medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Another work to consult:
Tom Izbicki

Title:
Eternal victory : triumphal rulership in late antiquity, Byzantium, and
the early medieval West / Michael McCormick.
Author:
McCormick, Michael, 1951-
Subjects:
Triumph
Emperors -- Rome
Rites and ceremonies -- Rome.
Processions -- Rome.
Byzantine emperors
Rites and ceremonies -- Byzantine Empire.
Processions -- Byzantine Empire.
Rites and ceremonies -- Europe.
Processions -- Europe.
Europe -- Kings and rulers
Publisher:
Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press ; Paris
: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1986.
ISBN:
0521261805 :
Series:
Past and present publications
Description:
xvi, 454 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Notes:
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral--University of Louvain, 1979)
Includes index.
Bibliography: p. 397-415.
Control No.:
(CStRLIN)MDJGAAE9964-B
AAE9964EI
LCCN:
84019907
Bibliography:
Bibliography: p. 397-415.

> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Pasting here a fascinating BMCR review of a book on the sacramental
> aspect of Byzantine emperors.  It looks as if anointing came into the
> process with Basil I (867).
>
> Also another link to a good article on the Byzantine coronation,
> although the Greek coding has turned to hash.
> http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/christou_byzemperor.html
>
>
> DW
>
>
>
> Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.11
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>       Gilbert Dagron, /Emperor and Priest. The Imperial Office in
>       Byzantium. Translated by Jean Birrell/.   Cambridge:  Cambridge
>       University Press, 2003.  Pp. xi, 337; pls. 8, plans 5, map 1.
>        ISBN 0-521-80123-0.  $75.00.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *Reviewed by Franziska E. Shlosser, Concordia University
> ([log in to unmask])*
> Word count: 2310 words
>
> /Emperor and Priest/ is the English translation of Gilbert Dagron's
> /Empereur et prêtre: Étude sur le "césaropapism" byzantin/, published by
> Éditions Gallimard in 1996. The book is divided into three parts and an
> epilogue, has eight plates, five plans and one simplified map of
> Constantinople, a glossary and an excellent index. There are three pages
> of bibliographical abbreviations, but most of the bibliographical
> references are contained in ample footnotes.
>
> The subject of the book is Caesaropapism, as indicated in the title of
> the French original. In the introduction, Dagron acknowledges by way of
> dedication the seminal works of Marc Bloch, /The Royal Touch/ (1924),
> and E. Kantorowicz, /The King's Two Bodies/ (1957). They have clearly
> been the source of inspiration for Dagron's /Emperor and Priest/. On
> what model, asks the author, did the emperors of Byzantium base their
> dual claim of being king and priest. He develops his findings, based on
> thorough knowledge of the sources from legal texts to the commentary of
> Balsamon.
>
> The book is divided almost symmetrically into three sections, each of
> which is further divided into chapters and subheadings. Part one, called
> "The Principles", is about dynastic legitimacy and rules of succession
> (largely lacking in Byzantium), coronations and, finally, ceremonial and
> memory. In the first chapter titled "Heredity, legitimacy and
> succession", Dagron takes a look at "power and dynasty". Foreigners were
> duly impressed with the pomp surrounding the imperial office but were
> equally amazed by its instability. Although emperors tried to found
> dynasties, there was no officially accepted principle of succession from
> father to son. Dagron concludes that succession became more regulated
> from the time of Alexios Komnenos. The chapter "Family and dynasty"
> follows. Emperors tried to establish the legitimacy of their reigns
> using a strategy of intermarriage, but even so few were able to found a
> dynasty. Leo III succeeded, and it was during his reign that the office
> of emperor took on a quasi-priestly character modeled on the kingship of
> Saul, David and Solomon in the Old Testament.
>
> In the last chapter of part one, Dagron analyses the ceremonial
> surrounding the coronation of a Byzantine emperor. As expected, much of
> this is based on a reading of /De ceremoniis/, a text that the author
> criticises for its lack of reliability. He concludes that when
> Constantine Porphyrogenitus was looking for a model of an imperial
> coronation, he found no established ceremonial but only some elements of
> ritual organised by each emperor "into a more or less theatrical
> ceremonial" (p. 78). The places for these ceremonies were invariable the
> same: the "Hebdomon, Tribunal of the Nineteen Couches, Hippodrome, St
> Sophia, or palace church," but the coronation itself was varied in its
> ritual. The ceremonies illustrated the process by which real power
> acquired legitimacy. Dagron describes this process of legitimisation as
> a long road for the emperor, who won his appointment on the battlefield,
> and a short one for the son, who was legitimised by his birth, by virtue
> of being a porphyrogenitus. This discussion includes also a reference to
> the part played by the patriarch in coronation ceremonies but finds that
> the head of Orthodoxy had no institutionalised role.
>
> The second part of the work is about "Emperors". It begins, not
> surprisingly, with the founder of the Christian Empire, Constantine the
> Great. Chapter four characterises Constantine as quasi-bishop. Dagron
> stresses the Hellenistic origins of the idea that the ruler represented
> a deity on earth. In the following pages, the discussion turns to St
> Constantine. He is described by a mixture of phrases from both the Old
> and the New Testament as "the friend of men, [possessing] the wisdom of
> Solomon, the sweetness of David and the orthodoxy of the apostles." He
> was thus "the equal of the apostles," and since he had "emulated Paul"
> he had the right to the "same honour as an apostle" (p.143). The /Actus
> Silvestri/, on the other hand, belongs to the Latin West, and is
> portrayed as an attempt to counteract the growth of Caesaropapism.
> According to a legend that circulated widely, Pope Sylvester baptized
> Constantine in Rome before the emperor departed for the East. He then
> left the care of the western part of the empire in the hands of the
> pontiff. This story had far-reaching consequences and contributed to a
> growing concept of the dual power of church and state.
>
> In Byzantium Constantine was /rex perpetuus/ who sanctified the rulers
> who came after him. They would be hailed as "New Constantines".
> Paradoxically, the loudly proclaimed sanctity of the founder of the
> Christian Empire did not set the tone, and few saints are recognised
> among the /basileis/ of the Orthodox East. By contrast, we find a number
> of royal saints in the Latin West, who were miracle-workers or martyrs.
> The "Christian" sainthood of Constantine remained an exception.
> Byzantine emperors were not considered saints or even Christians like
> the rest. "They were seen ... as players in a sacred history which went
> back to the Davidic alliance" (p.157).
>
> Chapter five, entitled "Leo III and the iconoclast emperors: Melchizedek
> or Antichrist," begins with "A Little Phrase". This little phrase is no
> less than Leo III's, the "heresiarch" emperor's supposed answer to the
> Roman pontiff, "I am emperor and priest". This expression appears in two
> possibly forged letters from Pope Gregory II, in which the pope requests
> that the emperor put away his arrogance or face the consequences of
> excommunication. Gregory reminds Leo "that the dogmas of holy Church do
> not fall within the province of the emperors, but of bishops" (p.160).
>
> It is at this point that Dagron, departing from a chronological
> narrative, introduces Maximos the Confessor. Maximos is important as the
> first in Byzantium who defended the sacerdotal role of the emperor in
> the seventh century. In a subheading of chapter five, Dagron
> investigates the role of "Melchizedek, priest and king", citing the
> relevant passages of the Old Testament, and the prominence that this
> obscure figure was to acquire in Christian thought. This was helped by
> the historicizing of Melchizedek by Flavius Josephus, in whose account
> King Melchizedek received the priesthood because he was just to the
> highest degree. Dagron concludes that after much exegesis and images
> involving Melchizedek, Leo III was no longer seen as a just king by
> comparison. It is this accusation that lay at the base of Pseudo-Gregory
> and the questionable letters. Chapter five concludes with the
> "Precursors of the Antichrist". Leo III was punished for his pride; he
> was a false Melchizedek. There was now suspicion that the emperors, the
> "almost-priests", were the precursors announcing the coming of
> Antichrist. Dagron sees this as a reason for the anxiety reflected in
> the ceremonial entry of an emperor into St Sophia. It gave the emperor a
> quasi-sacerdotal role but prohibited him to ever utter the "little
> phrase", "I am emperor and priest".
>
> The last chapter of Part five "Basil the Macedonian, Leo VI and
> Constantine VII: ceremonial and religion," begins with "models of
> kingship and dynastic saints." It tells how St Diomedes called out to
> the /hegoumenos/ of his monastery to open the gate to the vagabond at
> its entrance, "because he had been anointed by Christ to become emperor"
> (p. 192). The vagabond so anointed was no other than the future Basil I.
> Thus the supernatural had a hand in legitimising him well before his
> rise to the throne. Dagron ventures a guess that Basil himself may have
> believed the story to be true. Illustrations in the /Homilies/ of
> Gregory of Nazianzus, and possibly commissioned by Basil, show Elijah,
> Gabriel or Michael intervening for the Macedonian dynasty at every turn.
> It was Elijah who first revealed the sainthood of Theophano, first wife
> of Leo VI, by a miracle. There were, furthermore, models of kingship
> that point to the Old Testament. Like king David, Basil, the founder of
> the Macedonian dynasty, came from a humble background. The Constantinian
> model, too, is attested in the iconography of the reign. Eventually, Leo
> VI organized the cults and ceremonials of the Macedonian dynasty. He
> pronounced homilies from the ambo of churches built by his ancestors. As
> stated by Dagron, "He was their cantor" (p. 211).
>
> Part two finishes with taking a look at St Sophia and the /Nea/.The
> /Nea/ took its name from a renewed pact between God and the imperial
> power. The two churches are compared in function. Dagron conceptualises
> the /Nea/ as an imperial church while St Sophia is seen to reflect the
> sphere of the patriarch. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the grandson of
> the founder of the Macedonian dynasty, defined what was right ceremony
> in his /Book of Ceremonies/. The model of Melchizedek's kingship was
> abandoned, according to Dagron, for a greater mastery of the management
> of the sacred.
>
> Part three is about the "Clergy". Chapter seven titled "The kingship of
> the patriarchs (eighth to eleventh centuries)," discusses in its first
> subheading Theodore of Stoudios and Photios. In the wake of the early
> Iconoclasm, Theodore was able to demand equality of /sacerdotium/ and
> /regnum/. The gain made by the church was to be a loss to imperial
> power. Photios was later to use examples from Hebrew history to claim
> royal functions for the priesthood. He was thus the first to initiate
> ideas that came close to those of the Latin Church and papal
> pretensions. Under the subheading "A two headed power?" Dagron takes a
> look at the /Eisagoge/, a legal manual compiled between 879 and 886 that
> has in its preamble a description of the new stature of the patriarchate
> of Constantinople. He thinks that Photios was "quite plausibly" the
> author of the relevant pages that discuss the two powers. The patriarch
> was now seen as a New Moses and a New Melchizedek. There follows a
> discussion about "Michael Keroularios and the purple sandals," which
> characterises Keroularios as an ambitious patriarch who aimed at nothing
> less than making himself the supreme power in the empire. Taking his cue
> from the Roman pontiff, he donned the purple sandals reserved for the
> emperor. The pope justified his claims at imperial authority on the
> basis of the /Constitutum Constantini/. The chapter closes with "The use
> in the east of the Donation of Constantine".
>
> Chapter eight, "The canonists and liturgists (twelfth to fifteenth
> centuries)", develops chronologically the changes that took place over
> time. Dagron sees the origin of these changes not in incidental
> confrontations like the one in the time of the patriarch Keroularios but
> in a major "renaissance" of spirituality in the east. It was during the
> reign of Manuel Komnenos that the emperor was seen as an
> 'epistemonarchic' ruler. In the following subheading, "Balsamon and the
> imperial charismata", Dagron looks at the canonist Theodore Balsamon's
> contribution to the debate of the nature of emperorship in Byzantium.
> According to him, the emperor stood in the tradition of the Biblical
> kings who, as the Lord's anointed, had the right to engage in
> ecclesiastic matters. The anointment of the Byzantine rulers is
> described in "The unction of kingship". The emperor-- like the Messiah
> before him -- was the anointed in a metaphorical sense. An actual
> anointment by the patriarch, based on a Latin model, is known in
> Byzantium only from the beginning of the 13th century. In "From the rod
> of Moses to the rod of the verger," the emperor, having been deprived of
> his charisma, emerges at the low level of a verger in the Church of
> Christ.
>
> Chapter nine "'Caesaropapism' and the theory of the 'two powers',"
> begins with a historiographical discussion of the meaning of
> Caesaropapism. Starting with the word theocracy coined by Flavius
> Josephus we arrive at "Papo-Caesaria" and "Caesaro-Papia" in the
> writings of Iustus Henning Böhmer (1674-1749), professor at the
> University of Halle, who in his manual of Protestant ecclesiastical law
> denounced both the pope who claimed political power and the ruler who
> tried to interfere in matters of the church. The chapter finishes with a
> renewed discussion of the powers of the /basileus/, concluding with the
> words of the patriarch, Antonios IV, who reproached the Grand Duke of
> Moscow for his views on the Christian emperorship. A single /basileus/
> was in his words a keystone of ecclesiology.
>
> The Epilogue "The house of Judah and the house of Levi," traces the
> century-old debate about single or dual power, about the king-priest,
> the priest-king or the king and the priest. Did the Messiah arise from
> the house of Judah or the house of Levi? Complicated genealogies were
> constructed to establish Christ's ancestry and his role as priest-king.
> This role could not be transferred to Christian rulers since the
> spiritual part of Christ's powers went to the church. This was
> established early in the west between the fourth and fifth centuries but
> later in Byzantium during the Iconoclast Controversy between the eighth
> and ninth centuries.
>
> The translation of Dagron's important work on "Caesaropapism" reads very
> well indeed, but there are some minor mistakes. For example, beaurocracy
> on p. 225 should read bureaucracy. A more serious error is on p. 24
> where it says, "Constantine's daughters, Helena and Constantina, were
> married to his half-nephews, the former to Julian, then Gallus, sons of
> Julius Constantinus, the latter to Hannibalianus, son of Flavius
> Dalmatius ". It is impossible that Helena was married first to Julian
> and after to Gallus. The latter was executed in 354, while Julian was
> elevated to Caesar in 355 at which time he received Helena as his bride.
> A quick look at the /Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire/ would no
> doubt have avoided this mistake. All of this is minor and does not
> diminish the pleasure of reading /Emperor and Priest/. Andreas Schminck
> reviewed Dagron's /Empereur et prêtre/ in /Byzantinische Zeitschrift/
> 93, 2000, 197-204. In this review, he expressed his hope that the work
> would be translated into other languages, and become thus available to a
> wider readership. It seems to this reviewer that /Emperor and Priest/
> splendidly fulfills this wish.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Marjorie Greene wrote:
>> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
>> culture
>>
>> "The point is that emperors were made by the army, not by priests."
>>
>> True, as were the leaders of the Franks. (Anybody know what a
>> Merovingian coronation was like?) At least, it seems, up to the time of
>> Charlemagne, who was an emperor and who felt the desirability to be
>> ratified or whatever by the Church.
>> Another question to add to the growing list:
>> the installation of a French king was called "le sacre du roi." Does the
>> name of the ceremony in any other country at any time period include a
>> word with such religious connotation as "sacre"?
>> MG
>> ______________________________
>
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