Without a monarchical ideal, the Byzantines never needed an anti-monarchical ideal. They never absolutized natural rights or Roman law or even the Roman people. They, too, were mere mortals and sinners, and what mattered most was the good of the politeia, not the will of the people.
Their will was not even the only will that mattered: There was God’s Will to consider, and God was understood often to give people not what they wanted but what they needed. He dealt with people not according to fixed principles of justice but in ways that would best bring about each soul’s salvation. The Byzantine term for this was oikonomía, and it is still an important aspect of Orthodox Christian pastoral theology.
The Byzantine approach to politics was likewise “economic.” The supreme law was the safety of the commonwealth. Everything else was discretionary. The emperor’s divine warrant as a “revenger” of evil was understood pragmatically to mean that rulers were to restrain evil, not eradicate it.
Allowance was made for “humanity, commonsense, and public utility,” in Justinian’s words, with the understanding that some evils are not easily outlawed. Christian emperors were therefore slow to ban many evils condemned by the Church but popular with the people such as slavery, prostitution, pornography, and gladiatorial games.
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Kaldellis admits that Christian teaching supported the Byzantines’ republican commitment to the common good, and he judges Christian Byzantium more republican than the two previous phases of the republic—the Principate and the Dominate. But in his eagerness to argue against the conventional theocratic reading of Byzantine history, he errs in the opposite direction toward an essentially secular reading.
