Symphonia and the Autocrat

Joseph of Volotsk’s developed political theology of the God-given prince: the monarch appointed by God, owed obedience, the protector of the Church and the enforcer of orthodoxy. The famous formula associated with him — that the ruler is “in nature like all men, but in power like God” — expresses a high doctrine of sacral monarchy that Joseph framed most strongly after Grand Prince Vasili III had taken his side against the Trans-Volga critics; yet the same writings set an explicit limit, the conditional clause that obedience is owed to a pious orthodox ruler and not to one who is impious or commands against God, for such a one “is not a tsar but a tyrant.” This file traces the Byzantine symphonia background, Joseph’s shift from defending the Church’s autonomy under Ivan III to underwriting princely power under Vasili III, and the genuinely contested question of how original — or how derivative of Byzantine precedent — his theory of autocracy really was.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)

The Byzantine Inheritance: Symphonia

Joseph did not invent a theory of Christian rule out of nothing. He worked within the inheritance of Byzantine political theology, whose governing idea is conventionally called symphonia — the “harmony” or “concord” of the two powers, priesthood (sacerdotium) and empire (imperium), each divinely instituted and each ordered to the salvation of the Christian people (Meyendorff 1981; Fedotov 1966, II). The locus classicus is the sixth Novella of the Emperor Justinian, which speaks of the priesthood and the imperial power as “the two greatest gifts of God to men,” proceeding from one source and to be kept in agreement for the good of mankind (Justinian, Novella 6, preface; cf. Meyendorff 1981). In the Byzantine ideal the emperor is not a priest, but he is a sacred figure — anointed, the protector of orthodoxy, the convener of councils, “the bishop of those outside” in Eusebius’s much-cited phrase for Constantine — and the Church’s life and the empire’s are bound together without either swallowing the other.

This inheritance reached Muscovy along two channels Joseph drew upon. The first was the body of translated Byzantine canon law and imperial legislation gathered in the Slavonic Kormchaia kniga (the “Pilot Book,” the Slavic Nomokanon), which carried the church-state arrangements of the Christian empire into Rus’ (Meyendorff 1981; on the canonical framework see Church Governance). The second was the developing Muscovite ideology of the grand prince as the heir of the Orthodox emperors after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 — the cluster of ideas, contemporary with Joseph, that would crystallize in the “Third Rome” theme of the monk Filofei of Pskov, and in the genealogical and regalia legends (the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir) that traced Muscovite sovereignty to Byzantium and to Rome (Meyendorff 1981; on the period, The Mongol and Muscovite Periods). Joseph’s political theology is best read as the application of this inherited symphonia, under the specific pressures of his own struggles, to the rising autocracy of Muscovy. [Disputed: how original Joseph's theory of the God-given prince was, as against how far it simply transmits Byzantine precedent — one line of reading (Meyendorff 1981; Fedotov 1966, II) treats it as a substantially derivative application of Justinianic *symphonia* and Byzantine imperial theology to the Muscovite grand prince, while another stresses that Joseph reworked the inheritance to underwrite an unusually exalted and unusually unconditional Muscovite autocracy, going beyond the Byzantine balance in the weight he gave the prince's sacral power (Goldfrank 2000; Lurie 1960)]

Scriptural and Patristic Grounds for Obedience

Joseph’s case for obedience to the prince rests on the same scriptural foundations the whole Christian tradition used. The apostolic command is the bedrock: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1; cf. 13:1–7), with its corollary that the ruler “beareth not the sword in vain” but is “the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4). To this Joseph could join the Petrine injunction to “submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme” while yet to “fear God” and “honour the king” (1 Peter 2:13–17), and the dominical word rendering “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). These texts furnish both halves of his doctrine: the unconditional-sounding duty of obedience to the God-ordained ruler, and the reservation — fear God and honor the king, render to God what is God’s — that keeps the ruler’s claim within the boundary of the divine command (Joseph, Enlightener and epistles; Fedotov 1966, II; Goldfrank 2000).

Joseph reinforced these with the Old Testament image of the king as the Lord’s anointed and with patristic and Byzantine authorities on the honor due the sovereign, marshalling them in the same manner — dense citation in the service of a polemical case — that characterizes the Enlightener throughout (see Joseph as Theologian). The doctrine of the God-given prince is thus not a separate treatise but a thread running through the polemical and epistolary corpus, drawn tight at the points where Joseph needed the prince’s power on his side.

The Famous Formula: “In Nature Like All Men, in Power Like God”

The phrase by which Joseph’s political theology is most often summarized is the antithesis of the ruler’s nature and his power. In the epistolary and Enlightener material associated with him, the sovereign is described as being “in nature” (estestvom) like all other men — a mortal subject to the common human condition — “but in power” or “in authority” (vlast’iu) like God, set above all men as God’s vicegerent over the earthly realm (Joseph, Enlightener / epistles; texts in Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo, ed. Zimin & Lurie 1959; Fedotov 1966, II; Lurie 1960). The formula is a precise statement of sacral monarchy: it does not deify the man, who remains in his nature as frail as any other, but it raises his office to a likeness of God’s, so that obedience to the prince in his lawful power is a religious act and resistance to it a kind of impiety.

The formula has a recognizable Byzantine lineage — the contrast of the emperor’s human nature with his God-imaging power belongs to the rhetoric of Byzantine and post-Byzantine panegyric on Christian kingship — and Joseph’s use of it is one of the clearest channels by which that exalted conception passed into Muscovite political thought (Fedotov 1966, II; Meyendorff 1981). It is the kernel that later Muscovite ideologists, and ultimately the Enlightener’s reception, would carry forward into the high theory of tsarist autocracy. [Disputed: the exact wording, source, and original addressee of the "in nature like all men, in power like God" formula — it is securely a Josephite commonplace expressing his doctrine, drawn from the epistolary and *Enlightener* material (Fedotov 1966, II; Lurie 1960), but the precise Slavonic phrasing and its attribution to a particular letter or *Slovo* vary across the redactions and editions, and its closest Byzantine antecedents are debated; the substance — nature common, power God-like — is not in doubt even where the verbatim text is]

The Decisive Limit: Pious King or Tyrant

What is too often dropped from summaries of Joseph’s “absolutism” is the conditional clause he himself attached to it, and it is well attested in his writings. Obedience of this God-imaging kind is owed to a pious, orthodox ruler — one who governs in the fear of God and as the protector of the true faith. It is not owed without limit to a ruler who is impious, who tortures and oppresses for the ruin of souls, or who commands what is against God. Joseph states plainly that such a one is not exercising the God-given power at all: an unrighteous king, a heretic or a persecutor who leads his subjects toward impiety, “is not a tsar but a tyrant” (ne tsar’, no muchitel’ — literally “not a king but a torturer”), and the Christian is not bound to obey him in that which is against God and His commandments (Joseph, Enlightener / epistles; Fedotov 1966, II; Lurie 1960; Goldfrank 2000). Here the Petrine and dominical reservation — fear God, render to God what is God’s — does real work: the prince’s authority binds the conscience precisely because and insofar as it is exercised under God, and a power turned against God forfeits the obedience that the office, rightly held, commands.

This conditional clause matters for three reasons. First, it shows that Joseph’s doctrine, for all its exaltation of the prince, is a theory of Christian monarchy and not of naked despotism: the king is great because he is God’s minister, and a king who betrays that ministry is unmasked as a tyrant. Second, it places Joseph within, rather than outside, the older Christian tradition that distinguished the legitimate ruler from the tyrant and limited obedience by the law of God — the tradition of “we ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) when the two conflict (Fedotov 1966, II). Third, it complicates the picture of Joseph as the pure ideologist of autocracy: the man who in his own lifetime had defied a grand prince he judged to be in the wrong (below) built that very possibility into his doctrine. [Disputed: how to weigh Joseph's "tyrant" reservation against the absolutist thrust of his theory — some readings (Fedotov 1966, II) take the conditional clause seriously as a genuine, if narrow, limit that keeps obedience subordinate to the law of God; others (Lurie 1960; and the older liberal–Soviet historiography) treat it as a formal qualification largely overwhelmed in practice by the overwhelming weight Joseph gives to obedience and by the political use his doctrine was put to under Vasili III and after]

The Shift: From Defending the Church to Underwriting the Prince

Joseph’s political theology cannot be read as a timeless system; it has a history, and that history runs through his own changing relations with two grand princes. Under Ivan III (d. 1505), Joseph stood, at crucial moments, for the autonomy of the Church against the prince. He resisted Ivan’s flirtation with the secularization of monastic estates and his protection of the milieu accused of heresy; he defended, against the throne when necessary, the Church’s right to its lands and its duty to extirpate heresy even where the grand prince hesitated (see The Case for Monastic Estates and The Campaign and the Executions). In a sharply remembered episode of this period Joseph withdrew his monastery from the jurisdiction of his own local prince, Fyodor Borisovich of Volok, and placed it directly under the grand prince and the metropolitan — an act that set him at odds with the local sovereign and turned on the principle that a ruler who wrongs the Church may be resisted in that wrong (Goldfrank 2000; Lurie 1960). The Joseph of these years is no servile courtier; he is a churchman willing to defy princes in the Church’s defense.

The accession of Vasili III (r. 1505–1533) changed the configuration. Vasili came down on Joseph’s side — backing him in his quarrel with the prince of Volok and the bishop of Novgorod, and aligning the throne with the Josephite program against the Trans-Volga critics. With the autocrat now his protector, Joseph’s accent shifts from defending the Church’s independence to underwriting the sacred authority of the prince: the high doctrine of the God-given monarch, the duty of obedience, the prince as the Church’s sword against heresy, receive their fullest statement in this later phase (Lurie 1960; Goldfrank 2000; Fedotov 1966, II). The reframing was not cynical reversal so much as the same churchman applying the same symphonia under altered conditions: where Ivan had to be resisted for the Church’s sake, Vasili was to be magnified because he had become the Church’s protector and the enforcer of its orthodoxy. [Disputed: how to characterize Joseph's shift from defending church autonomy under Ivan III to exalting princely power under Vasili III — one reading (Lurie 1960) sees a real and consequential reorientation, the price of the autocrat's patronage, that bequeathed to the Russian church a habit of subordination to the state; another (Goldfrank 2000) stresses the underlying consistency, Joseph applying one doctrine of *symphonia* — obey and magnify the pious protector of orthodoxy, resist the prince who wrongs the faith — to two very different grand princes]

What Joseph Bequeathed

The upshot of Joseph’s political theology was a model — the prince as sacral, God-ordained protector of orthodoxy, owed a religiously charged obedience, but bound himself to the defense of the true faith and unmasked as a tyrant if he turned against it — that proved enormously influential on the Muscovite, and later the imperial Russian, conception of the relation of throne and altar. Through the dominance of his party in the sixteenth-century hierarchy (treated in the companion file) and through the wide circulation of the Enlightener, the Josephite vision of church and state became something close to the official one for a century and more (Fedotov 1966, II; Meyendorff 1981; see The Josephite Ascendancy).

The model’s later fortunes were double-edged, and this is part of an honest account. Joseph’s exaltation of the pious prince gave the Russian church a powerful theology of Christian monarchy and a real protector against heresy; it also lent itself, when the conditional clause was forgotten or set aside, to the subordination of the Church to a state power that did not always remain pious — a tension that runs through the whole subsequent history of Russian church and state down to the synodal period and beyond (Meyendorff 1981; Fedotov 1966, II; on the later inheritance, St. Tikhon of Moscow). That Joseph himself built the limit into the theory, and himself once defied a prince in the Church’s name, is the part of his legacy most worth holding onto against a flat reading of him as the mere ideologist of autocracy.

References

Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Ed. John Meyendorff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Joseph’s theology of the God-given prince; the “in nature / in power” antithesis; the “not a tsar but a tyrant” limit; the shift in Joseph’s church-state stance.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (Byzantine symphonia, the Kormchaia, and the transmission of imperial church-state ideology to Muscovy; the “Third Rome” context.)
Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Introduction and apparatus on Joseph’s thought; his conflicts with the prince of Volok and Ivan III, and his alliance with Vasili III; the consistency-versus-shift question.)
Lurie, Ya. S. Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka [The Ideological Struggle in Russian Publicistic Writing of the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960. (The political publicistics; the redactions of the Enlightener and epistles bearing on the doctrine of the prince; the reorientation under Vasili III.)
Zimin, A. A., and Ya. S. Lurie, eds. Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo [The Epistles of Joseph of Volotsky]. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1959. (Joseph’s letters bearing on obedience to the prince and the church-state relation.)
Joseph of Volotsk. The Enlightener (Prosvetitel), cited by Slovo. (The material on obedience to the God-ordained ruler and the limits of that obedience. Editions: Kazan 1857, 1882–1904; redaction history in Lurie and Kazakova.)
Justinian. Novella 6 (preface, on the two great gifts of God — priesthood and empire). In Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 3, Novellae, ed. R. Schoell and W. Kroll. (The classic Byzantine statement of symphonia.)