In official Byzantine doctrine, however, the state was compared to a body not in this early Christian sense, nor because all subjects of the empire had become genuine church members. The figure of the imperial body arose from pagan thinking. The state itself was conceived to be the only community established by God, and it embraced the whole life of man. The visible representative of God within it, who performed his will and dispensed his blessings, was the emperor. Thus, the old boundaries of the church were gradually effaced; the Christian community increasingly coalesced with Byzantine
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