CAESAROPAPISM

This term expresses the conception of government in which supreme royal and sacerdotal powers are combined in one lay ruler. Although the term itself is a more recent coinage, the concept is very old and applied particularly to the kind of government exercised by the emperor at constantinople. The reason for the emergence of this kind of government lay in the conception of the Roman emperor that he as supreme head of the Christianized Roman Empire had to take care of all the issues affecting it. Christianity had imparted to the Roman Empire a great strength of coherence and given it a force that bonded the various heterogeneous elements together. This consideration, together with the special functions that priests in a Christian community had, explains the efforts made by the emperors from the 4th century onward to control the Christian body politic by ordaining the faith for their subjects and by appointing and dismissing higher ecclesiastical officers, notably patriarchs and bishops.

Caesaropapism was, basically, nothing less than the transplantation of the function of the ancient Roman emperor as pontifex maximus to the Christian Roman emperor. The fundamental idea underlying caesaropapism was that the emperor as the divinely appointed vicegerent of divinity on earth, that is, of the pantokrator, was the autokrator who alone considered himself called upon to provide unity, peace, and order within the Christian empire. Just as only one being in the celestial order combined all power, so in the terrestrial order there was to be only one monarch.

Although signs of caesaropapism became ever clearer throughout the 5th century, it entered the sphere of practical politics in the henoticon of the Emperor Zeno (482), in which he unilaterally and in disregard of the Council of chalcedon ordained the faith for his subjects; at the same time began imperial appointments and dismissals of prelates. Caesaropapism reached its highest point in the government of justinian i (527–565) who, imbued with the idea of monarchy, acted to all intents and purposes as king and priest. In his time it could truly be said that there was "one state, one law, one Church."

Caesaropapism remained, with modifications, the governmental principle of Byzantium throughout the millennium of its existence. The breach between the papacy and Constantinople was to a very large extent due to the caesaropapal form of the imperial government. It was obvious that the papacy, as custodian of the Christian idea of government, could not acquiesce in this state of affairs. Although in the West European Middle Ages caesaropapism was hardly a doctrinal possibility, the Byzantine brand of caesaropapism was continued in Czarist Russia: evidence of caesaropapism could also be detected among Protestant princes, when cuius regio, eius religio came to be applied. Similar observations can be made about josephinism, febronianism, and partly also about gal licanism, where the principle was adopted that the ruler had a jus maiestatis circa sacra.

Bibliography: k. jÄntere, Die römische Weltreichsidee, tr. i. hollo (Turku 1936). v. martin, Les Origines du gallicanisme, 2 v. (Paris 1939). h. berkhof, Kirche und Kaiser (Zurich 1947). j. gaudemet, L'Église dans l'empire Romain (Paris 1958). o. treitinger, Die oströmische Kaiser-und Reichsidee (2d ed. Darmstadt 1956). h. raab, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10 v. (2d, new ed. Freiburg 1957–65) 6:289–295. h. rahner, Kirche und Staat im frühen Christentum (Munich 1961).

[w. ullmann]