It is questionable whether the notion of philosophical ethics as an autonomous inquiry that examines or establishes the principles of human morality existed in Byzantium. Certainly, moral concerns were present in everyday life and the formulation of codes of moral behavior was familiar to Byzantine culture. However, Byzantine ethics, that is, in the sense of a second-order activity that reflects on and makes self-conscious this morality, did not seem to exist. Nevertheless, we must be aware that the concept of “Christian ethics’’ is also questionable, at least before modernity.
In Byzantine texts occur ethical judgments, exhortations to virtue, and statements describing moral experience in a way that is perhaps more important to the fields of religion and psychology; and there are also statements defining ethical terms. Concepts and maxims did not form a whole of universalizable and justified propositions that evaluate or determine kinds of behavior. one may get the impression that the Byzantines deal with problems in a rather unsystematic way as an occasional response to particular problems posed by practice or while interpreting Scripture. This tendency is reflected in texts that are abundant in admonitions and edifying stories - with recurring themes as spiritual exercises, the treatment of the body, virtues, or marriage - but include no systematic treatises. Also, ethics did not find its way to the philosophy curriculum.
Another basic aspect of Byzantine ethics is that it is an ethics for a Christian society, that is, shaped in the context of a premodern spirituality according to which human conduct is dependent on God’s will and the society has an eschatological orientation. Hence, there is no sharp distinction between religious and secular ethics or between the public and the private; moral reasoning is inseparable from theological and the realm of ethics cannot be autonomous. A non-Christian ethics is inconceivable in Byzantium and Byzantine ethics cannot in principle be something distinct from (or independent from) religious ethics - with few interesting exceptions.
Being Christian, Byzantine ethics does not avoid an inherent paradox: it is addressed to man in general (as an image of God) claiming for universality, but it is adjusted to a particular society; it can only have temporal character, codifying the way of life of a community that heads to the Kingdom of Heaven, and it seems solidified in a society that understands itself as the realized Kingdom of God. In addition, it conceives moral precepts and goodness in terms of commandments and obedience respectively, and at the same time in terms of personal relation and love. Such an ethics cannot be easily characterized as deontological, of divine command or virtue ethics.
If the questions ‘‘how should I live?’’ or ‘‘what kind of life is ethical?’’ were central questions of Greek ethics, for the Byzantines philosophy - as theoretical endeavor - is not entitled to answer such fundamental questions. It was only in twelfth century that the question of the nature of ethics as a discipline was put by the commentators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; and the answer was that it could be a science but not in the strict Aristotelian sense, because it does not proceed from universal premises.
Perhaps the only possible mission of Byzantine ethics would be the rational and systematic exposition of Principles already accepted or the discussion of moral problems with the help of Greek moral thought. What Byzantines preferred was to see ethics (and ‘‘Christian philosophy”) as a way of life based on the imitation of Christ and aiming at the formation of the ‘‘new man.’’ The essence of Christianity was not taken to be a moral teaching or a law, that is, to impose moral rules and principles. Byzantines did not seek to determine what action is right in any given circumstance (judged by justified general principles) but to evaluate a person’s life considered as a whole; it is the communion of human being with the source of goodness that warrants its authentic relations with other people and finally the realization of itself. Ethics concerns the individual, its horizontal relations to other individuals (after Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbor as oneself), and also man’s vertical relation to God, a personal relation with the final goal of the restoration of the ‘‘society of righteous.’’
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