Byzantine Christianity

A Very Brief History

Averil Cameron

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780281076147
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

'... I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.'
W. B. YeatsFrom the foundation of Constantinople in 330 to its fall in 1453, this brief history explores the key components of Byzantine Christianity, including the development of monasticism, icons and iconoclasm, the role of the emperor in relation to church councils and beliefs, the difficult relationship with the papacy and the impact of the Crusades.The book also considers Byzantine Christianity as a living force today: the variety and vitality of Orthodox churches, the role of the Church in Russia and the enduring relevance of a spirituality derived from the church fathers.

Part 1
THE HISTORY

1
What was Byzantium?

Byzantium and the Byzantine empire are usually associated with Eastern Orthodoxy. However, we need to start by clari­fying both these concepts.

Byzantium

‘Byzantium’ and ‘the Byzantine empire’ generally refer to the empire ruled from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and lasting from the dedication of the city by the Emperor Constantine in ad 330 until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. But there are some problems here. First, the term ‘Byzantium’ is modern and was not used by the Byzantines themselves (they called themselves Romans). Second, Cons­tantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and came under Latin rule until 1261, when the exiled Byzantines regained the city and re-established themselves there. Third, although Byzantium was indeed an empire for most of its history and ruled extensive territory, its size varied greatly at different periods. From its height after the wars of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, it lost much of its territory in the east as a result of the Arab conquests but recovered and grew again in the tenth to twelfth centuries. After the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, it was reduced to several small enclaves or statelets ruled by various members and branches of the imperial family. The Byzantines from Nicaea recovered the city in 1261 but the territory ruled from Constantinople in its final phase was tiny compared with the empire’s former glory.

For 150 years after its foundation, Constantinople was the seat of government of the eastern part of the Roman empire, and there were also Roman emperors ruling in the west. But the language of culture and administration in the east was Greek rather than Latin, and the gradual ­divergence of the eastern and western churches soon became apparent.

This book will leave these caveats aside and understand Byzantium and Byzantine as referring to the whole long period from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries.

A united Church

The early history of Byzantine Christianity is part of the history of Christianity itself. The first Christian commu­nities developed in the eastern part of the Roman empire, and at the time of the Emperor Constantine (d. 337) there were still far more Christians there than in the west. The Church was still undivided, and would remain so for a long time yet. Byzantine Christianity was not something separate from early Christianity as a whole, and Christians today owe to it a great deal of what counts as Christian.

Orthodoxy

This is a book about Christianity in Byzantium, not about Orthodoxy, which is a narrower concept. In the Byzantine period the term ‘orthodoxy’ (lower case) embraced many differing beliefs and practices, and it is anachronistic simply to apply the term ‘Orthodoxy’ to Byzantium in the sense in which it refers to Eastern Orthodoxy today. The debt of the latter to Byzantine Christianity will be considered in Part 2.

There were many Christian groups both within and outside the Byzantine empire who passionately disagreed with each other, but all of whom considered themselves to be orthodox (meaning that they had the correct doctrine). The history of early Christianity is in part a story of struggles to assert one or another form of orthodox belief and practice. When Constantine decided to support the Christians he soon found, to his surprise and chagrin, that they did not all hold the same views. There had already been church councils or synods, but in a critically important move the emperor now called his own councils to attempt to settle matters. The Council of Nicaea (modern Iznik in western Turkey), summoned by Constantine in ad 325, was the first ‘ecumenical’ council; that is, it claimed to be a meeting of bishops from all over the Roman empire. In practice ­bishops from the western half of the empire were poorly represented, and the council was very far from the last word, even though it produced the first version of what became known as the Nicene Creed, still recited in eastern and western churches to this day. In later centuries the western habit of adding ‘and from the Son’ when referring to the Holy Spirit – known from the Latin as the Filioque – was to become one of the main sticking points between Rome and Constantinople, but the Creed of Nicaea, modified in 381, remained and remains common to both east and west. Six more councils were later also held to be ecumenical, the last in 787, again in Nicaea.

Within the Byzantine empire itself, continuing disagreements and increasing bad feeling in the later fifth and sixth centuries led to the formation of separatist churches in the eastern provinces (see Chapter 4), and after the Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, many Christians lived under Islam; most spoke and wrote in languages other than Greek, though Greek also continued, and some, including the patriarchate of Jerusalem, stayed loyal to the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon (ad 451). When Constan­tinople seemed to be departing from it in the seventh century a major crisis ensued, involving bishops, monks and communities from the east all the way to Rome. It is important to remember that all sides involved in these painful divisions saw themselves as orthodox and the ­others as mistaken.

Again, while it is correct to say that today’s Eastern Orthodox churches derive ultimately from Byzantium (see Chapter 11), and in some cases received their Christianity from Byzantine missions, we need to be cautious about applying the term ‘Orthodoxy’ to Byzantium itself.

Finally, Byzantine orthodoxy should not be straightforwardly identified with ‘Greek Orthodoxy’. Despite the pre-eminence of the Greek language throughout the history of Byzantium, Greeks in an ethnic sense constituted only a tiny proportion of the population of an empire that stretched at its height from Italy to the borders of Iran, and included Egypt and a substantial part of North Africa. Indeed, Byzantine rule from Constantinople had to be ­reasserted in mainland Greece after an uncertain period following the arrival of the Slavs in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Byzantium was conscious of its Hellenic heritage, preserved in language, culture and literature, but the Byzantine empire contained many different ethnic groups and many kinds of Christianity.

The Emperor Constantine (ad 306–37)

Constantine became sole emperor of the Roman world in 324 when he defeated his final rival, Licinius. It had taken him nearly 20 years to reach this position, from his father Constantius’s death in York in 306, when Constantine was proclaimed emperor by Constantius’s soldiers. In the years that followed, Constantine had gradually outmanoeuvred
and eliminated other rivals until only his former ally Lici­nius remained. Constantine, his father Constantius and Licinius were all members of the ruling group known as the ‘tetrarchy’, set up by Diocletian in 293 in the hope of bringing stability to the empire after decades of crisis, and Constantine was no less ambitious and ruthless than the other members of the group. His final victory destroyed the tetrarchic model of power sharing; nevertheless, his decision to found and name his own new city on the site of Byzantion, an urban settlement going back to classical times, followed the tradition of other ‘tetrarchic capitals’, including that of Galerius in what is now Thessaloniki.

It is hard to know what Constantine’s own religious beliefs really amounted to. He was said to have had a vision of the god Apollo while in Gaul in 310. Later, while on the way south through Italy to confront his rival Maxentius, he had a religious experience that seems to have impressed him enough to order the chi-rho (the first letters of the word ‘Christ’ in Greek) to be painted on his soldiers’ shields. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, later claimed that the emperor had a vision of the cross in the sky with the words ‘In this conquer’. Whatever the truth of these accounts, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge over the River Tiber in Rome late in 312,
and immediately began to involve himself in Christian affairs. At the time Christians were only a tiny minority among his subjects and had until very recently been persecuted by his rivals. Licinius returned to the policy of persecution – at least in the version told by Constantine’s propagandists – when he and Constantine went to war against each other some years later, but Constantine did not deviate from his determination to support Christianity.

From 324 to his death in 337, Constantine was the sole ruler of the Roman world. It is not clear, however, that ­Constantinople (‘the city of Constantine’) was intended by him to be a new capital to replace Rome. The seniority of Rome as an apostolic see continued to be accepted, and it took some time for Constantinople to become established as a leading Christian centre. In comparison with the number of churches he built in and around Rome, or the building of those he sponsored in and around Jerusalem, especially the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in Constantinople Constantine seems to have been mainly interested in creating an imperial centre worthy of his new position, with
an imperial palace, a hippodrome for chariot races, a splendid imperial way for processions and a statue of himself on a great column. He built an impressive imperial mausoleum with a controversial plan for his own burial, but the ‘Great Church’ of Hagia Sophia, or Saint Sophia (‘Holy Wisdom’), was completed only by his son.

However, Constantine had a loyal publicist in Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, and the latter formulated a political phil­osophy according to which the emperor was God’s vice-gerent on earth and the empire a microcosm of heaven. This was to have much mileage in later centuries.

By the end of the fourth century, Constantinople was a city with many churches and monasteries, whose bishop, or patriarch, was recognized as second only to that of Rome. Constantine did not and could not make Christianity the official religion of the empire, but the Emperor Julian, who tried to reverse the process but reigned only from 361 to 363, was the only emperor after Constantine who was not a Christian.

Constantine deferred to bishops and gave them a role in the justice system. He also made Sunday a day of rest; and even if this was not his intention, his repeal of Roman marriage legislation helped to open the way for Christians to choose celibacy and the ascetic life. Rulings made with his then ally, Licinius, in 313 gave the Church the legal standing it had not previously enjoyed, and while promising freedom of worship, made clear Constantine’s preference for Christianity. The Church could now legally inherit wealth and property, an important change whose effect soon became apparent as rich people began to bequeath and donate their wealth to it. Constantine also delivered a remarkable address in which he suggested that the birth of Christ was the event prefigured in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. By the time Constantine died, however, he had been in­fluenced by those who had opposed the decisions at the Council of Nicaea and he was baptized by one of them.

After Constantine

Divisions continued after Constantine’s death and throughout the fourth century, and were succeeded by others. But he had set the religion of the Roman empire on a new path. After him there was again often more than one emperor ruling at a time, and seats of government in both east and west. Milan and Ravenna, rather than Rome, were the homes of the imperial court in the west, but Rome retained its Christian prestige as the city of Saints Peter and Paul, and enjoyed recognized ecclesiastical primacy. From the last decade of the fourth century the east–west split was more pronounced, and in 476 the last Roman emperor
in the west was deposed. The Emperor Justinian, ruling in
Constantinople in the sixth century, fought lengthy wars to regain Roman control in the west, but with only
limited success. By then Constantinople had been the seat of Christian emperors for 200 years and had grown to be a city of approaching half a million inhabitants. When the first church of Hagia Sophia was severely damaged by ­rioting and fire early in Justinian’s reign, it was replaced with the great domed church that still stands. The dome was rebuilt later in the reign after earthquake damage, and centuries later became the model for the great mosques built in the city under Ottoman rule that dominate the skyline of Istanbul today.

2
Monks, monasteries and bishops

This chapter and the next take as their starting point the formative period in Byzantine Christianity in the two centuries that followed the dedication of Constantinople in ad 330, when its main features took shape. The Church was already organized into bishoprics, and bishops were the leaders of their local congregations. Before Constantine, churches were relatively modest, but his example as a church builder and his enabling legislation opened the possibility of giving them new visibility in urban settings, a process assisted by the wealth that now found its way into the Church, as noted in Chapter 1. This wealth was in the control of ­bishops and was used not only for assisting the poor and needy but also for church building and associated needs.

Monks and ascetics

Christian advocacy of celibacy and sexual renunciation rather than marriage was already under way in the reign of Constantine. Individual men and women, especially in Egypt and Syria, began to live ascetic lives, sometimes retreating from cities to live in caves or in the desert, and the first half of the fourth century also saw the beginnings of organized monasticism. In Egypt, Pachomius was the founder of the first cenobitic monastery at Tabennisi, and this marked the start of the monastic movement that became such a feature of Byzantine Christianity and the western Middle Ages. Byzantine monasticism was not centrally organized. Monasteries often began in informal ways, and groups of ascetics also lived together without being ­organized into a monastic complex with fixed rules. In the early fifth century, Palladius described male and female ascetics who pursued lives of chastity and renunciation in domestic settings in Constantinople. In some kinds of monasticism the monks would meet only for weekly communal worship; this is the model of the lavra, and it persisted in Byzantium alongside monasteries whose monks lived cenobitic or communal lives. Revered ascetic ­figures often attracted disciples who came to live near them. Be­fore Pachomius, Saint Antony had already retreated into the desert in Egypt to lead an ascetic life, and when the great theologian Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, was forced into exile, he took refuge with monks in the desert. Athanasius’s Life of Antony, composed soon after the
saint’s death in 356, is the first example of hagiography,
or ‘saints’ lives’, and was enormously influential in spreading the idea and ideals of asceticism.

It used to be thought that Egyptian monasticism was the inspiration for the rise of asceticism in Syria but it seems more likely that both developed over the same period. Syrian asceticism sometimes took exotic and individualistic forms, as we read in the account of it by the fifth-century bishop and theologian Theodoret of Cyrrhus (in northern Syria). Stylites, from the Greek word for ‘pillar’, like Symeon the Elder, who is said to have lived for 40 years on the top of a pillar at Qalat Siman in Syria, were also a feature of Syrian Christianity, though not confined to it (in the fifth century, Daniel the Stylite is said to have lived on a pillar near Constantinople for 33 years). Saint Basil, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, was the author of a rule for ceno­bitic monasteries that was widely followed later, while his sister, Macrina, lived in a less formal ascetic community based on her own household in the Pontus in what is now northern Turkey. Byzantine monasticism remained more varied than that in the west, and Basil’s rule did not give rise to an order like that of Saint Benedict; the founders of later Byzantine monasteries often drew up or commissioned their own rules.

From their beginnings in the fourth century, monasteries became a major feature of Byzantine life, and in the fifth and sixth centuries monks also sometimes played an important role in wider ecclesiastical affairs and were prominent in several turbulent episodes in fifth- and sixth-century Constantinople and other cities. Several large monasteries in Palestine were influential centres of ecclesiastical polit­ics in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the ninth century, monks of the Studios monastery in Constantinople were prominent in the opposition to the official iconoclastic policy (see Chapter 5), and their abbot, Theodore the Studite, was imprisoned for it. The Studite monastery was also influential in the flowering of monastic culture and spir­ituality that followed the ending of the iconoclastic controversy. Elsewhere, different kinds of asceticism were practised together, as in the Judaean desert outside Jerusalem, where the remains of dozens of small and large monasteries and monastic cells are still visible. Few early monasteries are still functioning today, but Saint Catherine’s, at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, founded by Justinian in the mid sixth century, has had an unbroken monastic history until the present day. Finally, the role of monasteries illustrates very well the typically Byzantine mix of the public and formal and the intimate and private. We often hear in saints’ lives of humble parents giving their child to live in a monastery from an early age to be brought up as a prospective monk. Man...