Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (79 page)

Cyril's visit to Rome was a moment which suggested a more generous future for a Church in central Europe, leaving behind the ill-will between Nicholas and Photios. Pope Hadrian had his reasons for favouring three-way diplomacy, for he was aware that Frankish rulers had their own agendas which might not include all that much consideration for the interests of the papacy. He made Methodios his legate in central Europe, and even authorized the use of Slavonic vernacular in the liturgy, although he did ask that the scripture lessons should be read over first in Latin. The atmosphere of reconciliation did not last. Frankish rivals to Methodios's clergy were not forgiving and they forced the Byzantine missionaries eastwards until they took refuge in Bulgaria. From the Church's Bulgarian centre in Ohrid (now in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), missionaries travelled west once more to reinforce Orthodox missions in a newly emerging kingdom, Serbia, and they took their grievances against Latin Westerners with them. Further west than Serbia, the Orthodox presence in the region between the Alps and the Carpathian mountains gradually weakened, although it was in Hungary that one crucial piece of cultural transmission took place, when the writings of John of Damascus were translated from Greek into Latin, spreading their influence permanently into the Western Church, and to Thomas Aquinas in particular (see p. 447).
⁸²
In the long struggle between Orthodox and Catholic in central Europe, the line of cultural differentiation between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, which has so recently poisoned their relationship despite their common language, has ended up as not so different from that division of the empire originally set by Diocletian.

The great contribution to the Orthodox future from Cyril and Methodios (and, behind them, their patron Photios) was to establish the principle that the Greek language did not have a monopoly on Orthodox liturgy. So, from the late ninth century, Churches of Orthodoxy have diversified through a remarkable variety of language families and the cultures which those languages have shaped; in fact it is the Church's liturgy which has been the major force in deciding which languages should dominate cultures in various parts of the Orthodox world. Not all of these cultures are Slavonic: one of the largest Orthodox Churches has come to be that of Romania, which, as its name implies and the forms of its language make clear, cherishes a Latin past. It is not surprising that across such a tangle of different peoples and societies, Orthodox Churches have shown a considerable relish for quarrels over jurisdiction and consequent separations or schisms.

Yet that tangled history does not render totally absurd Orthodoxy's pride in its uniformity of doctrine. Schism is not the same as heresy. The doctrinal disagreements and affirmations from the time of Justinian to the Triumph of Orthodoxy have (partly by dint of a good deal of selective writing of Church history) produced a profound sense of common identity across cultures. They are bound together by the memory of the worship in the Great Church in Constantinople, by a common heritage in the theology of such exponents of
theosis
as Maximus the Confessor, and by the final crushing of iconoclasm in 843. As we have noted, that common heritage goes so far as to provide the worshipping congregation with corporate ways of ceremonially denouncing Christians who do not accept it: the ninth century, the era of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, was probably the time at which the Orthodox hymns of hate first entered the performance of the liturgy.
⁸³
There is here a significant contrast with the Latin West. The sixteenth-century Reformation in the Western Church destroyed not merely the universality of Latin liturgy, a universality of language which did not exist in the East, and which indeed may have contributed to the frustrations behind the Reformation. It also ruptured the broad theological consensus in Western Christianity. By the time of that sixteenth-century explosion of dissent, the Byzantine Empire had perished, partly because of the inept and often malicious intervention of Western Latin Christians, which helped to destroy the institution so notably revived in the time of Photios and the Macedonian emperors.

14

Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700)

CRISES AND CRUSADERS (900-1200)

Around the millennium, Constantinople was the biggest city in the world that Europeans knew, with around 600,000 inhabitants. It surpassed Islam's greatest city, Baghdad, and dwarfed the Latin West's best attempts at urban life such as Rome or Venice, which at best might each muster a tenth of such numbers.
¹
The scale of the area comprehended by the ancient and medieval walls still has the power to astonish as one walks across it: in societies which were overwhelmingly rural, the first experience of 'the City' must have been like a moon landing. The Byzantine Empire was strong and well defended; the emperor was the guarantor of an imperial gold coinage which astonishingly had remained the same in weight and fineness since the time of Constantine the Great, and which was the only gold currency then known in Europe - its name both in Greek and Latin spoke of strength and reliability,
nomisma
('established'),
solidus
('immovable'). In Western European heraldry, this coin survives symbolized by a golden disc, and in the macaronic Norman-French language of heralds, it is termed a 'bezant'.

The Macedonian emperors, who had been in power since 867, were very ready to employ mercenary soldiers who brought new tactics in warfare and helped Byzantium claw back territories long lost, as far east as Cyprus and Antioch of Syria. The Church of Constantinople was likewise expanding and self-confident. In the 960s and 970s the Macedonian dynasty won another great military success on the western front, annexing Bulgaria and for two centuries putting an end to the independence of its archbishop along with its monarchy. The Byzantine victory also brought defeat and death for Sviatoslav, the ruler of a pagan monarchy far to the north in Kiev, who had his own designs on Bulgaria. Through the conversion to Christianity of Sviatoslav's son Vladimir in 988, Orthodox Christianity was established in another new region, with momentous consequences for its future (see Chapter 15). In the far west, the Byzantines still controlled southern Italy, although 962 saw them lose their last stronghold in Sicily to Muslim rule. The self-confidence and practicality of the Macedonian emperors allowed them to make allies of people whom Chalcedonian Christians thought of as heretics: as they pushed eastwards into territories much depopulated in Cilicia and Armenia, they peopled them with Miaphysite Christian settlers and were happy to see them establish their own bishoprics, not subject to the patriarch in Constantinople. Leading Byzantine churchmen were furious at this move, unprecedented in imperial Christianity, but it was a useful balance for Muslims living on the frontiers, and it was a way of giving the deviant newcomers a good reason to invest in the future security of Byzantine rule.
²

The recovery of nerve in society was nevertheless expressed in a vigorous affirmation of the institutions which had contributed to the Triumph of Orthodoxy and which now permanently shaped Byzantine religion. There was great attention to recording the ceremonial used at Court and in church. The definitive account of the formal life of the Byzantine Court was written as a guide for his heir by an exceptionally learned and reflective emperor, Constantine VII (reigned 945-59). He was known as
Porphyrogenntos
- 'born into the Purple' - to emphasize his legitimate imperial birth and status after his father's theologically controversial fourth marriage, and it was probably the contentious nature of his birth which made him give such attention to the proper order for formal ceremonies. By now Court ceremonial could not be separated from that of the Church, since all Church festivals of any significance needed the imperial presence, in procession, in the liturgy and afterwards as principal guest in a formal feast with the patriarch. Nearly all the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine liturgy date from the tenth century, even though they are copying much earlier texts: clearly there was an intense urge now to establish norms behind all these new texts.
³
At the end of the tenth century, the Emperor Basil II sponsored Symeon Metaphrastes ('the Translator') to lead a team of scholars in compiling a monthly catalogue or
Menologion
of saints' lives, which kept a peculiar authority among later compilations of saints, and around the same time an enthusiast for Constantinople's past collected all sorts of older materials to weld into an antiquarian guide to the city's monuments and treasures.
⁴

The assertion of uniform values within the Orthodox Church and the new wealth in the tenth and eleventh centuries also led to a great investment in the institutions which had defended (or invented) the tradition so successfully in the years of conflict: the monasteries. Naturally much of this investment went into ancient well-established foundations, many of which were in the capital or in great cities, but as a result, the restlessness of the monastic spirit led to inspirational holy men moving out to find new wildernesses. This was a great age of colonization of 'holy mountains', the chief active survivor of which is the monastic republic of Mount Athos, a peninsula thrusting into the Aegean Sea in Greek Macedonia. Although a few hermits had been attracted to the Athonite peninsula's wild grandeur and isolation in earlier centuries, the Great Lavra, the most important among its monastic communities, was founded in 963, and after Greek-speaking communities had multiplied, other language groups from Eastern Churches also founded monasteries here. Subsequent historical shifts of fortune have propelled the Holy Mountain into one of the most important resources of Orthodoxy worldwide, now enjoying autonomy within the Republic of Greece. It is the only the state in the world with an entirely male population, including any animal or bird within human control.

The tensions within a period of success and expansion in monastic life were exemplified in the career and writings of Symeon (949-1022). He was known as 'the New Theologian' maybe originally sarcastically, but soon the nickname ranged him alongside the evangelist John and the fourth-century Gregory of Nazianzus. Coming from a background at the imperial Court, Symeon was twenty-eight when he entered the Stoudite monastery in the capital, but he was expelled as a misfit, for not obediently conforming to the monastic rule and for showing too great an attachment to a senior monk (eccentric enough to be considered a Holy Fool by some modern commentators), Symeon the Pious. When the younger Symeon moved to St Mamas's monastery outside Constantinople, his strong personality had a more positive effect and within a few years he had become abbot. After a quarter of a century his continuing ostentatious devotion to Symeon the Pious (he had set up an icon of his spiritual father, with a commemoration of his death date) and the very personal character of much of his preaching were too much for the Church hierarchy; his icons of Symeon were destroyed and he was exiled for the rest of his life.

Symeon's turbulent emotional career led him to deploy the traditional Orthodox themes of light and
theosis
in writing with a rare candour about his own spiritual experience, negative as well as positive; John Climacus's ancient emphasis on the tears of spiritual experience (see p. 438) gained a new intensity in his writings. Symeon's conflicts with the Church authorities led him to some radical thoughts. He emphasized the tradition of his day that monks who were not ordained could offer forgiveness to penitents, as part of a wider theme that 'ordination by men' was not the same as appointment by God through the Holy Spirit - not a comfortable theme for the Church hierarchy. Symeon was contemptuous of ordered scholarship in comparison with personal spiritual experience, singing that the Holy Spirit is sent

. . . Not to lovers of glory,
Not to rhetoricians, not to philosophers,
Not to those who have studied Hellenistic writings . . .
Not to those who speak eloquently and with refinement . . .
But to the poor in spirit and life,
To the pure in heart and body,
Who speak and even more live simply.
⁵

It is not surprising that such potentially disruptive notions, sitting very uneasily with obedience to properly constituted authority, long met with suspicion and censorship. Symeon's teaching was later to become a catalyst for major arguments about the nature of the monastic tradition in the fourteenth-century Hesychast controversy (see pp. 487-91). Yet Symeon the New Theologian's reputation as one of the most profound of Orthodox writers has now reached beyond a tradition of monastic admirers.

The reign of the Emperor Basil II, later famed as 'the Bulgar-slayer' for his conquest of Bulgaria, ended after nearly half a century in 1025. A highly capable and energetic ruler who can be given the chief credit for the conversion of the Principality of Kiev to Christianity (see pp. 506-8), he seemed to have left the empire more secure than ever, but there was one fatal problem: he never married, and he failed to produce an heir who might guarantee the long stability which his predecessors in the Macedonian dynasty had created. For more than half a century, the empire was once more disrupted by contention for supreme power, and the lack of firm leadership spread insecurity into provinces only recently annexed, especially in the Balkans. It was a momentous sign of weakness when, in the 1040s, the gold
nomisma
coin was debased for the first time in seven centuries.
⁶

The international situation demanded a strong emperor in the mould of Basil, because in both West and East new powers fixed their eyes on the wealth and sophistication of Byzantium. Acquisitive-minded Latins, especially the Norman monarchy in Sicily and the Italian merchant-states of Venice and Genoa, were particularly concerned to extend their influence in the eastern Mediterranean trade routes. The Pope was fostering a crusader ideal which was increasingly looking eastwards for its fulfilment (see pp. 382-3). To the east, a new coalition of Muslim tribes under the leadership of a family of Turks called the Seljuks first overwhelmed the Muslim rulers of Baghdad and then swept into the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire; their Seljuk ruler took the title of
Sultan
, the Arabic for 'power'.