeared to the man of God, together with Saint Nino, and ordered him to send his
disciples throughout the whole of Georgia to teach men how to be pleasing to God.
Archbishop Eulabius recommended to the missionaries that each take a monk as
companion. Only Saint Shio, out of love for the solitary life, refused to go and settled
in a cave near Mtskheta, where a pigeon took him food and where he could, without
witnesses, shed torrents of tears before God day and night. Some time later, however,
a powerful personage at court called Evagrius asked to become a monk under his
direction. Their fame spread so widely that they attracted the king’s favour, and Saint
Shio finally gathered two thousand monks under his direction. Thanks to royal
donations, his desert became covered with churches, and the saint worked many
miracles for the people.

“At the time he sent his other disciples as missionaries, Saint John taught them how
to preach in imitation of the Apostles, and they, guided on their way by the Holy
Spirit, acquired the power to ‘tread on serpents and scorpions’, and to thwart all the
devil’s devices. They gave themselves to trials and afflictions with a good heart, taking
no account of the difficulties of the climate or the hostility of the pagans in their
bearing of the Good News of salvation. Strengthened by the power of their spiritual
father and the grace of the Holy Spirit, they communicated the ardour of their faith to
the people, throwing down the altars and temples of the idolaters, exhorting their
flock to purity of conduct and bringing many souls to the angelic life.

“Saint John stayed on Mount Zaden, with only Deacon Elias to assist him in his old
age, and continued to confront the demons’ assaults with courage. He sent all those
who wanted to lead the monastic life to the monastery founded by Saint Thaddeus at
the foot of the mountain. He visited the other disciples, though, dispersed as they were
around the country to be apostles of the monastic life, and strengthened them in their
struggles by reminding them of the account they must render on the day of their
encounter with Christ…”834

Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra, The Synaxarion, Ormylia: Convent of the Annunciation, 2005,
834

volume 5: May, June, pp. 81-83.

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 The Georgian Catholicos Kvirion II (r. 595-610),” writes Donald Rayfield, “after
writing to Pope Gregory I to clarify doctrinal points, defiantly declared Kartli [Central
Georgia] as dyophisite [Orthodox] Christian, that is professing Christ’s dual nature,
divine and human. This was one of the most fateful decisions ever taken in Kartli: it
permanently split Kartli from its former ally, Armenia. Armenia had chosen
monophysitism… in order to remain Christian and at peace with Persia. {For]
Dyophisitism, and thus adhesion to the Council of Chalcedon, was in 608 a declaration
of alliance with Byzantium. Until 604 the rift between monophysites and dyophysites
had caused no dissension in the Caucasus. A council of Caucasian Churches in the
Armenian ecclesiastical capital of Dvin in 506 accepted Emperor Zeno’s tolerant [but
heretical] Henotikon. In 525 Procopius called the Iberians the most orthodox
dyophysites in the Persian empire; in 551 the Armenian Church voted for
monophysitism, and began converting Caucasian Albanians from dyophysitism
(leading to the extinction of the Caucasian Albanian written language. For their
scriptures were dyophysite, heretical to Armenians, stressing Christ’s full incarnation,
not reducing the humanity to mere ‘clothing in human form’: Caucasian Albanians
henceforth heard [the Divine Liturgy] in Armenian.) The Armenians found Catholicos
Kvirion II’s declaration especially offensive because he had until 599 been an
Armenian bishop. Mose, Armenian bishop of Tsurtavi (a mixed Georgian and
Armenian diocese), fled to Armenia in 605: a polemical correspondence in Armenian
followed. In 608 Catholic Abraham of Armenia forbade any relationship, outside
commerce, with Iberians or Caucasian Albanians. The Georgian Catholicos Kvirion
was branded a ‘liar and traitor’; Georgians were accused of ‘killing like a wolf’ a
bishop Petre who argued against a breach with the Armenians. Conversely Armenian
dyophysites fled to Georgia and founded churches there. The Persian Church in
Ctesipon then banned dyophysitism; more dyophysites fled to Kartli.” 835

In 626, as we shall see, Persia capitulated to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who
made Lazica and Iberia into vassal states of the Byzantine empire, deepening the
separation between the Orthodox Georgians and the Monophysite Armenians. “The
breach became final by 700, under the Armenian pariarch Sahak III, when Arab
victories over Byzantium encouraged monophysitism.”836By this time the Armenian
Church had become entrenched, not only in anti-Chalcedonian Monophysitism, but
also in a kind of nationalism that made it the first national church in the negative sense
of that phrase – that is, a church that was so identified with the nation as to lose any
claim to universalism.

835 Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, London: Reaktion, 2012, pp. 52-53.
836 Rayfield, op. cit., p. 53.

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 53. THE PERSIAN EMPIRE

The great Persian empire contained many Christians, both Orthodox and heretical
(mainly Nestorian), but was never subdued by the Roman Empire. The two Persian
empires, of the Parthians and (from 224) the Sassanids, had been the greatest enemies
of Rome in the late pagan and early Christian periods, and had given Roma invicta her
most massive and humiliating defeats. Persia at its peak extended from Armenia and
Mesopotamia in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east to the Indian Ocean in the
south. It was by far the greatest rival and threat to Christian Rome – similar to the
threat that China poses to the United States today – and the threat it posed was not
only political but also religious, insofar as many heretical sects and teachings,
particularly those of a dualist nature such as Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism, as well
as the heretical Nestorianism, lived in Persia or the Iraqi lands under Persian control.

The great Persian empire of Cyrus and Darius had been conquered by Alexander
the Great, and then by the Parthians from the north of the country near the Caspian.
In 53 BC “the Parthians inflicted a savage defeat on the Roman legions and for a time
occupied Syria… Augustus ignored the demands of some of his generals that the
defeat of the Roman legions be avenged, preferring to have peace in order to organize
Rome’s new eastern provinces.’837

The magi-kings of the East who worshipped the Christ-Child were therefore very
probably from the Parthian empire; and Christ’s birth as a subject of Augustus, but
worshipped by subjects of the other great world power, showed that He was in fact
the Heavenly Sovereign of the whole world.

In 224, a quasi-restoration of the Persia of Cyrus the Great took place under the new
Sassanid dynasty and its first ruler Ardashir (or Artaxerxes). “The Sassanid Empire
lasted for four centuries in which it was almost incessantly at war with the rival great
power in the west. Shapar I, the second Sassanian ruler, took the title of ‘King of Kings
of Iran and non-Iran’, thus emphasizing his claim to dominion of the world.”838

“Sassanid Persia,” writes J.M. Roberts, “was a religious as well as a political unity.
Zoroastrianism had been formally restored by Ardashir, who gave important
privileges to its priests, the magi. These led in due course to political power as well.
Priests confirmed the divine nature of the kingship, had important judicial duties, and
came, too, to supervise the collection of the land-tax which was the basis of Persian
finances. The doctrines they taught seem to have varied considerably from the strict
monotheism attributed to Zoroaster but focused on a creator, Ahura Mazda, whose
viceroy on earth was the king. The Sassanids’ promotion of the state religion was
closely connected with the assertion of their own authority.”839

A wave of barbarian invasions towards the end of the fourth century affected both
the Roman and the Persian empires, including one that came through the Caucasus

837 Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 9.
838 Mansfield, op. cit., p. 11.
839 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, pp. 252-253.

420
and reached as far as Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, in 395. “United by a common
interest in repelling the barbarian hordes, Persia and Rome now formed a remarkable
alliance. To keep the nomads from descending through the Caucasus, a massive
fortified wall was constructed, running for nearly 125 miles between the Caspian and
Black Seas, protecting the Persian frontier from attack and serving as a physical barrier
between the ordered world to the south and the chaos to the north. Studded with
thirty forts evenly spaced along its length, the wall was also protected by a canal
fifteen feet deep. It was a marvel of architectural planning and engineering, and the
fortification was manned by some 30,000 troops…

“Rome not only agreed to make regular financial contributions to the maintenance
of this Persian wall, but also, according to several contemporary sources, supplied
soldiers to help defend it. In a sign of how past rivalries had been set to one side, in
402 the Emperor Arcadius in Constantinople appointed none other than the Shah to
act as guardian to his son and heir….”840

The Byzantines and the Persians continued to war against each other on occasion.
But this did not prevent acts of Christian kindness to the enemies of the faith and the
nation. Thus during one war between the Romans and the Persians (421-422), the
Byzantines had captured seven thousand prisoners, whom they refused to feed or to
release. So St. Akakios, Bishop of the Armenian city of Amida, summoned his clergy
and addressed the following words to them, among others: “Our God needs neither
dishes nor cups, for He neither eats nor drinks.... Since our Church possesses many
gold and silver vessels, which derive from the generosity of the Faithful, it is our duty
to ransom the prisoners with these and to feed them.” And that is what happened: the
treasures were melted down, the prisoners were ransomed, given food, and sent back
to their king with the necessary provisions for the return journey. Shah Baranos V was
so amazed by this magnanimous act of St. Akakios that he asked to meet the holy
hierarch in person.

By this time the Shahs had become much more tolerant of the Christians, both
Orthodox and heretical, that multiplied in their country. “Bishops from Persia and
elsewhere outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire had not been invited to
attended Nicaea. Councils held in Persia in 410, and again in 420 and 424, were
therefore organised to enable bishops to resolve the same issues that had been looked
at by their peers in the west. The impulse to meet and discuss was supported by the
Shah, described by one source as the ‘victorious king of kings [Shahanshah], on whom
the churches rely for peace’, who like Constantine was keen to benefit from the
support of the Christian communities.”841

Unfortunately, however, the heresy of Nestorianism triumphed over Orthodoxy in

Persia – and extended its missionary activity eastwards as far as China. “In 635
missionaries in China were able to convince the Emperor to withdraw opposition to

840 Peter Frankopan, Silk Roads, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 47.
841 Frankopan, op. cit., p. 51.

421
the faith and to recognize it as a legitimate a religion whose message not only did not
compromise imperial identity but potentially reinforced it.”842

India was first evangelized by the holy Apostle Thomas. It returned briefly to the
true faith through the conversion of Joasaph, son of King Abenner of India, through
the preaching of the holy hermit Barlaam, from the neighbouring land of Senaar.843
India even provided an early example of sacramental kingmaking in the consecration
of King Barachias by St. Ioasaph.844

Later, however, Indian Christianity probably fell into heresy. “A Greek-speaking

visitor to Sri Lanka in about 550 found a robust community of Christians [perhaps
Monophysites], overseen by clergy appointed ‘from Persia’.”845

The last Orthodox we know of in the region is St. Isaac, Bishop of Nineveh, who
died in about 700…

In 484 the Persian Shahanshah, Peroz, was defeated and killed by northern nomads,
the Hephthalites, or “White Huns”, which triggered a social and religious revolution
under his successor, Kavad, that looked back to the Jewish revolution of 67-70 and
forward to the Russian revolution of 1917.

“The ragged army of the dispossessed,” writes Tom Holland, “when they seized
the property of the rich, were motivated by more than mere hatred, or even hunger.
Just as the mowbeds [Zoroastrian priests] passionately believed themselves entrusted
by Ohrmazd [their “good” god] with the maintenance of the traditional order of
things, so had the poor, no less passionately, come to believe themselves entrusted
with a divine mission to bring it crashing down around their heads. Men, they
declared, were created equal. It followed, then, that all good things, from food to land
to women, should be held in common. The privileges of the nobility, the pretensions
of the priesthood: both had to be dissolved. Such were the demands of the self-
proclaimed ‘Adherents of Justice’: the world’s first communist manifesto.

“How was it, in the bowels of the world’s most intimidating monarchy, that such
a startling movement had come into existence? Clearly the evils and injustices of the
preceding decades had done much to inspire the spirit of revolution, as too had all the
many varied currents of belief abroad in Iranshahr, the cults and shadowy heresies that
had always plagued the Zoroastrian Church. Subsequent tradition, however, would
attribute the unprecedented eruption of the Adherents of Justice to the teachings of a
single prophet, the messenger from Ohrmazd long foretold: a one-time priest by the
name of Mazdak. Four hundred years on, and historians would still commemorate

842 Frankopan, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
843 St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom

Press, 2000, vol. III, November 19.

844 See St. John of Damascus, Barlaam and Ioasaph, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967,

pp. 552-553.
845 Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, p. 55.

422
how he had ringingly ‘proclaimed that what God had given to man should be
distributed equally, and that men had abused this in their injustice to one another.’…

“Amid all the uncertainty [about the existence of Mazdak], two facts are clear. The
first is that Iranshahr, by the time of Kavad’s reign, was teetering on the brink of a full-
scale social revolution. The second is that Kavad himself, ever the opportunist, had
helped to push it over the edge. Monarchs are rarely in the habit of promoting class
warfare, but Kavad, ‘a man who for cunning and energy had no rivals’, was
desperately negotiating uncharted waters. His support for the revolutionaries had
two aims: to ensure that his own estates were untouched; and to foster assaults on
those of the great Parthian dynasts. Yet, it is possible – even likely – that there was
more to this strategy than mere cold calculation: perhaps he did genuinely look with
sympathy upon the miseries and the damands of the poor. Tradition would recall that
Mazdak, brought into the royal presence, had converted the Shahanshah to his infant
faith, and tradition might conceivably be correct. Certainly, the sheer audacity of
Kavad’s attempt to neutralise the nobility is the best evidence we have that Mazdak
did after all exist. It is hard to believe that a Sassanian would ever have identified
himself with peasant insurrectionists had he not possessed an inner insurance that he
was truly fulfilling the divine purpose. Cynicism fused with religiosity: such was the
combination, surely, that made of Kavad a Mazdakite.

“Inevitably, though, his conversion stirred up a hornets’ nest. Events now began to
move very fast. In 496, an alliance of nobles and mawbeds [priests] forced Kavad’s
abdication. His brother, a young boy by the name of Zamasp, was proclaimed
Shahanshah in his place. Kavad himself was immured in the empire’s most fearsome
prison, the aptly named ‘Castle of Oblivion’ – ‘for the name of anyone cast into its
dungeons is forbidden to be mentioned ever again, with death as the penalty for
anyone who speaks it.’ Yet, to Kavad – a king so enterprising that he had toyed with
communism – this was never likely to prove a territorial roadblock. Sure enough, he
soon procured a complete outfit of women’s clothes, gave his gaolers the slip while
disguised as his own wife, and fled to the court of the Hephthalites. There, just as his
father had done nearly four decades before, he secured the khan’s backing and
returned to Iranshahr at the head of a Hephthalite army. The Parthian dynasts,
struggling desperately to keep their heads above the Mazdakite floodtide, found
themselves powerless to help their royal cipher; Zamasp was duly toppled without a
battle; blinded with burning olive oil, or else with an iron needle, he was banished
into oblivion himself.

“So it was, by 498, that Kavad was again the Shahanshah. Nevertheless, the
desperate circumstances of his realm still threatened to gie the lie to that title. The
empire remained racked by religious controversy, social upheaval and dynastic
feuding. It was also effectively bankrupt. How, then, was Kavad to pay his Hephtalite
backers for their support? A challenge, it might have been thought, fit to defeat even
his ingenuity.

“But Kavad was, as ever, nothing daunted. Instead, with his empire seemingly on
the verge of implosion, he opted to go on the attack: to fix his gaze towards the setting
sun, to cross his western border, and to take the gold he needed from there.

423
 “He would go to war with the only empire in the world that could rival his
own…”846

So the Persian King of kings became the first of many revolutionary despots who
chose to quell domestic unrest by foreign wars, using the complexes of all
revolutionaries – envy, resentment, wounded pride. In 501, employing his enemies,
the Hephthalites and the Parthian nobles into his army, he invaded Rome’s eastern
provinces, taking Theodosiopolis and then Amida. “Then, in an ecstasy of triumph
and greed, they stripped the city bare. Although many of its inhabitants were taken
as slaves, with notables carefully rounded up to serve as hostages, far more were put
to the sword. Tens of thousands of bodies, when the killing was finally done, were
slung beyond the city’s walls. Great piles of reeking corpses, tangled and gore-
smeared, provided the Persians with an intimidating trophy of their victory. Decades
later, the terrible slaughter would still haunt the imaginings of all those who live along
Rome’s eastern frontier.

“Which, no doubt, had been precisely Kavad’s aim. Although the war he had
launched would soon peter out into bloody stalemate, and although Amida itself,
besieged in turn by the Romans, would end up being sold back to them, albeit for a
tidy profit, the Shahnshah could consider his war aims to have been more than met. A
fearsome market had been laid down. After long years of defeat and decay, the lord
of Iranshah had triumphantly demonstrated to his own subjects, and the rest of the
world, that the spiral of his dynasty’s decline was over. There would be no collapse.
The House of Sasan had weathered the storm…”847

But after Kavad, Persia returned to its traditional religion of Zoroastrianism. And
the shahs no longer needed to pretend to be champions of the poor… Still more
importantly, the Roman emperors, including even Justinian, gave up any idea of
conquering Persia for the universal empire of Christian Rome…

846 Holland, op. cit., pp. 94-97.
847 Holland, op. cit., p. 109.

424
 54. BYZANTIUM, THE JEWS AND THE ARABS

While Justinian’s armies were reconquering Western Europe, writes M. Angold,

“along the eastern frontier, Petra was recovered from the Sassanians in 551 and with
it control of Lazica [Western Georgia]. In the desert war the Ghassanids, an Arab tribe
allied to the Byzantines, bested the Lakmids, who were clients of the Sassanians. In
562 a peace was concluded between Persia and Byzantium, designed to last for fifty
years. Among other things it regulated cross-border trade, trade routes being an
element in Byzantine- Sassanian rivalry. The Byzantines were dependent on these for
raw silk to feed their industry which was centred on Berytus.”848

There were many Jews in Arabia. They were the only people who never, at any
time, aspired to join the New Roman symphony of nations, but rather remained
permanently “the enemy within”… The hostility of the Jews towards Christianity and
Christian Rome had not waned since apostolic times. Sergei and Tamara Fomin write:
“To the prayer ‘birkam za-minim’ which was read everyday against heretics and
apostates there was added the ‘curse’ against ‘the proud state’ (of Rome) and against
all the enemies of Israel, in particular the Christians… [The Christians were also
identified with] the scapegoat, on which the sins of the Jews were laid and which was
then driven into the wilderness as a gift to the devil. According to rabbinic teaching,
the goat signified Esau and his descendants, who at the present time were the
Christians.”849

As for Christ Himself, said the rabbis who wrote the Talmud, he was “in fact ‘the
son of a harlot’, a failed student who had been dismissed by his rabbi for assorted
sexual misdemeanours, and had then, out of pique, fallen to worshipping a brick. Far
from reigning in heaven, as the minim [heretics] laughably claimed, the truth was that
he had been consigned to hell, where he would spend the rest of eternity in a plunge-
bath of boiling shit. God Himself, in His infinite wisdom, had foreseen the threat that
Jesus would pose His Chosen People, and that was precisely why he had given them
hidden as well as written Torah [i.e. the oral traditions on which the Talmud was
supposedly based] so that the minim would not be able to get their filthy hands on it,
‘and say that they were the Chosen People’.”850

The Jews also called the Roman Empire “the kingdom of the Edomites”. Thus Rabbi
David Kimchi wrote in Obadiam: “What the Prophets foretold about the destruction of
Edom in the last days was intended for Rome, as Isaiah explains (34.1)… For when
Rome is destroyed, Israel shall be redeemed.” And Rabbi Abraham in his book Tseror
Hammor wrote: “Immediately after Rome is destroyed, we shall be redeemed.”851

The teaching of the Talmud incited the Jews to terrible crimes against Gentiles,
especially Christians. Thus “under Theodosius II,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “it was

848 Angold, in Angus Mackay and David Ditchburn (eds.), Atlas of Medieval Europe, London and New
York: Routledge, 1997, p. 14.
849 Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 201-202.
850 Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2013, pp. 132-133; Numeri Rabbah, 14.10.
851 Quoted in Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, The Talmud Unmasked, St. Petersburg, 1892, Bloomfield Books, Sudbury,

Suffolk, pp. 43, 80, 81.

425
discovered that the Jews, on the day of the feast of the execution of Haman [Purim],
had introduced the practice of burning the Cross. The government had to undertake
repressions against the blasphemy, but the Jews were not pacified. Under the same
Theodosius II, in the city of Imma, the Jews during one of their feasts took hold of a
Christian child, crucified him on a cross and with scourges cut him into pieces. The
disturbed Christians took to arms, and a bloody battle took place. This incident, as
they said, was not unique. The Christian historian Socrates relates that the Jews more
than once crucified Christian children. At that time it was not a matter of ‘ritual
killings’, and in such acts only the hatred of the Jews for Christians and mockery of
them was seen. In the given case Theodosius II executed those guilty of the murder,
but at the same time the government began to take measures to weaken Jewry.
Theodosius destroyed the Jewish patriarchate in Palestine and confiscated the sums
collected throughout Jewry for the patriarchate. But all these repressions did not
quickly pacify the Jews. Under the same Theodosius II there took place in 415 the well-
known brawl in Alexandria elicited by the killing of Christians by the Jews. All this
boldness of the Jews in the face of a power that was evidently incomparably greater
than theirs seems improbable. But we must bear in mind that this was an age of
terrible Messianic fanaticism on the part of the Jews. It often drove them to acts that
were senseless, in which pure psychosis was operating… [Thus] in 432, on the island
of Cyprus there took place an event which shows to what an inflamed condition the
Jews of that time could come. On the island there appeared a man who was evidently
mad, called Moses, the same who had led the people out of Egypt through the Red
Sea. He declared that he now had an order from the Lord to lead the Jews out of
Cyprus into Palestine through the Mediterranean Sea. His preaching attracted crowds
of Jews who did not hesitate to follow the prophet. These hordes went to the sea and,
at a sign from Moses, began to hurl themselves from a lofty cliff into the water. Many
crashed against the rocks, others drowned, and only the forcible intervention of the
Christians saved the rest: fishermen dragged them from the water, while other
inhabitants forcibly drove the Jews from the shore. This mass psychosis shows to what
lengths the Jews could go in the name of the idea of the re-establishment of the
Kingdom of Israel…

“The [Western] Church had already quite early, in the sixth century, begun to take
measures to protect Christians from the influence of the Jews. Councils in Orleans in
538 and 545 decreed the suppression of relations between Christians and Jews and,
moreover, forbade the Jews from publicly showing themselves during the Christian
Pascha, doubtless to cut off the possibility of any blasphemous outrages. But we can
understand why these measures could not be maintained, nor were they systematic,
and relations inevitably continued, having two kinds of consequences: some they
spiritually cut off from Christianity and drew them into heresy, and others they filled
with hatred for the Jews.”852

852 Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, pp. 340-341, 350.

426
 In about 520, 4000 Christians were martyred by the Jewish ruler of the South
Arabian land of Omir (or Homer, modern-day Yemen), Yusuf A’sar Yath’ar, who was
finally defeated by the Christian king of Ethiopia.853

Homer was converted by an Italian bishop called Gregory. In his remarkable Life
we read: “There he was granted a vision of the holy Apostle, who told him to walk
the path of virtue and to live according to God’s will. That night he saw the Apostle
Paul in a dream bringing to him a cup filled with oil, foretelling that he should receive
the grace of the priesthood and the episcopacy.

“During this time the armies of the Ethiopian emperor Elesbaan (October 24)854
vanquished the Himyarite king Dunaan, who was of Jewish background. The city of
Negran was liberated, and Christianity restored in the land of Homer. But all the
clergy had been cruelly exterminated by Dunaan, and therefore Elesbaan sent
emissaries to the Patriarch of Alexandria asking him to send a bishop to Negran, and
clergy for the churches. While he was praying, the holy Apostle Mark appeared to the
patriarch, bidding him to find a deacon named Gregory, who was to be ordained to
the priesthood, consecrated as a bishop, and then to be sent to Elesbaan. The patriarch
did this. During the service a miracle took place. Saint Gregory’s face shone with the
grace of the Holy Spirit, and from his vestments came a sweet fragrance like myrrh or
incense, filling the whole church with the scent.

“Arriving in Homer, Saint Gregory began to set the Church in order, preaching to
both pagans and Jews. After three years Elesbaan returned to Ethiopia, leaving the
noble Abramius behind as King of Homer. Saint Gregory crowned and anointed
Abramius as king. Soon he issued a decree that all his subjects be baptized. Then
certain prominent Jews turned to the emperor saying that it was better for people to
believe willingly rather than under compulsion. They requested that he should permit
a debate on faith to be held between them and the Christians, vowing that if the
Christians proved victorious in this debate, the Jews would then accept Baptism.

“The Jews were given forty days to prepare for the debate, which lasted for several
days. Saint Gregory refuted all the arguments of the head of the Hebrew elder, Rabbi
Ervan, using only texts from the Old Testament. In a vision Ervan beheld the holy
Prophet Moses, who worshipped the Lord Jesus Christ. The prophet told Ervan that
Ervan was in opposition to the truth and would be defeated.

“By the grace of God Christian truth prevailed in the debate, but Ervan would not
acknowledge his defeat. He made a last desperate attempt. He said, ‘If you want me
to believe in your Christ, and to acknowledge that yours is the true God, then show
Him to me, bishop!’ The saint replied: ‘Your request is impertinent. It is not with man
that you contend now, but with God. However, the Lord can do what you have asked
in order to convince you.’

853 See the Life of the Holy Martyr Al-Harith, in St. Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives
of the Saints, House Springs, MO; Chrysostom Press, 1995, vol. II, pp. 351-376; Mango, op. cit., p. 92;
Tikhomirov, op. cit., chapters 41 and 42; Holland, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
854 Ethiopia was converted in the fourth century by St. Frumentius, who converted King Ezana.

427
 “Everyone waited to see what would happen. Saint Gregory, having steadfast faith
in God and trusting in Him, began to pray aloud. He recalled the mystery of the
Incarnation of God the Word, the miracles of His earthly life, the Three-day
Resurrection and the Ascension into Heaven, and he invoked the power of the Life-
Creating Cross. ‘Show Thyself to these people, O Lord,’ he prayed, ‘and glorify Thy
holy Name!’

“When he finished the prayer, the earth quaked, and in the east the heavens were
opened, and in a radiant cloud of light the Lord Jesus Christ came down on earth, and
the Voice of the Lord was heard: ‘Through the prayers of Bishop Gregory, He Whom
your fathers put to death will heal you.’

“Like Saul, who was struck blind by the Heavenly light on the road to Damascus,
the Jews were struck blind. Then they believed in Christ and they implored the holy
bishop to heal them. Upon receiving holy Baptism, all of them were healed. Rabbi
Ervan received the Christian name Leo (meaning ‘lion’).

“After this most extraordinary miracle, Saint Gregory guided the flock of Homer
for another thirty years. He reposed in the year 552 and was buried in a crypt in the
cathedral of Afar.”855

However, in spite of this miraculous appearance of Christ to the Jews, in their

majority they remained unbelieving, and in 555 they supported the Samaritans in their
rebellion against Byzantium.

The hostility of the Jews, not only to Christ and Christians, but also to all Three
Romes – Old Rome, New Rome and the Third Rome of Russia - would be a constant
and very important factor in world history…

855“Saint Gregory, Archbishop of Omirits”, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2013/12/19/103592-
saint-gregory-archbishop-of-omirits. A more detailed account of St. Gregory’s life can be found in St.
Demetrius of Rostov, The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints, House Springs, Mo.: Chrysostom Press,
2000, vol. IV, December 19.

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 55. THE BYZANTINE-PERSIAN WARS

Justinian’s empire began to disintegrate from the beginning of the 540s. Belisarius,
his famous general, had re-conquered Italy, but at a terrible cost Thus Rome herself
had been depopulated, albeit temporarily. In 540 the Persian King Chosroes I (531–
79), captured and sacked Antioch, in accordance with the prophecy of the Lord
through St. Symeon the Younger: “I will abandon the greater part of the population
to the sword, and those who survive to captivity.” In 541 bubonic plague hit
Alexandria and spread to Constantinople, continuing on to the West and Asia Minor
and causing drastic depopulation throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile, Slavs were
infiltrating the Balkans from the north. In 554, as we have seen, the Ghassanids, led
by the Christian Arethas and allied to the Romans, defeated the Lakhmids, led by the
pagan Mundhir and allied to the Persians, at Chalcis. In 557 a terrible earthquake hit
Constantinople, and the dome of Hagia Sophia caved in. And in 568, three years after
the death of an exhausted Justinian, the Lombards invaded North Italy… No wonder
that the people expected the end of the world soon.

In 602, the Emperor Maurice was murdered, together with all his sons, by the
usurper Phocas. In 608, Phocas took the opportunity provided by the death of the anti-
papist Pope Gregory the Great to encourage papism in the West, giving Pope Boniface
IV the title “Vicar of Christ”. Meanwhile he reserved for himself the caesaropapist
title, “Christ’s deputy in the East”...

In 609 AD the Jews of Antioch went out of control and revolted against the
Christians. They slaughtered Anastasios, the great Patriarch of Antioch: they hurled
his genitals into his face, then dragged him into the Mese and murdered him and
many landowners. Then they burned their bodies. Phocas appointed Bonosos Count
of the East and Kottanas general and sent them against the Hebrews, but they were
unable to quell their rebellion. The Jews gathered together an army, attacked them,
killed and mutilated many of their men, and drove them away from the city."856

Phocas was defeated, on the one hand, by the Sassanid King Chosroes II, and on
the other by Heraclius the Elder, Exarch of Africa, whose son, Heraclius, was crowned
emperor.

Chosroes displayed the typical hubris of the pagan despot, writing to Heraclius:
“Chosroes, greatest of gods, and master of the earth, to Heraclius, his vile and
insensate slave. Why do you still call yourself a king?”857 He represented pagan
despotism at its most gaudily splendid. “Few who enjoyed the supreme privilege of
being ushered into the royal presence would have doubted that Khorow [Chosroes]
had what it took for success. ‘May you be immortal!’ sounded the response to his
every utterance; and certainly, to look upon a Shahanshah enthroned in all his glory
was still, as it had ever been, to behold a man as close as any mortal could be to a god.
His robes gleamed with jewels; his beard was dusted with gold; his face was painted
like some ancient idol. Most dazzling of all was his diadem: the symbol of his farr

856 St. Theophanes the Confessor, Chronicle.
857 Chosroes, in Charles Oman, The Dark Ages, AD 476-918, London, 1919, p. 207.

429
[divine aura]. By the time of Khusrow, however, it was no longer possible tor a king
to wear one unsupported. Instead, as he sat on his throne, the crown had to be
suspended by a chain hung from the ceiling above his head. So massive had it become,
and so stupefyingly heavy the gold and jewels that adorned it, that it would otherwise
have snapped his neck.”858

In Antioch in 608, as the Persians threatened the city, the Jews in the city rebelled,
and Patriarch Anastasius was killed. In 609 the Persians conquered Amida, and then
in 613, Damascus with the help of the Jews. In 614 Chosroes, having passed through
the whole of Asia Minor, burned Ephesus to the ground.

In 615 he reached Chalcedon. “It was at this point, according to Sebeos, that
Heraclius had agreed to stand down and was about ready to allow the Byzantine
Empire to become a Persian client state, even permitting Khosrow II to choose the
emperor. In a letter delivered by his ambassadors, Heraclius acknowledged the
Persian empire as superior, described himself as Khosrow II's ‘obedient son, one who
is eager to perform the services of your serenity in all things,’ and even called Khosrow
II the ‘supreme emperor.’ Khosrow II nevertheless rejected the peace offer, and
arrested Heraclius' ambassadors.

“With the Persians at the very gates of Constantinople, Heraclius thought of

abandoning the city and moving the capital to Carthage, but the powerful church
figure Patriarch Sergius convinced him to stay. Safe behind the walls of
Constantinople, Heraclius was able to sue for peace in exchange for an annual tribute
of a thousand talents of gold, a thousand talents of silver, a thousand silk robes, a
thousand horses, and a thousand virgins to the Persian King. The peace allowed him
to rebuild the Empire's army by slashing non-military expenditure, devaluing the
currency, and melting down, with the backing of Patriarch Sergius, Church treasures
to raise the necessary funds to continue the war.”859

The situation was desperate for the Byzantines. For, even while their capital was
threatened from across the Bosphorus, the Slavs were overrunning the Balkans, and
the Avars, too, were attacking from the north. Meanwhile, the Persians under
Chosroes’ general, the Parthian Shahrbaraz, were overrunning the whole of Syria and
Palestine, and then, in 616, Egypt.

While the defenders of the City clung on doggedly, Heraclius patiently reorganized
his shattered empire and army.

Finally, he was ready to embark on one of the greatest feats of arms in Christian
history.

“On April 5, 622, the year Mohammed left Mecca for Medina, he left
Constantinople, entrusting the city to the Mother of God, and to Patriarch Sergius and
general Bonus as regents of his son. He assembled his forces in Asia Minor, and, after

858 Holland, op. cit., pp. 113-114.
859 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius.

430
reviving their broken morale, he launched a new counter-offensive, which took on the
character of a holy war …

“The Roman army proceeded to Armenia, inflicted a defeat on an army led by a

Persian-allied Arab chief, and then won a victory over the Persians under
Shahrbaraz. Heraclius would stay on campaign for several years. On March 25, 624 he
again left Constantinople with his wife, Martina, and his two children; after he
celebrated Easter in Nicomedia on April 15, he campaigned in the Caucasus, winning
a series of victories in Armenia against Khosrow and his generals Shahrbaraz, Shahin,
and Shahraplakan. In the same year the Visigoths succeeded in
recapturing Cartagena, capital of the western Byzantine province of Spania, resulting
in the loss of one of the few minor provinces that had been conquered by the armies
of Justinian I. In 626 the Avars and Slavs supported by a Persian army commanded
by Shahrbaraz, besieged Constantinople, but the siege ended in failure (the victory
was attributed to the icons of the Virgin which were led in procession by Sergius about
the walls of the city860), while a second Persian army under Shahin suffered another
crushing defeat at the hands of Heraclius's brother Theodore.

“… Heraclius exploited divisions within the Persian Empire, keeping Shahrbaraz

neutral by convincing him that Khosrow had grown jealous of him and had ordered
his execution. Late in 627 he launched a winter offensive into Mesopotamia, where,
despite the desertion of his Turkish allies, he defeated the Persians under Rhahzadh
at the Battle of Nineveh. Continuing south along the Tigris he sacked Khosrow's great
palace at Dastagird and was only prevented from attacking Ctesiphon by the
destruction of the bridges on the Nahrawan Canal. Discredited by this series of
disasters, Khosrow was overthrown and killed in a coup led by his son Kavad II, who
at once sued for peace, agreeing to withdraw from all occupied territories. In 629
Heraclius restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in a majestic ceremony.

“Heraclius's defeat of the Persians ended a war that had been going on
intermittently for almost 400 years and led to instability in the Persian Empire. Kavad
II died only months after assuming the throne, plunging Persia into several years of
dynastic turmoil and civil war.”861

In this period there were still many Christians in Persia. One of them was a former
magician, Anastasius, who was martyred for the faith just before Heraclius entered in
triumph into Persia.862

860 “A sudden hurricane dispersed the fleet of the enemy, casting the vessels on the shore near the Great
church of the Theotokos at Blachernae, a quarter of Constantinople inside the Golden Horn. The people
spent the whole night, says the account, thanking her for the unexpected deliverance.” The famous
akathist hymn to the Mother of God may have been composed and sung for the first time during this
siege.
861 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius.
862 http://www.stgregoryoc.org/st-anastasius-the-

persian/?fbclid=IwAR3zbEQsy80PWFvdjvXMtQOYdtk9FWOcJu4_Y8SMBfJI5ENP3QYe8ngADhQ

431
 In the Byzantine-Persian wars and during the Muslim incursions, the Jews
consistently took the side of the enemies of Christian Rome because they believed that
the “beast”, that is, the Roman emperor, was about to be killed by the long-awaited
Messiah. According to the chronicler St. Theophanes, Jewish crowds killed the Bishop
of Tiberias and 90,000 Christians in one day. When the Persians conquered Jerusalem,
“some fifty thousand corpses were said to have been left piled up in the streets. A
further thirty-five thousand Christians, including the patriarch himself, were hauled
off into captivity. With them, exhumed from a vegetable patch where it had been
buried upon news of the Persian approach, went the single most precious object in the
entire Christian empire: the True Cross. A shudder at the humiliation of this had
naturally run deep across the Roman world.”863

The Jews, writes Tikhomirov, “distinguished themselves at this point with a beastly
cruelty unique in the history of the world. They spared no money to buy many
Christians from the Persians with one purpose only – to gain enjoyment in killing
them. They say that in this way they bought and destroyed 80,000 people. The Jewish
historian G. Graetz glides silently over this terrible fact, saying only: ‘Filled with rage,
the Jews of course did not spare the Christians’ and ‘did not spare the holy things of
the Christians’. Graetz reduces the number of Christians killed to 19,000…”864

“No sooner had Jerusalem passed into Persian hands than a mysterious figure,
‘Nehemiah the son of Hushiel,’ stepped forward to lead the city’s Jews up on to the
Temple Mount, where they constructed an altar. Sacrifices, for the first time in five
hundred years, were offered on the sacred rock in accordance with the Law of Moses.
The opportunity had come at last, it appeared, ‘to found a temple of holiness’.

“Yet, all these ecstatic expectations were soon cruelly dashed. The Persians, no
more tolerant of Jewish pretensions than the Romans had been, did not have the
slightest intention of permitting the construction of a new Temple, or allowing some
upstart Jew to proclaim himself the Messiah. Only a few months into their occupation
of Jerusalem, they arrested Nehemiah, accused him of sedition, and executed
him…”865

After defeating the Persians, Heraclius turned his attention to the Jews of
Jerusalem, banishing them to a distance of three miles from the city.

On May 31, 632, he even sent a letter to the governor of Carthage decreeing that all
the Jews in Africa - “visitors as well as residents, their wives, their children, their
slave” – should be forcibly baptised…

863 Holland, op. cit., p. 318.
864 Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 343. The Jewish historian Graetz admits that the Jews took a greater part in

the destruction of Christian churches and monasteries than the Persians themselves (Istoria Evreev (A
History of the Jews), Odessa, 1908, vol. 1, pp. 28-32). See Antiochus Strategos, “The Capture of
Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 AD,” in F.C. Conybeare, English Historical Review, 25 (1910) pp. 502-
517, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/antiochus_strategos_capture.htm.
865 Holland, op. cit., p. 319.

432
 “Many Christians, it is true, were appalled: some because they feared the damage
that reluctant converts might do to the Church, and others because they believed, as
Gregory had put it, that ‘humility and kindness, teaching and persuasion, are the
means by which to gather in the foes of the Christian faith.’ Yet even before Heraclius’
decree, many had come to dread that it was too late for such an approach… A few
bishops in Francia forced baptism on the local Jews. In Spain, in 612, the king of the
Visigoths had followed suit…”866

There is no doubt that Heraclius’ decree, however understandable as a furious

reaction to the Jews’ cruelties, was wrong; and 150 years later the Seventh Ecumenical
Council would forbid forcible baptism. There is little doubt, either, that this decree,
together with his incestuous marriage to his niece Marina, and, still more, by his
support for the Monothelite heresy, contributed to the drastic reversal in his fortunes
that now took place… A new scourge was being prepared for the unfaithful
Christians: Islam… And now a long-lasting night would descend on the region where
Christianity first originated and flourished.

866 Tom Holland, Dominion, London: Abacus, 2019, pp. 163-164.

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 56. MONOTHELITISM AND THE SIXTH ECUMENICAL COUNCIL

The last ten years of Heraclius’ reign, until his death in 641, were miserable and
tragic: disgraced by personal scandal and his embracing of the heresy of
Monothelitism, he saw all his conquests reversed; vast areas of the East – Egypt, Syria,
Palestine – were lost to the Muslim Arabs.

The Monothelite heresy embraced by Heraclius was an attempt at a compromise

between the Orthodox doctrine proclaimed at Chalcedon in 451, which declared that
Christ is one Person in two natures, human and Divine, and the anti-Chalcedonian
heresy of the Monophysites, who taught that Christ has had only one, Divine nature
since His resurrection. Since the Greek-speaking provinces of the empire were mainly
Orthodox, and the Syriac- and Coptic-speaking provinces – Monophysite, the
Byzantine emperors, beginning with Heraclius (610-641), had a clear political motive
in trying to find a compromise theological formula. That compromise was
Monothelitism; it declared that while Christ has two natures, He has only one will.

Now the Syrians, as Daniel J. Sahas writes, “were known for their independent
thinking, a trait which, as far as theology is concerned, is reflected in the appearance
of various schools and heresies. In spite of a long history under foreign dominion they
preserved their religion, their culture, and their language, and they kept themselves,
essentially, intact from the influence of the Greco-Roman rulers. Furthermore politico-
religious events at times sharpened the differences between the Syrians and the
Byzantines. The efforts of Heraclius, for example, to bring the Monophysites and the
Chalcedonians closer together, and thus to draw the provinces closer to the capital,
led to the outbreak of Monothelitism, which disappointed both the Monophysites and
the Chalcedonians and increased the tension in the relations between Syria and
Constantinople. Also, the high taxes, the overruling power of the landowners over the
peasants and the participation in long, exhaustive and mostly fruitless wars with the
Persians were some of the reasons why the Syrians welcomed the change [to Islamic
rule]. These wars, which aimed at neutralizing the Persian threats against the
provinces and the capital and at strengthening the Byzantine influence, had,
ultimately, the opposite effect by preparing the way for the Arabs.”867

Not only did Heraclius lose the eastern provinces, but also the loyalty of most of
the local populations, Semitic, Coptic and Armenian, whose religious differences with
Roman Orthodoxy were compounded, according to some, by anti-Roman nationalist
feeling.

However, according to Fr. John Meyendorff, “Recent research does not condone
the view that Non-Chalcedonian Copts welcomed Muslims as liberators from the
Roman rule: even then, and in spite of Chalcedonian persecutions, there was
widespread loyalty to the Christian empire. It appears, therefore, that it is only under
Persian or Arab, and later Turkish rule, when intellectual contacts with Greek
theology were lost and every connection with Byzantium was viewed with suspicion
by the new masters, that the Non-Chalcedonian Christians communities of the Middle

867 Sahas, in John of Damascus on Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1972, pp. 22-24.

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East became close-knit national churches. As long as they were part of the Roman
oikoumene, Syrians and Copts remained basically loyal to it ideologically, even if they
had, in their majority, rejected Chalcedonian orthodoxy and suffered persecution. In
their minds, their struggle was not in the name of national particularism – since
neither their culture, nor their language, nor their liturgical traditions were challenged
by the empire – but against that which their spiritual leaders (often Greek-speaking)
saw as a betrayal of the true faith. Egypt, in particular – the cradle of the anti-
Chalcedonian dissidence – was not, Peter Brown remarks, a national enclave within
the Empire, but a microcosm of Mediterranean civilization, as moulded by Rome…”868

So the deeper reason for the political schism in the Eastern empire was not
nationalism, or not primarily so, but religious. God allowed the eastern provinces to
fall away from the Roman empire politically because they had already fallen away
from it in faith, embracing the heresies of Monophysitism and Monothelitism. St.
Anastasius of Sinai considered the defeats and defections that took place in the reign
of Heraclius to be Divine punishment for his heresy...869

In this era there was a parallel between the official religion and Christology of the
regime and its political theology. Thus the Orthodox doctrine of the Symphony of
Powers, the cooperation of the kingship and the priesthood under the One True Faith,
reflected the Chalcedonian teaching on the unity of the Divine and human natures in
the one Christ. But the Monothelite emperors, who rejected the human will of Christ,
and Iconoclast emperors, who likewise rejected His full incarnation, were bound also
to reject the Symphony of Powers. For in accordance with their Unitarian
Christologies, the emperor, instead of being a focus of unity in the religious sphere, was
more naturally seen as an imposer of unity – and a false unity at that. Similarly, the
Muslim rulers, who saw only one, human nature and will in Christ, believed in only
one religio-political power, which necessarily made it despotic.

Thus the Monothelite heretics wanted St. Maximus the Confessor, the main
champion of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, to acknowledge the power of a Monothelite
emperor over the Church, as if he were both king and priest like Melchizedek. But
Maximus refused. When his interrogators asked: “What? Is not every Christian
emperor a priest?” the saint replied: “No, for he has no access to the altar, and after
the consecration of the bread does not elevate it with the words: ‘The holy things to
the holy’. He does not baptize, he does not go on to the initiation with chrism, he does
not ordain or place bishops, priests and deacons, he does not consecrate churches with
oil, he does not wear the marks of the priestly dignity – the omophorion and the
Gospel, as he wears those of the kingdom, the crown and the purple.” The
interrogators objected: “And why does Scripture itself say that Melchizedek is ‘king
and priest’ [Genesis 14.18; Hebrews 7.1]?” The saint replied: “There is only One Who

868 Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1989, p. 27. However, Peter Mansfield writes that “Egypt was a Roman colony in the fullest sense, living
under iron military government and paying exorbitant taxes” (A History of the Middle East, p. 9).
869 Dagron, op. cit., p. 178.

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is by nature King, the God of the universe, Who became for our salvation a hierarch
by nature, of which Melchizedek is the unique type. If you say that there is another
king and priest after the order of Melchizedek, then dare to say what comes next:
‘without father, without mother, without genealogy, of whose days there is no
beginning and of whose life there is no end’ [Hebrews 7.3], and see the disastrous
consequences that are entailed: such a person would be another God become man,
working our salvation as a priest not in the order of Aaron, but in the order of
Melchizedek. But what is the point of multiplying words? During the holy anaphora
at the holy table, it is after the hierarchs and deacons and the whole order of the clergy
that commemoration is made of the emperors at the same time as the laity, with the
deacon saying: ‘and the deacons who have reposed in the faith, Constantine,
Constans, etc.’ Equally, mention is made of the living emperors after all the clergy.”870
And again he said: “To investigate and define dogmas of the Faith is the task not of
the emperors, but of the ministers of the altar, because it is reserved to them both to
anoint the emperor and to lay hands upon him, and to stand before the altar, to
perform the Mystery of the Eucharist, and to perform all the other divine and most
great Mysteries.”871

Although the main opponents of Monothelitism – St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and

St. Maximus the Confessor – were Greek, four of the Eastern patriarchates fell into the
heresy, leaving only the Western patriarchate of Rome to uphold the Orthodox faith.
So St. Maximus fled to Rome, where Pope St. Martin convened a Local Council in the
Lateran in 649 that anathematized Monothelitism. In the second session of the Council
a special libellus was composed by the eastern monks living in Rome. 872 And so, with
the East sunk in heresy and overrun first by the Persians and then, more permanently,
by the Muslims, the West became briefly the savior both of Orthodoxy and Romanity.

Later, Saints Martin and Maximus were arrested on the orders of the emperor, and
transported in chains to Constantinople. During St. Maximus’ interrogation, when
Bishop Theodosius of Caesarea claimed that the Lateran Council had been invalid
since it was not convened by the Emperor, St. Maximus replied: “If only those councils
are confirmed which were summoned by royal decree, then there cannot be an
Orthodox Faith. Recall the councils that were summoned by royal decree against the
homoousion, proclaiming the blasphemous teaching that the Son of God is not of one
essence with God the Father… The Orthodox Church recognizes as true and holy only
those councils at which true and infallible dogmas were established.”873

870 Dagron, op. cit., p. 181.
871 The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., p. 12.
872 One of them may have been the future St. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury). He may have been

the “Theodorus, abbas” who signed the decrees of the Council (Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin
West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 16). Cf. Andrew Ekonomou, Byzantine
Rome and the Greek Popes, Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias,
AD 590-752, E-book, pp. 176-177.
873 The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, pp. 22-23. The opposite view to that of Theodosius

– namely, that the Lateran Council, in spite of the fact that it was not convened by the Emperor, was
ecumenical in status – is sometimes asserted. It hardly matters whether we call it Ecumenical or Local.
In either case its dogmatic decisions are valid and binding for eternity. However, there is no doubt that
the support of the Emperor was vitally important in seeing that the decisions of any Council,
Ecumenical or Local, were enforced throughout the oecumene.

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 Saints Maximus and St. Martin suffered for the faith from the tyrant emperor
Constans II, dying after torture in distant exile. 874

The Popes after St. Martin placed good relations with the Monothelite Eastern
Empire above Orthodoxy until the death of Constans II in 668.875 And from the time
of Pope Vitalian Rome and Constantinople drew steadily closer as invasions by Arabs
from the south and Lombards from the north demonstrated to the Romans how much
they needed Byzantine protection. Religious differences were underplayed; Constans
II received communion from the Pope on a visit to Rome; and Eastern influence in the
Roman Patriarchate steadily increased.876 Indeed, from the time of Pope St. Agatho
(+680), who was a Sicilian Greek, until Pope Zacharias (+752), all the Popes were either
Greeks or Syrians; the Roman Church, now filled with eastern refugees from the
Muslim invasions, became a thriving centre of Byzantine faith and culture.877

The pattern of Greek theological leadership fortified by Western hierarchical

constancy continued until the final extirpation of the heresy. Thus a local Council in
Hatfield in England in 679 led by St. Theodore “the Greek”, Archbishop of
Canterbury878 anathematized Monothelitism; a local Council in Milan under
Archbishop Mansuetus did the same, as did another local Council in Rome under
Pope St. Agatho in 680, at which the decision of the English Council was read out by
St. Wilfred of York.

This Western confession of faith was confirmed by the Eastern Churches at the
Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 681, at which St. Agatho’s epistle
played an important part.

Unfortunately, however, traces of the still dormant heresy of papism are evident in
St. Agatho’s epistle, notably the assertion that the Orthodox teaching rests on the rock

874 St. Maximus summed up the causes of tyranny as follows: “The greatest authors and instigators of
evil are ignorance, self-love and tyranny. Each depends on the other two and is supported by them:
from ignorance of God comes self-love, and from self-love comes tyranny over one’s own kind…”
(Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice: First Century).
875 Pope Vitalian seems to have cooperated in the persecution of Saints Maximus and Martin, and to

have been in full communion with their persecutor, Emperor Constans II, until his death in 668, after
which he preached Orthodoxy. As Louth writes, “Martin’s immediate successors – Eugenius I and
Vitalian – seem to have compromised, although neither of them formally accepted the Typos, both of
them were in communion with the Monothelite Patriarch Peter, who had presided at the trial of Martin.
Resistance to Monothelitism was now virtually reduced to one man, the monk Maximus.” (Maximus
the Confessor, pp. 17-18). See Ubipetrus, “Was Pope Vitalian a Monothelite?” Ubi Petrus Ibi Ecclesia,
February 14, 2020, https://ubipetrusibiecclesia.com/2020/02/14/was-pope-vitalian-a-
monothelite/?fbclid=IwAR3ujzd-yJBHUFns06WLsg-zEX79MNNJFbuZw4aNhNSSOzHy-B3lae8pz5Q
876 An example of this was Pope Vitalian’s sending, in 668, of a Greek, St. Theodore, to be archbishop

of Canterbury, and another Greek, St. Hadrian, to kick-start English ecclesiastical education, together
with a Roman chanter, John, to introduce Roman Byzantine chant into England
877 Thus the iconography of Rome in this period is unquestionably Byzantine. See Daniel Esparza, “The

‘Sistine Chapel of the Middle Ages’ is back in business”, Aleteia, May 5, 2017.
878 St. Agatho calls him “ the archbishop and philosopher of the island of Great Britain” in his letter to

the 125 bishops of the Roman Synod that was to serve as an instruction for his legates to the Sixth
Ecumenical Council (http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG0429/_P4.HTM)

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of the Roman Church, which “remains foreign to all error of every kind” and “by the
grace of God has never departed from the way of truth”. Agatho passes over in silence
the uncomfortable fact that in 638 Pope Honorius died in the Monothelite heresy, and
was anathematized as “a pillar of heresy” by the Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical
Council879 together with Agatho’s legates. This anathematization, as Dvorkin points
out, “was repeated at the Seventh Ecumenical Council and proclaimed by all the
Popes at their enthronement right until the 11th century.”880 In effect, therefore, Rome
herself condemned her own incipient teaching on papal infallibility already in the
seventh century.

This period – the seventh and early eighth centuries – probably represents the high-
water-mark of Western Orthodoxy and western civilization in general, when the West
lived through its most truly Christian period, its golden age. Its patriarchate was more
consistently Orthodox than any other; its monasticism on the Benedictine model was
flourishing; and the national kingdoms in England, France and (up to a point) Spain
were consciously based on the Byzantine model of Church-State relations. Moreover,
it worked well with the East in defending Christendom against what at one time
looked like the all-conquering tide of Islam. For after the Muslims had conquered most
of Spain in 711, in 732 they were defeated by the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the
Battle of Poitiers, one of the most important battles in history. This victory saved
Christianity in the West, and significantly relieved the pressure on the Emperors in
the East, who were being attacked by the Arabs. These events demonstrated the real
unity and interdependence – for the time being - of the two halves of Christendom…

However, the linguistic and cultural, as well as the doctrinal, differences between
East and West were beginning to widen. St. Gregory the Great (+604) was the first
Pope who did not speak Greek, although he had served as apocrisarius in
Constantinople, and remained loyal to the Byzantine Empire. In the sixth century
Latin was still regularly spoken in Byzantium881, but from the time of the Emperor
Heraclius in the early seventh the East stopped using Latin even in its official
documents, although it always retained the title of “Empire of the Romans”. The last
emperor who came to Rome did so in 663 and the last pope to go to Constantinople
went there in 710.882 Moreover, the Eastern Council in Trullo (692), which entered into
the documents of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, rejected certain Roman customs, such
as fasting on Saturdays.

879 When the Acts of the Sixth Council were sent to Rome, St. Agatho’s successor, Leo II, called
Honorius’ confession "profane treachery ... who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with
the teaching of Apostolic tradition”.
880 Dvorkin, op. cit., p. 515. Excerpt from the Profession of Faith required upon the Consecration of a

new Bishop of Old Rome, used from the late 7th century until sometime in the 11th century: "Also the
authors of the new heretical dogmas: Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter of Constantinople, together with
Honorius, who paid incentive to their depraved assertions." (P.L.105, fol. 52, Liber Diurnus).
Additionally, Pope Leo II (+683), in a letter to the Emperor states: "We anathematize also even
Honorius, who did not purify this Apostolic Church with the Doctrine of the Apostolic Tradition, but
by wicked betrayal sought to subvert the Immaculate [Faith]." (Letter to Emperor Constantine
IV, (P.L.96, fol. 408)
881 Judith Herrin, Women in Purple, London: Phoenix Press, 2002, p. 62.
882 Roberts, op. cit., pp. 329-330.

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 The Lord promised that the Church would prevail against the gates of hell – that
is, heresy and schism (Matthew 18.18). But that promise was to the Church as a whole,
not to any individual Church or see. And so while Orthodoxy faltered in different
places at different times, it never fell in all places at the same time. Moreover, the
underlying unity of Orthodox Christian civilization throughout Europe and the
Middle East remained unshaken through most of the period of the Seven Ecumenical
Councils. It was only in the first half of the seventh century, with the rise of Islam and
Monothelitism in the East, and towards the end of the eighth century, with the rise of
Iconclasm and Filioquism in the Carolingian empire of the West, that the first more or
less permanent cracks and distortions in the unity both of faith and civilization (the
two are always closely linked) began to appear.

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 57. THE RISE OF ISLAM

Modern scholarship has been able to establish little that is historically well-founded
about the birth of Islam.883 This is in stark contrast (contrary to the opinion of the
dissident Muslim writer Salmon Rushdie) to the wealth of reliable information that
we have about the earthly life and teaching of Christ. What we know with reasonable
certainty is the following. Mohammed was born in 570 or 571 in Mecca, a trading
community in Western Arabia, and married a rich widow. At about the age of forty,
a demon posing as the Archangel Gabriel gave him a supposed revelation from God
that is recorded in what we know as the Koran, which is for Muslims the literal word
of God and, together with the hadith, various stories about the sayings and actions of
Mohammed, the basis of the religion of Islam.

Muslims believe that Mohammed himself is the last of God’s messengers and the
seal of the prophets, who included Moses and Jesus. For them it is the one true faith
which completes and perfects the partial revelations of Old Testament Judaism and
Christianity. And this in spite of its multiple and radical contradictions with those two
religions.

St. John of Damascus (+749) knew Islam well, for he was the chief minister of Caliph
Abdul Malek before becoming a monk in the monastery of St. Savas near Jerusalem.
He writes: “There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails
and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist. They are descended
from Ishmael, [who] was born to Abraham of Agar, and for this reason they are called
both Agarenes and Ishmaelites. They are also called Saracens, which is derived from
Sarras kenoi, or destitute of Sara, because of what Agar said to the angel: ‘Sara hath
sent me away destitute.’ These used to be idolaters and worshiped the morning star
and Aphrodite, whom in their own language they called Khabár, which means great.
And so down to the time of Heraclius they were very great idolaters. From that time
to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This
man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems,
having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having
insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he
gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven. He had set down
some ridiculous compositions in this book of his and he gave it to them as an object of
veneration.”884

While unambiguously condemning Islam, St. John saw it as a Christian heresy

rather than a separate religion, and indeed it looks like a syncretistic amalgam of
paganism, Judaism and Christianity. Thus Abraham, Moses and Jesus are all
recognized as prophets, and Mary is recognized as a Virgin if not as the Mother of
God. But the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is fiercely attacked, and the Cross
and Resurrection are explicitly denied – it is asserted that some other body was
substituted for Christ’s at the Crucifixion. Paradoxically, however, Jesus is seen as
coming again to judge the world at the end of time…

883 Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, London: Abacus, 2013, chapter 1.
884 St. John, The Fount of Knowledge, Part 2: Epitome of Heresies.

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 Islam may therefore be seen as a syncretistic religion designed to steal adherents
from the other monotheist religions of Judaism and Christianity through its
borrowings from them.

Islam owes its success to a number of human factors in addition to demonic

influence. First was the power vacuum created by exhaustion of the Romans and
Persians after their long wars. Second was the economic disruption and deprivation
caused by the same war. Third was the religious chaos created by the competition
between the Jews, the Christians and various pagan cults in the Arabian peninsula.
Fourth was the disunity of the Arab tribes and the lack of a focus for a Arabic national
identity. Fourth was the appeal to fallen men of a religion allowing pre-pubescent
marriage and pre-pubescent sexual intercourse, as practised by Mohammed
himself.885 Mohammed’s new religion, promising believers wealth and power in this
life and endless sensuous delights in the next, fulfilled all these needs and wants…

Arabia, writes Frankopan, “was a region where belief had been changing, adapting
and competing with each other for the best part of a century. What had been a
polytheist world of multiple deities, idols and beliefs had given way to monotheism
and to ideas about a single, all-powerful deity. Sanctuaries dedicated to multiple gods
were becoming so marginalised that one historian has stated that on the eve of the rise
of Islam traditional polytheism ‘was dying’. In its place came Jewish and Christian
concepts of a single, all-powerful God – as well as of angels, paradise, prayer and
alms-giving which can be found in inscriptions that begin to proliferate across the
Arabian peninsula in the late sixth and early seventh centuries…

`’There is also growing consensus that Muhammed was preaching to a society that
was experiencing acute economic contraction as a result of the Perso-Roman wars. The
confrontation and the effective militarisation of Rome and Persia had an important
impact on trade originating in or passing through the Hijaz. With government
expenditure funnelled into the army and chronic pressure on the domestic economies
to support the war effort, demand for luxury items must have fallen considerably. The
fact that the traditional markets, above all the cities in the Levant and in Persia, were
caught up in the fighting can only have further depressed the economy of southern
Arabia.

“Few would have felt the pinch more than [Mohammed’s tribe] the Quraysh of
Mecca, whose caravans, carrying gold and other valuables to Syria had been the stuff
of legend. They also lost their lucrative contract to supply the Roman army with the
leather needed for saddles, strapping for boots and shields, belts and more besides.
Their livelihood too may have been further threatened by a decline in pilgrims visiting
the baram, an important shrine dedicated to pagan gods located in Mecca. The site was
centred on a series of idols – reportedly including one ‘of Abraham as an old man’ –
but the most important of which was a red agate statue of a man with a golden right
hand and with seven divinatory arrows around it. As guardians of Mecca, the
Quraysh did well from selling food and water to visitors and performing rituals for

885 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouA2rvBKzMI

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pilgrims. With upheaval in Syria and Mesopotamia having repercussions further
beyond, and disruptions in so many aspects of daily life, it was not surprising that
Muhammed’s warnings of imminent doomsday struck a powerful chord.”886

However, Mohammed’s “ecumenist” message, attempting to combine elements of

Judaism, Christianity and paganism, was not popular throughout Arabia. It “met with
ferocious opposition from the conservative elite of Mecca, who were enraged by its
criticism of traditional polytheistic practices and beliefs. Muhammed was forced to
flee to Yahrib (later renamed Medina) in 622 to escape persecution; this flight, known
as the hijra, became the seminal moment in Islamic history, year zero in the Muslim
calendar.”

The opposition of the “old believers” of Mecca forced Mohammed, who claimed to
abhor every kind of idolatry, to retain certain pagan elements in his Islam. Thus he
proclaimed the moon-god Allah to be the one true God. 887 Another pagan element
he retained was the worship of the black stone called “kaaba”888, which he associated
with Abraham and called the house of Allah.

The flight to Medina was also important because it was a Jewish town, and in it
Mohammed made a kind of mutual defence pact with the Jews that was to prove vital
in securing the weakening of Byzantine power and the Muslim conquest of Syria and
Palestine.

Having made his new religion dominant in Arabia, Mohammed died in Mecca in
632. His three early successors – known as the Rashidoun or Rightly Guided Ones –
then burst out of the Arabian desert into the Fertile Crescent, spreading the faith by
fire and sword throughout the Middle East and defeating both the Byzantine and the
Persian armies. Thus the first caliph, Omar bin al-Khattah, defeated the Byzantines at
the Battle of Gaza in 634, and again in 636 at the Battle of the Yarmuk on the Golan
Heights in Syria (where the Byzantines lost 52,000 men).

In 638 Jerusalem, after a year-long siege, was surrendered to Omar, who entered
the Holy City on foot. St. Sophronius the patriarch of Jerusalem was not impressed:
The godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our Lord, Jerusalem, with the
permission of God and in punishment for our negligence, which is considerable, and
immediately proceeded in haste to the place which is called the Capitol. They took
with them men, some by force, others by their own will, in order to clean that place

886 Frankopan, The Silk Road, pp. 73-74.
887 Nektarios Lignos writes: “Allah, worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia, is the god Muhammad’s

Quraysh tribe worshipped, …. the moon god who was married to the sun goddess and they had three
daughters – Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat. This is why we see the crescent moon symbol in conjunction
with Islam.”
888 “In her book Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong asserts that the Kaaba was officially dedicated

to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols which probably represented the days of the year.
However, by the time of Muhammad's era, it seems that the Kaaba was venerated as the shrine of
Allah.”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaba)

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and to build that cursed thing, intended for their prayer and which they call a mosque
(midzgitha).”889

“The present circumstances,” he wrote, “are forcing me to think differently about

our way of life, for why are so many wars being fought among us? Why do barbarian
raids abound? Why are the troops of the Saracens attacking us? Why has there been
so much destruction and plunder? Why are there incessant outpourings of human
blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human bodies? Why have churches
been pulled down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ, who is the dispenser of
all good things and the provider of this joyousness of ours, blasphemed by pagan
mouths (ethnikois tois stomasi) so that he justly cries out to us: ‘Because of you my
name is blasphemed among the pagans,’ and this is the worst of all the terrible things
that are happening to us. That is why the vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the
abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets, overrun the places
which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages,
set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine
armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies of war and add
victory to victory. Moreover, they are raised up more and more against us and
increase their blasphemy of Christ and the church, and utter wicked blasphemies
against God. Those God-fighters boast of prevailing over all, assiduously and
unrestrainedly imitating their leader, who is the devil, and emulating his vanity
because of which he has been expelled from heaven and been assigned to the gloomy
shades. Yet these vile ones would not have accomplished this nor seized such a degree
of power as to do and utter lawlessly all these things, unless we had first insulted the
gift of baptism and first defiled the purification, and in this way grieved Christ, the
giver of gifts, and prompted him to be angry with us, good though he is and though
he takes no pleasure in evil, being the fount of kindness and not wishing to behold the
ruin and destruction of men. We are ourselves, in truth, responsible for all these things
and no word will be found for our defence. What word or place will be given us for
our defence when we have taken all these gifts from him, befouled them and defiled
everything with our vile actions?”890

Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes that St. Sophronius “handed over the city to
Caliph Omar on definite conditions. The churches at the holy places (first of all
Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre) remained in the possession of the Jerusalem
Patriarchate, half of whose churches were turned into mosques. The preaching of
Christianity to Muslims was forbidden, and the Christian churches into which Caliph
Omar entered were seized by the Muslims and converted later into mosques. Later,
this agreement was often broken by the Muslims, and the majority of the churches
were destroyed. Even the very church of the Resurrection over the Holy Sepulchre
was destroyed more than once. And yet the agreement with Omar created a certain
basis for the further existence of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. It was recognized as a
legal person, and the possessor of a series of churches and plots of land in Palestine.
It was allowed to carry out Divine services, to look after the spiritual needs of
Christians and even to judge the Christian population in civil cases. On the whole the

889 St. Sophronius, addition to his friend John Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow, 100-102.
890 St. Sophronius, On Holy Baptism, 166-167.

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Mohammedans did not interfere in the internal administration of the Jerusalem
Patriarchate, although they often carried out external acts of violence and theft on the
Christian population and clergy. The patriarch himself was elected by the Synod,
although the Caliph confirmed him.

“The main feature of this agreement was the preservation of the earthly existence
of the Jerusalem Church, the guarantee of its legal existence, possession of churches
and property, the right to carry out open public services. The cost that had to be paid
for this was not only complete loyalty to the Mohammedan authorities and prayers
for the caliph and his army, but also – which is more important – the refusal to preach
Christianity to the Muslims and their own children who had been seduced into Islam.
But the Arabs by deceit and violence converted thousands of Christians to their faith
– and the archpastors of the Church did not dare to protest against this, and did not
dare openly to carry out anti-Islamic propaganda, which was punished by death at all
times in Islamic countries.”891

The Jews rejoiced at the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, saying that Mohammed
was a prophet who was preparing the way for the Messiah. And even when the
Messiah failed to arrive, “Jews continued to look favourably on Islamic rule in
Jerusalem. In a letter written in the eleventh century, the Jerusalem rabbis recalled the
‘mercy’ God had shown his people when he allowed the ‘Kingdom of Ishmael’ to
conquer Palestine. They were glad to remember that when the Muslims arrived in
Jerusalem, ‘there were people from the children of Israel with them; they showed the
spot of the Temple and they settled with them until this very day.’”892

Following the conquest of Jerusalem, the Muslims quickly conquered Antioch,

Edessa and Caesarea (642). Between 639 and 642 they conquered Egypt, the bread-
basket of Constantinople, driving out the Romans and increasing the taxes threefold.

It was at this time that the long rollcall of martyrs for Christ againnst Islam began,
including that specific form of martyrdom that became so common among the Greeks
under the Turkish yoke, in which the martyr suffers for Christ in penance for having
(sometimes accidentally) apostasized to Islam. In about 640 an Egyptian called Meirax
was tortured and killed. “He was tricked by the Mohammedan Emire into accepting
Islam. He later repented, went into a mosque bearing a cross, declared himself a
Christian and called upon the Moslems to forsake their errors and turn to the faith.”893
Then he was killed…

Meanwhile, writes M. Angold, “The Byzantine Empire had to meet the challenge.
It contained the Arabs in Anatolia by evolving the theme system of defence. Initially,
this meant dividing Anatolia into three military commands: Opsikion, Anatolikon and

891 Alferov, “Vizantijskij servilizm i sovietskoe sergianstvo” (Byzantine servility and Soviet sergianism),
http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=news&id=63406, pp. 5-6.
892 Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem, London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 233.
893 Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, vol. II, p. 313.

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Armeniakon. The Opsikion, originally the strategic reserve, was now quartered across
the approaches to Constantinople. The Anatolikon was the old army of the East, but
now withdrawn to defend south-eastern Anatolia. The Armeniakon was the army of
Armenia, now established in northern Anatolia and covering the routes from Melitene
and the middle Euphrates.

“The threat from the Arabs was all the more formidable because they took to the
sea. They occupied Cyprus (649–50) and destroyed the Byzantine fleet at Phoinix (655)
off the coast of Anatolia. Constantinople was blockaded from 674 to 678, but this attack
was beaten off with Greek fire. Another assault similarly failed in 718. From then on
Constantinople and Anatolia were relatively secure, though there were intermittent
raids down to the mid-ninth century, some penetrating to within striking distance of
Constantinople.

“The Byzantines were less successful in holding the Arabs in the Mediterranean.
Carthage finally succumbed in 697, and from their new capital of Kairuan the Arabs
converted the Berbers. This fuelled the Muslim advance into Spain. Toledo, the
Visigothic capital, fell in 711 and by 718 the conquest of Spain was virtually complete.
The Muslims advanced northwards across the Pyrenees, but their defeat in 732 by the
Franks at the battle of Tours limited any further conquests in this area. Their efforts
were concentrated in the Mediterranean. Crete fell in 824 and a start was made on the
conquest of Sicily from the Byzantines. They established a base at Palermo, but it was
not until 878 that the Byzantine provincial capital of Syracuse fell. In 840 Bari was
captured and became the centre of an emirate which terrorized southern Italy and the
Adriatic. It was recovered in 876 by the Byzantines and a degree of stability was
restored in the central Mediterranean.

“The Muslim advance stretched Byzantine resources to their limit, for it was also
involved in the Balkans. In 582 Sirmium fell to the Avars, and their Slav tributaries
swarmed into the Balkans. They settled on a permanent basis and penetrated as far
south as the Peloponnese, where Monemvasia provided a refuge for the native
population. In 679 the Bulgarians crossed the Danube and settled the lands to the
south. Byzantine territories were now limited to Thrace and a few towns along the
fringes of the Aegean, such as Thessalonica, which withstood a series of Slav sieges.
To hold these areas the themes of Thrace and Hellas were established at the end of the
seventh century. From the late eighth century a determined effort was made to
strengthen the Byzantine hold in Europe. This culminated in the reoccupation of the
Peloponnese and the creation (c. 805) of the theme of the Peloponnese with its
headquarters at Corinth.

“The Byzantine Empire survived the assaults and losses of territory which occurred
from the seventh to the early ninth centuries. In many ways, it emerged all the
stronger, thanks to its capital Constantinople and the evolution of the theme
system.”894

*

894
Angold, op. cit., pp. 14-16.

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 In Persia, meanwhile, anarchy took hold between 628 and 632, when “there were
no fewer than six kings who claimed royal authority; one well-informed Arab
historian writing later put the number at eight – in addition to two queens.”895 In 636,
the Persians were shattered at Qadisiyya, near their capital of Ctesiphon on the banks
of the Tigris. This “was a huge boost for the surging Arab armies and for Islamic self-
confidence. The fact that a swathe of Persian nobles fell in the course of the battle
heavily compromised future resistance, and served to put an already teetering state
on the canvas…

“The heart of the world now gaped open. One city after another surrendered, as
the attacking forces bore down on Ctesipon itself. After a lengthy siege, the capital
eventually fell, its treasury being captured by the Arabs…”896

In 645 the Arabs returned to Persia, killing 40,000 men, destroying many temples
and by 651 had extended their rule to the borders of India.

“Heraclius had driven the Persians out of the Caucasus and installed Adarnerse I
(619-639) as its ruler. This peace, however, only lasted a few decades… By 645 the
Muslims were at the gates of Tbilisi; soon thereafter the entire country was under their
dominion. During the period of Arab-Muslim rule many Georgians received the
crown of martyrdom, especially at the hands of Marwan bin Muhammed’, known in
Georgia as Murvan Qru, ‘the Deaf’, because of his cruelty (to this day in western
Georgia heartless people are called ‘Murvanas’). During this period the holy martyrs
Abo, Davit and Tarichan, the holy king Archil, and Sts. Davit and Constantine offered
up their lives for the Faith.”897

After consolidating their gains in the Middle East, the Muslims swept through the
whole length of North Africa as far as Spain (which they invaded in 711) and in the
south reached as far as Makuria (modern-day Sudan).

However, at this point they were checked by a little-known victory of the Orthodox:
“During the summer of 642, the Orthodox Christians of the Kingdom of Makuria
defeated a Muslim invasion at the First Battle of Dongola. Ten years later the Orthodox
Makurians would defeat a second and larger invasion force by the Caliphate. This
resulted in a peace that lasted for nearly 700 years.” 898

So the Muslims were checked by Orthodox armies in the south and in the west. In
the east, however, they encountered no significant opposition. “In 751, the Arab
conquerors were brought face to face with the Chinese, defeating them decisively in a
confrontation by the Talas River in Central Asia. This brought the Muslims up to a
natural boundary, beyond which there was little point in expanding further – at least
in the short term. In China, meanwhile, the defeat brought repercussions and

895 Frankopan, op. cit., p. 77.
896 Frankopan, op. cit., p. 78.
897 Riassophore-Monk Adrian, in Archpriest Zakaria Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, Platina,

Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006, p. 20.

898 Hieromonk Enoch, Facebook, July, 2016.

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upheaval, triggering a major revolt against the ruling Tang dynasry led by the Sogdian
general An Lushan, which led to an extended period of unrest and instability that
created a vacuum for others to exploit…”899

“Within thirty years of the Prophet’s death,” writes Peter Mansfield, “decisive
events were to shape the future of Islam and of the Prophet’s Arabian homeland. In
AD 656 the Caliph Omar’s successor, Othman, was assassinated. His natural successor
seemed to be Ali, the first cousin of the Prophet and husband of his daughter Fatima.
But Ali was opposed by the ambitious and able Arab general Muawiya, whom Omar
had appointed governor of Syria and who, like Othman, belonged to the powerful
Umayyad family of Mecca. The defeat of Ali and his son Hussein by the Umayyads
led to the first great division in Islam, between the Sunnis, or ‘people of the sunnah’,
who are the great majority, and the Shia or ‘partisans’ of Ali, who continue to regard
Muawiya and his Umayyad successors as secular usurpers.”900

The militant nature of Islam was demonstrated in its first, early years of conquest,
and has never been abandoned or apologised for even in later, more peaceful times.
Indeed, as Mansfield goes on to say, “Arabs today are still inspired to the point of
obsession by the story of the first achievements of Islam”.901

Hence also the emphasis on jhad, armed struggle against the unbelievers, which
must continue until the whole world is Islamic and all unbelievers have been
destroyed. Many love to make a distinction between the religion of Islam, which is
supposedly peaceful, and “Political Islam”, which is not; this is false. Just as there is
no fundamental distinction between Church and State in Islam, so there can be no real
distinction between the violent religion that we see preached in the Koran and the
violent politics of Islam.

That the religion of Islam is inherently violent is proved by the Koran, which says:
"Christians and Jews must believe what Allah has revealed to Muhammad or Allah
will disfigure their faces or turn them into apes, as he did the Sabbath-breakers."
(Koran 9:30). “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” (Koran 2:191). “Make war
on the infidels living in your neighbourhood” (Koran 9:123). “Fight and kill the
unbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and
ambush them using every stratagem of war.” (Koran 9:5; cf. 8:60). “O believers, make
war on the infidels who dwell around you. Let them find firmness in you” (Sura: 9;
Ayat: 123). “Fight those who believe not… even if they be People of the Book [Jews
and Christians] until they willingly agree to pay the tribute in recognition of their
submissive state” (Sura: 9; Ayat: 29). “You will be called to fight a mighty nation; fight
them until they embrace Islam” (Sura: 48; Ayat: 16).

899 Frankopan, op. cit., p. 92.
900 Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 14-15.
901 Mansfield, op. cit., p. 13.

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 Paul Johnson writes: “Islamic law to non-Moslems was based on the arrangements
Mohammed made with the Jewish rulers of the Hijaz. When they refused to
acknowledge his prophetic mission, he applied the principle of what he called the
jihad. This divides the world into the dar-al-Islam, the peaceful territory of Islam, where
the law reigns, and the dar-al-Harb, the ‘territory of war’, controlled temporarily by
non-Moslems. The jihad is the necessary and permanent state of war waged against
the dar-al-Harb, which can only end when the entire world submits to Islam.
Mohammed waged jihad against the Jews of Medina, beat them, divided their menfolk
(save one, who converted) in the public square, decapitated their women, children,
animals and propety among his followers. Other Jewish tribes were treated rather
more leniently, but at Mohammed’s discretion, since God gave him absolute rights
over the cities as he saw fit. Mohammed, however, sometimes found it politic to make
a treaty, the dhimma, with his beaten foes, under which he spared their lives and
permitted them to continue to cultivate their oases, provided they gave him half the
proceeds. The dhimma submitted, receiving the right to his life, the practice of his
religion, even protection, in retrun for special taxes – the kharaj or land-tax to the ruler,
the juzya or poll-tax, higher commercial and travel taxes than the believers of the
population, and special taxes at the ruler’s pleasure. Moreover, the status of the
dhimma was always at risk, sinc the dhimma merely suspended the conqueror’s natural
rights to kill the conquered and confiscate his property; hence it could be revoked
unilaterally whenever the Moslem ruler wished.”902

Therefore the natural state of relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim
worlds must necessarily be one of struggle, or jihad, interrupted by periods of peace
permitted for purely tactical reasons.903 The 15th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun
wrote: "In the Muslim community, jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism
of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by
persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission,
and the jihad was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. But
Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Thus, as L.A. Tikhomirov wrote: “In submitting without question to God, the
Muslim becomes a spreader of the power of God on earth. Everyone is obliged to
submit to Allah, whether they want to or not. If they do not submit, then they have no
right to live. Therefore the pagans are subject either to conversion to Islam, or to
extermination. Violent conversion to Islam, is nothing prejudicial, from the Muslim
point of view, for people are obliged to obey God without question, not because they
desire it, but because Allah demands this of them.”904

Again, as Kenneth Craig writes, holy war, or jihad, “was believed to be the recovery
by Islam of what by right belonged to it as the true and final religion but which had
been alienated from it by the unbelief or perversity embodied in the minorities whose
survival – but no more – it allowed....”905

902 Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1995, p. 175.
903 Henry Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 101-102.
904 Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 296.
905 Craig, The Arab Christian, London: Mowbrays, 1992, pp. 57-58.

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 And if it allowed their existence, this was not because they had the “right” to
survive, but because, for the time being, it was not advantageous to the Muslims – or
within their power – to kill them…Orthodox Christianity was spread by twelve
defenceless men not enjoying any political or military support and using no power
except the power of preaching and prayer; it is truly the religion of peace. However,
although Mohammed himself fought only relatively small-scale wars for the control
of Arabia, his successors, the early caliphs, went, as we have seen, with fire and sword
throughout the Middle East and North Africa, conquering a vast swathe of land from
Spain to India in the first sixty years. Carthage was conquered in 695, Spain in 717. In
fact, Islam has been the most violent religion in history.906

Having said that, it remains true that, once having gained control of a region, the
Muslims could be relatively tolerant. “The Muslim advance,” writes Jenkins, “was
initially tolerant. In his study of the Silk Roads, the historian Peter Frankopan stresses
the sympathy with which early Islam treated the faiths of the near east. ‘ The message
was inclusive and familiar...’”907

This initial tolerance and “inclusiveness” did not last long beyond the end of the
seventh century. According to Fr. Andrew Louth, “the Muslims seem to have been
even-handed in their treatment of the different Christian groups – and also of the
adherents of other religions that could claim to be ‘people of the book’, such as the
Jews, the Manichees, and perhaps also the Samaritans – but they must have looked
with less disfavour on those Christians who did not share the faith of the Byzantine
emperor. Despite the fact that monoenergism and monothelitism were imperial
policy, the Melkites [those loyal to malka, ‘king’ in Syriac] remained staunchly
Chalcedonian; the only group of Christians to embrace monothelitism was the
Maronites of Lebanon, who adhered to the Christological doctrine after it had been
abandoned by the Byzantines (formally at the Sixth Ecumenical Synod of 681-82,
though the usurper Bardanes Philippikos attempted to revive it at a synod held in
Constantinople in 712).

“The Muslims’ attitude to the Christians in their newly acquired domains was one
of tolerant disdain. As non-Muslims, they were required to pay a poll tax, the jizya,
but otherwise, to begin with at least, the Christians were left alone. There seems to
have been little attempt in the seventh century to convert non-Arab Christians to
Islam. In this period, too, the Muslim presence was largely a military presence, which

906 Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Simon &
Schuster, 1996, pp. 254-258. St. Gregory Palamas wrote: “It is true that Mohammed started from the
east and came to the west, as the sun travels from the east unto the west. Nevertheless, he came with
war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God, but
instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil. Consider now, in times past, did not Alexander (the Great)
prove victorious from the east to the west? There have also been many others, in many other times,
who set out on military campaigns and dominated the world. Yet none of the peoples believed in their
leaders as you revere Mohammed. Though Mohammed may employ violence and offer pleasures, he
cannot secure the approval of the world. Albeit, the teaching of Christ, though it turns away from
(worldly) pleasures, it has taken hold to the ends of the world, without violence, since it is opposed to
it. This phenomenon is the victory that overcomes the world (I John 5:4).”
907 Jenkins, op. cit., p. 51.

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remained in a minority. The civil structures of the societies they had conquered they
left intact; the personnel of the Byzantine administration remained Christian. The
fiscal administration in Damascus, from 661 to 750 the seat of the caliphate, was
headed in the seventh century by members of the Christian family to which the monk
and theologian, St. John of Damascus, belonged. In such a climate, the principal
change for Melkites as a result of the Arab conquest may have been less the presence
of Islam than the new freedom experienced by those religious groups that had
experienced persecution under the Byzantines: Jews, Manichees, Samaritans and
Christians who rejected Imperial Orthodoxy.”908

908 Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 21.

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 58. ICONOCLASM AND THE SEVENTH ECUMENICAL COUNCIL

The first phase of the iconoclast heresy lasted from the 720s to 787. Then there was
an Orthodox interlude, from 787 to 815.909 Then the second phase ensued, from 815 to
843. At the beginning of the first phase, after Emperor Leo III espoused the heresy,
falsely accusing the Orthodox of worshipping (as opposed to venerating) the icons,
and began to persecute the iconophiles, Pope Gregory II condemned it in letters to the
emperor. His successor, Gregory III, convened a council in Rome and anathematized
it in 733.

“In retaliation,” writes Fr. Andrew Louth, “Leo confiscated the papal patrimonies
in Calabria and Sicily, and transferred the ecclesiastical provinces of Calabria, Sicily,
and Illyricum, formerly under papal jurisdiction, to the patriarch of Constantinople In
730, Leo required the patriarch of Constantinople Germanus I, to support imperial
policy. When he refused, he was deposed and withdrew to his country estates at
Platanion. He was replaced by the more compliant Anastasios. The iconodule sources
speak of extensive persecution, and see this as directed not just at the cult of the saints,
but also at the veneration of relics, and indeed the cult of the saints itself.”910

Leo’s quasi-Muslim understanding of the nature of icons went hand in hand with
a resurrection of the pagan model of the imperator-pontifex maximus. In fact, insofar as
the Muslim Caliph considered himself to be both a king and successor of the prophet,
Leo could be said to have borrowed his theory of kingship (“I am both king and
priest”), as well as his iconoclasm, from the Muslims. It was therefore eminently fitting
that his main critic in both spheres should have been St. John of Damascus, the chief
minister at the Caliph’s court.

St. John taught that the icons are not worshipped, and therefore not idols, as the
Muslims and iconoclasts (and, later, the Protestants) would have it. But they were
holy, and therefore to be venerated. For since the Word was made flesh, there is no
unbridgeable gulf between spirit and flesh; matter can become Spirit-bearing.

Christ could be venerated on icons insofar as He had assumed flesh and become
visible: “Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was not depicted at all. But
now that God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I make an image of the
God that can be seen. I do not worship matter but the creator of matter, Who for my

909 The heresy was mainly based in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Other Eastern patriarchates,
especially Jerusalem, opposed it. Thus Sergei Shumilo writes: “a Council in Jerusalem was held in 764,
at which the Patriarch of Jerusalem Theodore (735–770), together with the Patriarch of Alexandria
Cosmos (727–765) and Patriarch of Antioch Theodore, condemned the iconoclastic heresy, and
confirmed the acts of the six Ecumenical Councils. Another “Pan-Orthodox” Council in Jerusalem took
place in 836, which, in addition to the Jerusalem Patriarch Vasily (820–838) who convened it, was
attended by Patriarchs of Alexandria Christopher (817–841) and Antioch Job (813–843), as well as many
monks from different monasteries. The council condemned the iconoclastic heresy and sent a message
to the Byzantine emperor Theophilos of Constantinople, in defense of the veneration of icons, which
was included in the codex of official Orthodox conciliar definitions.” (“Shine Forth, O Kiev, the New
Jerusalem – the Mother of Churches Watches over You”, Orthodox Christianity, February 27, 2020).
910 Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 49.

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sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter, Who through matter effected
my salvation.”

The emperor, said St. John, had no right to impose his false dogmas on the Church.
For “What right have emperors to style themselves lawgivers in the Church? What
does the holy apostle say? ‘And God has appointed in the Church first apostles,
second prophets, third teachers and shepherds, for building up the body of Christ.’ (I
Corinthians 12.28). He does not mention emperors… Political prosperity is the
business of emperors; the condition of the Church is the concern of shepherds and
teachers.”911

Offended by St. John’s bold defence of the faith, Emperor Leo slandered him to the
Caliph, “who had his right hand cut off. John fell down in prayer before the icon of
the most holy Mother of God, and his hand was re-joined to his arm and miraculously
healed.”912 So the living prototype of the icon witnessed by the miracle to the truth of
St. John’s theology of the icon – and simultaneously to the falsehood of the emperor’s
despotic theory of state power…

Some years later, in a document probably written early in the ninth century in
Constantinople, but ascribed to the earlier Orthodox Pope Gregory II, Leo III’s claim
to be both king and priest was refuted, while it was admitted that true kings are in
some ways like priests: “You write: ‘I am Emperor and priest’. Yes, the Emperors who
were before you proved this in word and deed: they built churches and cared for them;
being zealous for the Orthodox faith, they together with the hierarchs investigated
and defended the truth. Emperors such as: Constantine the Great, Theodosius the
Great, Constantine [IV], the father of Justinian [II], who was at the Sixth Council. These
Emperors reigned piously: they together with the hierarchs with one mind and soul
convened councils, investigated the truth of the dogmas, built and adorned the holy
churches. These were priests and Emperors! They proved it in word and deed. But
you, since the time that you received power, have not begun to observe the decrees of
the Fathers...”913

The Pope also wrote: “You know, Emperor, that the dogmas of the Holy Church
do not belong to the Emperor, but to the Hierarchs, who can safely dogmatize. That is
why the Churches have been entrusted to the Hierarchs, and they do not enter into
the affairs of the people’s administration. Understand and take note of this... The
coming together of the Christ-loving Emperors and pious Hierarchs constitutes a
single power, when affairs are governed with peace and love”. And again: “God has
given power over all men to the Piety of the Emperors in order that those who strive
for virtue may find strengthening in them, - so that the path to the heavens should be
wider, - so that the earthly kingdom should serve the Heavenly Kingdom.”914

911 St. John of Damascus, Second Apology against those who attack the Divine Images, 12. It may be pointed
out, however, that I Corinthians 12.28 includes among the spiritual gifts that of “governments”
(kubernhseiV), which could plausibly be interpreted as referring to political government. But of course,
this gift was that of governing the State, not the Church…
912 St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prologue from Ochrid, Bimingham: Lazarica Press, 1986, vol. II, p. 283.
913 Pope Gregory II, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 87.
914 Pope Gregory II, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 82.

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 One person in two distinct natures: one power in two distinct functions: the
Chalcedonian basis of the symphonic doctrine of Church-State relations is clear. And
just as the symphonic doctrine of Church-State relations reflects Chalcedonian
Orthodoxy, so the absolutist theory of Church-State relations reflects both
Monothelitism and Iconoclasm. Just as Monothelitism denies that there is more than
one will in Christ, so the absolutist theory denies that there is more than one will in
the government of the Christian commonwealth, declaring that the will of the emperor
can take the place of the will of the hierarchs. And just as Iconoclasm destroys the
proper relationship between the icon and its archetype, saying that icons are in fact
idols, so absolutism destroys the proper relationship and distance between the earthly
type and his Heavenly Archetype, so that the emperor becomes, in St. Maximus’
words, “another God incarnate” - that is, an idol. For this, no less than for his
iconoclasm, Leo III is called “forerunner of the Antichrist” in the service books, and
was anathematized by the Church as “the tormentor and not Emperor Leo the
Isaurian”.915 The later iconoclast emperor, Constantine Copronymus, was also
anathematized and denied the title of emperor: “the tyrant, and not Emperor”. Even
more emphatic was the anathematization of Emperor Leo V the Armenian: “the evil
first beast, the tormentor of the servants of Christ, and not Emperor Leo the
Armenian”.916

The iconoclast heresy was confessed by the emperor and the patriarchate of
Constantinople: the other patriarchates, of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem
anathematized it. It was in order to avoid the terrifying power of these anathemas that
Patriarch Paul repented of his iconoclasm and retired, while his successor Tarasius
took his place only on condition that an ecumenical council was convened with the
other four patriarchates in order to overthrow the heresy and deliver the Great Church
from anathema.917 So when the iconophile Empress Irene came to the throne, and
installed the iconophile Tarasius as patriarch, she immediately convened the Seventh
Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 787, which confirmed the true faith and
anathematized not only iconoclasm but all deviations from Holy Tradition.

The Seventh Council not only brought to an end the period of Christological
debates of the first Christian millennium. It also brought to an end the debates over
the role of the Emperor in the Church. The role of the Emperor in the Church was now
defined in iconographic terms: the Emperor is an icon of Christ the King, but only so long
as he remains Orthodox, holding to the doctrine of Christ in all things. Otherwise, the likeness
between icon and archetype is destroyed and the grace of God does not descend from Archetype
to icon. The Emperor is in the Church, but not above it. He is not, and never can be, a priest.

915 Menaion, May 12, Service to St. Germanus of Constantinople, Vespers, “Lord, I have cried”; Fomin
and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 88. In two hagiographical texts, Theosterict’s Life of Nicetas of Medicion and
St. Methodius’ Life of Euthymius of Sardis, Leo is given the apocalyptic title of “beast” (D.E. Afinogenov,
“Povest’ o proshchenii imperatora Feofila” i Torzhestvo Pravoslavia (The “Tale” of the Forgiveness of the
Emperor Theophilus and the Triumph of Orthodoxy), Moscow: Ilarik, 2004, pp. 26, 28).
916 Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., pp. 89, 94.
917 See the Life of St. Tarasius in St. Demetrius of Rostov’s Lives of the Saints for February 25.

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He can be the focus of unity of the Church, but cannot create that unity, which is created by
the adherence of the whole Church to the Orthodox Faith.

For, as the Council declared: “The priest is the sanctification and strengthening of
the Imperial power, while the Imperial power is the strength and firmness of the
priesthood… God gave the greatest gift to men: the Priesthood and the Imperial
power. The first regulates and cares for heavenly things, while the second, by means
of legal norms, administers earthly things. Now in truth… agreement (symphony) has
taken the upper hand over disagreements, and disunity has given way to unity.” 918

From 815, however, the second phase, or renewal of the iconoclast heresy began, in
which we see an interesting new argument put forward by the iconoclasts: that an
emperor that is truly an icon of the Omnipotent Christ must necessarily be victorious
in battle, having the blessing of Christ on all his works. And therefore, since the
iconoclast emperors Leo III and Constantine V were on the whole victorious in battle,
while the iconophile emperors Constantine VI and Irene, Michael I Rangave and
Nicephorus, were defeated, this spoke in favour, according to the iconoclasts, of the
iconoclast emperors having the true faith…919

Of course, this was not a theological argument. It is natural, but simplistic, to

suppose that the success or failure of an emperor or king in battle is a direct function
of the Orthodoxy or heterodoxy of his faith and a due reward for it. Thus Eusebius
believed that Constantine the Great was so dear to God and so blessed, “so pious and
so fortunate in all that he undertook, that with the greatest facility he obtained
authority over more nations than any who had preceded him – and yet retained his
power undisturbed to the very end of his life.”920 However, this is by no means always
the case. Sometimes God allows an Orthodox king to be defeated - for various
different reasons that are concealed in the mysteries of Divine Providence. Saul fell at
Gilboa because of his impiety, but Josiah, though righteous, was defeated and killed
in battle, as were St. Oswald of Northumbria and St. Lazar of Serbia. Heraclius
gloriously defeated the Persians, but was routed by the Muslims…

In the Life of the sixth-century St. Elesbaan, king of Ethiopia, we read that he “lived
when Arabia was ruled by Dunaan, the oppressor of Christians. The pious Elesbaan
was unable to look on indifferently as believers in Christ were being massacred. He
declared war on Dunaan, but his military campaign was unsuccessful.

918 Seventh Ecumenical Council, in Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 91; Sobolev, p. 77. As Gervais
Dumeige points out, the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea was freer than the Fifth Council, “which
felt the strong pressure of the Emperor Justinian, and more even than Constantinople III [the Sixth
Council] where the presence of Constantine IV risked imposing on the conciliar debates… At Nicaea
the men of the Church dealt with the affairs of the Church, under the direction of a man of the Church
who knew the desires and wishes of the sovereigns. It was on a path prepared in advance that the
bishops were able to advance freely” (Nicée II, Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1978, p. 195).
919 Nun Cassia (Senina) (editor), Zhitia Vizantijskikh Sviatykh Epokhi Ikonoborchestva (Lives of

theByzantine Saints of the Iconoclast Period), vol. I, St. Petersburg: Kvadrivium, 2015, p. 10.; George
Peter Bithos, Saint Methodios of Constantinople, Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2009, p.
28. “Leo V’s motives seem clearer: the veneration of icons was to be made the scapegoat for the
successive Byzantine defeats at the hands of the Bulgars and the Arabs” (Louth, op. cit., p. 128).
920 Eusebius, Life of Constantine, 1.6.

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 “Wishing to learn the reason for his defeat, Elesbaan, with prompting from above,
turned to a certain hermit. He revealed to the emperor that he had proceeded
unrighteously in deciding to take revenge against Dunaan, since the Lord had said,
‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay!’ (Hebrews 10:30).

“The hermit counselled St Elesbaan make a vow to devote his final days of life to
God, to escape the wrath of God for his self-willed revenge, and then to defeat
Dunaan. St Elesbaan made a vow to the Lord, and marching off with his army against
the enemy, he defeated, captured and executed him. After the victory the saint
resigned as emperor, secluded himself within a monastery and for fifteen years he
dwelt in strict fasting and asceticism.”921

Another witness that might is not right, and that success on the battlefield does not
necessarily signify the favour of God, comes in the lives of the forty-two Amorian
martyrs at the hands of the Muslims in 829. When some Muslim sages tried to
persuade the Christians to apostasize to Islam on the grounds that they were
everywhere victorious against the Christians, the latter replied: "If you would gauge
the truth of a faith by victories in wars, then this would mean that all the idolatrous
nations, who from time to time have conquered the world, such as the Persians,
Greeks, Romans and others, possessed the true faith. This, even you Muslims would
never acknowledge. And because you have been victorious over the Christians now,
this does not mean that your faith is better; rather, that our sins are greater and because
of this, God punishes us, through you."922

If, therefore, we are to speak of Orthodox kings as icons of Christ the King, we must
nevertheless remember that they were sinners who, with their peoples, were very
often chastised for their sins with sufferings and defeats…

The reason why the history of the Orthodox peoples is so often a history of wars
and suffering lies in the mystery both of God’s mercy and of His justice. Of course, all
the peoples, as being the descendants of Adam, fall under the curse of suffering and
death. But God especially chastises those whom He loves, His sons by grace and
adoption. For “if you endure chastening, God is dealing with you as with sons. For
what son is there who his father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening,
of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons…”
(Hebrews 12.7-8).

921 Life of St. Elesbaan, Holy Cross Monastery.
922 St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prologue from Ohrid, March 6.

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 CONCLUSION. THE TRUTH IS ONE
If we are asked to point to the most important difference between the ancient and
the modern worlds, then we should reply: for the ancients of almost all religions and
beliefs, the truth is one, whereas for moderns the truth is multiple or relative or even
non-existent. Probably the most modern man in the ancient world was Pontius Pilate,
who, standing before the Truth Incarnate, asked: “What is truth?” (John 18.38) - and
would not wait for an answer. The ancients’ faith in the existence of the one truth
compelled them to anathematize those whom they considered to be in heresy, and
even to persecute and kill them at times, in a way that appals modernists. Perhaps
rightly: the Truth did not encourage destroying the evil tares of the heretics “lest while
you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them” (Matthew 13.29).
However, He considers lukewarm indifference to the truth a greater sin than a fiery
zeal that is not according to reason; for “because you are lukewarm, and neither cold
not hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (Revelation 3.16).

Since they believed in the existence of the truth, very many of the ancients –
martyrs, priests, ascetics, kings and queens, men, women and children of every class
and nation - were given the grace to receive it and be saved by it. That is why the
Church of Christ, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy 3.15) reached the
peak of its power and greatness precisely in the first eight centuries of the Christian
era. The enemies of the truth – the pagans, the Jews, the heretics, the Muslims – also
had their triumphs. But by far the greatest fact of this period is the glory of the Church
and of its multitudes of saints. And since the truth they confessed, and by the power
of which they worked so many wonders, remains the truth to this day and forever –
for “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13.8) - this period
of history will remain forever relevant and vitally precious to every succeeding
generation that still wants to know the truth.

For “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world, and this is the victory that
has overcome the world – our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that
believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” (I John 5.4-5).

“It is a good thing,” wrote St. Symeon the Theologian, “to believe in Christ, because
without faith in Christ it is impossible for anyone to be saved; but one must also be
instructed in the word of truth and understand it. It is a good thing to be instructed in
the word of truth, and to understand it is essential; but one must also receive Baptism
in the name of the Holy and Life-giving Trinity, for the bringing to life of the soul. It
is a good thing to receive Baptism and through it a new spiritual life; but it is necessary
that this mystical life, or this mental enlightenment in the spirit, also should be
consciously felt. It is a good thing to receive with feeling the mental enlightenment in
the spirit; but one must manifest also the works of light. It is a good thing to do the
works of light; but one must also be clothed in the humility and meekness of Christ
for perfect likeness to Christ. He who attains this and becomes meek and humble of
heart, as if these were his natural dispositions, will unfailingly enter into the Kingdom
of Heaven and into the joy of His Lord.”923

923 St. Symeon, The First-Created Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, p. 76.

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