ABSTRACT
The structural difference between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church emerges nowhere as sharply as in the basic relationship of Church and state. In his speeches and writings on Constantine, as well as in his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius set his stamp upon the political attitudes of Orthodoxy and formed the Church's picture of its relationship with the state for many centuries to come. The Orthodox theologians called this conjunction of the Christian emperor and the head of the Christian Church a symphonia, that is, a concord or harmony. A form of national Russian Caesaropapism came into being, in what might be called a rightist deviation from the original status of the Orthodox Church. The political ideology of Russian tsarism was rooted directly in the Byzantine conception of Church and state as this had been formulated by Emperor Constantine. The Christian emperor had been made both the political and the sacramental heir of the Roman god-emperor.
