Strengths of the Christianity in Byzantine Empire

Eastern Christianity (Byzantine) was the strongest in not only religious, but as well in cultural, societal, and political aspects. To begin I would like to focus on multiple reasons as to why the Roman Empire came to its fall in the first place. The biggest reason can be pinned on the western empire’s rise of Christianity. As we learned in chapter 5, The Roman Empire, Christians were made to be easy targets. The Roman Empire believed in many gods so when the Christian’s proclaimed a new faith outside the traditional Roman religions, it was seen as dangerous. The prosecutions only stopped under the ruling of emperor Constantine.

Under his ruling, Christianity became an established religion and the moderately new religion began to spread throughout the Empire. At this time, the Romans strongly believed in their emperor’s being a god. Constantine soon came to realize that Christian’s held a strong belief in only one god, which clearly was not himself. This did not sit well as it played with his authoritative power as an emperor. The Romans had the traditional polytheistic view, and so Christianity uprooted those tradition, furthermore moving concentrate away from the magnificence of the state and onto a sole god. So Constantine split the Roman empire into the western half, consisting of Rome, and the eastern half, consisting of Constantinople.

Indeed, the western half of Rome suffered a great deal due to its military weakness. Rome attempted to send troops of sufficiency and assets to safeguard its outskirts from nearby uprisings and outside assaults. As more funds were being attributed to the military, Rome struggled to keep up, and the empire began to fall. In addition, the Romans were already enduring an onslaught from outside powers. Rome was additionally disintegrating within thanks to money related emergencies. Wars broke out and overspending fundamentally benefited the treasury, as well as severe tax assessments and inflation had augmented the gap between the rich and the poor. Wanting to avoid the tax collection, “wealthy Romans from the social elite built villas on large estates staffed staffed by tenants bound to the land like slaves” (Hunt et al. 225) in the countryside. The wealthy Romans withdrawal from open administration shriveled Roman government, and the new kingdoms never supplanted the customary administrations.

As the years went by, Rome became more corrupt and Constantinople flourished. The Eastern and Western Empire substantially neglected to sufficiently cooperate outside dangers. With that said, the two would regularly quarrel about assets and military help. Constantinople's location was a great benefit as it made it less vulnerable to any outside attacks. The Byzantine Empire was a tremendous and ground-breaking human advancement growing in wealth while the Western Empire declined in financial conditions. The eastern Roman empire’s goal was to divert from the Barbarian ways of the western empire. “Trade routes and diverse agriculture kept the east richer than the west, and the eastern emperors minimized the effect of the foreign migrations on their territory and blunted the aggression of the Sasanid kingdom in Persia with force, diplomacy, and bribery” (Hunt et al. 225).

Byzantine society held itself to certain qualities in high regard and were an extremely religious society. Theodora was also greatly influential on the decisions emperor Justinian imposed. She initiated approaches disallowing prositiution, organizing brutal disciplines for assault and different types of savagery against women, and making religious circles.

Bryzantine Christianity was a significantly extraordinary religion and social practice than Western Christianity. One of its prevalent attributes was the job of the head in issues of confidence. The Eastern religious philosophy had its underlying foundation in its Greek way of thinking, though a lot of Western philosophy depended on Roman law. In particular, Orthodoxy underscores an extreme accommodation to the natural rulers. While in Western Christianity, Christians frequently oppose the state. The problem between the Eastern and Western Christianity was the fixation on who sent the Holy Spirit, whether it was the Father or the Father and the Son. For the Byzantines, Christianity was the very establishment of their domain.

At the point when Constantine manufactured his new capital, he expected it to be the religious focal point of the realm. The Eastern Orthodox Church felt that their church depended on a lot of convictions that they could follow back to Jesus Christ and crafted by clerics in early Christian boards. Religion and government were all the more firmly connected in the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire than the Wester.

The Byzantines saw the sovereign as the leader of the administration as well as the living delegate of God and Jesus. This implied church and state were consolidated into one all-amazing body. The state religion likewise joined individuals in a typical conviction. The Orthodox Church assumed a focal job in everyday life. A great amount of people went to the chapel consistently. Religious holy observances offered shape to each phase of the voyage from birth to passing.