In this regard, it is important to note one more point. Modern researchers increasingly find it convenient to describe the fourth and sixth centuries as the "proto-Byzantine" era or as "Christian antiquity," referring the beginning of the Byzantine period proper to the crisis of the middle of the seventh century (the decline of cities, the loss of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and so on) [12]. If we accept this periodization, conditional like any periodization, but having quite serious grounds for itself, it becomes quite clear that the most universally significant, the most classical paradigms of "Byzantinism" were given to Byzantium even before its final formation. In fact, who was the model of a "faithful" sovereign for the entire Byzantine millennium? Of course, the founder of the capital on the Bosphorus is Constantine the Great (274-337), with whom the Byzantine chroniclers began the history of their state:

He is the father of pious sovereigns,

The foremost of the Christ-loving Caesars... [13]

Who is the ideal Byzantine preacher, the mirror of the church orator for all times of Orthodoxy? Of course, this is John Chrysostom, whose fate and work were a model for our archpriest Avvakum; but he also died at the beginning of the fifth century (in 407). What kind of building is a Byzantine church in the utmost correspondence to its ideal, and serves the Christian empire as the Parthenon was for classical Athens? Of course, this is Hagia Sophia, which was imitated by the Turkish architects of Istanbul; but it too was consecrated in 537, during the brilliant reign of the Emperor Justinian I, during which the best mosaics of Ravenna and the best hymns of the Greek Church, the kontakions of Romanos the Melodist, also appeared. And all this is included in the concept of the "proto-Byzantine" era. It would seem that this concept should imply immaturity, uncertainty, uncertainty of creative attitudes (features inherent in, for example, the "proto-Romanesque" era); but no, the age of Justinian is a truly classical time, marked by a rare maturity of taste and artistic will. In the art of words, this maturity came even earlier, in the second half of the fourth century, in the time of Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom (church architecture and monumental painting began to develop freely only from the time of Constantine, while church literature had a rich tradition by that time: an architect or a mosaicist needs a rich client and the full legality of his work, while even the time of persecution does not prevent a writer from honing his style in the silence of his study). This means that the path followed by the Byzantine scribes and their countless disciples for a millennium was in principle chosen not even in the "proto-Byzantine" era, but even earlier. In order to find the origins of a long-lasting system of canons, we must go back to the times in which the beginning of our chronology falls in a significant way.

Two forces that were intrinsically alien to the polis world of classical antiquity and in their duality constituted the formative principle of "Byzantinism"—imperial power and the Christian faith—arose almost simultaneously. Byzantine writers were fond of noting that the birth of Christ coincided with the reign of Augustus. The Christmas sticheron of the ninth-century poetess Cassia puts it this way:

When Augustus reigned on earth,

the multiplicity of powers is being exterminated;

When God became incarnate from the Most-Pure One, polytheism of idols is abolished...

If Christianity and the Caesarist experience of the holy power in the era of Constantine met, constituting two poles of Byzantine social psychology, which necessarily complemented each other, then their deep conjugation should be thought of as rather contradictory. Christianity was able to become the spiritual correlate of the absolutist state precisely – such is the paradoxical logic of reality – thanks to its moral isolation from this state. Of course, after the Christianization of the empire, the church went very far towards the secular power: Christians, who once died for refusing to deify the emperor, began to depict earthly rulers with the attributes of the King of Heaven. And yet in the Gospel there were: "My kingdom is not of this world" and "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," and these words could not disappear from the memory of believers. Moreover, they were exactly what the subjects of the sacred Roman state needed.

He also knew that when things got really bad, he could go to a monastery, to a skete, to the desert — and there to give himself over to the power of such principles, in the face of which worldly power is insignificant and contemptible. In the fact that the newborn Christ was recorded as a subject of the Emperor Augustus, the Byzantine exegetes saw a fundamental abolition of the pathos of power and citizenship: "... By registering as a slave, He abolished the slavery of our nature. For those who serve the Lord are no longer slaves of men; as the Apostle says: "Do not become slaves of men"[14].

The transcendental holiness and transcendent insignificance of earthly power – this antinomy, which is revealed in the Christian consciousness, can be called characteristic of the East (with the proviso that the words "East" and "West" for the history of culture can serve as symbols rather than exact terms denoting equal concepts).

And here we come to the second point of our reflections, the process of Orientalization of the Mediterranean spiritual world, within which both the psychology of Caesarism and the psychology of Christianity developed. The establishment of the empire meant the triumph of such a system of relations between power and man, which had long been worked out in Middle Eastern despotisms. It was not for nothing that in the time of Caesar and Octavian there were dark rumors about the impending transfer of the imperial capital to the east (which more than three centuries later had to be carried out in practice).

And I will give you the treasures that are kept in darkness and the hidden riches, that you may understand that I am the Lord who calls you by name..." (Chapter 45, verses 1-3). The drama of the sacred world-power, interpreted in a pagan way by Augustus and in a Christian way by Constantine, has been enacted in the East throughout its history, and during this time not only the rulers but also the subject have had occasion to learn their roles with a thoroughness which was lacking in the descendants of the republican peoples of the Mediterranean, who fell into the conditions of the empire. In the times of the polis, the Greeks were accustomed to speak of the subjects of the Persian state as beaten serfs; the wisdom of the East is the wisdom of the beaten, but there are times when, according to the proverb, two unbeaten men are given for a beaten. In the spaces of the old Oriental despotisms, such an experience of moral behavior in conditions of deep-rooted political unfreedom was accumulated, which the Greco-Roman world could not even dream of (this experience, as we know from Leskov's story "Odnodum", was able to help a hungry lover of one Eastern book – the Bible – to remain straight in the world of crookedness as early as the 19th century). In order to grasp the specifics of the Eastern experience, it is useful to recall for contrast the ancient ideal of spiritual freedom in the face of death – the ideal of Socrates. The Athenian sage knows for sure that he can be killed, but cannot be humiliated by brutal physical violence, that his measured speech at the trial will take as long as the rights of the accused guarantee him, and no one will silence him by striking his eloquent lips (as happens in the New Testament with Jesus and the Apostle Paul). When Socrates calmly picks up his cup of hemlock, it is a beautiful gesture that radiates the illusion of infinite spiritual freedom, but this illusion is conditioned by the social guarantees that a free city republic provides to a full citizen. It is possible to maintain a calm posture, to measure the modulations of one's voice and the movements of one's soul that manifest themselves in these modulations, in the face of death, but not under torture[16]. Even Seneca, at the dawn of the imperial era, was allowed to cut his veins with his own hands and demonstrate the spectacle of ataraxia for the last time[17] - a high-ranking Stoic continued to be an actor, with the consent of the murderers, completing his role; but the captives who were nailed en masse to crosses by Vespasian's soldiers, or those Asia Minor women who were tortured by the aesthete and writer Pliny the Younger due to the boring duty of service, were in a completely different life situation.

As for the Near Eastern world, in its despotisms, the dignity of the human body was from time immemorial treated differently from the civic consciousness of the Greeks. Even the confidant of the Persian sovereign had to prostrate himself before him (the very custom of proskinesis that so shocked Callisthenes and seemed to Diogenes inadmissible even in relation to the gods[18] and which was sublimated in the Byzantine ascetic practice of prostrations at prayer!), and in case of disgrace he could be impaled. Such an execution as crucifixion was used in the Greco-Roman world for slaves and other people with no equal rights, but in the East, the Hasmonean monarch Alexander Jannaeus could give hundreds of revered teachers of the Jewish people from among the Pharisees to be crucified. The Oriental scribe, the sage or prophet, the Oriental nobleman, and then the Eastern king (remember the gouged out eyes of Hezekiah, whose fate was the prototype of so many imperial destinies in the Byzantine centuries!) knew well that their bodies were in no way guaranteed against such abuses, which would simply leave no room for Socratic equanimity. In such social conditions, which were gradually becoming characteristic of the Mediterranean, the classical ancient concept of human dignity turned into an empty phrase, and truth and holiness appealed to the hearts of people in the most unaesthetic, most unplastic image possible, in the stunning guise of the "Servant of Yahweh" from Isaiah 53, who was a type of Christ for Christians: