Download PDF | (Church history 3) Andrew Louth - Greek East and Latin West_ The Church, AD 681-1071-St Vladimir's Seminary Press (2007).
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THE CHURCH IN HISTORY SERIES of St Vladimir's Seminary Press balances the approaches of the abundance of church histories written from a Western Christian point of view. Series authors-in the unique position of being Orthodox scholars conversant with Western scholarship-have taken on the task of analyzing complicated primary sources and thoroughly critiquing modem scholarly literature to guide readers through the maze of centuries of church formation and life. Through fresh eyes, they chronicle the past with fairness, objectivity, and sympathy, and add equilibrium to the annals of Christendom.
FOREWORD
In the 1980s, Father John Meyendorff planned a six-volume history of the Church, written by Orthodox scholars, to be called The Church in History, which was to be published by St Vladimir's Seminary Press. In 1989, his own volume was the first to appear, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church AD 450-680, the second volume in the series. In 1994, volume 4 in the series appeared, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy:
The Church AD 1071-1453, written by Aristeides Papadakis, with Fr John himself contributing the chapters on the Slav world. By that time Fr John was dead; he had died prematurely in 1992. Thereafter the project lost steam, and most of those whom Fr John had approached to contribute to the other four volumes thought that, in the absence of Fr John's leadership, the project had fallen by the wayside. A few years ago, St Vladimir's Seminary Press asked me ifl could write the third volume, bridging the historical gap between the two published volumes; this is the volume that now appears.
A little later, I was asked if I would undertake the task of General Editor of the series. With the current volume the project envisaged by Fr John revives and it is hoped that over the next few years the other volumes in the series will see the light of day: volume 1, Formation and Struggles: The Church AD 33-450; volume 5, The Crisis of Tradition: The Church AD 1453-1782; and volume 6, The Orthodox Church and the Modern World: The Church AD 1782-the Present. It is hoped that the completed series will be a fitting tribute to Fr John Meyendorff's scholarship and vision. -Andrew Louth General Editor.
PREFACE
Perhaps a word of explanation is needed about this volume called, in accordance with Fr John Meyendorff's intentions, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071. For there are other works with not dissimilar titles, notably The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition by the noted and now deceased Orthodox scholar and man of letters Philip Sherrard, and East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church,from Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence by the great scholar, church historian and theologian Henry Chadwick. 1 Both of these books are attempts to account for the division of Christendom into "Greek East" and "Latin West," that is, Eastern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic Church (including, perhaps, the Churches of the Reformation), on the other.
Chadwick's work is fundamentally historical, while Sherrard's work explores a broader canvas, raising philosophical issues as well as historical and theological ones. This volume is different in that, though it covers the period during which "Greek East" and "Latin West" evolved separate identities to such an extent that estrangement seemed bound to amount to schism (though there was no formal schism in the period covered, despite the symbolic date of 1054), it is not simply, or even primarily, concerned to explain the schism. Its primary purpose is to give an account of the Church in the period from the end of the Sixth Cfficumenical Synod in 68r to the Battle of Manzikert in ro71 for its own sake, not simply as a way of explaining the schism.
The question of the growing rift is, of course, discussed, and it is hoped this volume sheds some light on that question, but the purpose of the book is wider and simpler: to give some account of the development (or developments) of the Church in the period. "Greek East" and "Latin West" are becoming such distinct entities during the period that I have generally treated them in parallel, and noted the points at which their destinies coincide or conflict, but the scope of the book is also wider than the title suggests, principally because though the "West" was "Latin," the "East" cannot be restricted to what was "Greek." In addition to the Greek, that is, the Byzantine East, the East included Churches linguistically defined by their use of the Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Armenian languages-and by other more far-flung Eastern languages-some account of some of which is given in this book (though often only very briefly), as well as an emerging Arab Christianity in the countries that had fallen to Islam, together with the Slav version of Byzantine Christianity, that emerged from the ninth century onwards.
It is traditional in works concerned with Byzantine history to include a word about the convention followed in the spelling of names. Where common English forms exist ( e.g., John, Peter), I have used them. Latin names pose no problems. Greek names (where no common forms exist) have been transliterated directly from Greek, not via a Latin form (so Photios, Methodios). Slav names, likewise, I have not transliterated via a Latin form (so Feodosij, not Theodosius). For other names in languages I do not know I have followed the examples in the books I have used. I doubt if I have achieved any kind of consistency. This book has taken several years to write and would never have been finished without periods of sabbatical leave granted by the University of Durham UK, where I have taught since 1996, and an additional term's leave made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain in Michaelmas Term 2005, for which I am very grateful.
I have been helped in forming my ideas by teaching both Byzantine history and Byzantine church history and theology for many years both at the University of Durham and, before that, at Goldsmiths' College in the University of London. I owe a great debt to my students over the years. More immediately I am indebted to Sally Milner (who was one of those students), Mary Cunningham and Fr Huw Chiplin, who undertook to read a draft of the book and made both critical and encouraging comments. I am also indebted to the sharp eyes and intelligence of Deborah Belonick of St Vladimir's Seminary Press, who saved me from not a few mistakes and asperities of style. Although the book deals with a period in which Christians in East and West became increasingly uncomprehending of one another, my hope is that it will contribute to greater mutual understanding and the union for which we all pray. -Andrew Louth Feast of the Virgi,n-Martyr Theodosia of Tyre and Blessed John of Ustiug, Foo/for-Christ, 2005.
INTRODUCTION
Toe period AD 681-1071 defines a natural period for the Byzantine Church and Empire. It begins with the Sixth CJEcumenical Synod, held at Constantinople in 680-81, which condemned the Christological compromises of Monenergism and Monothelitism by means of which the Byzantine emperor had sought to regain religious unity within his domains, and ends with the year in which the Byzantines were defeated by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert, the very same year in which they finally lost any foothold in Italy after their defeat at Bari. These dates define the period of what one might call unequivocally Byzantine greatness. During this period the Byzantines recovered from the disasters of the seventh century and emerged as the most powerful Christian empire on earth, though only a shadow of the Christian Roman Empire that Justinian had reconstituted in the sixth century.
These seventh-century disasters were twofold: first, the loss of the Eastern provinces-Syria, Palestine and Egyptinitially to the Persians, and then, permanently, to the Arabs, who had found a new unity in their embrace of Islam and went on, as the seventh century progressed, to conquer the provinces of North Africa, which had been recovered in the sixth century by Justinian's general, Belisarius; and secondly, the loss of effective control of much of the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, which had been settled by tribes from the Central European plain, mainly Slavs. These losses had severely affected the viability of the Empire. Even Asia Minor, which remained unconquered by the Arabs, found itself constantly harassed by the Arabs, either intent on reaching Constantinople and completing their conquest, or content to loot and destroy.
As well as only exercising a fragile control of the Eastern provinces that remained to it, Constantinople found itself cut off from its provinces in Italy, still under Byzantine control through the exarch in Ravenna. It is hardly surprising that in the course of the seventh century, emperors seriously considered abandoning the capital in favour of somewhere more remote from the threat from the East: Carthage or Sicily.
As the Byzantines regained power and confidence, they experienced a cultural renaissance, a growth in population, and a revival of monasticism. They regained control of that part of the Balkan peninsula now known as Greece, by conquest and resettlement, and the prestige of the revived Byzantine Empire led to the expansion of Christianity into the newly emerging Slav nations, first in Bulgaria, then a century later in Russia. Towards the end of the tenth century, the Byzantines, now well established in the southern Balkans, began to recover by military might some of their former territories, incorporating Bulgaria and Armenia into the Empire and conquering parts of Syria beyond the Taurus mountains, reaching as far as Antioch. When Basil II died in m25, the Byzantine Empire was an apparently formidable state, its territory stretching from southern Italy across to northern Syria, with the Danube as its northern frontier.
Its decline from this position of greatness was swift: in fifty years' time, territory over which the Byzantines had any real control had shrunk dramatically. The city of Constantinople retained only imperfect control over the southern Balkans, now open to attack from the Normans of Italy, and Asia Minor, the southwestern half of which had become the Sultanate ofKonya (Ikonion). The period defined by this book is less natural for the Latin West. The beginning makes some sense, for at the end of the seventh century the West consisted of the Christian kingdoms of Merovingian France and Visigothic Spain, both of which were to face Muslim invasions in the next fifty years, with most ofVisigothic Spain yielding to the Moors to form what eventually became the Umayyad Caliphate ofCorduba, together with a Lombard presence in Italy, already beginning to encroach on Byzantine territory and threatening the power of the papacy in Italy, and an emerging Christian nation in England, though this was to begin with less a political reality than an idea in the mind of the learned Northumbrian monk, Bede, still a child in 681.
In the course of the eighth century, the political geography of the West was transformed by the emergence of the Carolingian Empire, Charlemagne being crowned as Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800. Our final date, m7r, only makes sense insofar as marking a point between the emergence of the power of the Normans (conquering England in m66 and defeating the Byzantines at Bari in 1071), and the preaching of the first crusade in the m9os. 1071, however, cuts short the progress of the Papal Reform Movement, or the Hildebrandine Reform-Hildebrand only becom-ing Pope Gregory VII in rn73, and also cuts short the latest wave of monastic reform that would culminate in the emergence of the Carthusians (founded ro84) and the Cistercians (founded in 1098). However, there are plenty of histories that tell the story of the Church in accordance with the rhythms of the West (in fact, virtually all such histories available in the West), so there is room for one that defines its periods according to the rhythms of the East.
It is evident, even from the sketch given above, that in our period Christendom is beginning to split into what may be called "Greek East" and "Latin West": that is, into two Christian civilizations 1 that, for all that they shared in common (and that was a very great deal), were beginning to define themselves differently, and sometimes in opposition one to the other. The epithets "Greek" and "Latin" begin to make sense: the Christian civilization centred on Constantinople was Greek-speaking and used Greek for all official purposes; the Christian civilization that was emerging in the West used Latin for legal purposes and in the liturgy of the Church and, even though various vernaculars were used- Teutonic languages in the North, Latin-based emergent "Romance" languages in the South-Latin was the lingua.franca of the educated (education being almost entirely in the hands of the Church).
Communication between these two sister civilizations-which certainly did not think of themselves as separate-was profound, but it now depended on those who had command of both languages, of whom there were plenty, especially in the West, though probably in diminishing numbers as the centuries passed (contact in forms that avoided the "linguistic filter"-art and maybe musicwas much easier). All this is in some contrast with the multi-cultural civilization of the earlier Byzantine or Roman Empire, on which John Meyendorff laid such emphasis in volume II of this series. The Church in the fourth to the sixth centuries had benefited greatly from the multi-culturalism of the Roman/ Byzantine Empire, particularly in the East with vernacular forms of Christianity emerging using Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, and just beyond the borders of the Empire, Armenian and Ethiopic. The monastic movement owed a great deal to what is often, rather unfortunately perhaps, thought of as the "periphery," as did the development of Christian art.
The development of Greek liturgical poetry-and perhaps liturgical music-was deeply indebted to the highly developed tradition of Syriac liturgical and theological poetry; St Romanos the Melodist, a native of Emesa, the greatest writer of kontakia, is the most notable example of the link between Syria and the capital in his context. The support heresy found on the periphery-whatever the reason for this-certainly also contributed to the refining of Christian Orthodoxy. The loss of this multi-culturalism was a diminishment for the surviving Byzantine Church and Empire, though it was not total, for there continued to be links between those Byzantine Christians who found themselves living under Arab rule and the Byzantine capital, at least for a few centuries. In the Latin West the situation was rather different. Whereas the structures-political, fiscal and also educational-of the Empire continued in the East, in the West these had mostly collapsed, and though the barbarian kingdoms in the West were eager to define themselves in Roman political terms (what others were there?), these had to be recovered, or reinvented.
The Church was the only institution surviving from the Roman Empire, so it inevitably came to play a major role in reconstituting these relics of Romanitas into a Latin culture. The kingdoms of the West, however, represented a variety of cultures, and these had their effect on the emerging culture of the Latin West. At the commencement of our period we find Bede in Northumbria beginning to create a vernacular Christian culture in Anglo-Saxon, with some translations of the Scriptures and prayers in Anglo-Saxon; we also find some vernacular expression of Christianity in Irish, but these seem to be exceptions: the flowering of the latent multi-cultural diversity of the West did not take place until after the end of our period. The principal factor in the transition from multi-cultural Byzantium to Greek East and Latin West was the rise of Islam and the Arab destruction of the stability of the Mediterranean wodd in the seventh century.
The conquest of the Eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire and the collapse of the Persian Empire took place in an astonishingly short space of time: within barely a dozen years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the Arabs controlled Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and in 661 the Umayyad Empire had emerged with its capital at Damascus, which eventually stretched from Spain to the Hindu Kush. The Umayyad Dynasty, with its successorsthe Abbasid Empire with its capital in Baghdad and Ottoman Empire with its eventual capital in Constantinople-was to alter the political geography of the Mediterranean world and the Near East forever. Whatever doubts there may be about details of Pirenne's famous "thesis,"2 there can be little doubt that his central perception of the significance of Muhammad and the rise of Islam for the division of Christendom remains valid. For the whole of our period, it could be argued that the centre of the action lay with the huge, and hugely wealthy, Muslim civilization to the east of our Greek East, and that the events of the history of the now divided Christendom were simply reactions to what was taking place in the Dar al-Islam.
This applies, first of all, to the changes that took place in the political structure of the Byzantine Empire that were already under way at the beginning of our period: the move from a system of provincial government, with a clear separation with civil and military authority, to the system of military themes, ruled by a governor (a general or strategos) who combined both civil and military authority and was responsible to a much more centralized bureaucracy, located in the imperial court at Constantinople, administered by the sakellarios and his assistants, called logothetes ("secretaries"). At the head of the Empire was the emperor, a position that had traditionally been that of commander-in-chief, and once again became a post that generally required military expertise, many of the emperors in our period emerging from the ranks of the strategoi who governed the themes.
This produced a curious tension in the "constitution" of the Empire. The early Byzantine period (from Theodosios the Great onwards, if not from Diocletian and the reforms instituted by him and Constantine the Great) had seen a change in the perception of the emperor from a predominantly military man to a figure of the court, instinct with "divinity" increasingly defined in terms of sacred protection by God, the power of the Holy Cross, and the care of the Heavenly Court, that is, the saints and especially the Mother of God, whose particular concern was the "Qieen of Cities," Constantinople or New Rome. This sacred protection was objectified in the rapidly expanding cult of holy images or icons.3 The notion of the emperor as a sacral figure of the court strengthened the natural desire of emperors to establish a dynasty, and our period is customarily defined in dynastic terms. However, the military exigencies imposed largely by the pressure oflslam (though in changing forms) required genuine military competence in the emperor that could not be reliably secured by dynastic means.
What Yie find, then, in our period is sometimes quite extended attempts to preserve dynasties, qualified by the ready acceptance of successful usurpation. Though dwarfed by the Islamic civilization in the East, the parallel civilizations of the Greek East and-after the emergence of the Carolingian Empire-the Latin West became powerful and wealthy Empires, both laying claim to the heritage of the Roman Empire. This sense of a common heritage was the source of enduring similarities, especially those rooted in their common faith, and also the cause of constant frictions.
Their common faith entailed in both cases a church consisting of episcopally governed communities, which were the successors of the poleis and civitates of the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean societies that had preceded it; an investment in monasticism as a home for ascetic endeavour, charitable outreach, a Christian literary culture based on Scripture and the Fathers (and the-Greek or Latin-classics), a source of inspiration and spiritual guidance for the rest of the Church ( ... and also an acknowledged way of disposing of superfluous wealth), as well as, though fitfully, a sense of the missionary task of taking the Christian gospel to those people who had not yet heard it( ... and also a convenient way of acculturation of newly conquered people). Not only did Greek East and Latin West have much in common, the rhythms of their development often seem to match each other throughout our period, producing a series of curious synchronisms. 4 Both societies experienced a literary renaissance in the ninth century, each marked by the abandonment of the old majuscule ("uncial") script for literary manuscripts in favour of the cursive script written in minuscule, not hitherto used for literary texts; in both societies there are synchronisms in monastic reform-St Theodore of Stoudios and St Benedict of Aniane at the beginning of the ninth century, Cluny and Mount Athos in the tenth. The case of missionary expansion is even more interesting; not only are there synchronisms-St Anskar's mission to Sweden and the conversion of Bulgaria in the ninth century, the conversion of Scandinavia and the conversion of Rus' in the tenthbut the very notion of mission as an essential mark of the Church seems to be something that emerges at the beginning of our period.
As Ian Wood has recently pointed out, the first saint's life to portray the saint as a missionary seems to be the Life of St Amandus, dated no earlier than the late seventh century, while the first church history to see the history of the Church as a history of mission is Bede's Church lfistory of the English People, completed in 731.5 What these synchronisms reveal is less easy to discern: in some cases it may be mutual contact, particularly in the case of monastic reform, though the nature of the reform (and even what might be meant by "reform") is somewhat different in East and West. The other synchronisms may rdate to the fact that economic development seems surprisingly to have followed a similar pattern in Greek East and Latin West, producing the same periods of confidence necessary for both cultural renewal and missionary expansion. But whatever these synchronisms reveal, they are certainly striking. Equally, however, there are features of the Greek East missing from the Latin West, and vice versa.
Some are particularly striking. Although women had exercised political power in the West before our period-one thinks of the formidable Merovingian reines-meres, or of the equally formidable AngloSaxon abbesses of royal blood like Hild and JEthelthryth, in our period they are strangely absent. This was not so in the East; the powerful women of the Byzantine court have long been a source of fascination, 6 and in our period there is no lack of them. Each time the icons were restored, it was by a Byzantine Empress-indeed Eirene was the only woman to hold the supreme power in her own right and not as a regent for her infant son. These powerful women have attracted a good deal of attention lately. 7 Heresy is another contrasting feature. In our period, heresy does not seem to have been much of a problem in the West.
There were, of course, theological controversies-about adoptionism in eighth-century Spain, about the nature of the eucharistic presence in ninth- and eleventh-century France, about predestination again in the ninth century-but these controversies only concerned scholars. It is not until the end of the eleventh century that heresy became a wider problem in the West, leading to the setting up of the Inquisition. 8 The story in the East is very different: in our period there is a good deal of evidence for the activities and beliefs of groups such as the Paulicians and Bogomils, and there is certainly a link between Byzantine dualistic heresy (for the Bogomils were definitely dualistic, though it is less clear in the case of the Paulicians) and later Western dualistic heretics, such as the Patarenes and the Cathars. 9
Another contrast between Greek East and Latin West is to be found in the controversy that dominates the history of the Church in the Byzantine world for the first half of our period, namely iconoclasm and its final rejection in favour of a clearly articulated theology of the nature of Christian art. Although the contrast can be exaggerated, it seems dear that the question of the making and veneration of religious images or icons was far more contentious in the Greek East than in the Latin West. The West was opposed to iconoclasm, and the pope had no intention of obeying the imperial edict requiring him to destroy religious images; nevertheless religious imagery does not seem to have been invested with the same profound significance in the West as in the East.
As a result, the emergence from the period oficonoclasm of an Eastern theology of the nature, and indeed necessity, of Christian art meant that the development of Christian art in the East was guided by a much more dearly articulated theology than the development of Christian art in the West from the Carolingian period onwards. This does not mean that Christian art in East and West developed separately: far from it, East and West continued to borrow from each other, but there was a much more clearly defined sense of the purpose of Christian art in the East. This, added to the way in which iconoclasm had led to estrangement between the papacy and the Byzantine emperor just when the papacy needed military support against the Lombards, forcing the papacy into the arms of the emerging Carolingians, means that the iconoclast controversy marks a crucial point in the deepening estrangement between Greek East and Latin West that would eventually lead to the Great Schism.
This schism was never fully effected in our period; as we shall see, the events of 1054 had less significance at the time than has been bestowed on them by later ages. What does happen in our period, however, is the formation-in terms of doctrine, church life as defined in canon law, and liturgical practice-of that Byzantine Orthodoxy which will define the Greek East over against the Latin West. In that definition of Greek East against Latin West, one, at least, of the synchronisms will serve to heighten the contrast. For, as we shall see, the missionary expansion of Greek East and Latin West took different forms. Although, to begin with, both East and West preached Christianity in a linguistically defined form, the experience of Bulgaria, where pagan resistance to Christianity, feeding on Slav resistance to Hellenization, led the Byzantines to accept the idea of Byzantine Christianity in a non-Greek dress, whereas, in the West, to accept Christianity entailed accepting the Latin culture-which was also a clerical culture-that went with it.
In opposition to the Latin West, there came to be not simply a Greek East, but rather a Byzantine East, that had grown out of the Greek East: a Byzantine East, united by the Byzantine Orthodoxy formed in the wake of iconoclasm, in which those aspects of Christian culture that could slip past the "linguistic filter," namely liturgical ceremonial and the cult of icons, assumed even greater significance, and further heightened the contrast between the two halves of a formerly united Roman/Byzantine Christendom. The greatest contrast, however, between East and West in this period concerns the development of the papacy. At the beginning of our period, the see of Rome had not even effectively established itself as the patriarchate of the West, as Fr Meyendorff emphasized in volume II of this series; particularly in the wake of the condemnation of the Three Chapters at the Fifth CIEcumenical Synod in 553, the pope found himself unable to exercise theological leadership in the West. This failure was even more manifest in the seventh century, for it was Pope Honorius himself who seems to have proposed the Christological compromise of Monothelitism, for which he was condemned, along with a number of patriarchs of Constantinople, at the Sixth CIEcumenical Synod, Constantinople III, though the papal reputation for Orthodoxy had been restored by Pope Martin, who called the Lateran Synod in 649 and for his pains died as a confessor in 655.
The pope's reputation as guardian of Orthodoxy was further enhanced in the course of the iconoclast controversy, a fact of great importance to St Theodore of Stoudios, and in the wake of that controversy the papacy began to articulate claims that the Church of Rome was mater et caput ecclesiarum, and involved itself directly in the affairs of the patriarchate of Constantinople, claiming the right to adjudicate over elections to the see of Constantinople. Such claims were resisted, not only by the Byzantines, but also by some of the bishops of the Frankish Empire. In the tenth century, a period of scandal for the papal throne, the papacy was in no fit state to exercise itself over such claims, but by the eleventh century, a revived and purified papacy once again began to make claims to authority over the whole Church, in virtUe of being successor to the Apostle Peter. The establishment of what has been called a Papal Monarchy was part of the programme of the Hildebrandine Reform, and it was resistance to these claims that lay at the root of the growing rift between Greek East and Latin West. We shall now embark on the account of the long process by which, in theological, religious, cultural and political terms, the two paths of Greek East and Latin West diverged from their formerly common route.
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