The Christianization of the Roman Empire starting with Constantine the Great (306-337) intensified the involvement of the state in the Divine Economy. Fourth-century ecclesiastical authors, such as Lactantius and Eusebios of Caesarea, attributed to the emperorship a pivotal role in Christianity. In the following three centuries, the Roman state was gradually viewed as the Empire of the Christians, the last earthly kingdom and the vessel for salvation. An important consequence of this development was the emergence of the Christian ‘ethnos’, a politicized Christian identity closely linked to the Roman Empire. This view, which became the core of imperial ideology, was shared by many, but not by everyone. As Christianity spread within and beyond the imperial borders, the voices that questioned the providential role of the Roman Empire of Constantinople multiplied. Ecclesiastical dignitaries, provincial communities, and heterodox groups inside and outside the Empire criticized and rejected the imperial claims of universal pastoral authority, proposing alternative visions of salvation. In turn, this phenomenon impacted the notion of the ‘Christian ethnos’, giving prominence to other forms of Christian identity. The Thematic Session explores the interplay between competing visions of salvation and communal identities in the wider Byzantine Ecumene. The participants, based on their respective expertise, offer case studies that demonstrate the pertinence of reading identity formation through the prism of soteriology.
The long 12th century was the age of the crusades, an era when apocalyptic speculation was widespread throughout Christianity. Judging by the narrative of the historian Nicetas Choniates, political prophecy among the ruling class of the Eastern Roman Empire was not at all absent during the many decades of the Comnenian relative dynastic stability. Its…
Byzantine apocalyptic imagination offers various visions of salvation. Historical apocalypses cast salvation as dependent upon an external, divinely appointed saviour – typically envisioned as a legendary emperor – rendering humanity’s ultimate redemption beyond human control. By contrast, a strand of apocalypses – often termed ‘moral apocalypse’ – attributes a fundamentally different degree and quality to…
This paper investigates the interplay between collective destiny and individual salvation within the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition, reconsidering the dual horizon that structures its imaginative and theological frameworks. Byzantine apocalyptic texts—emerging from the intersection of imperial ideology, Orthodox eschatology, and scriptural exegesis—reveal a distinctive concern with the fate of the Christian polity as both a historical…
In March or April 871, Louis II, Carolingian emperor of the Western Roman Empire, sent a letter to Basil, who had recently usurped power in Constantinople. The lengthy epistle, ghost-written by the infamous Anastasius Bibliothecarius, addresses many topics, but circles in its core mostly around the hierarchy of the two Roman empires of the ninth…