Abstract
Scholars have often focused on the doctrinal and canonical reasons for the lack of a just war tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The consensus seems to be that the Eastern Orthodox Church, for historical as well as theological reasons, has never developed a doctrine for the justification or the containment of war but was rather orientated to the question of peace (albeit without being pacifist) and the theological imperative of deification. There is, however, another reason why just war concerns never found fertile ground in Eastern Orthodoxy. Byzantine political theology carried an anarchistic theocratic dynamic that remained in tension with any effort to sanctify the Empire or its martyrs. Such a perspective has more in common (without being identical) with conceptualisations of just peace or just war as a tradition of ethical restraint on war rather than as a doctrine for the moral justification or legitimation of war.
Introduction
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, discussions on just war theory have gained a renewed prominence in the West. When proponents of just war theory claim that the Russian invasion is unjust, the arguments employed to support this claim are usually derived from the long and venerable just war tradition as developed in the West from Augustine, through Aquinas and the sixteenth-century Scholastics, up to modern just war theory. 1 What, however, seldomly features in these debates is a serious discussion of the Eastern Orthodox theological and moral responses to the dilemmas of war and peace. While both Russia and Ukraine (barring the minority presence of the Uniate Church) belong to the Eastern Orthodox world, the tendency to read their confrontation through a Western just war lens may reflect the wider Western unfamiliarity with, or perhaps downright ignorance of, not only the traditions, practices, and sensibilities that form the Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war and peace, but also the broader contours of Eastern Orthodox political theology.
My purpose here is not to provide a romanticised defence of a tradition that is usually presented as in opposition to dominant Western attitudes to war (pacifism, just war, holy war). Indeed, this temptation is often present in accounts that depict Eastern Orthodoxy as untainted by the sins of holy war or by the tendency in just war thinking to morally justify, rather than tolerate or limit, armed violence. 2 That said, it remains overwhelmingly the case that Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war are perceived as transcending the conventional occidental distinctions between pacifism, just war, and crusadism. 3 What is, however, not often persuasively addressed in those accounts is the broader political theological framework within which Eastern Orthodox attitudes to war and peace make sense and which, in turn, may better explain their distinctive character.
In this brief article, I will review the principal Eastern Orthodox approaches to war and peace while also debunking the dominant Western stereotypes about the nature of Eastern Orthodox political theology. The reigning prejudice on this issue is that the absence of a Western type of political theology in Eastern Christianity can explain the lack of a just war tradition in Orthodox thought. Whereas in the West church and state are perceived to be distinct and separate entities that sometimes work together, and other times are at odds with each other, Eastern Christendom, the same argument goes, has historically followed the model of symphonia or synallēlia where the state focuses on worldly affairs and the church on divine ones. Ultimately, this model would evolve into the harmony between imperium and sacerdotium where allegedly the state and church would be inextricably bound together and complement one another. 4 Presumably, the result of this arrangement was that the church never felt the need to address social and political issues independently of the state or claim political power for itself. Orthodox political theology, as it were, did not exist, or certainly did not challenge imperial power. Orthodox political theology was to legitimise the existing political order, which, in turn, supported the church and protected the Christian faith. 5
This neat but seriously flawed narrative will be duly challenged. Instead, it will be argued that it is Western political theology that depended on a model of consecration of power, of which modern sovereignty is a direct offshoot. In contrast, Byzantine political theology arguably rested on an understanding of the relationship between faith and political power that kept the temptation of the sacralisation of power, or sanctification of violence, at bay. This paradoxically, anti-monarchical political theology, grounded in Eastern Orthodox Trinitarianism, may then explain, what I call in this article, the oikonomic attitude to war that Eastern Christianity has developed in its tensive relationship with the powers of this world. Such a perspective better illuminates the distance that separates the abuse of religion for political purposes from Eastern Orthodox theological sensibilities. It also refutes those who, on the face of the Russian Church's capitulation to Russian nationalism, believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is somehow congenitally destined to obey the state or sanctify national myths. While those temptations have always been present in its long history, Eastern Orthodoxy may still embody a model of political theology that is not only critical to secular power but also well-attuned to the tragic inevitabilities of a fallen world.
Eastern Orthodox Attitudes to War and Peace
As Yuri Stoyanov informs us, the origins of the dominant responses to the questions of war and peace for both Western and Eastern Christianity can be easily traced back to the New Testament and some of its well-known passages, such as Matthew 5–7, 26:52, Lk. 2:14, 3:14, 6:29, foregrounding the pronounced pacifistic outlook of Christ's moral teaching. Concurrently, Eastern Orthodoxy was also heir to those non-pacifist traditions of exegesis of New Testament passages containing military allusions that in Western Christianity were sometimes used to justify the use of force (Stoyanov cites 1 Thess. 5:8, Eph. 6:10, 1 Cor. 9:7, 2 Tim. 2:3-4, Jesus’ ‘sword’ allusions in Matt. 10:34, Lk. 22:35-38 and the heavenly war imagery in Revelation 20). 6 Eastern Orthodoxy, then, inherited evident tensions between the imperative of peace and the exigency of war, found respectively in both the Old and New Testaments, which in some cases led to divisions and schisms, fuelling apocalyptic and heretical movements within Christianity.
Indeed, early Christian pacifistic attitudes were often reinforced by eschatological expectations of an apocalyptic end of the world and a concomitant, often purist, condemnation of Christian participation in Roman military service. While such anti-militarist and pacifist preoccupations were shared in varying degrees and hues by several early Church Fathers, such as St Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215), St Hippolytus (c.170–c.236), Tertullian (c.160–c.225), and Origen (c.185–c.254), early Christian pacifism was interpreted in the context of the providential role accorded to the Empire by figures such as Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260/5–339), St Cyril of Alexandria (376–444), and St John Chrysostom (345–407). The tensive relationship between a religion of peace and a newly evolving imperial ideology that identified the earthly Roman empire with the ‘empire of Christ’ was reflected in the domain of military service. Cults of worship of military saints who were serving in the imperial army, even in the pre-Constantinian era, began to spread coupled with efforts to sanctify those soldiers who died in defence of a Christian Empire that perceived itself as the Christian ecumene, the centre of a Christianised world. 7
Tensions between the pacifistic theological and social ethos bequeathed from early to Byzantine Christianity, on the one hand, and the political and military necessities of an imperial state that remained Roman in military structure, mobilisation, and ethos, on the other, could be frequent and acute. The most characteristic expression of this uneasy relationship can be found in the famous 13th Canon of St Basil the Great (c.330–379) from his first Canonical Epistle to Amphilochus, Bishop of Iconium. For St Basil, the act of killing during war needed to be distinguished from voluntary murder, although this distinction should be interpreted within the context of the overall pastoral concerns of the Eastern Orthodox Church for the salvation of the soul of those engaged in warfare. The Canon prescribes a three-year refusal of the Holy Communion for those who killed in battle as a means of purification from sin. Warfare, then, is acknowledged, yet never condoned as ineradicable, but only as a tragic necessity that damages the soul, even if it cannot be avoided. 8 Although the historical record shows that the Byzantines were hardly immune to just war practices or holy war ‘deviations’, 9 canonical regulations prohibited Christian clergy and monks from entering military service or working for the secular state administration and government, a phenomenon that has been aptly defined as ‘stratification of pacifism’ since pacific standards were stipulated for both clergy and monks while any military activity was strictly reserved for the laity. 10
Truth be told, St Basil's 13th Canon was often perceived as too onerous or intolerable since its strict implementation would preclude Christian soldiers involved in warfare from participation in the holy mysteries. And yet, the Eastern Church not only refused to bend St Basil's Canon but also systematically denied requests by emperors to establish canonical regulations through which Byzantine soldiers fallen in battle in defence of the state would begin to be honoured as holy martyrs and celebrated with hymns and feast days. While in the West, Popes such as Leo IV (847–855) and John VIII (872–882) were preparing the ground for the eventual formalisation of the Crusade idea and the sanctification of holy war by the Catholic Church by granting absolution to those who fought for Christendom, Patriarch Polyeuktos (956–970) and the Byzantine ecclesiastical hierarchy were invoking the authority of St Basil's Canon to refuse treating fallen Christian soldiers as martyrs often against the wishes of popular emperors, such as the monkish warrior-emperor Nicephorus II Phocas (963–969) who pushed for their canonisation. 11 Even though the pressure by the political and military authorities and the imperial ideology of the Byzantine state, which saw itself as the centre of the Christian ecumene, to bestow a certain quality of ‘holiness’ to its military expeditions was considerable, the Eastern Church tenaciously opposed the notion of sanctified military martyrdom for fallen soldiers.
War, Peace, and Eastern Orthodox Theology
Eastern Orthodox canonical law and practice reflected specific theological commitments common to the Christian faith. Echoing the patristic ethos of early Christianity, Eastern Orthodox theology was not concerned fundamentally with morality as an end-in-itself but only as part of the eschatological vocation of humanity which is destined for deification (theōsis), participation in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity. Human beings are called to become by grace all that God is by nature. 12 Granted, some instances of killing may be tragically necessary, such as the actions of a soldier in defending his or her nation from invasion by a conquering power. Killing in such circumstances may be understood in light of the Orthodox category of ‘involuntary sin’, which includes actions that damage the soul despite the fact that they are done without malice and out of necessity. The Church knows that killing does not have to be murder for it to be spiritually damaging. As a result of its emphasis on deification and spiritual healing, Orthodox moral theology does not find the theoretical justification of war a worthy endeavour, let alone pronouncements that war can be ‘holy’ or ‘just’. 13 Although Orthodoxy does not necessarily regard nonviolence or pacifism as absolute characteristics of the Christian life, neither does it sacralise or justify war. Instead, Orthodox theology merely tolerates war as a sometimes tragically necessary or unavoidable endeavour for which a period of penitence is required (confession, refraining from the Eucharist, etc.).
Correspondingly, the soldier is not condemned as a murderer but is treated as someone in need of pastoral guidance in the process of healing from the spiritually ruinous effects of taking life. Repentance, then, is understood therapeutically in Orthodoxy. The focus is not on paying a legal penalty for one's sins but, instead, on finding healing by reorienting one's life towards God. 14 The soldier who has killed in war needs repentance, not because of breaking the law, but because taking life presents a profound challenge to spiritual health. It is obviously difficult to grow in holiness while killing people, regardless of the circumstances. 15 This explains why Orthodoxy has not canonised saints simply on account of military prowess or treated soldiers as martyrs, even if they died in defence of the faith or of an Orthodox nation. St Basil's 13th Canon and Patriarch Polyeuktos’s tenth-century rejection of the canonisation of Byzantine soldiers who died serving the empire illustrate this attitude that reflects Orthodoxy's reluctance to link holiness to the defence of earthly political purposes or invest political causes with the aura of sanctity.
Ultimately, spiritual resources within Orthodoxy enabled a more dynamic and flexible praxis of peace in response to the challenges of war than an abstract, systematic formula for assessing the moral legitimacy of violence. The Byzantine synthesis between a pacific attitude, grounded on the priority of ontological peace of a creation, viewed eschatologically, and the pastoral care for a creation ‘groaning in labour pains’, as expressed in the practical embracement of the late Roman just war tradition and some innovations in the theory and practice of warfare, created an ambivalent and flexible system of nuanced attitudes to war in which various compromises were achieved to accommodate the inherent frictions between the various elements. This may explain the consensus among Orthodox theologians that the Eastern Orthodox attitude to war cannot be captured by the conventional categories of pacifism, political realism, just war, and holy war.
Conscious of this complexity, esteemed Orthodox theologian Perry Hamalis has proposed that Orthodox thinking on war should be classified as falling between the traditions of ‘just peace-making’, as an active and transformative practice of preventing war, and that of Christian realist tragic pragmatism, which kept its distance equally from pacifism and the just war tradition. 16 Such a sensibility may share affinities with recent developments in contemporary Catholic thinking on war. Advocates of a ‘just peace’ perspective remind us that the objective of peace had always been the horizon within which just war thinking took place and argue that this emphasis on peace-making needs to be revived and cultivated. 17 Like Orthodox thinking on this matter, just peace thinkers feel uncomfortable both with pacifism's inability to appreciate the tragic realities of international politics and with just war's emphasis on morally justifying the use of armed force. But whereas the just peace project is either still internal to the ways the just war tradition can be interpreted or seeks to replace it, Orthodox attitudes on war and peace have been less systematic and more driven by pastoral considerations that may explain their casuistic, flexible character.
Oikonomia and Eastern Orthodox Political Theology
A central role in this flexible approach was played by the pastoral concept of oikonomia. The concept of oikonomia is based on the idea that there are rules that govern the church, yet to appropriately manage the ‘household’ (oikos) of the church, sometimes those rules must be reconsidered in context. The necessity for this reconsideration derives from the tension within church life between the transformative potential of inaugurated eschatology (Christ has already announced the new creation) and the reality of a fallen world in anticipation of salvation (the Kingdom of God has not yet been consummated). Oikonomia negotiates the gap between the two. In some respects, it may be said that the explicit church rules are meant to provide grounds for careful consideration of actions and to emphasise the need for discernment (diakrisis), rather than to invoke blind obedience. Discernment and knowledge of circumstances are prerequisites of oikonomia, and decisions to employ it are made only after deep consideration and empathetic understanding. While the teaching of the church on the concept of oikonomia is not precisely defined, Georges Florovsky has articulated much of the thinking that sustains its practice: In the broadest sense ‘economy’ embraces and signifies the whole work of salvation … οἰκονομία is opposed to ἀκρíβια as a kind of relaxation of church discipline, an exemption or exception from the ‘strict rule’ (ius strictum) or from the general rule. The governing motive of ‘economy’ is precisely ‘philanthropy’, pastoral discretion, a pedagogical calculation—the deduction is always from working utility. ‘Economy’ is a pedagogical rather than a canonical principle; it is the pastoral corrective of the canonical consciousness … ‘economy’ is pastorship and pastorship is ‘economy’.
18
Contrary to this perspective that reduces it to the hellish reproduction of administrative apparatuses, impersonal regulatory frameworks, and control mechanisms, oikonomia for the Byzantines involved the meditative and compassionate resolution of ecclesiastical and moral questions in accordance with the spirit of God's love of humankind, wisdom, and will for the salvation of the person (a Christianised version of the Aristotelian epieikeia, the measured, contextual, and prudential application of the law in the service of life). 20 Consequently, oikonomia, as a sanctified path for navigating problems and contradictions in an imperfect world, was not a mechanism for granting exceptions to dogmatic maxims, or legitimacy to arbitrary rule, but the practice of justice as the aim and fulfilment of those rules themselves. Oikonomia was, then, perceived as a way of putting rule-following to the service of life, akin to Agamben's idea of a form-of-life in which form (the law) is not experienced as oppressive, foreign, or imposing but as a way of life. 21
In fact, a closer look at the legal and political history of Byzantium reveals that the Christianisation of imperial power—specifically, the merging of God's anarchic (‘no rule’) sovereignty with the Roman legal concepts of aequitas and the Aristotelian epieikeia, which gave the Empire its characteristic law-governed character and Byzantine politics its trademark preoccupation with social welfarist policies 22 —occurred not, as Catholic Agamben implies it did, in the name of universal salvation as part of an economic management/governance machine, but in that of the emperor qua patron and imitator Christi in his merciful benevolence as expressed in the emperor's love of the poor. 23 The emperor's exercise of oikonomic power was not a legal running of the household but a practice of philanthropy as the true content of the law (justice) owed by the emperor qua humble servant of God to His people and exercised by way of welfare policies and dispensations that merged God's anarchic praxis with the rigour and austerity of the law, mirroring on earth God as the ‘Living Law’ (nomos empsychos). 24
But, to gain a deeper understanding of the kind of political theology this image and function of oikonomia rested on, one must revisit the thorny and widely misunderstood issue of the relationship between Christian faith and secular power in the Eastern Roman Empire (what has been misleadingly—and now conventionally—called ‘Byzantine Empire’). Instead of retroactively attributing to Byzantium the caesaro-papist outlook of the Russian Czars, the Eastern Roman Empire should rather be re-imagined as a sort of populist ‘Byzantine republic’, an ennomos politeia (law-governed republic) 25 where the holder of the imperial office was always suspected as potentially illegitimate—a fake messiah, or an illegitimate high priest-king—that was ‘tolerated only insofar as his administration was conducive to the salus populi, not of everyone in the people to be precise, but of enough supporters and friends to keep him in office—the filoi’, 26 the informal system of patronage that was pivotal in effectively keeping him in power.
As Diamantides and Schütz aptly put it, against the customary Western mythological assumptions about Eastern history, based as they are on the hopelessly inappropriate term of ‘caesaropapism’, the Byzantine Christian empire, while trying by all means to impress the populace and foreign powers, was characterised by a weak—doubtlessly to the Western reader a dangerously, uncannily weak—quasi-sovereignty, with each Basileus enjoying full recognition as dominus while facing a perennial legitimacy deficit …
27
Theologically speaking, the key difference between the Latin/Catholic West and the Greek/Orthodox East rested on different interpretations of the Trinity. In Eastern Trinitarianism, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, proceeds from God the Father, without the possibility of any grafting on Christ's authority or His earthly representatives (Pope or Emperor). In the corresponding political theology, the Eastern Roman Empire, like its church, did not need to be ‘instituted’ or sanctioned as a righteous, God-serving entity (unlike the ‘Holy Roman Empire’). It was simply taken for granted that the institutional survival of the Roman Empire after its Christianisation was a result of God's providence. Yet, unlike the elected Pope or anointed monarch, there was no assumption that the Byzantine basileus was indeed God's representative. It was impossible for God, being anarchos, to be represented by consecrated authorities.
As a result of the lack of an official doctrine of divine representation, the imperial legitimacy crisis was not understood as a necessary ‘exception’ to a rule but both as the sign of a mysterious divine providence and as the condition of possibility for the next emperor's rise to power, which explains why the Eastern Roman Empire never developed a tradition of dynastic succession. The obfuscation of anomic oikonomia behind the fiction of a divinely sanctioned ‘exception’ to rules and principles happened only later, and only in the West, in the context of what György Geréby calls Nestorian crypto-monarchic tendencies in Latin Christendom. 29 As opposed to the model of sacralised monarchical power and the divinisation of sovereignty that prevailed in late medieval Western Europe, 30 Byzantine political theology was based upon a generalised suspicion of power and the conviction that, being under divine dispensation, imperial power was weak in legitimacy but potentially more effective if attuned to the right duties, tending to the poor and the common good. What, therefore, in Eastern Orthodoxy came to be recognised as symphonia was nothing other than this praxis of ‘economic’ government that endorses divine anomia as a mystery (both sustaining and undermining power by keeping it under the divine regimen)—namely, as a practice of fidelity to the idea that the law exists in the service of life and justice and not as the fig leaf of a glorified sovereign power to be suspended at its will.
Conclusion
What all this means is that in the Eastern Roman Empire, as opposed to the Latin West, oikonomia was not yet obscured by claims to ‘exception’ from the law or ‘governance’ as opposed to ‘rule’. Since divine rule could not be represented and since imperial rule was under divine dispensation, suffering from a permanent legitimacy deficit, violence or un-Christian behaviour was not excused but portrayed as necessary in a fallen world. On the question, then, of the justification of war and state violence, the two traditions could not have been more different and that may explain the occidental awkwardness in classifying the Eastern Orthodox perspective, but also the tendency of the latter to transcend the occidental categories of pacifism, just war, and holy war. War, for the Orthodox, is a tragedy and perhaps a necessary evil when the innocent need to be defended or justice vindicated, but it is never recognised as something good, or moral, or holy, or even a lesser good. Oikonomia and diakrisis (=discernment) are the two pastoral weapons that allowed the Orthodox to square the tragic inevitabilities of a fallen world with the eschatological nature of Christian spiritual life that looks to growth in holiness and, ultimately, deification. The specific nature of the Eastern Orthodox oikonomia and dynamic praxis of peace, however, cannot be understood outside of the general anomic context of Byzantine political theology that regulated the tensive relationship between faith, secular power, and authority.
