The presentation of a doctoral thesis, within the scope of Religious Studies, with the title “Church and Empire in the Chronography of Teófanes Confessor: The interpretation of History in the time of the iconoclastic crisis”, will certainly provoke a mixture of strangeness and admiration. Who, in Portugal, is dedicated to the study of the history of the Eastern Roman Empire, usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire? This, despite references by contemporary philosophers such as Marie-José Mondzain (regarding the status of the image and the power of the visual) and Giorgio Agamben (regarding economic devices) regarding the influence that the thought and language of this Empire that lasted about of a millennium has on contemporary cultural and social axes.
The research work was defended on the 13th of February at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP), in Braga, by André Vieira Antunes who, in addition to being a researcher and translator, is also responsible for the Communitas Bracarensis project , an open school of Latin and Greek, with face-to-face and online courses, according to the living language learning method. The project was guided by professors José Carlos Miranda and Manuel Summares (UCP).
At the center of the work, a translation into Portuguese of a text in medieval Greek, the “Cronografia de Teófanes Confessor”, datable to the 9th century AD. C. The translation is accompanied by a historical and theological context of the period and what is referred to as the Iconoclastic Crisis. If this is usually exposed in brief lines as a cultural and pastoral issue – the rejection or acceptance of the cult of icons –, the several decades of conflicts that opposed the imperial authorities of Byzantium with monastic communities and believers place this problem in a broader panorama. .
First, that of the Emperor's authority and his relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy: if the icon as a place of Christological mediation is rejected by him, what is at stake is a policy of controlling the visual and the aesthetic. But also a unifying policy, in the face of external threats to the Empire (from Persia and Islam) and the various currents that, more or less underground in history, maintained the plurality of Christianity (Judeo-Christians, Nestorians, Monophysites). This at a time when, for better or for worse, theological and Christological controversies fed the force fields of thought and politics.
The history of this Roman Empire is the history of Europe, the history of the conflict in Ukraine, the history of (latent) tensions in the Balkans and (patent) tensions in the Middle East. It is also the history of Christianity in one of its lungs, that of Orthodoxy, which has so much to teach our Latin culture about liturgy, synodality, pneumatology, meditative and sensitive prayer. Perhaps that is why the work presented by André Antunes received the best possible rating from the jury. It is expected that this text will be published shortly and that the author, with his proven track record in the field of teaching and disseminating classical languages, will also continue to provide us with a better understanding of this History of Christianity.
