Monks and Humanists.

In 843, the byzantine church celebrated the “triumph of orthodoxy” over iconoclasm, a triumph that was interpreted as a victory over all the heresies, which until that time had divided Christendom. The document composed for the occasion, the famous Synodikon, commemorates the champions of the true faith, condemns the heretics, and implicitly presupposes that Byzantine society had reached an internal stability, which would never allow further division. In fact, new conflicts and crises did occur, and the Synodikon would have to be expanded. But the tendency to freeze history for considering their empire and Church as expressing the eternal and unchangeable form of God’s revelation would be a permanent and mythological feature of Byzantine civilization even if though it was constantly challenged by historical realities. In the ninth century itself, Byzantine society was, in fact, a divided society — divided politically, intellectually, and theologically.

During the entire iconoclastic period, Byzantium had been culturally cut off from the West and fascinated with the military and intellectual challenge of Islam. When, in 787 and 843, communion was finally re-established with the Church of Rome, the hostile emergence of the Carolingian Empire prevented the restoration of the old orbis Christianorum. Moreover, the resumption of the veneration of icons was a victory of Greeks traditions as distinct from the Oriental, non-Greek cultural iconoclasm of the Isaurians. The result of these historical developments was the emergence of the Byzantine Church from the iconoclastic crisis as more than ever a “Greek” church. It might even have become a purely national church such as the Armenian if the empire had not expanded again in the ninth and tenth centuries under the great emperors of the Macedonian dynasty and if the evangelization of the Slavs and the subsequent expansion of Byzantine Christianity into Eastern Europe, one of the major missionary events of Christian history, had not taken place. Unlike the West however where the papacy “passed to the barbarians” after their conversions, Constantinople, the “New Rome,” remained the unquestionable and unique intellectual centre of the Christian East until 1453. This “Rome” was culturally and intellectually Greek so much, so that Emperor Michael III, in a letter to Pope Nicholas I, could even designate Latin as a “barbarian” and “Scythian” tongue.

The Hellenic character of Byzantine civilization brought into theology the perennial problem of the relationship between the ancient Greek “mind” and the Christian Gospel. Although the issue was implicit in much of the theological literature in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, it had not been raised explicitly since the closing of the pagan universities by Justinian. In the ninth century following the intellectual renewal, which had taken place under Theophilus (829-842), the last iconoclastic emperor, Byzantine scholars undertook more vigorously the study of ancient pagan authors. The University of Constantinople endowed and protected by the Caesar Bardas and distinguished by the teaching of the great Photius became the centre of this first renaissance. Scholars such as Photius, Arethas, and Michael Psellos promoted encyclopaedic curiosity and encouraged the copying of ancient manuscripts. Much of our knowledge of Greek antiquity is the direct result of their labors. On the whole, their interest in ancient philosophy remained rather academic and coexisted easily with the equally academic and conservative theology, which predominated in the official circles of the Church. When John Italos in the eleventh century attempted a new synthesis between Platonism and Christianity, he immediately incurred canonical sanction. Thus, Byzantine humanism always lacked the coherence and dynamism of both Western Scholasticism and the Western Renaissance and was unable to break the widespread conviction of many Byzantines that Athens and Jerusalem were incompatible. The watchdogs in this respect were the leading representatives of a monasticism, which persisted in a staunch opposition to “secular wisdom.”

This polarity between the humanists and the monks not only appeared on the intellectual level; it manifested itself in ecclesiastical politics. The monks consistently opposed the ecclesiastical “realists” who were ready to practice toleration toward former iconoclasts and imperial sinners and toward unavoidable political compromises and, at a later period, state-sponsored doctrinal compromises with the Latin West. Conflicts of this sort occurred when Patriarchs Tarasius (784-806) and Methodius I (843-847) accepted into the episcopate former supporters of official iconoclasm, when the same Tarasius and Nicephorus I (806-815) condoned the remarriage of Emperor Constantine VI, who had divorced his first wife, and when in 857 Patriarch Ignatius was forced to resign and replaced by Photius. These conflicts, though not formally theological, involved the issue of the Christian witness in the world and, as such, greatly influenced Byzantine ecclesiology and social ethics.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 474