[lit-ideas] The Theodosian Code
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:51:51 -0700
[from Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, pages 124-5] "On Christmas Day
438, a new compendium of recent Roman Law, the Theodosial Code (Codex
Theodosianus), was presented to the assembled senators in the old imperial
capital. All senatorial meetings were fully minuted and the minutes passed
on to the emperor. . . The Praetorian Prefect of Italy, Glabrio Faustus, who
presided, and in whose palatial home the senators had gathered, opened the
meeting by formally introducing the text to the assembly. After reminding
the audience of the original edict that had established the law commission,
he presented the Code to them. In response, the assembled senators let rip
at the tops of their voices:
'Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses!' (repeated 8 times)
'God gave You to us! God save Your for us!' (27 times)
'As Roman Emperors, pious and felicitous, may you rule for many years!' (22
times)
'For the good of the human race, for the good of the Senate, for the good of
the State, for the good of all!' (24 times)
'Our hope is in You, You are our salvation!' (26 times)
'May it please our Augustuses to live forever!' (22 times)
'May You pacify the world and triumph here in person!' (24 times)"
". . . The great and good of the Roman world were speaking with one voice in
praise of their imperial rulers in the city that was still its symbolic
capital. Only slightly less obvious . . . is the second message: the
confidence of the senators in the Perfection of the Social Order of which
they and their emperors were symbiotic parts. You can't have complete Unity
without an equally complete sense of Perfection. . . And, as the opening
acclamations make clear, the source of that Perfection was,
straightforwardly, God, the Christian deity. By 436, the Senate of Rome was
a thoroughly Christian body. At the top end of Roman society, the adoption
of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the
Empire was God's vehicle in the world.
"The same message was proclaimed at similar ceremonial moments all the way
down the social scale, even within Church circles. . . Many Christian
bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old
claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea
was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no
accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus,
the first Roman emperor. Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went
his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for
each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, thorough it, all
mankind might eventually be saved.
"This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God's
chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority
within Christianity. As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration
of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to
Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established
a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were not intimately involved
in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business
of the new religion's administration. To settle disputes, emperors called
councils . . ."
Comment: This code is shot through with what the Reformers later would see
as heresy. You do not trust in a political leader for salvation. The book
of Ephesians indeed says that Christ "gave some to be apostles, some to be
prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to
prepare God's people for works of service . . ." I don't find any
precedent in the New Testament for this sort of devotion to an emperor, but
this is part of the age-old debate between Protestants and Catholics.
Protestants won't believe it unless they can find it in the Bible, but
Catholics rely upon tradition as well as Scripture and since their tradition
has grown up in Rome, the investiture of the Pope with great authority seems
only fitting.
Theodosus II was of course the Eastern emperor, but Heather assumes that the
same sort of thing was going on in Valentinian III in the west. It is
called the Theodosian code rather than something more all-encompassing
because only this one example has survived.
What about "the Holy Roman Empire"? There is this interesting from
Wikipedia: The precise term Holy Roman Empire was not used until the 13th
century, but the doctrine of translatio imperii ("transfer of rule") was
fundamental to the prestige of the emperor, the notion that he held supreme
power inherited from the emperors of Rome. The office of Holy Roman Emperor
was traditionally elective, although frequently controlled by dynasties. The
German prince-electors, the highest ranking noblemen of the empire, usually
elected one of their peers as "King of the Romans", and he would later be
crowned emperor by the Pope; the tradition of papal coronations was
discontinued in the 16th century. The empire never achieved the extent of
political unification formed in France, evolving instead into a
decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units,
principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains.
The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various princes, lords,
and kings of the empire were vassals and subjects who owed the emperor their
allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de
facto sovereignty within their territories. Emperor Francis II dissolved the
empire in August 1806 after its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of
Austerlitz."
Lawrence
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