Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (82 page)

As before in Byzantine history, when secular administration decayed, monasteries flourished. Mount Athos, now the most prominent survivor of the holy mountains, remained independent of Ottoman rule until as late as 1423, assiduously cultivating the Muslim authorities which had by then encircled it for more than half a century. It is significant that, when given the choice in 1423, the Athonian monks preferred the Muslim overlordship of the sultan to a chance which they were offered of rule by the Venetians: the thought of Latin overlordship by the conquerors of 1204 was repulsive to them.
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By then, the emperor had long been only one patron-monarch among many for the Athonian monasteries. Sava's foundation on Mount Athos had been one indication that already in the twelfth century it was becoming a focus for multiple Orthodox identities beyond its Greek origins. A proliferation of divinely sanctioned rulers were drawing their legitimacy from their Orthodox Churches, as far away as the Principality of Kiev and the rulers in Muscovy.

It was in this age that one of the most familiar features of the Orthodox church interior arrived at its developed form: the
iconostasis
, a wall-like barrier veiling altar and sanctuary area from worshippers. The word means 'stand for images', because now the barrier is covered in pictures of saints and sacred subjects, in patterns which have become fixed in order and positioning. Customarily the wall does not reach the ceiling, so that the sound of the clergy's liturgical chanting at the altar can clearly be heard above it and through its set of doors. It took a long time for the iconostasis to achieve its modern form. Both in East and West in the first centuries of church-building, there were low partitions inside churches to mark off the sanctuary area around the altar, and the different ways in which these partitions were developed is instructive. Western Latin churches developed their own taller screens to separate off the entire area containing clergy and liturgical singers (the 'choir' or 'chancel', plus the sanctuary area), and this was also a late development, encouraged by the intensification of eucharistic devotion in the thirteenth century. But the screens in Latin churches were generally open above waist-height to afford views of the high altar; they rarely presented themselves as solid walls in the Eastern manner, except in monastic or cathedral churches where clergy were carrying out their own round of liturgy in an enclosed space inside the church building. Universally, these new Western screens were associated with and carried above them carved figures of Christ hanging on the Cross or 'Rood', flanked by his grieving mother, Mary, and the new son whom Christ had assigned to her, John the Evangelist. Hence Western chancel screens are known as 'rood screens'.

The Orthodox development was entirely different, and it may be no coincidence that it happened in the same era, the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, when Latin churches were completing the development of the rood screen. For Orthodox liturgy, the iconostasis encloses a set of actions rather than the whole area occupied by the clergy caste and assistants, although it does also mark a sanctuary area excluding laypeople without specific functions or permissions. It shelters and defines those liturgical actions only performed at the altar. When it first grew beyond the low barrier, it was known as a
templon
, and was enclosed only to waist-height, with open arcading above, so that the altar remained clearly visible to all at all times. What happened then was a gradual accretion of holy images which made a much more substantial solid screen. Some congregations concluded that it would be more reverent to veil the central parts of worship at the altar, and curtains filled the arcade spaces, to be pulled across at particular times. In other churches, icons were hung from the arcade, or against the curtains if they were now in place, and the screen now took on its character of an 'icon stand'.

Yet even if this might seem a visual barrier far more formidable than the average Western rood screen, it is quite the reverse to the eye of faith. Any representations of the sacred or of saints which appear in the decoration of a Western rood screen are incidental to the screen's character, below the figures of the rood group which crown it, Christ, Mary and John. Icons, by contrast, are of the essence of an iconostasis. Because each icon in its theologically appointed place reveals and refracts the vision of Heaven, the iconostasis becomes not so much a visual obstruction in the fashion of the Western rood screen, but is actually transparent, a gateway to Heaven, like the altar beyond it. It aids the spiritual eye to see something more real than that which it conceals from the human eye. Moreover, in developed form, the iconostasis is the culmination of a set of steps which symbolize the ascent of the soul towards heavenly joy. Those steps lead to a shallow platform before the iconostasis, on which much of the liturgy takes place, but it is also available for the congregation, excluded from physical entrance to the sanctuary, to venerate the icons of the iconostasis.

A gateway needs doors. The doors of the iconostasis are important: basic to the structure is a central entrance - the 'Beautiful Gates' - which, when open, affords the sight of the altar, and which is flanked by smaller doors - again, of course, all appropriately bearing their icons. Outside the time of worship, the doors are closed. Open or closed, they mark punctuation points in the liturgy which retains the processional quality so important in Byzantine worship from the earliest days of New Rome. The Beautiful Gates are principally reserved for the bishop, the side doors used liturgically by deacons (and therefore they often bear the images of sainted deacons such as the first martyr of the Christian faith, Stephen). Around the doors stand the other saints, prophets and festal scenes. These are dominated by images of Christ and his Mother, which may have their counterparts in different positions in the screen. The greatest development of the iconostasis and its structured decoration was to come in Russian Orthodoxy, but the overall concept and use were achieved in the empire before the fall of Constantinople.

It was a paradox of this age that despite all the wretchedness of the relationship between Latin and Greek Christianity in the wake of 1204, Latin and Orthodox cultures were now closer and more regularly in contact than they had been for half a millennium. Influences went in both directions, with Venice and its newly acquired colonies as one of the main conduits - literally in the case of a large number of art objects, which in Venice included not merely the famous four antique bronze horses stolen from Constantinople during the sack of the city, but a huge number of marble blocks and carvings which were shipped around the Greek coast and up the Adriatic to transform the exterior and interior of St Mark's Cathedral. Surprisingly in view of the distinctiveness of Orthodox worship, with its distinct liturgical models drawing on Eastern traditions attributed to St John Chrysostom, St Basil and St James, one of the greatest aspects of similarity remained in the liturgical chant which both Churches employed. In the charged atmosphere of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, a Greek canon lawyer, John, Bishop of Kytros, could still say that the texts of chants and their melodies were common to East and West. In the next two centuries, Western musical innovations like polyphony could also be heard in Greek churches - indeed, Greek liturgical chant and Western plainsong probably did not sound especially different throughout the medieval period.
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The real separation came with the trauma of the complete Ottoman conquest in 1453, when a great divergence in musical practice began. In particular, the Orthodox were never seized by the enthusiasm for the pipe organ which, in the era of Constantinople's fall, began its long dominance of the musical imagination of Western Christians.

Above all, in the realm of ideas, the two worlds spoke much more frequently to each other, albeit not always harmoniously. It was the first era in centuries in which Greeks began to read Latin texts, though there had always been a good deal more traffic in the other direction. One of the catalysts for exchange was the ultimately futile sequence of negotiations for reunion of the Churches which preoccupied thirteenth-century popes: one of the many papal friar-negotiators sent east, the Dominican William of Moerbecke, was highly important in extending Western knowledge of ancient scholarship because he collected Greek manuscripts and translated a variety of Greek authors, including Aristotle, into deliberately very literal Latin versions.
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A few Easterners became interested in Western theologians whom the East had previously ignored, including the most prominent Westerner of them all, Augustine of Hippo. One Court protege of Michael VIII Palaeologos, Manuel (monastic name Maximos) Planudes, translated Augustine's
De Trinitate
for the first time into Greek, and persisted with his efforts even when the Emperor's successor abandoned the policy of dialogue with the papacy. Naturally, that meant that he translated Augustine's views on
Filioque
, although in a puzzle which has not yet been resolved, he also wrote two treatises attacking the doctrine.
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The translation work of Planudes was not confined to theology; he ranged through Latin classics then completely forgotten in the East, such as Cicero, Boethius and even the less racy parts of Ovid's poetry. He was followed by a number of scholars who widened the range of texts on offer, including an extraordinary gamble in contemporary translation by brothers Prochoros and Demetrios Kydones: among their many other imaginative projects in the mid-fourteenth century, Demetrios undertook Greek versions of Aquinas's
Summa contra Gentiles
and
Summa Theologiae
. It was an acknowledgement unprecedented since the days of Justinian that other cultures could have major contributions to make to Byzantine society, but in many sections of the Church that was a deeply controversial and unacceptable idea.
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Amid the dismally deteriorating political situation in Constantinople, the Church was convulsed by a dispute about the validity of a style of mystical prayer known as Hesychasm. The principal combatants were Gregory Palamas, a monk of a community on Mount Athos who championed Hesychast spirituality, and Barlaam, an Orthodox monk from Calabria, the religious frontier land in Italy where Byzantine and Latin monasticism existed side by side. Hesychasm was only one of the issues which brought them into contention, but its results were the most far-reaching. The word 'Hesychasm' probably seems one of the more intimidating fragments of theological jargon to those first encountering it, but it simply comes from the Greek verb
hsychaz
, 'to keep stillness' (or silence). Linked with the idea of stillness was the characteristic mystical idea of light as the vehicle of knowing God, or as a metaphor for the knowledge of God. Gregory Palamas maintained that in such practice of prayer, it is possible to reach a vision of divine light which reveals God's uncreated energy, which is the Holy Spirit. He pointed to the episode of transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus was with his disciples on Mount Tabor, and they could see that his face 'shone like the sun'.
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The Transfiguration, already commemorated with greater elaboration in Orthodoxy than in the Latin West, therefore became a favourite Hesychast choice of subject for icons (see Plate 56).

Mystical themes have a habit of emerging in unpredictable circumstances as a counterpoint to various structured versions of Christian belief, so the Hesychast emphasis on silence and light is curiously reminiscent of a Christian movement remote in time and space from fourteenth-century Byzantium: the Quakerism which emerged in England during its seventeenth-century civil wars (see p. 653). The sharp contrast with the Quakers is in the way in which Hesychasm is rooted in specified devotional practices. Apart from contemplation of the icon, there are practical ways to structure still or silent prayer: appropriate physical posture and correct breathing are important, and one characteristic practice is to repeat a single devotional phrase, the most common of which came to be 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me'. This phrase or variants on it became known as the 'Jesus Prayer'. Such set techniques are reminiscent of systematic Eastern approaches to prayer, from Buddhism to the Sufis of Islam, who themselves may have drawn on Indian spirituality. There may indeed be a direct relationship between the Hesychast approach and Sufism, though there remains controversy as to which way the influence travelled.
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Both the Hesychasts and their opponents appealed to the Orthodox past; in fact both were looking back to Maximus the Confessor, and beyond Maximus to that unknown writer who had borrowed the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite to lend respectability to his ideas (see p. 439). Barlaam wanted to defend his own understanding of monastic spirituality as being true to Orthodox tradition. For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence. If so, it was foolish to suppose that, simply by concentrating in prayer, an individual could perceive something which was part of God's essence, the Holy Spirit itself. To expect to achieve this was to confuse creator and creation. There was a real risk that Hesychasts would forget all the dangers to which Maximus had pointed long before, allowing mystical experience to run out of control, and even wholly rejecting the control of reason in their search for God. Such excesses would jettison a tradition of purposeful meditation which ran back all the way to Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth century, and which Orthodox mystics had treasured ever since, even when the memory of Evagrius himself had been blackened.

Barlaam raised the name of various heresies, Bogimilism among them, and implied, not without some justification, that the Hesychasts were in danger of falling into the same excessive rigour and rejection of Christianity's setting in a fallen world. In retaliation, Palamas and his admirers said that Barlaam was a mere rationalist who was reducing any talk of God to the human capacity to grasp only what God was not. Palamas sneered at Barlaam's assertion that the great theologians of the early Church had used 'light' as a metaphor for knowledge and, echoing Symeon the New Theologian's dismissal of philosophy, he went so far as to praise a lack of instructed knowledge as something good in the spiritual life - close, indeed, to a condition for salvation, a bizarre position for one who wrote at intricate length on his chosen theological themes.
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