Symphonia and Its Failures

Symphonia was Justinian’s name for a relation between the priesthood and the imperial power in which each attends to its own sphere and both proceed from one source. It was a real ideal and it produced real goods. It also failed repeatedly, in both directions — emperors legislating dogma, and churchmen serving states — and the history of those failures is a more useful ecclesiological instruction than the ideal itself.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Symphonia Claimed

The classic statement is the preface to Justinian’s Novel 6, issued in 535:

“The greatest among the gifts of God given to men by his supernal clemency are the priesthood and the imperial power; the first serves things divine, the second directs and administers human affairs; and both proceed from one and the same source and adorn the life of mankind. Nothing therefore is of such concern to emperors as the honour of the priests, who pray to God continually for them. For if the priesthood be blameless in every respect and enjoy free access to God, and if the imperial power rightly and duly order the commonwealth entrusted to it, a good harmony will result…” (Justinian, Novellae 6, preface)

Four claims are made, and it is worth separating them because they are usually run together.

Two authorities, not one. Symphonia is not caesaropapism. It asserts a distinction of spheres: things divine and human affairs.

One source. Both come from God, which means the emperor’s authority is not merely secular and the Church’s is not merely private.

A conditional outcome. Harmony results if both perform well. The formula names a hope, not a mechanism, and it contains no procedure for what happens when one party fails.

The emperor has a duty toward the Church. He is to care for the honour of the priesthood — which in practice licensed a great deal of imperial activity in church affairs, convoking councils, confirming elections, and legislating on ecclesiastical discipline.

The later Eisagoge (or Epanagoge), a legal handbook of the late ninth century associated with the circle of St Photius, states the parallel more sharply still, giving matched definitions of the emperor and the patriarch as the two parts of the body politic. [Disputed: whether the Eisagoge was ever formally promulgated as law is contested in the scholarship; it is transmitted as a legal text and is regularly cited for its theory of the two powers, and its Photian authorship is probable but not established. Its value here is as evidence of how the relation was theorized at Constantinople, not as enacted legislation.]

What It Produced

The ideal was not empty. Under it the Ecumenical Councils were convoked and their decisions given civil force; monasteries and charitable institutions were endowed on a vast scale; canon law and civil law were harmonized in the Nomocanon; and Christian principles reshaped Roman law in matters of marriage, slavery, and the treatment of the poor. An ecclesiology that treats the whole arrangement as a fall has not read the record.

Nor was the emperor understood as a priest. Eusebius’ description of Constantine as a kind of “bishop of those outside” (Life of Constantine 4.24) is a rhetorical formula from a panegyrist and was not received as a definition of imperial competence; the emperor did not consecrate, did not absolve, and — on the Church’s own repeated insistence — could not define the faith.

The Failures

Imperial heresy, and the Fathers who resisted it

The most serious failures were doctrinal, and in each the emperor took the wrong side and used the state’s power.

Monothelitism. Heraclius and his successors promoted the doctrine of one will in Christ, published the Ekthesis and the Typos, and prosecuted those who resisted. St Maximus the Confessor was tried, and the record of his interrogation preserves the exchange in which his examiners put to him that the emperor, having been anointed, holds a priestly rank; Maximus denied it and refused to concede that the emperor’s office gave him competence to define doctrine (Relatio motionis). He was mutilated and exiled and died in 662; the Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated his position in 681.

Iconoclasm. The imperial promotion of iconoclasm under Leo III and Constantine V is the clearest case of an emperor legislating dogma and enforcing it, and it produced the clearest patristic statement of the limit. St John of Damascus, writing from outside the empire, denies flatly that it belongs to emperors to legislate for the Church: political affairs are the emperor’s business, and the ordering of the Church belongs to her pastors and teachers (Three Treatises on the Divine Images, II). St Theodore the Studite took the same line inside the empire and at greater cost, and applied it also to a disciplinary matter in the Moechian controversy, where he resisted the imperial marriage and the ecclesiastical accommodation of it.

The pattern is worth naming: the limit on imperial authority in the Church was not stated in the theory of symphonia; it was stated by confessors under persecution. That is a fact about how the limit came to be known, and it is the reason the Orthodox tradition’s resources on this question are hagiographical as much as legal.

Imperial pressure at Florence

At Ferrara–Florence in 1438–39 the Emperor John VIII brought the Greek delegation to a union he needed for military reasons, and the pressure on the bishops to sign was intense and documented. The union was signed and it was not received (The Council and the Question of Reception). This is a failure of symphonia of a particular kind: not an emperor imposing heresy, but an emperor with a legitimate political emergency using the Church to solve it.

The Ottoman millet

After 1453 the relation was reconstituted on wholly different terms. The Ecumenical Patriarch became the head of the Orthodox millet, responsible to the Porte for the community’s civil administration and its taxes, and holding office at the sultan’s pleasure. The arrangement preserved the Church’s institutional life under Islamic rule, which was not a small thing; it also made the patriarchate an office of the Ottoman state, produced frequent depositions and the payment of large sums on appointment, and fused ecclesiastical with ethnic-communal identity in a way that has consequences down to the present (Phyletism and the Council of 1872, and The Ottoman Period).

The Spiritual Regulation of 1721

The most thoroughgoing subordination of a church to a state in Orthodox history was carried out by an Orthodox monarch. Peter the Great, on the death of Patriarch Adrian, left the see vacant and in 1721 replaced the patriarchate with the Most Holy Governing Synod, established by the Spiritual Regulation drafted by Archbishop Feofan (Prokopovich). The Synod’s members were appointed by the sovereign; its business was supervised by a lay Ober-Procurator, an imperial official; and the arrangement lasted until 1917. The Church was, in institutional terms, a department of the imperial administration.

The Russian Church’s own judgment on the period is unambiguous: the restoration of the patriarchate by the Council of 1917–18, and the election of St Tikhon on 5/18 November 1917, was understood as a return to canonical normalcy (The Council of 1917–18; The Synodal Period).

The Declaration of 1927

Under Soviet persecution, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) issued in 1927 a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state, seeking the Church’s legal existence at the price of a public identification of the Church’s interests with the state’s. The judgment on it has divided Russian Orthodoxy ever since; the ROCOR critique of “Sergianism” is one of the two historic grounds of its separate existence, and the material is treated in The Sergianist Controversy and Soviet Persecution. What belongs here is only the structural point: this is a failure of symphonia in the second direction — not the state usurping the Church’s competence, but the Church’s administration accommodating itself to a state which was, on any reading, not a Christian one.

The Limit, and Where the Church States It

The tradition does have a limit, and it is stated in three registers.

Patristic. It belongs to bishops and teachers, not to rulers, to order the Church’s faith and life (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II; Maximus, Relatio motionis).

Canonical. The canons bar clergy from civil office and from the pursuit of secular power (Apostolic Canons 6, 81, 83), and Chalcedon, Canon 3 forbids clerics to undertake worldly business. These are modest provisions and they are the canonical residue of a large principle.

Modern. The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, adopted by the Jubilee Bishops’ Council in Moscow in 2000, sets out the relation systematically in its third chapter and states the limit explicitly: the Church is loyal to the state and prays for it, but if the authority compels the faithful to apostatize from Christ and his Church or to commit sinful and spiritually harmful acts, the Church must refuse obedience (Basis of the Social Concept, III.5). This is the clearest modern Orthodox statement of the principle and it is stated by a church often accused of the opposite, which is a reason to quote it rather than to pass over it.

What Follows Ecclesiologically

Three conclusions, and they govern how this collection reads the modern record.

The relation is not dogma. Symphonia is a historical arrangement suited to a Christian empire that no longer exists. Its collapse is not a wound in the Church’s constitution, and Orthodox churches living under secular, hostile, or indifferent states are not thereby in a defective condition.

State involvement in church affairs is the norm of the modern record, not the exception. Every modern autocephaly arose with a state’s involvement (How Autocephaly Arises). This is a fact that bears on all parties, and it is why an argument of the form “a state was involved, therefore the act is void” proves too much: applied consistently, it would void nearly every modern autocephaly, including those of the churches making the argument.

The failures were named from inside. It was Maximus, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Mark of Ephesus, and the confessors of the Soviet period who identified the failures — not external critics. An ecclesiology that cannot criticize the Church’s political entanglements has not learned from her own saints.

See Also

References

  • Justinian, Novellae 6, preface (535); Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 3, ed. Rudolf Schoell and Wilhelm Kroll. Berlin: Weidmann, 1895.
  • Eisagoge (Epanagoge), Titles 2–3 (late ninth century, associated with the circle of St Photius).
  • Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine 4.24; trans. NPNF II/1.
  • Maximus the Confessor, Relatio motionis (the record of the trial); in Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile, ed. and trans. Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images II; trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics Series 24. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003.
  • Theodore the Studite, Letters (on the Moechian controversy and on imperial interference).
  • Apostolic Canons 6, 81, 83; Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canon 3 — trans. NPNF II/14.
  • Peter the Great, Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi Reglament), 1721, drafted by Feofan (Prokopovich).
  • Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), 1927.
  • The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church. Jubilee Bishops’ Council, Moscow, 2000, ch. III (esp. III.4–III.5).
  • Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Geanakoplos, Deno J. Byzantine East and Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989.