Apocalypticizing Warfare: From Political Theology to Imperial Eschatology in Seventh- to Early Eighth-Century Byzantium

Abstract

Medieval Eastern Orthodox attitudes to the problems of warfare, just and holy war offer important parallels to and difference from the respective Western Christian attitudes but have not received the more or less exhaustive treatment of the corresponding attitudes to the same phenomena in Western Christianity.*Yet lately an interesting debate has developed among Eastern Orthodox theologians and scholars centred on the historical development and transformations of the notions of "justifiable war" and "just war" or the categorization of war as "lesser good" or "lesser evil" in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 1 It is worth mentioning at this stage that it is still difficult to present a definitive reconstruction of the evolution of the notions of just and/or justifiable war in Eastern Orthodox thought and societies, since some of the main relevant works in its classical representative tradition, Byzantine Christianity, have either not been edited and published or when edited, have not been translated into modern Western European languages and thus remain inaccessible to the larger scholarly audience.2 As in Western Christianity, the roots of the prevalent attitudes to war and peace in Eastern Orthodoxy can be easily traced back to the New Testament and its wellknown passages concerning the use of force, violence, Christ's moral teaching and its emphatic pacifistic perspective (Mathew 5-7, 26:52, Luke 2:14, 3:14 6:29, etc.).At the same time Eastern Orthodoxy inherited the potential for a non-pacifistic and even militaristic exegesis of the New Testament passages, containing military imagery (for example, 1 Thessalonians 5:8, Ephesians 6:10, 1 Corinthians 9:7, 2 Timothy 2:3-4, etc.), Jesus's 'sword' allusions (Matthew 10:34, Luke 22:35-38) and the heavenly war imagery in Revelation 20, which, as in Western Christianity, in suitable circumstances and through suitable literalist interpretations could be used to sanction the use of force.Eastern Orthodoxy inherited also the evident tensions between the ideas of war and peace respectively in the Old and New Testament, which despite the continuity between the notions of the ultimate universal eternal peace in some trends of Jewish prophetic This is the version of the chapter accepted for publication in La Porta, Sergio and Bardakjian, Kevork, (eds.),

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