The Byzantine Origins of Symphonia

In 2014, the Russian Orthodox Church's Metropolitan Hilarion argued,

The Social Doctrine underscores the continuity of the church's understanding of symphonia with the original Byzantine conception: “In Byzantium . . . the principles of church-state relations were expressed in the canons and the laws of the empire and were reflected in patristic writings. In their totality these principles were described as symphony between church and state” (III.4, ¶ 3). In the same spirit, in a 2015 polemic letter, three Orthodox writers insist that symphonia means an “organic instead of adversarial understanding of the sacerdotium and the imperium united, harmoniously albeit with some tension, in a single Christian commonwealth.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, such a utilization of symphonia raises a number of difficult philosophical issues.Footnote ¹⁵

This conceptualization of symphonia in the Social Doctrine is based on the definition taken from the Byzantine constitutional draft of the ninth century, dubbed Epanagoge (Ἐπαναγωγή): “The temporal power and the priesthood relate to each other as body and soul; they are necessary for state order just as body and soul are necessary in a living man. It is in their linkage and harmony that the well-being of a state lies.”Footnote ¹⁶

This language suggests that the church and the state are taken not as separate entities but as organic parts of one Christian polity. Practically, this definition means the indirect authority of the state over internal affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and provides the possibility of the church's having a say in political matters.

This formulation stems from an earlier and broader formula in Justinian's Sixth Novel:

This reading of symphonia is linked to the Christian dogma that formed when Christianity became the new official religion under Constantine the Great.Footnote ¹⁸ One of Constantine's biographers, Eusebius of Caesarea, outlined in the fourth century an ideal model of church-state relations, where the emperor had the obligation to protect the church, its order, and its dogma, while the church had to sanctify the emperor's political power and to pray for him.Footnote ¹⁹ Eusebius argued that like body and soul are one in man, as divine and human natures are one in Christ, so the Christian state shall be one with the church. This consubstantiality of the ecclesiastical and political authorities in one Christian polity agrees with the Christological dogma (shaped by the 451 Council of Chalcedon, after Eusebius died), according to which in Christ's person divine and human natures are harmoniously and inseparably united.Footnote ²⁰

This theory of symphonia hinges on the antique perception of religion as the public cult underlying the common life in a polity, with the emperor as a symbol of unity. One finds no intellectual attempts to differentiate between the state and the church or to reconcile hierosyne and basileia in medieval Byzantine political philosophy, both being understood as one political body.

Epanagoge restated the emperor's supreme power as similar to that of God in the Heaven: the emperor appeared as “sovereign in issuing laws,” while “ecclesiastical traditions and conciliar decisions are made laws by imperial decree, but they have no legal and binding existence by themselves.”Footnote ²¹ The contestation of supreme authority between the church and the state, so important for the medieval debates in the West after the Papal Revolution, was not problematized in Eastern Christianity to any significant extent: the state and the church were understood as one orchestra conducted by the emperor who normatively stood above and directed both of them,Footnote ²² although the modalities of this were more sophisticated than a command-subordination relationship.

The church-state balance in the Eastern Empire was apparently different from the balance in the West in the era of the Crusades and afterward. The emperor's powers were neither enumerated in any constitutional document of the Eastern Empire nor limited de facto. Normatively, the patriarch had certain accepted powers to protect the church and its dogma.Footnote ²³ This empowerment also had procedural gateways: Justinian gave to the church canons the force of law and therefore their violation could give a way to legal action initiated by the patriarch. Factually, patriarchs lacked powers similar to those possessed by popes in the Catholic Church. This notwithstanding, on some occasions the Russian Orthodox Church (in a broad sense, as the totality of believers, not limited to the church's hierarchs) objected to iconoclastic and other policies that gravely violated Orthodox dogma, without largely meddling in properly political battles.Footnote ²⁴

Probably under the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy, from around the eleventh century Byzantine political theory started to consider the emperor as the supreme principle of unity, mirroring the role of Mind, Logos, Nous in the world order, implying that the church was a subordinated unit.Footnote ²⁵ This Neoplatonic transposition of celestial order onto earthly affairs meant that just as God is the autocrat in heaven and on earth, so the emperor, acting in God's image, reflects this power of God. Symphonia signified a well-organized choir of the body (polity) and the soul (church), conducted by the emperor.Footnote ²⁶

Such an earthly copy of the Kingdom of Heaven implied that symphonia is due to the wise management of the state and of the church by the emperor who is an indispensable part of the world order. Characteristically, in 1393, the Constantinople Patriarch Antonius admonished the Great Prince Vasily of Moscow, who ordered the name of the Byzantine emperor to be dropped from the liturgy: “It is not possible for Christians to have a church and not to have an empire. Church and empire have a great unity and community, nor is it possible for them to be separated from one another.”Footnote ²⁷

Theoretically, this reading could imply a parity between the empire and the church, but practically it led to the symbiosis, called caesaropapism, with the political preeminence of the emperor. Orthodox political philosophy did not distinguish clearly between the state and the church nor divide their respective competences. In this normative vacuum, the emperor symbolized their unity and guaranteed cohesion of the social whole.Footnote ²⁸

Thinking of the church and the state as two separate phenomena is undoubtedly a modern intellectual construction absent from antique social philosophies.Footnote ²⁹ To separate the political from the religious would be as illogical from the antique and medieval perspectives as to separate body and soul, either delimiting their respective capacities or physically separating them from each other, which would result in death of the social organism. Symphonia perfectly translated this idea of wholeness. The separation in the Enlightenment era supported the modern conception of state, while in the Middle Ages there was only a blurred distinction between state and church, but no separation.Footnote ³⁰ The metaphor of body and soul, and their desired harmony justified political unity based on the common religious cult and on the ideology common both for state and church united in one Corpus Christi.Footnote ³¹

Symphonia in Kievan Russia

The Church Statute said to have been drafted at the end of the tenth centuryFootnote ³² by Grand Prince Vladimir implicitly reaffirmed the symphonic balance in relations between the state and the church. His son, Grand Prince Jaroslav, in the middle of the eleventh century composed another Church Statute, which opened with the characteristic preamble: “following my father's gift, hav[ing] consulted with Ilarion, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus’, we have compared Greek Nomocanon; since a prince, or his boyars, or his judges ought not have jurisdiction over these suits.”Footnote ³³ The same striving to harmonize the church-state relationship is seen in the Eulogy of Prince Vladimir and Prince Jaroslav written by Metropolitan Ilarion during the same period of time.Footnote ³⁴

This normative ideal reflected the new conception of social order that started to form in medieval Russia after the 988 baptism. The church provided an example of the right order, opposed to the feudal fragmentation of Kievan Rus’, so that rows between the ecclesiastical and the mundane authorities, if they were frequent, could eventually delegitimize this order and stir up centripetal tendencies. Medieval Russians firmly believed that good and bad princes were sent by God as a reward or punishment for the people, so that any revolt against the state would be suspicious (albeit not excluded as an act of God's will, punishing bad princes) as encroaching on God and His order.Footnote ³⁵ Gregory Fedotov aptly describes this style of thinking: “if a bad prince is sent by God and his tyranny has a penitential significance this seems to exclude revolt against the tyrant as a legitimate political action.”Footnote ³⁶

In medieval Russian political philosophy, this symphonic conception was opposed to the cosmological social order characteristic for paganism. This order was reflected in the factual political structure of the Kievan Rus’, which was governed by one large but parceled family, mirroring the polytheist worldview in which gods, conceived as members of one divine family, shared sovereignty over the world and contested the mutual powers of each other.Footnote ³⁷ Practically, the cosmological idea of diversity rejected the principle of hierarchy and implied a complicated, multilevel, polytheistic world order, with clans as the main intellectual pattern of power relations.

Oppositely, the ecclesiastical order of the church displayed the ideal of accord and hierarchical unity. The Orthodox symbol of symphonia clearly referred to the monotheistic unity of the hierarchically organized world according to the Christian teaching. This perspective can partly explain why bishops and other hierarchs usually acted as mediators in political rows between princes, popular assemblies, and other political institutions in medieval Russia. In this sense, one can agree with Janet Martin who argued, “[t]he Church became a second institution, along with the Riurikid dynasty, that gave shape and definition to the emerging state.”Footnote ³⁸ Furthermore, the alliance between the church and the Kievan grand princes contributed to their mutual legitimacy by promoting and strengthening the other, so that “in Kievan Rus’ the prince did not exercise ultimate authority, but shared this responsibility with the head of the church, in symphonia, in harmony.”Footnote ³⁹

There is no early medieval Russian literature that specifically deals with the conception of symphonia or even mentions it explicitly. Neither is there evidence of any serious impact of Epanagoge on Russian law: as argued by Feldbrugge, it had minimal importance and never had the force of law in Russia.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nonetheless, given the discussions around Epanagoge in Byzantine political thought from the ninth century, it is likely that the theory of symphonia could have come to Russia from the Eastern Roman Empire. The absence of debates about symphonia in Russia suggests that this theological construction did not meet any intellectual opposition in Kievan Rus’. The problem of church-state relations did not seem to preoccupy Russians in the early Middle Ages: Sermon on Law and Grace by Metropolitan Ilarion (1038) can serve as an example of this optimism.Footnote ⁴¹

The effect of symphonia was already observable in Russia in the process of baptism when the church and the state authorities closely worked together to convert Russians to Christianity, and to eradicate paganism. Grand Prince Vladimir was lauded by Metropolitan Ilarion in Sermon on Law and Grace for having, similar to Constantine the Great, “with our new fathers—the bishops—in frequent assembly and utmost humility took counsel on how to establish the law for these people new in their knowledge of God.”Footnote ⁴² In the consequent political history of Kievan Rus’, there are other examples of the reconciliatory role of the Orthodox clergy in feuds between Russian princes: the Kievan Abbot Grigoriy to prevent the war between Prince Vsevolod Olgovich and Prince Mstislav in the mid-eleventh century; Metropolitan Nikolai to reconcile Prince Vladimir Monomakh and Prince Sviatopolk Iziaslavovich in the late eleventh century; Metropolitan Mikhail and Metropolitan Feodor in the mid-twelfth century, and Metropolitan Kirill in 1220s to repeatedly calm the warfare between the clans of the Monomakhovichs and the Olgovichs.Footnote ⁴³

Similar trends in the church-state relationship could also be observed in other provinces of Russia, such as the Novgorod archbishops, who were elected by the Novgorod popular assembly (Veche) and then the metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia confirmed the appointment. Archbishops’ powers went beyond the episcopal pattern and included, along with a judicial function, the role of ceremonial head of the state (the city of Novgorod) with the right to sign treaties and to conduct negotiations at the international and constitutional (to calm civil conflicts inside the state) levels.Footnote ⁴⁴ Each time two antagonistic parties of citizens living on two different banks of the Volkhov river—the merchants and the artisans—were ready to start fighting, they waited on the main bridge for a while expecting the archbishop to come between them and start reconciliation talks. This ritual was repeatedly used and was a part of the political order of that city.Footnote ⁴⁵ The church's role was mostly confined to negotiations. Before the Mongol invasion, the Russian clergy was reluctant to interfere with state politics, unless it touched on religious matters (such as a breach of religious oath or fighting heresies).Footnote ⁴⁶ Although there are mentions of the political interferences of princes in the election of metropolitans, they are relatively few.Footnote ⁴⁷ These medieval realities could be successfully described with the help of the concept of symphonia.

Symphonia in Muscovite Russia

The church remained relatively unaffected by the Tartar invasion in the mid-thirteenth century: the invaders were generally protective of the religions of the conquered lands and did not try to impose any religion of their own. Of practical importance was the fact that the church was exempt from taxation, unlike the rest of Russian society, and enjoyed full jurisdictional and fiscal rights on its vast territories. The state authorities willingly conceded these rights to the church on colonized territories in the northwest, where monasteries functioned as de facto representatives of the state.Footnote ⁴⁸

Feeling its relative strength, from the fourteenth century on, the church started actively interfering in political rows, explicitly supporting Moscow grand princes (later, tsars) in their warfare with the rival provinces (Novgorod, Tver, and others), using excommunication, the interdiction of liturgies, and other tools to support Moscow in its sacred function of “the gathering of Russian lands” (sobiranie zemel’ russkikh).Footnote ⁴⁹ Moscow's exemplary fidelity to the Orthodoxy, opposed to attempted alliances of the rival provinces with the Lithuanian and Polish Catholics, have been one of the gages of this new tacit church-state alliance.Footnote ⁵⁰

Using its financial resources and sacerdotal power, the church did not hesitate to pursue the national interest that was understood prima facie as Moscow's political interest and identify this interest with church's corporate interests.Footnote ⁵¹ Sergiy of Radonezh, one of the most venerable Russian saints, blessing the Moscow Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoi in the Kulikov Battle (1380) is a symbolic example of this identification of church and state interests.

This strategic alliance with Moscow grand princes gave the church much political and economic power, and could probably have secured its independence. The church became opulent and mighty, but, unlike the Catholic Church, it lacked an efficient governance structure. Therefore, it had to rely on the state to fight dissidents and heresies, especially when the church experienced significant internal conflicts. Yosef Sanin (Volotsky) and other church hierarchs were well aware of the institutional frailty of the church, and sought advantageous alliances with the state to amend this. In the controversy between the possessors and the non-possessors at the turn of the sixteenth century, the church got the upper hand over the non-possessors and retained its riches thanks only to the state's support.Footnote ⁵²

Such pragmatic alliances triggered the process of the merger of the church with the state. The culmination point was the creation of the Moscow Patriarchate, which localized the Russian “branch” of Orthodox Christianity.Footnote ⁵³ However, the rise of the power of the church was temporary and dependent on political circumstances. Twenty years of the factual co-governance of Tsar Mikhail Romanov and Patriarch Filaret, Mikhail's father, in the first half of the seventeenth century exemplified the attempt to implement symphonia in Russian politics.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this co-governance and the political struggle of the next patriarch Nikon, the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century, according to James Billington, “were consumed by one last great effort of the Russian Orthodox Church to reestablish and extend its authority over all Russian life.”Footnote ⁵⁵

This great effort failed and the harmonious relations between the church and the state broke down. Progressively gaining independence from Constantinople, the Russian Church identified its corporate interests with the national interest: dropping the yoke of the pagans, defending Orthodox Russia from the Latin West, securing national unity and religious homogeneity through suppressing heresies and dissent, reasserting its property rights, and so on. Byzantine political ideas soon found fertile ground in Russian politics and ideology aimed at the centralization of political power around Moscow.Footnote ⁵⁶ Among the characteristic events is the dynastic marriage between the Moscow grand prince Ivan III and the Byzantine princess Sophia Palaiologana in 1472, the acceptation of the new title of “tsar” by Moscow grand princes in 1547, and the establishment of the Moscow patriarchate in 1589.

The asserted continuity between Byzantium and Russia became one of the main legitimation instruments when the former progressively started to dwindle and finally fell under the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The centralization tendency in nation-building was strengthened also from a soteriological perspective, in the view of Moscow's messianic role in world history. Monk Filofei's (Philotheus) 1511 Epistle summed up this messianic ideal in the famous theory of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” which signified “the tsardom, which shines like the sun in its orthodox Christian faith throughout the whole universe.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Filofei assured the Moscow grand prince that “all the empires . . . of the orthodox Christian faith have gathered into your single empire . . . you are the only tsar for Christians in the whole world.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The conception of symphonia evolved in Russia from the idea of natural equilibrium to the idea of an orchestrated performance under the direction of the tsar, progressively taking the shape of the Byzantine caesaropapism.Footnote ⁵⁹ The conflict between Tsar Alexei and Patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century showed that symphonia was no longer a theoretical solution for church-state relations. It was Patriarch Nikon's grave mistake to challenge the new role of the state in his controversy with Tsar Aleksei.Footnote ⁶⁰ In vain, he incorporated passages from Epanagoge about symphonia into Kormchaya kniga to legitimize the tsar's authority and to persuade the tsar not to intervene in Church affairs.

The decisive point in this appropriation of the church by the state was the suppression of the patriarchate in 1721 by Peter the Great, who transformed the church into one of the state ministries (the Holy Synod).Footnote ⁶¹ In Peter's 1721 Decree, one reads the following justification of this political decision: “[T]he common people do not understand how the spiritual authority is distinguishable from the autocratic, but marveling at the dignity and glory of the Highest Pastor, they imagine that such an administrator is a second sovereign, a power equal to that of the Autocrat, or even greater.”Footnote ⁶² Reasoning that there shall not be two heads for one body, Peter decided to cut one head off and abolished the patriarchate.

The new political language was based on allegories of corporeal constitution and of political mechanics, representative of the political discourse of the late Middle Ages and of modernity in the West.Footnote ⁶³ In Pravda Voli Monarshei Footnote ⁶⁴ and other statements of the official ideology, one finds abundant references to Hobbes, Pufendorf, Wolf, and other Western philosophers who resolutely distinguished between the church and the state, and between the ruler and the state—a distinction that had not been conceptualized in Russian political thought. The beginning of the eighteenth century can be considered as the moment at which Western ideas about the church-state relationship penetrated into Russian political realities and decisively tipped the balance in favor of the state.Footnote ⁶⁵ This was the end of the era of symphonia and of rethinking the relationship between the political and the spiritual in terms of Modernity. These constructions clashed with the remnants of the medieval political philosophy in the Russian romanticism of the nineteenth century.

Symphonia in Russian Romanticism of the Nineteenth Century

The Byzantine political ideals were received into Russian political philosophy through the lens of nineteenth-century discussions about Russia's uniqueness and historical mission in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ Today, the glorious past of the Russian Empire—its philosophical and ideological legacy inclusive—is asserted as a part of the spiritual revival not only in the official state ideology, but also in the Russian Orthodox Church's official documents.

Piotr Chaadaev's famous Philosophical Letters, about Russia's historical mission, his criticism of Russian religious and cultural development following the particularistic Byzantine culture triggered the Slavophiles-Westernizers controversy.Footnote ⁶⁷ His condemnation of Russia's past and present promised no good prospects for uncovering in Russian history any good, let alone ideal, forms of church-state relations: “From the very first moment of our social existence, nothing has emanated from us for the common good of men; not a single useful thought has sprouted in the sterile soil of our country; not a single great truth has sprung from our midst.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Driven by his Catholic sympathies, Chaadaev even ventured to suggest that adapting Orthodoxy from Byzantium was one of the main factors that divided Russia from Western civilization. Later, in his Apology of a Madman, Chaadaev reasserted the decisive role of Orthodoxy in Russian nation-building and the spiritual role of Orthodoxy for the accomplishment of the mystical mission of Russia.Footnote ⁶⁹

In their responses to Chaadaev's Letters, the first Slavophiles sought to identify the uniqueness of Russia through the prism of a spiritual connection between the Russian communitarian lifestyle (mir), the requirement to follow this style (narodnost’), Orthodoxy (pravoslavie), and political autocracy (samoderzhavie). Ivan Kireevsky formulated the famous distinction between Russian and Western social philosophies: in the West, the tendency toward the rationalistic segmentation of society prevails, while Orthodoxy preserves the inward integrality of spirit.Footnote ⁷⁰ The principle of integrality (vseedinstvo) excluded the separation of church and state and made their union a matter of supreme religious intuition and wisdom.Footnote ⁷¹ In the words of Georges Florovsky, “Slavophiles returned to the Church as to the sole ‘organic’ force amidst the ‘critical’ dissolution and disintegration of all binding ties . . . and did not fully discern or admit the incommensurate natures of Church and society.”Footnote ⁷² Replacing a rational distinction with a mystical intuition, the Slavophiles endorsed anti-individualism and illiberalism.Footnote ⁷³

Given the rational separation of the respective competences of the church and the state, their pragmatic coordination was not a solution for the first Slavophiles. Konstantin Aksakov was explicit on this point: “In the West . . . they kill souls and replace them by the perfecting of political forms and the establishment of good order and by police action. Conscience is replaced by law; regulations become a substitute for the inward impulse; even charity is turned into a mechanical business in the West; all the anxiety is for political forms. . . . At the foundation of the Russian State there lies spontaneity, freedom and peace.”Footnote ⁷⁴

This vision mandated fusion instead of separation, faith instead of critical reflection, and common good instead of individual interest. According to the dichotomy between Byzantium and the West, as explained by the Slavophiles, in Eastern Christianity the philosophical premises of the fusion of church and state relied on the vision of the polity as a unity of the logos and the social body under the grace of God.Footnote ⁷⁵ In their opinion, the strict differentiation between Civitas Dei and Civitas Terrena in Western political thought led to the practice of the Holy See of Rome repeatedly trying to fight the state into submission. Taken in this context, the idea of sobornost’ meant a denial of such theocratic aspirations.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Berdyaev's opinion, this Slavophile style of thinking reflects “the very true and very Russian idea,” which is defined as “the fusion of right in the sense of truth, and right in the sense of justice, of integral knowledge by the whole being of man.”Footnote ⁷⁷

These generalizations were exaggerated as both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions were much more diverse and sophisticated than their Slavophile summations. However, the Slavophile conceptual synthesis proved to be a fruitful ideological solution for conservative ideologies for years to come. This synthesis implied a syncretic worldview in which the church and the state were considered as stemming from the same spiritual sources and harmonically fused in a mystical communion, all-unity (vseedinstvo). However, this ideal of wholeness “discouraged individuals from viewing themselves apart from the community, it also made the Orthodox Church slow to distinguish itself from the state.”Footnote ⁷⁸

This Slavophile discourse followed the famous triad of Sergei Uvarov: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,” which he formulated in 1834 to summarize the official ideology of the Russian Empire:Footnote ⁷⁹ “Sincerely and deeply attached to the Church of his fathers, the Russians have, from the earliest times, looked upon it as the pledge of social and family happiness . . . . The saving conviction that Russia lives and is preserved by the spirit of a strong, humane, enlightened autocracy must permeate public education.”Footnote ⁸⁰

This ideology was not unanimously accepted by Russian intellectuals, many of whom were abhorred by attempts to justify Russian political absolutism by references to church dogmas. This ideology partly discredited the church itself, so that some intellectuals chose atheism to affirm their protest against the alliance between church and state. Vladimir Soloviev tried to restore the authority of religion and to find other ways to formulate what he saw as the social philosophy of Orthodoxy. In his Critique of the Abstract Principles (1880), Soloviev relied on philosophical holism, which prompted him to argue that all distinctions between the political, the legal, the religious, and other principles, between mystical and rational cognition are artificial. It is in their fusion that one can find the concrete universalism that is the real foundation of social life.Footnote ⁸¹ For Soloviev, social life is determined by two absolute principles: first is a self-subsistent God, the second is mankind in the process of becoming; their alliance being expressed by the term Godmanhood (bogochelovechestvo)Footnote ⁸²—another concept that is widely utilized by the Russian Orthodox Church in its official discourse. The original meaning of this concept is that “there is no essential difference between God and the world. In other words, the ‘essence’ of God and world are the same.  . . . God himself endows each point of being with the power of self-consciousness—apart from which the whole of manifold reality could not become external to God.”Footnote ⁸³ His approach to the church-state symphonia stems from this eschatological perspective and is expressed in the formula:

It is plausible that the authors of the Social Doctrine were inspired by Soloviev's conception,Footnote ⁸⁵ but they failed to notice the distance between his ecumenical project and the medieval conception of symphonia, or his final disappointment about the feasibility of this project. Toward the end of his life, Soloviev dropped his earlier theoretical attempts to work out ecumenical projects (“free theocracy”) for the reunification of churches and for the implementation of his social ideal. In his final work, Three Conversations, Soloviev resolutely abandoned his former belief in progress and its culmination on earth.Footnote ⁸⁶

Symphonia in the Social Doctrine

The first commentators lauded the Social Doctrine for presenting the ideas about church-state relations so that these ideas find “their best fit to the teaching on relation between state power and spiritual power as set out in the canons and by the Fathers of the Church.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The Social Doctrine describes symphonia as a theoretically homogeneous conception. Such a description disregards the plurality of meanings that this concept has in Byzantine political thought and how it was historically received and developed in Russia. Playing a symphony (be it political or musical) presupposes that someone selects the performers, assigns musical compositions to musicians, and directs their performance. As shown above, there were at least two versions of symphonia in Byzantium, one based on the mystical union of body and soul in one Corpus Christi, while the other considered this union as possible only with the intermediary role of logos incarnated in the person of emperor who conducted the performance of the social orchestra. Neither of these versions fits the conceptualization of symphonia in the Social Doctrine.

The authors of the Social Doctrine do not treat symphonia as a historical fact and argue that neither in Byzantine nor in Russian history did symphonia exist in a pure form, always being subject to distortions (III.4, ¶¶ 6–8). After their critical appraisal of the separation of church and state in the West, the Social Doctrine's authors close their deliberations on church-state relations (in chapter 3, where symphonia is dealt with) with a reference to the “two-thousand-year-long historical experience” (III.4, ¶ 16). This reference serves as a meaningful link to the consequent deliberations about the correct model of the church-state relationship in the following parts of the Social Doctrine. It implies that the pre-modern concept of symphonia can work as a normative ideal for shaping church-state relations in modern times.

The Social Doctrine definitively does not support the idea of the state being a part of Corpus Christi; neither does it accept the lead role of the mundane authorities (emperor, tsar, president) to conduct the social orchestra. The difference of the intellectual frameworks between the mystical political thought of the Middle Ages and the rational thinking of modernity is also disregarded. In the political narratives both on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church clergy and of the political leadership, symphonia remains only an allegoric figure of speech. It does not seem that the Social Doctrine's authors believe that the church and the state can be fused into one, as the medieval thinkers believed. The system of checks and balances in the church-state relationship proposed in the Social Doctrine is evidently based on rational, pragmatic thinking and conclusively rules out any mystical all-union between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state. In such an all-union, legal or institutional guarantees would become useless, as the state and the church would be mystically fused into wholeness.

Despite the lip service paid by its authors to the medieval theory of symphonia, the Social Doctrine is far from this in its philosophical implications and is closer to what Vladimir Soloviev condemned as the “theocratic temptation” of Catholicism in his Three Conversations. The Social Doctrine clearly delimits the respective goals, competences, and sovereign powers of the Russian Orthodox Church and the state (III.5). With this, the Social Doctrine seems to be closer to the “two-swords” theory than to Eusebius or other Byzantine theoreticians of symphonia. The Social Doctrine explicitly considers theocracy as the ideal form of social order. Only after “society moved away from obedience to God”—claim the authors of the Social Doctrine—“people began to think about the need to have a worldly ruler” (III.1, ¶ 3). The general conclusion is that the golden age remains in the past, while other non-theocratic polities are only distortions of the ideal.

To exclude God's responsibility for this occurrence, the authors refer to the well-known theological argument of Thomas Aquinas that God granted human beings only “an opportunity to order their social life by their own free will, so that this order is a response to the earthly reality distorted by sin” (III.1, ¶ 3). Therefore, God is not responsible for erroneous deviations from theocracy to other, worse forms of social organization. These worse forms result from sinful resolutions and are tacitly equated to the liberal forms of governance that distort the hierarchical world order. What is symbolically important in this constellation of ideas is that the real social life is not expected to reproduce a natural harmony or symphonia that can be available only from an eschatological perspective. Neither is the church ready to assign to the state the role of the conductor of the divine-social orchestra.

On the other hand, even a bad state is better than anarchy: “God blesses the state as an essential element of life in the world distorted by sin” (III.2, ¶ 2). Echoing Soloviev's philosophical ideas, the Social Doctrine claims that the state is called to restrict evil and to support good. The obligation to obey the state authorities is not absolute but is conceptually dependent on their moral justification: “Christians should avoid attempts to make [the state] absolute and failure to [recognize] the limits of its purely earthly, temporal and transient value conditioned by the presence of sin in the world and the need to restrain it” (III.2, ¶ 3). However, the church reserves for itself a rich arsenal of means to curb state authorities. In its possible conflict with the state, the church can go as far as applying to “international bodies and the world public opinion and appealing to her faithful for peaceful civil disobedience” (III.5, ¶ 4). However, any interference of the state into the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church is precluded.

This approach is hardly compatible with the Byzantine symphonia. Justinian's Sixth Novel explicitly excludes any disagreement with the state rules, and solely “grants permission to everyone, no matter what may be his office or to what order he may belong, when he becomes aware of any of these breaches of discipline, to notify the emperor, or the government.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The right to disobey the sovereign and his commands, so intensively discussed in medieval Western natural-law philosophy, was not central to Byzantine political thinking. Only in a few exceptional cases could the clergy and laity make use of this right.

From such a moral justification of the authorities and their commands in the Social Doctrine one may infer that citizens have to decide themselves about the limits of their obeisance to the state, based on their moral evaluations. “The Church remains loyal to the state,” but only insofar as this does not contradict “the task of salvation” (III.5, ¶ 3). When the state compels people “to commit sinful and spiritually harmful actions, the Church should refuse to obey the state” (III.5, ¶ 4). An individual also has the right to disobedience: “following the will of his conscience, he can refuse to fulfil the commands of state forcing him into a grave sin” (III.5, ¶ 4). Such flexible conceptions as “spiritually harmful actions” or “grave sin” leave the matter of obedience undefined, while the commanding power of the state is dependent on individual discretion of the clergyman or the lay believer. The normative force of such individual judgments cannot be found in the Byzantine or Russian medieval political literature, including those works that are referred to in the Social Doctrine.

The original idea of symphonia does not conceptually provide room for freedom of individual choice. Individual freedom would turn symphonia into a discord, as the multiplicity of individual value judgments would inevitably bring dissonance into the orchestrated choir. Characteristically, the Byzantine symphonia does not imply any social contract between free individuals, so their consent to be commanded by the political authorities would have no normative bearing.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Social Doctrine clearly adheres to the Gesellschaft-framework, based on the premises of the Western legal tradition about individual freedom as the cornerstone of social order and about the right to disobedience justified by individual moral judgment.Footnote ⁹⁰

The difference in the natures of the church and the state, as explained in the Social Doctrine (III.3), implies that the church is a divine-human organism—“Being the body of Christ, [the church] unites in herself the two natures, divine and human, with their inherent actions and wills” (I.2, ¶ 1). While the state is simply a human production—“the emergence of the temporal state should not be understood as a reality originally established by God” (III.1, ¶ 4). Still, this difference was not recognized in Byzantine political thought in this sense, as the state and the emperor's power also explicitly emanated from the God's will and were integral parts of the God-created world order. The divine-human alliance results from the symphonic alliance between the church and the state (“general good will result,” in the words of Justinian's Sixth Novel Footnote ⁹¹), both the church and the state being parts of a divine-human organism. Moreover, the emperor's power had explicit divine sanction in Byzantine political philosophy. That this power was blessed by God meant that the church was obliged to subordinate itself and to play its part of the symphonia, following the emperor's baton.

To underplay the state and to check its possible interference with divine matters, the authors of the Social Doctrine reason that “the Church has been founded by God Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, while the God-instituted nature of state power is revealed in historical process only indirectly” (III.3, ¶ 1). Once again, this “indirect revelation” was inappropriate for Byzantine political thought, in which the emperor's power was de facto deified. The difference between the natures of the emperor's or the patriarch's powers was not discussed. Quite the contrary, Justinian's Sixth Novel underscores that both powers “proceed from the same principle”: only the fields of their competence can be theoretically distinguished in divine and human matters, respectively.

In the same vein, the Social Doctrine distorts the symphonia theory when it asserts the freedom of the church to pragmatically decide about cooperation with the state—“the Church can cooperate with the state in affairs which benefit the Church herself, as well as the individual and society” (III.8, ¶ 1). This assertion cardinally diverges from the very principle of symphonia, which was either preestablished by God's providence or secured by the emperor's power and did not depend on decisions of the church's clerics.

Apparently, what the Social Doctrine allows the church in its relationship with the state goes far beyond the limits of the Byzantine symphonia, which reserved for the church only a limited autonomy in “divine matters.” With its Social Doctrine, the church pretends to assume the role of the defender of morality in Russia, seeking “the prerogative to arbitrate the meaning of morality in Russian society.”Footnote ⁹² The Social Doctrine argues that “the Church is called to take part in building human life in all spheres where it is possible and, in doing so, to join efforts with representatives of the secular authority” (III.8, ¶ 1). In particular, the church condemns such convictions or actions that may result in the “total control over a person's life, convictions and relations with other people, as well as erosion in personal, family or public morality, insult of religious feelings, damage to the cultural and spiritual identity of the people and threats to the sacred gift of life” (III.6, ¶ 3).

With its conservative philosophy enshrined in the Social Doctrine, the church evidently intends to counteract the liberal rights based on the ideas of Western individualism that are established in the Russian Constitution. Kristina Stoeckl aptly describes this philosophy as “present[ing] human rights as the product of a Western secular legal positivism, which started to influence the Russian legal space after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, but was essentially alien to the national legal culture. The document clearly remained on a confrontational and ideologically closed plane vis-à-vis the concept of human rights. . . . [I]t represents the nationalist and anti-Western viewpoint on human rights.”Footnote ⁹³