Church and State after Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm, though originating within the Church, had ended as a policy which the Empire attempted to force on the Church. The flaw in the ‘symphony’ of Church and State of which Justinian had been the architect became apparent.
The eighth-century emperors, fighting to defend and preserve the Empire, sought to subordinate the Church to the State, seeing themselves as responsible to God for both aspects of Byzantine life. In persecuting the monks, the chief defenders of icons, the iconoclastic emperors were also engaged in conflict with that element in the life of the Church which was most conscious of the distinctive vocation of the Church to be in the world but not of it, and so to distance itself from the State. The revival of monasticism in the early ninth century under the inspiration of St Theodore of Studios (759-826) contributed to a reappraisal of Church-State relations within the Church, from which there emerged the late-Byzantine pattern of the theocratic state. This pattern was embodied in the introduction to Basil I’s law code issued towards the end of the ninth century. Known as the Epanagoge, it set out the respective functions within the Christian Empire of emperor and patriarch. Each had his God-given task to perform, and neither was subordinate to the other. The image of the pious emperor kneeling before Christ became a frequent one in the centuries after the defeat of iconoclasm, and reflected a different understanding of the emperor’s position from that held by Constantine, Justinian and the iconoclastic emperors. In practice the balance in the relationship between emperor and patriarch often failed to correspond to the theory, and with the gradual weakening of the Church, and the increasing pressure exerted by the emperors, the position of the patriarch became more and more subordinate to that of the emperor. The Church became thoroughly Byzantine, losing any awareness of itself as called to any kind of prophetic role within the Empire.
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