This lecture was hosted by the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews. It is not citation without permission of the author. For further information, please visit intellectualhistory.net where you will find news about upcoming events. and all the relevant information about studying with the Institute in St. Andrews. Okay, everybody, welcome. Before we kick off, just to remind you of the Jesse Norman event, because I'll forget again, on Friday, that's at 11.
until 12.30, where he's going to be talking about his novel and answering any questions. But before then, we've got Vasilis. Pius from IR who's actually contributed to the National History Program for so long and it is terrible that it's taken this long to get into actually talk because His seminars are great, and he's great, and it's way overdue. Anyway, so it's fantastic to have you here. The topic is between pacifism and just war.
Thank you, Richard, and thanks for the kind invitation. I feel honored to be here. I know this is a tough audience. I'm not sure I'm very well prepared for a tough treatment today, especially since I'm coming from, as I mentioned, two lectures. I've given already two lectures. It's been quite a long day. So this is not a captatio benevolentia. This is true. So yes, indeed, this paper is coming out of an...
a recent engagement of mine with the, let's say, the Just Work Crowd, but not only the Just Work Crowd, actually the Just Peace and Just Work Crowd. There was a conference... I saw the look by Rory. There was a conference workshop, actually, is the right name for it perhaps, that was organized last March by Christian Brown, who is now based in...
King's College on just war, just peace and it was a conference to investigate the difference perhaps or the distinction between these two ideas, just peace and just war. and basically they wanted the odd one out. They wanted someone from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, perhaps, or someone to speak about the Eastern Orthodox outlook.
or attitude on issues of war and peace. So I reluctantly agreed to participate because I'm not, and this is a huge caveat, I'm not a just war theorist or someone who... works in the just word tradition in the same way that Rory does, for example, who's an expert. So I'm basically a dilettante in my approach to the topic.
So these are all the caveats. So what I tried to do in my engagement with the topic of the conference was to speak about the Eastern Orthodox attitudes to... issues of peace and war, attitude to war and peace perhaps and I wanted to do it through my general engagement with political theology so I wanted to think about
What is it that within the general framework of Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine political theology, although the term Byzantine is a bit misleading and perhaps inappropriate, for reasons that you may... You're a historian, so I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's a misnomer. It's a designation that was instituted, I think, in the 17th century in the court of Louis XIV, the studies of the...
The study of the world of the Eastern Roman Empire was designated as Byzantine studies, or the world of Eastern Roman Empire was renamed the Byzantine world. So what is it within, but for reasons of convenience I'll be using that denomination. So what is it within the Byzantine political theology framework as a whole, so the relationship within...
within Byzantine, or let's say the Byzantine understandings of the relationship between politics and theology. What is it that perhaps can explain better explain the eastern orthodox attitudes to war and peace and of course my engagement with the topic comes in the context in a very obviously in a context that is very
familiar to all of us the context of the russian invasion in ukraine ukraine obviously barring for the minority presence of the united church belongs to overwhelmingly to the eastern orthodox world And the tendency perhaps among just war theorists is to read this conflict through the lenses of traditional just war theory or the just war tradition as a broader term. Just war theory is something perhaps more.
Restrictive refers to the way the Just War tradition was developed and studied in the 20th century. So there is a tendency perhaps to read the confrontation through Western Just War lenses. And this fact may reflect the wider Western perhaps unfamiliarity with or perhaps even downright ignorance.
of not only the traditions of practices and sensibilities that form the Eastern Orthodox attitudes toward peace, but also a downright ignorance of the broader contours of the Eastern Orthodox political theology. So my purpose in the paper is not so much to provide a romanticised defence of that tradition, because there is this danger as well. in opposition perhaps to dominant Western attitudes to war. These are of course pacifism, just war and crusadism or holy war.
but actually to highlight what is distinctive perhaps in Eastern Orthodox Attitudes to War and what is distinctive and you see that in many commentators in many experts on eastern attitudes to warranties you see that what they stress overwhelming stress is that Eastern Orthodoxy seems to transcend the conventional Occidental distinctions between pacifism, just war, and crusade.
But what is, however, not persuasively addressed in those accounts is the broader political theological framework within which Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war and peace make sense. and which in turn may better explain their distinctive character. So what I do in the paper is I review the principal Eastern and Eastern Orthodox approaches to war and peace.
while also at the same time debunking the dominant Western stereotypes about the nature of Eastern Orthodox political theology. What is the reigning prejudice here on the question of Eastern Orthodox political theology? The reigning prejudice is that the absence of a Western type of political theology in Eastern Christianity can explain the lack of a just war tradition in Orthodox thought.
So whereas the argument goes in the West, church and state are perceived to be distinct and separate entities that sometimes work together and other times are at odds with each other, Eastern Orthodoxy... On the other hand, Eastern Christendom, on the other hand, has historically followed the so-called model of symphonia, or synallelia in Greek, where the state focuses on worldly affairs and the church on divine ones.
Ultimately this model of course would evolve into the harmony between the Imperium and the Sacerdotium. where allegedly the state and church would be inextricably bound together and complement one another, and the expression, perhaps the most succinct expression of that idea, can be found in Emperor Justinian's sixth novella. I won't read the whole text of the novella, but it outlines exactly this harmonious relationship between the Imperium and Sacerdotium.
Presumably the result of this arrangement was that the church never felt the need to address social and political issues independently of the state or claim political power for itself. Orthodox political theology, as it were, did not exist.
or certainly did not challenge imperial power. Orthodox political theology was to legitimize the existing political order, which in turn supported the church and protected the Christian faith. And here, you know... I need only to remind you Pope Francis' admonition widely recorded in the press to Patriarch.
Kirill, in the context of the Russian church's support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to become Putin's altar boy, as he put it, you know, very Catholicly. So what I do in the paper is that I want to... I'm trying to challenge this very neat but seriously flawed narrative. So what I argue is that it is Western political theology that depended on a model of consecration of power.
of which modern sovereignty is a direct offshoot. In contrast, Byzantine political theology arguably rested on an understanding of the relationship between faith and political power. that kept the temptation of the sacralization of power or sanctification of violence at bay. This is a paradoxically, this rests on a paradoxically, and I say paradoxically because we associate Byzantine political theology with theocracy. So paradoxically this is an anti-monarchical political theology.
grounded in eastern orthodox trinitarianism and this is what authorizes and that's what i tried to argue in the paper the byzantine economic or economic and to follow the erasmic pronunciation or economic attitude to war, that Eastern Christianity has developed an extensive relationship with the powers of this world.
My perspective I think better illuminates the distance that separates the abuse of religion for political purposes, something that we see in the context of the current relationship between... the Russian Orthodox Church and political power in Russia, the Putin regime, from Eastern Orthodox theological sensibilities. It also refuses those who, on the face of the Russian Church's capitulation to Russian nationalism,
believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is somehow congenitally destined to obey the state or sanctify national myths. While those temptations have always been present in its long history, and I'm not arguing in the paper that... This kind of, if you want to call them deviations, don't exist and we don't find examples of this kind of deviations. Deviations towards holy war, for example. We do find them in Byzantine history.
Eastern Orthodoxy may still embody a model of political theology that is not only critical to secular power, but also well attuned to the tragic inevitabilities of a fallen world. So in the rest of the paper what I'm trying to do is I revisit the main Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war and peace. And I locate them in the intensive relationship between, on the one hand, a religion of peace, which is Christianity. This is what we all understand Christianity to be, on the one hand.
and on the other hand a newly evolving imperial ideology that identified the earthly roman empire with the empire of christ There were cults of worship of military saints developed in the Eastern Roman Empire. Saints, you know, military saints were serving in the Imperial Army, even in the pre-Constantinian era. And these cults of worship did begin to spread, coupled with efforts to sanctify those soldiers who died in defense of a Christian empire.
that perceived itself as the Christian ecumen, the center of a Christianized world. So there was this tension between, on the one hand, the pacifist religion of peace, a religion of peace, Christianity, on the one hand, and on the other hand, of course, the... the Roman imperial ideology. The most characteristic expression of this uneasy relationship can be found in the famous 13th canon of St. Basil's the Great.
St. Basil the Great lived in the fourth century. For St. Basil, the act of killing during war needed to be distinguished from voluntary murder. Although this distinction should be interpreted within the context of the overall pastoral concerns of the Eastern Orthodox Church for the salvation of those engaged in warfare. So what the canon does is that it prescribes a three-year refusal of the Holy Communion for those who killed in battle as a means of purification from sin.
Warfare then in this context is acknowledged, yet never condoned as ineradicable, but only as a tragic necessity that damages the soul even if it cannot be avoided. As I said, the 13th Canon imposed perhaps too honourable duty on Byzantine soldiers. So that's why in the history, in Byzantine history, we observe many deviations from the canon in practice. And there was a lot of pleasure from military emperors, especially in the 10th century.
to overrule this canon. And there was a lot of pressure on the church actually to bend St. Basil's 13th canon. And a lot of pressure to sanctify soldiers, soldiers that died in defense of the empire and so on. So there were pressures towards crusadism or holy war, obviously. But it never became an official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The famous example here is of Patriarch Olieftos in the 10th century and the Byzantine ecclesiastical hierarchy who invoked the authority of St. Basil's Canon to refuse treating fallen Christian soldiers as martyrs. Often against the wishes, as I said, of popular emperors, such as the monkey's warrior emperor, Nikiforos Fokas, in the 10th century, but also Ioannis Dudiskis and Basil II, the Bulgar slayer.
exerted similar pressures on the church to canonize fallen soldiers. Now, what is the theology behind this resistance by the church? Well, the Eastern Orthodox theology... is fundamentally concerned not with morality as an end in itself, but only as part of the eschatological vocation of humanity. which is destined for deification. So there is a strong escapological orientation in Eastern Orthodox theology and a strong, how should I put it, prejudice.
in favor of or a strong emphasis on deification theosis is the greek term here a participation in the internal life of the holy trinity Human beings are called in this world to become by grace all that God is by nature. Granted, some instances of killing may be tragically necessary. such as the actions of a soldier in defending his or her nation from invasion by conquering power killing in such circumstances may be understood in light of the orthodox category of so-called involuntary sin
which includes actions that damage the soul, despite the fact that they are done without malice and out of necessity. But although orthodoxy... does not necessarily regard non-violence of pacifism as absolute characteristics of the Christian life, neither does it fall into the trap of sacralizing or justifying war.
Instead, Orthodox theology merely tolerates war as a sometimes tragically necessary or unavoidable endeavor for which a period of penitence is required. So St. Basil's Canon, for example, imposes... certain duties to the penitent, to the soldier who has committed, who killed in battle. Confession, refraining from the Eucharist, as I said, for three years and so on.
So the soldier is not condemned as a murderer, but he's treated as someone in need of pastoral guidance in the process of healing from the spiritually ruinous effects of taking life. So repentance is understood in this context, in the context of Orthodox theology, as a therapeutic means to purify the soul of the sinful soldier, the sinful individual who had to commit.
who had to kill in battle. So the approach, in other words, that the Christian Orthodox theology is taking here is more pastoral rather than juridical, I would say. So the Byzantine synthesis here between a pacific attitude grounded on the priority of... ontological peace, the ontological, the priority of peace as an ontological given, viewed eschatologically and the pastoral care for a creation groaning in labour pains.
as expressed in the practical embracement of the late Roman just war tradition and some innovations in the theory and practice of warfare created an ambivalent and flexible system. of nuanced attitudes to war in which various compromises were achieved to accommodate the inherent frictions between the various elements of that tradition. What is the instrument here, the main instrument, or I would say, using a biopolitical term, the main instrumentality perhaps for which...
Orthodox attitudes to war or Orthodox Church try to cope with this tension. And that's, of course, the instrumentality of economia, of the concept of economia. Economia is a Greek term. It means the management of the household, the management of the oikos. The idea here is that there are rules that govern the church.
It's a canonical term, yet to appropriately manage the household of the church, sometimes those rules must be reconsidered. They must be considered in context, perhaps. The necessity of this reconsideration... derives from the tension within church life between, on the one hand, the transformative potential of inaugurated eschatology, the fact that Christ has already arrived and has announced the kingdom on the one hand.
and the reality of a fallen world in anticipation of salvation. So the kingdom of God has not yet been consummated. So what economia does, as an instrumentality perhaps of management of souls in the time in between, is trying exactly to negotiate this gap between the already of the Christian message and the not yet. That gap between salvation and sin, perhaps.
And, of course, an important role within that overall concept of economia is played by the monkish virtue of discernment, diacrisis in Greece. We need to make judgments, we need to make distinctions. Economia is a form of making distinctions, not necessarily drawing exceptions to rules, because this is the understanding perhaps of economia.
or the understanding of sovereignty in the West as well. Sovereignty is all about deciding on the exception. And in a sense, the sovereign engages in economic management. of the idea of sovereignty by making exceptions, by authorizing exceptions and so on. So economy in the Byzantine context is not just managing the exception or the exceptional, but it's actually putting rules in the service of life.
itself. So it's closer to ancient Greek ideas, Archetylian ideas, Archetylian ideas for example of Epiachia in the application of rules. There is a definition here given by George Glorowski, who is one of the most famous students of patristic thought in the Eastern Orthodox world in the 20th century. And he says, in the broader sense, I'm quoting, in the broader sense, economy embraces and signifies the whole work of salvation. Economia is opposed to acryvia.
as a kind of relaxation of church discipline, an exemption or exemption from the strict rule or from the general rule. The governing motive of economia is precisely philanthropy. Pastoral discretion, a pedagogical calculation. The detection is always from working utility. economy is a pedagogical rather than a canonical principle. So you see perhaps here the pastoral versus the juridical.
It is the pastoral corrective of the canonical consciousness. Economy is pastorship and pastorship is economy. It would be, however, I argue in the paper, a mistake to view the concept of economia in isolation from the overall Byzantine political theology and its resistance to sacralizing authority.
This is important as the idea of economia or economic political theology has been lately extensively treated in the work of Giorgio Agamben and other Italian thinkers of biopolitics, such as Roberto Esposito. who built on Foucault's idea that Christian pastoral practices form the basis of modern governmentality. In his The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben argues that the entire edifice and function of modern sovereign power rests on the medieval formula the king reigns but does not govern.
Government or administration has been assigned the economic maintenance of society while the machine of sovereignty is running on empty. Authority is glorified by standing in for divine absence. Essentially for Agamben, economic theology is what happened to political theology in the West once the machine of separation between sovereignty and economy legitimized the perpetual management of social and political order.
The latter is premised exactly on the idea of the empty throne of sovereignty, of the always lurking and legitimizing sovereign exception that retains its effects, the possibility of suspending the law. by remaining hidden or oratic. So contrary to this perspective that reduces economia
to the hellish reproduction of administrative apparatuses, impersonal regulatory frameworks and control mechanisms. Economia for the Byzantines involved the meditative and compassionate resolution of ecclesiastical and moral questions.
in accordance with the spirit of god's love for humanity wisdom and will for the salvation of the person a christian version as i mentioned the measured contextual and prudential application of the law in the service of life Consequently, economia as a sanctified path for navigating problems and contradictions in an imperfect world was not a mechanism for granting exceptions to dogmatic maxims.
or legitimacy to arbitrary rule, but the practice of justice as the aim and fulfillment of those rules themselves. Economia was then perceived as a way of putting rule following to the service of life. akin to Agabin's idea perhaps of a form of life with dashes, a life that puts the power of, a form of life that puts the power of life in the service of life.
in which form the law is not experienced as oppressive, foreign, or imposing, but as a way of life. So how do I try to show... so i'm trying to link this understanding of economia with the role of imperial power in byzantine political theology and the nature of imperial power so The emperor's exercise of power involved the exercise of economic power. And that was not in the sense of the legal running of the household.
but a practice again of philanthropy as the true content of the law so a form of justice true justice owed by the emperor humble servant of God to his people and exercised by way of welfare policies and dispensations that merged God's anarchic praxis with the rigor and austerity of the law. mirroring on earth God as the living law. The word in Greek is nomos empsichos. So the emperor was the living law. The Byzantines would describe it as
The emperor being the living image of God on earth. But by that didn't mean or they didn't assume that authority was sacralized. They meant that to the extent that the emperor remained legitimate, if at all he was legitimate, I will explain why he suffered a legitimacy deficit. He was so because he remained under the divine regimen. So God's sovereignty is recognized.
here primarily. And the emperor is the servant of that logic in some ways. He's not anointed. His authority, his power is not sacralized. There is no sacralized authority in the Byzantine context. So instead, the argument in the rest of the paper is that instead of retroactively attributing to Byzantium the caesaro-papist outlook of the Russian Tsars...
The Eastern Roman Empire should rather be reimagined as a sort of a populist Byzantine Republic. And this is the title of the latest book by Anthony Kaudelis, which is... a rising Byzantinologist, Byzantine historian. An ennumus politaea, a low-governed republic. where the holder of the imperial office was always suspected as potentially illegitimate, a fake messiah, an illegitimate high priest king.
that was tolerated only insofar as his administration was conducive to the salvation of the people. So being merely blessed by the church, so the ceremony when the emperor was pronounced, acclaimed, was not an anointment ceremony. It was a ceremony where the church offered its blessing, but the church didn't anoint the emperor.
as was the case with his western counterpart. So the Byzantine Basileus, the emperor as we conventionally call him, could not account on the authority given him by God to defuse... insurrections, seditions or challenges to his power. Sovereign rule thus remained personal rather than invested in an immortal, naturally or irreducibly glorious office, advantageously articulated.
with a smoothly functioning managerial decisionist administration. So contrary to the occidental misleading of the situation, the Christianization of the empire was from the vantage point of the imperial office, not a power enhancing move. But on the contrary, a constraining development. It was the origin of an evolution that was mired in a legitimacy deficit. So in the corresponding political theology, the Eastern Roman Empire, like its church,
did not need to be instituted or sanctioned as a righteous, God-serving entity, unlike the Holy Roman Empire. It was simply taken for granted that the institutional survival of the Roman Empire... after its christianization was a result of god's providence that was that was given yet unlike the elected pope or anointed monarch there was no assumption that the byzantine basileus was indeed god's representative
God being anarchos, no rule, exercising no rule authority, was impossible to be represented by consecrated authorities. So there was no theory of representation of that sort. So as opposed to the model of sacralized monarchical power and the divinization of sovereignty that prevailed in late medieval Western Europe, and that's very nicely depicted here. Ernst Kadorovic's famous The King's Two Bodies. Byzantine political theology was based upon a generalized suspicion of power.
and the conviction that being under divine dispensation, imperial power was weak in the legitimacy, but potentially more effective if attuned to the right duties, tending to the poor and the common good. which explains why in Bizarium you never had a rule of dynastic succession. So in a sense the emperors were home of sake, or the bodies of the emperors were openly home in the sake.
So what therefore in Eastern Orthodoxy came to be recognized as symphonia was nothing other than this praxis of economic government that endorses divine anomia as a mystery. both sustaining and undermining power by keeping it under the divine regimen, namely as a practice of fidelity to the idea that the law exists in the service of life. And justice doesn't serve as the fig leaf of a glorified sovereign power to be suspended at its will. So that's the argument of the paper.
where I was getting up. I was trying to place the overall Eastern Orthodox attitudes on war and peace in this Byzantine political theological framework to give an additional explanation why perhaps Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war and peace transcend these conventional categories of pacifism, just war, or holy war. And I'll stop here because I've talked too much.