PIETY AND SECURITY: THE POLES OF AUTHORITY

The history of East Roman or Byzantine culture in the later sixth and seventh centuries can be most easily represented in terms of two dominant motifs: the increasing introversion of orthodox culture and the quest for security. By the former, I mean the generalised concentration in the thinking of the society as a whole on the personal relationship of individuals to God, the identity of orthodox thinking with the survival of the Roman oikoumenē, and the exclusion of all marginal or heterodox groups from consideration, in a much more emphatic way than had been the case before the last years of Justinian. By the latter, I mean the manifest collapse of confidence in the traditional symbols of earthly supremacy, in particular the institutions of the imperial establishment, and the search for ways in which an imagined older order – of stability and confidence – could be recovered, which would fulfil the desire both to conform to the spirit and the letter of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and at the same time to reassert the political dominance of East Rome and the symbolic universe it represented. The first is evident in the literary texts of the period; the second is implicit in the assumptions, actions and responses of individuals and groups within Byzantine society in the period from the 640s and beyond.

These two motifs were, of course, inseparable, since the maintenance of orthodoxy and the exclusion of heterodoxy automatically – it was believed – brought with it, ultimately, political supremacy, at least until the events immediately preceding the Last Judgement.