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The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883

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The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883 Durham E-Theses The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883 WAGSCHAL, DAVID,FERGUSON How to cite: WAGSCHAL, DAVID,FERGUSON (2010) The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/468/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883 David Ferguson Wagschal The present work seeks to explore the nature of law and legality in the Byzantine canonical tradition through a careful reading of the central texts of the Byzantine canonical corpus. The principal topics to be considered include the shape and growth of the corpus as a whole, the content and themes of the traditional prologues, the language, genre and style of the canons themselves, and the traditional thematic rearrangements of the canonical corpus. As a cultural-historical exploration of law, this work has as its goal throughout to trace the fundamental contours of how the tradition conceives, frames and "imagines" itself as a legal system: central themes and concepts, basic presuppositions, recurring patterns, and prominent contextualizations. Drawing on categories of modern legal theory and legal anthropology, this work is particularly interested in the nature of legal norms and their relationship to other normative systems, the place and role of technical rule-discourse, and mechanisms of change, development and interpretation. The relationship of the canons to the secular law will also be taken into account. The central argument of this work is that the picture of law that emerges from the Byzantine material is fundamentally at odds with many formalist/positivist expectations of modern western legal culture. This dissonance had traditionally made it very easy to dismiss Byzantine canon law as "primitive" or "decadent". If approached more sympathetically, however, this strange legal world can be read as constituting a surprisingly coherent and rich legal system that is characterized by 1) a deep investment in embedding itself in broader value-narratives; 2) the centrality of the idea of law as a sacred (and relatively inviolable) tradition; and 3) a strong orientation towards the realization of substantive justice, not formal consistency. If taken seriously, this picture of law has a number of important implications for contemporary Orthodox canonical legal theory, the broader history of church law, and the study of late antique and Byzantine law generally. The Nature of Law and Legality in the Byzantine Canonical Collections 381-883 Volume One of Two David Ferguson Wagschal Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Theology and Religion Durham University 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME I Introduction.......................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Shape of the Law Introduction.....................................................................................................................25 A. A preliminary problem: codicology...........................................................................25 B. The tradition takes shape: a survey of the textual history of Byzantine canon law...30 C. Major contours of the tradition..................................................................................47 1. Unity, stability, continuity...............................................................................47 2. A Greek phenomenon......................................................................................54 3. Size..................................................................................................................56 4. Autonomy........................................................................................................58 5. Structure, order and patterns of growth in the corpus.....................................59 6. Is something missing? The problem of official definition, jurisprudence and professionalization...............................................................................................68 D. Summary and analysis: a curious law indeed.............................................................78 Chapter 2. Introducing the law: the traditional framing material Introduction.....................................................................................................................83 A. Content........................................................................................................................85 1. The Nicene creed.............................................................................................85 2. The Apostolic material....................................................................................86 3. The Prologue of the Coll50: Οἱ τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ .........................................90 4. The Prologues of the Coll14: Τὰ μὲν σώματα and Ὁ μὲν παρών...................95 5. The Trullan complex.....................................................................................103 6. II Nicaea 1.....................................................................................................107 7. Minor texts.....................................................................................................110 B. Central themes, priorities, categories........................................................................116 1. An initial problem: "rhetoric"........................................................................116 2. Embedding the canons: fundamental contexts and referents.........................120 3. One special context: the civil law .................................................................124 4. Sources and legislation..................................................................................127 C. Summary and analysis: the law introduced..............................................................130 Chapter 3. The Language(s) of the law: reading the canons Introduction...................................................................................................................132 A. Nomenclature............................................................................................................132 1. Naming the laws: terms for rules...................................................................132 2. Naming the law? The missing concept of "canon law"................................145 B. Genre.........................................................................................................................146 C. Normativity I: the canons as rules. Structure and dispositive vocabulary................151 D. Normativity II: the legal language of the canons......................................................159 1. The legal parts...............................................................................................160 2. The legal whole?............................................................................................171 E. Normativity III: The non-legal legal language of the canons...................................175 iii 1. Three principal discourses: tradition, pedagogy, persuasion.........................177 2. Principal "assemblages": basic contexts and motifs.....................................187 a. Scripture.............................................................................................187 b. Morality and metaphysics..................................................................190 c. Honour and appearances...................................................................192 d. Purity, cleanliness and defilement.....................................................195 e. Medicine............................................................................................197 f. The Divine presence and the sacred...................................................198 3. The legal whole revisited...............................................................................201 F. Summary and analysis: the language of the law.......................................................203 Chapter 4. Systematizing the law: the 6th C thematic collections Introduction...................................................................................................................206 A. Origin and dating......................................................................................................206 B. Self-presentation.......................................................................................................213 C. Morphology...............................................................................................................215 D. Source selection........................................................................................................217
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