The Emperor as Church Governor

Caesaropapism names an arrangement in which the head of state also exercises effective supreme authority over the church, appointing bishops, convening councils and shaping doctrine through political power, a fusion the term itself, combining Caesar and Pope, was coined in the nineteenth century to criticize, chiefly by describing the Byzantine Empire's relationship to the Eastern Church.

Byzantine emperors from Constantine onward convened and presided over ecumenical councils, appointed and deposed patriarchs of Constantinople, and issued religious legislation as a matter of course, an authority that had no equivalent claim to sacramental or doctrinal office but that in practice shaped the church's governance profoundly. Byzantine political theology itself did not describe this arrangement as caesaropapism, a hostile external label, but as symphonia, a harmonious cooperation between the two powers that Byzantine theory held to be properly distinct even where practice concentrated real authority in the emperor's hands, a tension between the ideal and the reality of imperial religious power historians of Byzantium continue to debate the balance of. The word itself entered common use only in the nineteenth century, coined by German historians describing Byzantium from outside the empire's own vocabulary rather than a term any Byzantine writer applied to their own system of government.