"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

monastic state is considered one of the essential forms of Christian
perfection and witness. Through detachment, through the vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, and through a life projected into the already-given
reality of the kingdom of God, monasticism becomes an "angelic life." The
monks, according to Theodore, formed an eschatological community, which
realizes more fully and more perfectly what the entire Church is supposed to
be. The Studite monks brought this eschatological witness into the very
midst of the imperial capital, the centre of the "world" and considered it
as a normal being in almost constant conflict with the "world" and with
whatever it represented. They constituted a well-organized group. Their
abbot abhorred the spiritual individualism of the early Christian hermits
and built Studios into a regimented, liturgical, working community in
accordance with the best cenobitic traditions stemming from Basil and
Pachomius.
For Theodore and his disciples, "otherworldliness" never meant that
Christian action was not needed in the world. Quite to the contrary. The
monks practised and preached active involvement in the affairs of the city
so that it might conform itself as far as possible to the rigorous criteria
of the kingdom of God as they understood it. The iconoclastic emperors
persecuted the monks for their defence of the icons, of course, but also for
their attempts to submit the earthly Christian empire to the imperatives and
requirements of a transcendent Gospel. Their Orthodox successors obliged to
recognize the moral victory of the monks and to solicit their support also
found it difficult to comply with all their demands. The conflict over the
second marriage of Constantine VI (795), which Patriarchs Tarasius and
Nicephorus tolerated but which Theodore and the Studites considered
"adulterous" ("moechian schism"), provoked decades of discussion over the
nature of oikonomia - i.e., the possibility of circumventing the letter of
the law for the ultimate good of the Church and of the individual's
salvation. This principle invoked by the council of 809 and discussed at
greater length in the next chapter was challenged by Theodore not so much in
itself as in the concrete case of Constantine VI. "Either the emperor is
God, for divinity alone is not subject to the law, or there is anarchy and
revolution. For how can there be peace if there is no law valid for all, if
the emperor can fulfil his desires - commit adultery, or accept heresies,
for example - while his subjects are forbidden to communicate with the
adulterer or the heretic?"2
Theodore was certainly not an innovator in his attitude toward the
state; for his was the attitude of Athanasius, of John Chrysostom, of
Maximus the Confessor, and of John of Damascus, and it would be that of a
large segment of Byzantine churchmen in later centuries; it merely
illustrates the fact that Byzantine society was far from having found the
"harmony" between the two powers about which Justinian spoke in his Novella
6. The action and witness of the monks was always present in Byzantium to
demonstrate that true harmony between the kingdom of God and the "world" was
possible only in the parousia.
Theodore's ideology and commitments normally led him away from the
Constantinian parallelism between the political structure of the empire and
the structure of the Church, a parallelism endorsed in Nicaea and best
exemplified in the gradual elevation of the bishop of Constantinople to