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The Rise and Fall of Christian Rome

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The Rise and Fall of Christian Rome THE RISE AND FALL OF CHRISTIAN ROME Vladimir Moss © Copyright. All Rights Reserved. Vladimir Moss, 2018. INTRODUCTION 5 I. THE BIRTH OF NEW ROME 6 1. THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS 7 2. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (1) THE HIERARCHICAL PRINCIPLE 12 3. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (2) AUTOCRACY AND TYRANNY 16 4. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (3) EMPIRE AND PRIESTHOOD 25 5. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (4) RELIGIOUS FREEDOM 36 6. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (5) MONASTICISM AND CULTURE 48 7. THE CONSTANTINIAN REVOLUTION: (6) ROME AND THE NON-ROMAN WORLD 56 II. THE CHALLENGERS TO NEW ROME 61 8. THE FALL OF OLD ROME 62 9. THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS 72 10. THE POSITION OF THE ROMAN PAPACY 78 11. THE SYMPHONY OF NATIONS 85 12. NEW ROME, THE JEWS, THE PERSIANS AND ISLAM 90 13. THE DISSONANCE OF POWERS: (1) MONOTHELITISM 105 14. THE DISSONANCE OF POWERS: (2) ICONOCLASM 109 15. NEW ROME, OLD ROME AND THE FRANKS 113 III. THE ZENITH OF NEW ROME 125 16. ST. PHOTIUS THE GREAT AND CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS 126 17. MIGHT AND RIGHT IN NEW ROME 134 18. NEW ROME AND THE BULGARIANS 141 19. NEW ROME, OLD ROME AND THE GERMANS 146 20. NEW ROME AND THE RUSSIANS 154 21. THE TRIUMPH OF BYZANTINISM 164 22. THE RIGHTS OF THE ORTHODOX AUTOCRAT 170 IV. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEW ROME 174 23. THE SLIDE TOWARDS ABSOLUTISM 175 24. 1204. THE FIRST FALL OF THE CITY 184 25. THE NICAEAN EMPIRE AND ROYAL ANOINTING 187 26. NEW ROME AND THE GEORGIANS 197 27. NEW ROME AND THE SERBS 202 28. NEW ROME AND THE COUNCIL OF LYONS 205 29. THE CRISIS OF BYZANTINE STATEHOOD 214 30. THE REBELLION OF THE SERBS 223 31. ST. MARK OF EPHESUS AND THE COUNCIL OF FLORENCE 229 32. 1453. THE SECOND FALL OF THE CITY 242 APPENDIX. THE GREAT IDEA 253 INTRODUCTION The foundational culture and civilization of Europe is Christian Rome, otherwise known as New Rome or Byzantium. All the nations of Europe that received the faith in the first millennium received it either directly from Christian Rome or from one of its offshoots. They inherited from Christian Rome their faith – Orthodox Christianity, their statehood – the Byzantine “symphony of powers”, and their earliest music, art and architecture. This is as true of Western Europe as of Eastern Europe, although the Christian nations of Western Europe underwent a certain corruption of their Byzantine inheritance towards the end of the first Christian millennium. Although the West today constitutes a different civilization from that of the East, it is impossible to understand it without examining its Orthodox Christian roots. This book is a study of the origins of Christian Rome in the life of St. Constantine the Great, its zenith and final decline and fall in the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In an appendix the “great idea” of the revival of Christian Rome during the nineteenth-century Greek revolution is examined. I. THE BIRTH OF NEW ROME 1. THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS “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…”1 It was indeed a renewal, a Renovatio Imperii. 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 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.”2 The renewal of the Roman Empire by the first Christian Emperor was surely a vindication of the Christians’ loyal and patient attitude to the pagan Roman empire. 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.”3 However, he was wrong: in response to the patience and prayer 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). 1 Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2013, p. 97. 2 Florovsky, “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”, Christianity and Culture, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, pp. 72, 74. 3 Tertullian, in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 155. Paradoxically, in spite of his vast – indeed, unprecedented - achievements, St. Constantine has received a remarkably bad press, not only from pagans and heretics in his own time but also from medieval and modern Christians. He has been accused of being the originator of “Caesaropapism”, of causing the fall of the very Church that he saved from destruction, of cruelty and rank hypocrisy, even of a supposed “heresy of Constantinianism”…4 Let us now examine the real essence of the Constantinian revolution, beginning with a brief description of his path to power… In 285 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. But then, 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 sacrificial victims. This seemed to indicate that the gods were displeased, and Diocletian was worried… In 302 the same thing happened, again at Antioch. Diocletian conferred with his fellow Augustus, Galerius, who advised him to persecute the Christians. Diocletian hesitated… Then he 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, the feast of the Terminalia, the persecution began. 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. 5 Churches were destroyed, the Holy Scriptures burned, and Christians who refused to sacrifice were tortured and killed. To many Christians it seemed that the world was about to end insofar as Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, the worst 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?”6 4 Edward Leithart, Defending Constantine, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2010, p. 250, note 61. 5 Jean-Louis Voisin, “Le Songe de l’Empereur” (The Dream of the Emperor), Histoire (Le Figaro), 8, June-July, 2013, p.46. 6 Lactantius, Divine Institutions; quoted in Robert Garland, “Countdown to the Beginning of Time-Keeping”, History Today, vol. 49 (4), April, 1999, p. 42. However, at the height of the persecution, on May 1, 305, Diocletian and Maximian abdicated and handed over power to four Caesars. This allowed the Caesar in the far West, Constantius Chlorus, to bring the persecution to an end in Gaul and Britain (it had in any case been very mild there). Then, after Constantinius’ death, on July 25, 306, the Roman troops in York proclaimed his son Constantine emperor. In 312 Constantine marched on Rome against the Caesar Maxentius.
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