Major and favorable themes are: virtues and vices, evil and passions, the Good, the commandments and their observance, labor, marriage and family, sexual life, spiritual exercises, asceticism, Church and secular power, social problems, wealth and poverty, war, death, resurrection, and deification. Moral considerations are grounded in human nature and its relation to God not in the abstract but in the postlapsarian condition. The scope of ethics is determined by the evaluation of this condition - whether man is totally corrupted or likeness to God was dimmed but remains capable to attain similitude. In either case man cannot be the foundation of ethics, notwithstanding the possibility of moral knowledge. Revelation, hence scriptural authority and tradition, turns to be the ultimate source of Byzantine ethics.
How can good be defined? The Euthyphro’s dilemma can be Christianized: Is the good because God loves it [or: commands it] or God loves it [or: commands it] because it is good? For the Byzantines, the second option is unthinkable because it assumes a morality independent of God's will. Their choice of the first option was not weakened by the obvious difficulty that in this case morality could be the product of an arbitrary will. In their theological perspective, God is conceived not as an impersonal cause but as a person whose will created the world; and this will is also expressed by the moral order of this world.
For human beings the options are two: (a) estrangement from God and good, and a voluntary spiritual death. (b) The care of the self: deliberate obedience to divine commands and purification of the intellect and of the senses. The ultimate goal of homo byzantinus is deification, to live a ‘‘life proper and according to nature, i. e., assimilating to divine nature.'' This goal cannot be achieved without God's cooperation and it is in this life that man has to regain his authentic being: holy men and, primarily, Jesus are the embodied models to be imitated. Pleasure was almost expelled (see however Metochites), but the vocabulary oflove reenters to express the personal relation of man to God. Man is united with the object of its desire -‘‘sinks in God's beauty and love; pleasure and divine sweetness surge within him’’ (Symeon). This mystic communication with God is suitable to the realities of homo byzantinus who, although a member of the Church, felt insecure and subordinated himself to various political and social hierarchies. The superiority of contemplative life is undeniable, not only in its ascetic form.
As for the practice of Byzantine ethics, we have to keep in mind that though the texts are full of canons and precepts and declare constantly the ideal of a pious ascetic life we must not get the wrong impression that this normative ethics ruled over Byzantine society - no matter how theo-centric it was. The attitudes of Byzantines toward sexual life, wealth and poverty, philanthropy, or marriage reveal an antinomic element in ethical theory and practice. On the one hand, obedience to prescriptive rules enacted from above (God, Emperor), intolerance and repression; on the other hand, dispensation, adaptation of the rules to given circumstances and to man's condition, that is, the principle of‘‘economy,’’ accepted by the Church and justified by Incarnation. There was a dissonance between the immutable principles of ‘‘official’’ religious ethics and the moral behavior of everyday faithful people.
World History
