Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth

Crisis of Empire

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Introduction

In the course of the seventh century, the Eastern Roman empire underwent a profound transformation. As first the Persians and then the Muslims swept over and seized the valuable provinces of the Roman Near East, the inhabitants of the now reduced empire experimented with a series of structural and cultural changes that responded to the dramatic curtailment of Roman power. The structural elements of that change—that is, the series of administrative, economic, and military reforms imposed by the emperor Heraclius and his successors—are now for the most part well known; and aspects of the cultural change (in particular, the decline in secular literature, the explosion in anti-Jewish and apocalyptic texts, and the heightened interest in, or anxieties over, religious icons), have also occupied a prominent position within scholarship. Other elements within this cultural change, however—in particular, the debasement of monasticism as the guardian of ascetic virtue, the rise of the eucharist as the central, aggregating icon of the Christian faith, and the renegotiation of competing ascetical and liturgical narratives—are less well appreciated. This book explores them in greater depth.

The story of the Christian religion in late antiquity is in many ways the story of a religion struggling and failing to overcome its ancient roots. From the conversion of Constantine onward, court theologians articulated a grand vision of a new Christian empire under a Roman emperor presented as God’s pious vicegerent on earth. The Christian faith, however, had been conceived and developed in opposition to the political culture of the Roman state and, as such, carried within its intellectual inheritance the conceptual potential for a full ecclesial dissociation from the secular realm. As the pagan provincial convert was exposed to the new political ideals emanating from Constantinople, therefore, so too was he or she exposed to a Christian culture cut through with political ambiguity, one that held forth the possibility, to some for the first time, of a political identity distinct from, and even antipathetic to, that of Rome.

As the imperial authorities wrestled with the inherent ambiguities of Christian empire, so too did they struggle to mediate those divergent methodologies of Christological exegesis that had developed in the pre-Constantinian period. Emperors aspired to the spiritual and political consensus expounded in the new rhetoric of Christian rule, and in this forced or, at least, precipitated attempts to reconcile the different Christological positions. As a result of those attempts the more extreme doctrinal ideas conceived on both sides were marginalized, but the more important, and more permanent, effect was nevertheless to crystallize the different tendencies into distinct and intractable traditions with their own formulas and Fathers, languages, and hierarchies. As the imperial position became more focused on particular definitions, and as the number of official heretics ever expanded—in particular after the divisive Council of Chalcedon (451)—some alienated communities

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