To Believe and to Govern or the Oikonomic Sense of the Image of Power

Abstract

The medieval imaginary emerged as a corpus of discursive formations, which do not always have a strictly Byzantine source. Some elements of ethics and justice, of social organization or relationship between the perceptible and the non-perceptible, of understanding the divine and correlation with ethical faith and duty, have their roots in the philosophical imaginary of the ancient political system, the first system that aimed at the construction of a model of civic society. The ″inheritance″ at the level of the collective imaginary is, thus, not only Christian, but also ancient. Without having established an unmediated scientific relationship with the ancient texts whence the philosophical imaginary of the political can be extracted the medieval Romanian power followed the natural community formation routes, which were derived from a social model. This type of organization was re-interpreted by the philosophers of Christian power and theologically included in the oikonomic plan. The practical interpretation given by Romanian lawmakers to some of the post-Byzantine political ideas aimed at an adaptation of those discursive formations, which governed the trans-state collective imaginary in the area of influence of the empire . The Romanian imaginary itself will spring from these intersections between a normal line of socio-economic coalescence and a political plan for the formation of a state unit with its own acknowledged ″national″ identity, under the influence of the ″basileic chimera″. Finally, the ″history of the imperial idea for the Romanians will be that of a compromise between a political ideal and practical realities″.

Keywords

• imaginary
• byzantine empire
• imperial image
• oikonomia
• romanian medieval states
• romanian medieval imaginary