Crisis of Empire

Abstract

Against the background of the Persian and then Muslim invasions of the Roman Near East in the first half of the seventh century, this book explores the careers and output of three prominent and closely associated Palestinian contemporaries: Sophronius of Jerusalem, John Moschus, and Maximus Confessor. By analyzing Sophronius’s Miracles of Cyrus and John, Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow, and Maximus’s Mystagogy, it first examines how, in the context of imperial crisis, all three authors attempted to negotiate long-standing ambiguities surrounding the relationship between asceticism and the Eucharist, therein asserting visions of a unified church immune to the caprice of temporal politics. It then explores how—as the emperor and the patriarch at Constantinople threw their weight behind a doctrinal compromise that aimed to reunite the fractious Christian churches of the East, and as claims to Roman renewal were proved vapid in the spectacular rise of Islam—the same circle emerged as the capital’s most vociferous religious critics, developing an explicit doctrinal opposition to imperial initiatives. Here the earlier reconciliation of competing ascetical and clerical narratives was put to more subversive ends: as the basis both for a dramatic recognition of Roman preeminence within the church and for a radical rejection of imperial interference in matters of the faith.

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