Caroline Humfress explores the distinctive relationship between sacred (Christian) temporality and (Western) ‘hermeneutics of the state’, through a focus upon the founding texts of the Civilian legal tradition: the sixth-century CE Digest, Code and Institutes. Part 1 analyses the Emperor Justinian’s claim that these law-books were to be ‘valid for all eternity’ through a series of close textual readings of the same law-books’ prefatory constitutions. Part 2 contextualises Justinian’s lawyerly invocation of ‘eternity’ within contemporary Eastern Christological disputes, including a set of theological debates, orchestrated by Justinian himself, that took place at the same time (and location) as his law-books were being compiled. Part 3 concludes by arguing that the ‘timeless’, rational, universal, authority of the Civilian Legal tradition – as explored in the chapter by Ryan – was in fact underpinned by a specific Eastern (‘Byzantine’) sacred temporality.

Across East Asia, the period after the Mongol retreat was one of rebuilding and reordering. As they solidified political power, new regimes in China, Korea and Japan aggressively established authority over the religious realm, demanding compliance with moral and ritual norms, managing certain types of religious pluralism and violently crushing deviant devotion and organised religious resistance. Violence pervaded religion itself. Theological exploration of ideas such as cosmic destruction and rebirth, divine retribution, enforcer deities and the morality of killing for a greater good created stylised roles for both victims and perpetrators of violence. These themes manifested differently across the region. After Japanese militarists destroyed Buddhist mountain strongholds, lay armies defending the dharma fought with the ferocity of the faithful. Persecuted Christian converts willingly met martyrdom in the Catholic idiom. In China, the undercurrent of millenarian ideas that circulated through banned texts and teachings proved impossible to contain. These ideas could quickly militarise in response to stress, feeding a devastating cycle of rebellion and repression that continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the region, temples and monasteries fought for resources, and religious affiliations often provided a spark for local tensions to erupt into organised violence.