Seated at the Right Hand of Power, 2

Viewed from a juridi­cal point of view, the entire body of Byzan­tine canon­i­cal sources hardly con­sti­tutes a coher­ent whole. The attempts at cod­i­fi­ca­tion which we shall men­tion later are far from exhaus­tive and do not elim­i­nate impor­tant con­tra­dic­tions. They were never intended to pro­vide the Byzan­tine Church with a com­plete cor­pus juris. Many West­ern polemi­cists have pointed to this state of affairs as an essen­tial weak­ness of East­ern Chris­tian­ity, which has failed to pro­vide itself with an inde­pen­dent and con­sis­tent canon law and thus has sur­ren­dered to the power of the state. These judg­ments how­ever have gen­er­ally taken for granted that the Church is a divine “insti­tu­tion” whose inter­nal exis­tence could be ade­quately defined in juridi­cal terms, a pre­sup­po­si­tion, which Byzan­tine Chris­tians did not con­sider. For them the Church was first of all a sacra­men­tal com­mu­nion with God in Christ and the Spirit, whose mem­ber­ship — the entire Body of Christ — is not lim­ited to the earthly oik­oumene (“inhab­ited earth”) where law gov­erns soci­ety but includes the host of angels and saints as well as the divine head. The man­age­ment of the earthly Church was cer­tainly rec­og­nized as a nec­es­sary task; and there, the use of juridi­cal terms and con­cepts was unavoid­able. But these con­cepts never exhausted the ulti­mate real­ity of the Church of God and could be deter­mined occa­sion­ally by the coun­cils or even left to the benev­o­lent and, in prin­ci­ple, Chris­t­ian care of the emperors.

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This atti­tude did not mean how­ever that the Byzan­tines were either indif­fer­ent toward the canons or juridi­cally incom­pe­tent quite the con­trary. They were gen­er­ally aware that at least cer­tain canons reflected the eter­nal and divine nature of the Church, and it was a Chris­t­ian and absolute duty to obey them. Yet Roman tra­di­tions were always strong enough in Byzan­tium to main­tain almost per­ma­nently a series of highly com­pe­tent eccle­si­as­ti­cal lawyers who advised the emper­ors on decrees con­cern­ing the Church and also intro­duced prin­ci­ples of Roman Law into eccle­si­as­ti­cal leg­is­la­tion and jurispru­dence. But again, they always under­stood their role as sub­or­di­nate to the more fun­da­men­tal and divine nature of the Church expressed in a sacra­men­tal and doc­tri­nal com­mu­nion unit­ing heaven and earth. And they rec­og­nized that there was no canon­i­cal leg­is­la­tion in heaven (for if “jus­ti­fi­ca­tion comes by law, then Christ died in vain,” Ga 2:21), and that their task was a lim­ited one. ¹

Hav­ing made known to us the [τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ] mys­tery of His will, accord­ing to His good plea­sure which He has pur­posed in Him­self: That in the [εἰς οἰκονομίαν] man­age­ment of the full­ness of times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth (Eph. 1:9–10)

Among the Greek Fathers, oikono­mia has the stan­dard mean­ing of “incar­na­tion his­tory,” espe­cially dur­ing the Chris­to­log­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies of the fifth cen­tury. In a sub­sidiary way, it is also used in canon­i­cal texts and then obvi­ously places the pas­toral “man­age­ment” entrusted to the Church in the con­text of God’s plan for the sal­va­tion of humankind. Thus in his famous Let­ter to Amphilochius, which became an author­i­ta­tive part of the Byzan­tine canon­i­cal col­lec­tions, Basil of Cae­sarea, after reaf­firm­ing the Cypri­anic prin­ci­ple about the inva­lid­ity of bap­tism by heretics, con­tin­ues: “If how­ever this becomes an obsta­cle to [God’s] gen­eral oikono­mia, one should again refer to cus­tom and fol­low the Fathers who have man­aged [the Church].” The “cus­tom” to which Basil ref­ered was cur­rent “in Asia” where “the man­age­ment of the mul­ti­tude” had accred­ited the prac­tice of accept­ing bap­tism by heretics. In any case, Basil jus­ti­fies “econ­omy” by the fear that too much aus­ter­ity will be an obsta­cle to the sal­va­tion of some.12 In the Latin ver­sions of the New Tes­ta­ment and in later eccle­si­as­ti­cal vocab­u­lary, the term oikono­mia is very con­sis­tently trans­lated by dis­pen­sa­tio.” In West­ern canon law, how­ever, the term dis­pen­sa­tio acquired a very def­i­nite mean­ing of “excep­tion to the law granted by the proper author­ity.” The text of Basil quoted above and innu­mer­able ref­er­ences to oikono­mia in Byzan­tine canon­i­cal lit­er­a­ture clearly inter­pret it in a much wider sense? What is at stake is not only an excep­tion to the law but an oblig­a­tion to decide indi­vid­ual issues in the gen­eral con­text of God’s plan for the sal­va­tion of the world. Canon­i­cal stric­tures may some­times be inad­e­quate to the full real­ity and uni­ver­sal­ity of the Gospel and do not pro­vide them­selves the assur­ance that in apply­ing them one is obe­di­ent to the will of God. For the Byzan­tines — to use an expres­sion of Patri­arch Nicholas Mys­tikos (901−907, 912–925) — oikono­mia is “an imi­ta­tion of God’s love for man” and not sim­ply an “excep­tion to the rule.”

Of its nature, oikono­mia can­not be defined as a legal norm, and pirat­i­cal mis­uses and abuses of it have fre­quently occurred. Through­out its entire his­tory, the Byzan­tine Church has known a polar­iza­tion between a party of “rig­orists” recruited mainly in monas­tic cir­cles and the gen­er­ally more lenient group of Church offi­cials sup­port­ing a wider use of oikono­mia, espe­cially in rela­tion to the state. In fact, oikono­mia since it per­mits var­i­ous pos­si­ble ways of imple­ment­ing the Chris­t­ian Gospel prac­ti­cally implies con­cil­i­a­tion, dis­cus­sion, and often unavoid­ably ten­sion. By admit­ting rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the two groups in the cat­a­logue of its saints — Theodore the Stu­dite as well as the patri­archs Tara­sius, Nicepho­rus, and Method­ius and Ignatius as well as Photius, — the Church has given credit to them all as long as it rec­og­nized that the preser­va­tion of the ortho­dox faith was their com­mon con­cern. In fact, no one in Byzan­tium ever denied the prin­ci­ple of oikono­mia rather every­one agreed with Eulogius, Patri­arch of Alexan­dria (581−607) when he wrote, “One rightly can prac­tice oikono­mia when­ever pious doc­trine remains unharmed.” In other words, oikono­mia con­cerns the prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions of Chris­t­ian belief, but it never com­pro­mises with the truth itself. ²

When such, then, have been purged from it and utterly removed by the heal­ing processes worked out by the Fire, then every one of the things which make up our con­cep­tion of the good will come to take their place; incor­rup­tion, that is, and life, and hon­our, and grace, and glory, and every­thing else that we con­jec­ture is to be seen in God, and in His Image, man as he was made. ³