For the French Catholic Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the king personified the state: “Tout l’État est en la personne du prince,” he wrote, or as the Sun King would say, “L’État c’est moi.”
Against this New Absolutism came counterclaims subjecting the king to other sovereigns: common law, natural rights, constitutions written or unwritten, the will of the people.
Continued religious and political contention drove Westerners toward opposite poles of political idealism, pitting the monarchical idealism of Divine Right against anti-monarchical “republican” idealism variously conceived. The arguments in favor of the latter are more familiar to us today.
Our Founding Fathers availed themselves of all of them, with scant regard for consistency and without really solving the practical or theoretical problem of limited sovereignty. For if the people are sovereign, what is to protect us from democratic absolutism since the people decide what laws to make, what rights to respect, and even how to read the Constitution? Who is to tell the people they are wrong, and who is to stop them when they don’t listen?
The Byzantines never bothered to ask such questions because they never needed to. Their concern was not the source of government—sovereignty—but, says Kaldellis, the purpose of government. They did not therefore absolutize the emperor. They knew him to be a mere mortal and a sinner accountable to both God and the politeia. They did not believe in Divine Right.
They believed that God ordained rulers as “revenger[s] to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4), but they also knew that God often un-ordained rulers for His own reasons. They were tempted like many people to believe in royal blood, but that didn’t stop them from throwing over incompetent emperors “born in the purple.” And if any Byzantine emperor had declared, “The state is me,” everyone in earshot would have thought him insane.
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.
