Papacy – Post 1
by modestinus
Since I could delay this forever, I suppose I should start to deliver on my promise to write some reviews of the 2011 Angelus Press Conference on the Papacy by offering some very general remarks on Professor John Rao’s opening lecture, “The Catholic Church as Heir of the Roman Empire.” Please keep in mind these comments are very general and I am sure if I went back to the lecture again, I could find a lot more to write on it.
The short and the long of Rao’s thesis is that not only the Catholic Church, but the Eastern Church as well, became the “heir(s) of the Roman Empire” to the extent that they were uniquely positioned to appropriate—and then apply—the administrative heritage of Rome. Indeed, the very constitution of the Church after the Edict of Milan began to increasingly reflect imperial structures, albeit with noticeable modifications. This is what Rao, it seems, is really concerned to get across. To the extent that the Catholic Church (or the Eastern Church) appropriated, revised, and then applied the administrative heritage of Rome (along with, I should add, the intellectual heritage of Hellenism), Rao sees nothing wrong. It is, however, during those periods of “conceptual slippage” (my term, not his) that bothers him. That is, when ancient Rome qua Rome became the model by which the Church and, eventually, individualized States ought to model themselves on, at the unfortunate expense of the Gospel. Rao identifies a certain genius in the Catholic Church insofar as it worked diligently, over many centuries, to appropriate and modify the Roman-Hellenic tradition. On the other hand, Rao is deeply critical of the Eastern tradition to the extent that it simply stopped the modification; that is, it simply accepted what had come from “old Rome” and then, where conflicts arose, invoked the murky concept of oikonomia to justify the retention of “old Rome” when, in fact, a “new Rome” or a “Christianized Rome” ought to have reigned.
That’s a very general overview, and if it is vague, I apologize. In my defense, I think Rao is, at points, unduly vague in his assessments, particularly of the Christian East. Without denying for an instant the East’s susceptibility to be too deferential to the imperial heritage of Rome and, from there, attempt to institute a radical centralization in Byzantium that effectively gave primacy of place to its rites, theology, spirituality, political orientation, etc., it’s possible that Rao undersells the extent to which such troublesome phenomena occurred in the West. But, if one wants to be charitable (and I certainly do), then one has to pay attention to the reality that for many, many centuries, the West had nothing comparable to Constantinople. The actual city of Rome was a shell of itself for at least the first millennium of Christendom, and even after there arose in the West alternate outposts of secular political power that certainly defied any possibility of the centralization the East “enjoyed” up until the degeneration and eventual collapse of the Byzantine Empire. After listening to the lecture, I did wonder whether or not Rao believes, somewhere in his heart, that the stultification of Byzantium was part of its collapse. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Another point that jumps out from Rao’s lecture is his belief that the concept of symphonia, so often associated with the Christian East, was better actualized in the West to the extent that the Western Church’s centralization in Rome, with the heir of St. Peter at the helm, better maintained something of the “balance” or the “harmony of the dance” with secular authority than the East did. Rao depends, it seems, on the thesis that the Eastern Church (at least the Greek Eastern Church) was effectively the handmaid of the State almost from the beginning and that, due to political and theological controversy, it never positioned itself to be anything more than a nominal force in Byzantine society except to the extent that the Imperial authority found some utility in allowing the Church to be such. Then, of course, there is also the sticky matter of whether or not the East, in the name of symphonia, collapsed Church and State into one institutional expression, thus eradicating the independent authority of the Church altogether while bolstering the authority of the State—a State that was now vested with not only earthly power, but spiritual absolutism. Certainly there are many Orthodox historians who, today, would contest such a view. But they contest the view on the basis of historical pockets, that is, moments in time where perhaps there was a Patriarch (or two) who had the temerity to stand up against the Byzantine State. When such temerity didn’t result in bloodbaths, it certainly resulted, in the end, with the weakening of the Church. Or, at least, that’s how one story goes.
Many eyes—spiritual and secular—are fixed on the happenings of contemporary Russia, and certainly there is no shortage of commentators who want to weave in the history of the Christian East when they offer their assessment of the quasi-confessional State that is Russia. Whether there is any merit to such claims or not is a matter for another day. What cannot be denied, it seems, is that Russia’s history can be read as a recapitulation of the history of the “second Rome,” where the Church attempted something like symphonia only to wind up, by the end of the 17th C., playing second fiddle to the State. (And, for the record, I am not ignoring the reality that the Catholic Church, in various places in the West, fell under the same dilemma.) Even though certain trends in Russian thought wanted to see Russia, or more specifically Moscow, as the “third Rome,” the harder truth is that it never had the political power or sophistication to be anything close. 17th C. visions of a vast, reinstituted Eastern (Roman) Empire with Moscow at the helm yielded a severe schism in the Russian Church and, from there, the aforementioned belittling of the Church as a major presence in Russian political life. The revival of Russian Orthodoxy in the latter part of the 19th C. was, as we know, cut drastically short at the dawn of the 20th. What it is today, in its concrete manifestation, is open for serious debate, albeit a debate few Orthodox living in the West want to actively engage in. For we shouldn’t forget that the idea of “Russian Orthodoxy” is akin to the idea of a mothership that those few Orthodox living in the West can look to and feel something akin to the strange pride some Catholics feel for the fact there is but a single head of their Church in Rome who, as the story goes, “governs” 1.1 billion believers. Both viewpoints have, to say the least, serious defects.
While I recognize that this observation borders on the banal, I still think it’s worth iterating that the histories of East and West, particularly during their period of ecclesial union, are so fundamentally different as to make the sort of easygoing comparison that Rao attempts more harmful than helpful. Rao pays only passing attention to the fact that after Constantinople fell, it was the “Roman heritage” preserved in the East which made its way West and, from there, kickstarted a series of socio-political upheavals that resulted (in Rao’s mind at least) with the rise of the “will to power” as the expression of the Western political mind. For what it’s worth, Rao lays the blame at the feet of two Westerners, Marseilles of Padua and William of Ockham. But neither man’s thought, nor the learning that surrounded them, would have likely been possible had the Eastern preservation of “old Rome” (and its literary corpus) made its way West. Moreover, Rao’s lecture—had he the time—could have been fleshed out further with a more detailed examination of how the influx of Roman law, as meditated through Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis, impacted both the governance of the Church (which, up to that time, had its own canonical legal tradition that, arguably, represented a reformulation of the Roman inheritance) and the governance of civil society across the various States that had arisen in the West at that time.
Still, I think Rao is on to something insofar as he raises the question of symphonia for the West. It is all-too-common for Christian historians and commentators to accept the thesis that symphonia is an “Eastern thing” and that something altogether different was pursued and actualized in the West. The harder reality may be that both “sides” attempted their own form of this “dance” and both, in the end, failed to keep it moving along in a harmonious, coherent fashion. Who was “better” is, as I noted, an open question. Then again, I have to wonder whether the answer has any substantial meaning any more. Doesn’t it just seem like scorekeeping?
What it is today, in its concrete manifestation, is open for serious debate, albeit a debate few Orthodox living in the West want to actively engage in. For we shouldn’t forget that the idea of “Russian Orthodoxy” is akin to the idea of a mothership that those few Orthodox living in the West can look to and feel something akin to the strange pride some Catholics feel for the fact there is but a single head of their Church in Rome who, as the story goes, “governs” 1.1 billion believers.
I’m not sure what sort of a debate you’re talking about Orthodox in the West having. The Russian Church today is in a vastly different place than in was in 2000, let alone 1990. It’s easy to think of that as rather significant church of time — its only been 50 years since the Roman church started changing things up post Vat. II, and secular society is vastly different. But in Ecclesiastical history, that’s really not a long time.
The Russian church is simply in a vastly different place than most churches throughout history. The only other time parallel I can possibly imagine would be Spain during the beginning successes of the Reconquesta — and that’s obviously a stretch (moderninity, less of a racial element, etc etc). But i don’t think anyone in the Russian church would really object to the idea that it’s still a changing institution. For example, there’s always a hesitancy to discuss one’s dirty laundry in public, but it’s pretty much understood that there is still a significant camp of borderline non-believers amongst the hierarchy that are leftovers from the Soviet era. That’s why the twenty years following Perestroika were spent developing a functioning, jurisdiction-wide “church”, in the sense of building parishes and monasteries, developing clerics, and “getting the typicon in order”. Its only within the last ten years, and really since Kirill took over, that there’s been any attempt to define the church/state relationship. (and even that is only in the Russian Federation — about 25% of Kazakzstan’s population identifies as Russian Orthodox, and the Metropolitianate of Astana certainly goes about things differently than they do in Riga).
It is a fascinating process to watch and (tangentially) live through.
The debate I was referring to is whether or not the Russian Church’s ascendency is an unqualified good when that ascendancy has — in the eyes of some — compromised her independence from the Russian State. I think a lot of Orthodox in the West look to the Russian Church as the “ideal” (though there are plenty who don’t). There are certainly those who look at +Kiril as something of the “leader” of Orthodoxy in the way Catholics clearly look to the Pope as their leader. I am not sure that’s an accurate way for them to view the situation and so again there is certainly room for debate on that issue (though that’s one the Orthodox need to hash out — it’s really beyond me to comment on it anymore).
Gotcha.
Most of the idealism of the Russian church amongst American Orthodox comes from the same place that makes people suspect Bartholomew is a crypto-heretic.
The short and the long of Rao’s thesis is that not only the Catholic Church, but the Eastern Church as well, became the “heir(s) of the Roman Empire” to the extent that they were uniquely positioned to appropriate—and then apply—the administrative heritage of Rome.
Is this is a purely historical debate or does Rao think his thesis has some modern relevance for the Church, because Rome and Constantinople are long, long gone and not coming back. The heirs to Empire are the West’s transnational, globalist bureaucracies.They in turn have to reserve a seat at the table for the non-Christian oil exporting nations and Asian powers. Russia is highly idiosyncratic and an international pariah with grave domestic issues. Greece is slipping into Third World status. Greece and Russia are no more influential to the rest of the world than Orban’s Hungary.
The aforementioned bureaucracies are themselves a slow-motion trainwreck. They will not leave anything to salvage. Somebody please tell me what I’m missing as this seems an awfully backward-looking debate.
Given the fact Rao is a historian, I think it’s safe to say this is a “historical debate” in many respects.
With that said, history bleeds into the present. The Eastern Orthodox Church, no less than the Catholic, is defined in many respects by its history. Back lack temporal authority; both suffer from severe losses in temporal influence; but both have to face the reality of a thousand year schism that was, in many respects, more political than doctrinal. The legacy of polemics from both sides reaches into history, and even some Orthodox have come to recognize that the historical order of the Church during the Byzantine era has shaped what might generally be called the “Orthodox consciousness,” not only of itself but its relationship (or lack thereof) with the West. One need only step into any Orthodox cathedral to see the Byzantine (Roman) legacy at work in its liturgical ordering and, certainly, there are more than a few Orthodox who hold fast to “new Rome/third Rome” ideology, almost invariably to the detriment of looking at their concrete situation today. Whether unraveling history will solve this is a matter I’m agnostic on. But I don’t think ti’s an entirely useless conversation to have, even if — as you rightly note — the situation today is radically different of that of a thousand years ago.
I ask because I see this theme pop up a lot among Catholic intellectuals. As near as I can tell, they seek to reclaim the Church’s former influence in the now-militantly secular State in order to shape a more godly social order. Justice Scalia for example seems to relish the role of Thomas More to the democratic State’s Henry.
Nobody seems prepared for the probability that the State itself is headed for collapse.
Well, I dunno if we’re prepared for the probably collapse of the State. Who could possibly be prepared for such a thing? But I do think many of us have at least contemplated this probability. Heck, the apparition-chasers I know can give you a detailed scenario, LOL!
Diane:
What’s your time frame, or did history end when we invented secular democracy?
I find the debate intriguing because like I said, I’m starting to see a lot of earnest Catholic/Red Tory argument for saving secular democracy from itself.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the only way the Church will ever be in spitting distance of temporal influence again is when (i.e., because) the secular State’s power structure has been greatly reduced, if not completely dismantled.
Even if this doesn’t happen, the conclusion is a fortiorithe same: don’t waste time re-tooling for Holy Roman Empire v3.
Anti-G: I was joking.
And yes, I agree completely: Holy Roman Empire 3.0 is an ultra-trad pipe dream. I have encountered very little of this sort of stuff, because I have very scanty exposure to ultra-trads. Thank goodness.
Thanks for the replies Diane, and sorry for my tone. I just find the whole idea baffling.
Perhaps everyone needs to wake up. The past is the past. Dead dreams don’t enliven the present.
Neither Rome, nor Byzantium (Constantinople), nor Moscow will have any say so in the future.
Thinking otherwise just leads to vapid delusions.
This doesn’t mean that what “they” strove for will disappear.