The Byzantine Legacy of Religious and Legal Pluralism: A Contemporary Reassessment of Byzantine Church-State Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In modern times, many Christians have struggled with the question of how their faith commitments can inform a meaningful social and political engagement within the contemporary secular realities that surround them. This article critically explores one especially commanding narrative that has often complicated such efforts for Orthodox Christians in particular, namely the Byzantine legacy of church–state relations. The article proceeds to make the case in favour of a more nuanced and layered account of church–state relations in the Eastern Roman Empire. First, the exact value of Justinian’s Sixth Novel in reflecting the celebrated symphony in Byzantine church–state relations is evaluated not only on the basis of the Novel itself, but also with respect to the recognized role played by legal pluralism in Byzantine society. Second, the Edict of Milan (313) is highlighted as having inaugurated a period of religious pluralism which only terminated with Theodosius’s promulgation of Christianity as a state religion in 380, some 43 years after the death of Constantine. Third, the early monastic and hierarchical resistance to the increasing imperialization of Christianity is expounded as further support for the conceptualization of alternative facets in the Byzantine legacy of church–state relations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".