Monday, March 05, 2012

Byzantium and heterodoxy

I'm currently reading Haldon's "Byzantium in the Seventh Century", and I came across a passage on the relationship between patriarch and emperor which makes sense of heterdoxy - and particularly iconoclasm.

The conventional approach here probably treats theological debate as separate to politics - I'd not previously read anything that makes a convincing link between the two, other than a superficial materialist "form of dissent", usually with an unconvincing connection of particular heresies to specific class groupings.From memory this is the line taken by. Otherwise, theology is a separate discipline, which comes with a general failure to understand how ordinary people could have been so hung-up on it (although they seemingly were).

The section in Haldon is on p284 of the 1997 paperback edition. Here he is talking about the relationship between emperor and patriarch, and particularly Justinian I's view of the harmony between secular and religious authority. He identifies two inter-related trends: the use of church structures in administration; and the growing religiosity of imperial ceremony (highlighting religious coronation, an innovation of the seventh century).

Specifically he says:

"Faced with this monolithic concentration of authority, it is not surprising that oppositional tendencies were represented through a rejection of these poles of authority and a search for alternative routes of access to God and his spiritual authority from those of the emperor, the secular Church and the power of the state and its apparatuses."

Here then is the key connection. Facing a (usually) cohesive church-state structure, dissent is framed as a rejection of orthodoxy. This does mean a crude connection of heresy to a particular class in society. It is rather an explanation of the complex link between political dissent and heresy - and it is then easier to see why theological dispute was so important to the Byzantines. Rejecting orthodoxy was tantamount to rejecting the Roman state as constituted.

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