EMPIRE OF SADNESS

This essay has FOUR parts AND A POSTSCRIPT. Click here for the FIRST part, “UNDER THE INFLUENCE”. Click here for the SECOND part, “HISTORY AND PROPHECY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “A POET REMEMBERS”. CLICK HERE FOR THE POSTSCRIPT.

ThIS ESSAY IS THE SECOND IN the ENCOUNTERS WITH CHRISTIANITY series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST ESSAY, “ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL”.

19. Gilbert Dagron, “Holy Images and Likeness”, Dunbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 45, 1991, p. 28.

20. Ibid., pp. 31, 33.

21. Part 3, ch. 6.

22. Erik Peterson, “Christ as Imperator” (1936), in Theological Tractates, pp. 147–8.

23. Such odd affinities make an interesting study. For example, Peterson’s Christian absolutism can be compared with Nietzsche’s anti-Christian purism. Nietzsche thought that Christianity corrupted the perfection of the old Roman Empire. See The Anti-Christ (1895) in “The Twilight of the Idols” and “The Anti-Christ”, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003): “Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum” (p. 192) and it was “the corruptest form of corruption” (p. 193). Alexander Herzen also saw corruption, but as if in a mirror. See From the Other Shore (1855), tr. Moura Budberg, in “From the Other Shore” and “The Russian People and Socialism” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 112: “The ancient world, its vital forces exhausted, was failing. Christianity arrived at its bedside as physician and consoler, but was infected itself by contact with the patient and became Roman, barbarian, anything you please, but not evangelistic.” Contrast their great contemporary Jacob Burckhardt’s emphasis on a civilising continuity and blending. See The Age of Constantine the Great, tr. Moses Hadas (1853/80; London: Folio Society, 2007), p. 111: “Christianity was brought to the world by high historical necessity, as a full stop to antiquity, as a break with it, and yet in part to preserve it and transmit it to new peoples who as pagans might well have utterly barbarised and destroyed a purely pagan Roman empire. The was come for men to enter into a new relationship with things of the senses and things beyond the senses, for love of God and neighbour and separation from things earthly to take the place of older views of the gods and the world.”

24. Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem: A Contribution to the History of Political Theology in the Roman Empire” (1935), in Theological Tractates, p. 68: “May St. Augustine, whose impact has been felt in every spiritual and political transformation of the West, help with his prayers the readers and the author of this book!” Italics in the original.

25. Origen, Homilies on Luke, Fragments on Luke, tr. Joseph T. Lienhard (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 126.

III
SUSPICION

In “Holy Images and Likeness” Gilbert Dagron traced “the progressive elaboration of the image of Christ” that resulted in His depiction becoming ever more beautiful and splendid, ever more imaginary (in Dagron’s loaded use of the word), and ever less like the foreshadowing description of the redeemer in Isaiah chapter 52.¹⁹ The Church Fathers took the man of sorrows to be the prototype of Christ. However, the forerunner’s unsightliness together with his grief lessened in the iconography by stages, until His image settled into the comely, bearded, long-haired visage which is still standard today. Dagron noted the intermixing of pagan sources in this hybrid, concocted image, and he uncovered more fascinating historical material besides in his formidable analysis. But his main purpose was to demonstrate “the normalization of the imagination” through “the discreet but effective enforcement of forms”, which he understood to be both arbitrary and sinister, since it was dictated by the overriding (though not exactly planned) need to hold the Church together in a consensus.²⁰ This analysis was is in essence sociological and anthropological. It can be seen as a remote descendant of Belinsky’s radicalism in that it understood ecclesiastical history in terms of duress. Dagron was Professor of History and Civilization of the Byzantine World at the Collège de France, where Michel Foucault was for a while one of his colleagues. The influence of Foucault, though not explicitly acknowledged, seems unmistakable: it is like a shadowy presence in the background. Behind the scenes of the meticulous scholarship of “Holy Images and Likeness” is what seems almost like an atheist mysticism of suspicion—a scholarly practice of divination whose object is not God but the secret and impersonal apparatus of social control. Somehow it reminds me of Ippolit’s nightmare vision of a gigantic, hidden spider-machine in The Idiot by Dostoevsky.²¹

If Dagron reduced religion to political coercion, the reverse was true in the case of Eric Peterson. With awesome erudition, he went further even than Saint Paul in rejecting both the world of human politics, which he considered to be pagan in essence, and the Jewish religious foundation. The double focus was unified breathtakingly in a trinitarian denial of monotheism, leading Peterson to formulate what can be called a Christian absolutism opposed to any organisation of earthly power at all. He demonstrated, in order to refute, how Church Fathers claimed that the Roman Empire at the time of Christ was stabilised by Providence in order to allow for the Incarnation. And Peterson made the connection to his own time, to the elevation in his home country of a tyrannical Führer, which was a further reason (if it were needed) to denounce any monarchy whatsoever—until eventually Peterson went even further and developed out of a reading of Revelation a theory of empire belonging only to the world beyond:

Christ—who is emperor—and Christians—who belong to the militia Christi—are symbols of a struggle for an eschatological imperium that is opposed to all imperia of this world. This is not simply a matter of a conflict between a state and a Church that face each other as two opposed institutions, and as institutions must find a modus vivendi; rather, a battle (and not merely an accommodation) has now become unavoidable because the institutional basis in the empire has been lost. With the expansion of the empire, the masses can no longer be governed simply through the institutions of the polis, the princeps as leader [Führer], has to unify all power in himself.²²
Peterson repudiated human despotism no less fiercely than the nineteenth-century revolutionaries; there is a perverse affinity between these opposites.²³ Peterson’s tractates were ultimately exercises in a kind of purist but terrible faith. Here, however, one detail of Peterson’s style seems worth mentioning. His most influential work, “Monotheism as a Political Problem”, starts with a prayer to Saint Augustine.²⁴ And “Christ as Imperator” uses incantatory phrasings as though the author were breaking into—or wishing to be seen to be breaking into—prayer. This stylistic feature bothers me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Peterson was a Catholic convert, and reports say he was never welcomed into the theological establishment in Rome, despite his great learning. I do not know. For all Peterson’s surpassingly brilliant scholarship, there is something blurry, indecipherable in his work. Again Dostoevsky’s characters come to mind.

“Whenever you hear quotations from the Scriptures, be careful of trusting the speaker immediately. Consider the person: what sort of life he leads, what sort of opinion he holds, what sort of intention he has,” said Origen in his thirty-first homily on Luke. For, “he might pretend that he is holy and not be holy, and, infected with the poisons of heresy, he might be a wolf concealed in a sheep’s skin. The devil might even be in him, citing the Scriptures.”²⁵ It was one thing to discern the character of a teacher in a close religious community in the third century, it is quite another to do so in the cosmopolitan world of today. There may be nothing to go on but intuition, and it needs confidence to trust intuition when faced with academic authority. (Dagron wrote of the enforcement of consensus as though his work were not involved in the very same process institutionally.) What my intuition tells me is that in their different ways both professors were coping with unbelief, or with that despair which is perhaps the real condition of rational humanism.

Returning now to the Byzantine miniature, which recognisably belongs to the same Orthodox world as the homilies of Chrysostom it illustrated, we might imagine what it would look like if it reflected these two contrasting scholarly examples. It is impossible to imagine a version dictated by Dagron’s analysis having any room for Michael, and next to the emperor would stand in Chrysostom’s place a less than saintly bishop or a Grand Inquisitor. There is neither faith nor eschatology in Dagron’s mistrustful sociology: his is a political world and nothing else. As for a version compatible with Peterson’s vision, there would in that case be no room for Nicephorus Botiniates. The ruler’s temporary place would be taken instead by Jesus Christ Himself in His ultimate, eternal glory under God—Jesus Christ reigning triumphant and imperious over the angels, saints and martyrs in a unified cosmos no longer containing a fallen human world.
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