Church and Emperor

The ecclesiology Theodore forged in the Moechian affair and carried into the iconoclast persecution: that the canons bind the emperor as they bind every Christian; that matters of doctrine and discipline belong to the Church and her councils, not to the imperial will; and that the Church is free of caesaropapism — of the claim that the emperor’s authority extends over the faith. The principle that made one man immovable through three reigns.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Byzantine Problem

In the Byzantine world the emperor was no ordinary layman. He was the basileus, God’s anointed viceroy, who convened the councils, confirmed the patriarchs, and was acclaimed in the liturgy; the line between his sacred office and the priesthood was never as sharp in the East as the language of “Church and State” suggests (on the Byzantine theory of empire, see The Byzantine Church). The danger latent in this arrangement is what historians call caesaropapism — the slide by which the emperor’s real authority over the Church’s external order becomes a claimed authority over her faith and her discipline. The whole iconoclast crisis, on the iconodule reading, was caesaropapism in action: emperors legislating dogma. Theodore’s distinctive contribution to Orthodox ecclesiology is the clearest patristic-age statement that the emperor’s writ stops at the boundary of the faith.

The Canon Binds the Emperor

Theodore worked the principle out first in the Moechian affair (see The Adulterous Marriage Affair). The marriage of Constantine VI was a sin not because he was a private man but although he was the emperor: the canon against adultery is no respecter of the purple. When Patriarch Tarasios declined to discipline the emperor out of pastoral economy, Theodore’s objection was that economy cannot be stretched to exempt the powerful from a law that binds the weak — for then the law is no law (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 80–120). The conviction is summed up in the principle that runs through his letters: in matters of the divine law, “there is no acceptance of persons” — the emperor stands under the canon exactly as the peasant does (cf. Theodore, Letters, ed. Fatouros, CFHB 31, on the imperial overreach in both controversies; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 89–113).

Doctrine and Discipline Are Not the Emperor’s

The deeper claim emerged in the iconoclast struggle. When Leo V summoned Theodore and the other abbots and demanded their submission to the imperial revival of iconoclasm, Theodore drew the line that defines his ecclesiology: the emperor’s competence runs to the affairs of the city and the army, not to the dogmas of the Church. The tradition preserves his reply in several forms, the most famous being his retort that he would not be moved though an angel from heaven should command it:

“Let God’s matters be settled by those whom God has appointed… To you, emperor, are entrusted political affairs and the army; concern yourself with these, and leave the Church to its pastors and teachers.” (the substance of Theodore’s stand before Leo V, as reported in the Studite vitae and the Letters; cf. Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 152–170; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 210–230)

This is the division of competences that the iconodule cause needed and that Theodore stated more boldly than anyone of his generation. Where an emperor like Leo V claimed the right to define what might be venerated and what depicted, Theodore answered that such questions are settled by the Church in council, by her bishops and Fathers, under the apostolic and patristic tradition — and that an imperial decree against an ecumenical council (Nicaea II) is simply void, carrying no authority over conscience (see The Resistance). The emperor may persecute; he cannot legislate the faith.

The Appeal Beyond the Emperor

Because the faith is not the emperor’s, it can be appealed away from him — to the wider Church, to the council, and to the other patriarchal sees. This is the link between Theodore’s doctrine of the Church’s freedom and his ecclesiology of the pentarchy: when the throne and a captive patriarchate in Constantinople fell into heresy, Theodore appealed over their heads to the “five-headed body” of the universal Church, and above all to Rome, which was beyond the emperor’s reach (see Rome and the Pentarchy). The freedom of the Church and the conciliar-pentarchic structure of the Church are two sides of one teaching: the faith has organs of its own — councils, the consensus of the sees — that do not run through the imperial palace (Cholij, pp. 152–185).

Not Sedition, but Confession

It is important to see what Theodore’s principle was not. He was no revolutionary; he did not deny the emperor’s God-given authority in its proper sphere, nor counsel rebellion against the throne as such. The Byzantine ideal of the symphonia of priesthood and empire — the two powers working in concord, each in its own domain — he accepted; what he denied was that, when concord broke, the priesthood must yield its domain to the empire (Cholij, pp. 152–185; on symphonia see The Byzantine Church). His resistance was confession, not sedition: he would not strike at the emperor, but he would not obey him in the things of God, and he would suffer whatever the refusal cost. That is why the same principle that looked like rigid obstinacy in the marriage affair appears, in the iconoclast persecution, as the very courage that saved the icons.

The Continuity of the Two Confessions

Theodore’s two great stands — for the canon against an emperor’s marriage, for the icons against an emperor’s heresy — are one stand. In both he set the law of the Church above the will of the throne; in both he accepted exile rather than yield; in both he appealed from the captive Church of the capital to the wider Church and to Rome. The Moechian affair, which can look like an exercise in monastic rigorism, was the schooling in which Theodore learned the ecclesiology that would arm the iconodule resistance two decades later (Cholij, pp. 80–185; Pratsch, pp. 89–230). The freedom of the Church from caesaropapism is the single conviction that makes sense of his whole life — and it is the reason the Orthodox tradition reveres him not merely as a strict abbot but as a Confessor and a Father.

Symphonia and Its Limit

The framework within which Theodore’s whole stand has to be read is the Justinianic ideal of symphonia — the “concord” of priesthood and empire articulated in the preface to Justinian’s Sixth Novel (535), which names the two greatest gifts of God to men as the priesthood (hierosyne) and the empire (basileia), the one ministering to things divine, the other presiding over things human, both flowing from one source and adorning human life when they hold together in agreement (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Symphonia”; on the imperial theory see The Byzantine Church). Symphonia is not a doctrine of two separate sovereignties, in the manner of the later Western theory of the “two swords”; it is a doctrine of a single Christian commonwealth in which two distinct ministries cooperate, each within its proper sphere. Precisely because the ideal is one of concord rather than of jurisdictional division, it carries no built-in mechanism for the case in which the two powers fall into conflict — and it was exactly that case which Theodore’s life forced into the open.

Theodore did not reject symphonia; he affirmed it, and located its limit. The emperor’s God-given competence, in the formula Theodore pressed before Leo V, extends to “political affairs and the army” — the ordering of the human commonwealth — but not to the dogmata and kanones of the Church, which belong to the priesthood and the councils (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 152–185). Where the harmony held, the two powers reinforced one another; where it broke — where an emperor presumed to legislate the faith — the priest’s duty was not to surrender his sphere for the sake of an outward peace but to hold it and suffer. Theodore’s contribution is thus less a rejection of the Byzantine ideal than its disciplining: he supplied symphonia with the boundary it lacked, the answer to the question of what happens when concord fails. The Church’s freedom is the reserved clause of the whole arrangement — the guarantee that “concord” can never be cashed out as the simple subordination of the altar to the throne (Cholij, pp. 152–185; ODB, s.vv. “Symphonia,” “Caesaropapism”).

Theodore in the Line of the Confessors

Theodore did not invent this stand; he stood in a line of confessors who had already set the law of Christ above the will of the basileus, and he knew it. The pattern reaches back to St. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople whose reproof of the empress Eudoxia and whose refusal to trim his preaching to the court cost him two depositions and death in exile (407) — the type, for the Byzantine Church, of the bishop who will not flatter the purple (ODB, s.v. “John Chrysostom”; on the Fathers see The Church Fathers). It reaches still more pointedly to St. Maximus the Confessor, who in the seventh century refused communion with a Monothelite patriarchate backed by the imperial Typos of Constans II, was tried, mutilated (his tongue and right hand cut off), and died in exile (662) for declining to let an emperor settle a question of dogma by decree (see St. Maximus the Confessor). When Maximus was pressed at his trial — was not the emperor a priest, since Scripture calls Melchizedek both king and priest? — his answer was Theodore’s answer in advance: the emperor does not stand within the sanctuary, he does not consecrate, he is named after the laity in the diptychs, and it does not belong to him to define the faith (the substance of the Disputatio; cf. Cholij, pp. 152–185).

Theodore inherited this conviction and gave it its sharpest ninth-century formulation, now armed with the conciliar and pentarchic apparatus the iconodule cause supplied (see Rome and the Pentarchy). The three confessors form a single tradition: Chrysostom against a court’s vindictiveness, Maximus against an emperor’s dogmatic decree, Theodore against both an emperor’s marriage and an emperor’s heresy. Each accepted exile rather than yield; each was vindicated by the Church after his death; each became, in the calendar and the conscience of Orthodoxy, a touchstone of the principle that the faith is not the emperor’s to legislate. It is this lineage that later Orthodox ecclesiology drew upon when, in every subsequent confrontation between conciliar Orthodoxy and the claims of secular power — Byzantine, Ottoman, and Russian alike — it reached back to the confessors who had drawn the line. Theodore’s name stands in that line not as an innovator but as its most articulate ninth-century voice, the abbot who turned a monk’s akribeia into a doctrine of the Church’s freedom (Cholij, pp. 152–185; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 210–230).

References

Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On Theodore’s ecclesiology, the limits of imperial authority, and the pentarchic appeal.)
Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (On the confrontations with Constantine VI, Nikephoros I, and Leo V.)
Theodore the Studite. Epistulae, ed. Georgios Fatouros, CFHB 31, 2 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992. (The letters in which the freedom of the Church and the appeals beyond the emperor are stated.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Caesaropapism,” “Symphonia,” “Theodore of Stoudios.”)