Download PDF | (Byzantina Australiensia, 10) Pauline Allen, Elizabeth Jeffreys (eds.) - The Sixth Century_ End or Beginning -Brill (2017).
346 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The twenty-two papers contained in this volume are intended not as published conference proceedings but rather as a collection of essays focused on a theme. Indeed, although the majority were delivered at the conference held by the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies in Brisbane in 1995, six of them, those by Barry Baldwin, Daniel Callam, John Chryssavgis, Michael Maas, Mary Cunningham and Karl-Heinz Uthemann, were not read on that occasion, but were offered by their authors as contributions to a study of the sixth century and the extent to which it can be viewed as an end or a beginning.
The choice of this theme is partly an obvious one, given that the preponderance of Byzantine scholarship in Australia focuses on late antiquity and the transition to the Byzantine Middle Ages. Partly, however, it offers a timely occasion to reflect on the strides that have been made in our understanding of the sixth century over the past three or four decades. During this time we have seen the publication of both important text editions (those of the works of Ps. Denys and Romanos come to mind as examples) and monographs, translations and commentaries (it is appropriate to mention here the outcomes of the Australian Malalas project). In addition we have witnessed a growth in awareness of the significance of oriental sources, whether written, monumental or pictorial, for the study of early Byzantium.
Then too the concerted attention which the process of transformation of the seventh century has recently been receiving from Byzantine and other scholars incites a fresh attempt to consider the sixth century in context. If further justification were needed for the suitability or topical nature of the theme, one would only have to adduce the European Science Foundation project on the transformation of the Roman world from the fourth to the eighth centuries, coordinated by Evangelos Chrysos, one of the participants at the Brisbane conference. All of these developments denote that we cannot limit a consideration of the significance of the sixth century for the late antique world and for Byzantium to political events and warfare. Our horizons have to be much broader. The historical perspective, based on a sensitive reading of texts and due recognition of their genres, is essential. So too must we engage in the vexed question of literacy and education: how much continuity can we expect between the literary awareness and education of an increasingly Christianised late antique society and its classical or post-classical predecessors?
This was a society, too, which incorporated a new, powerful and sometimes dangerous element which could not be counted on to support the arrogation of ecclesiastical powers by the state - namely the monks and holy people, who communicated their values to the community at large. Nor can we neglect the theological factors in play after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the seeming polarisation of the adherents of the one-nature and two-nature christologies: one of the questions to be faced is how the theological debate and religious practices changed after this impasse was reached, and how these changes impacted - if indeed they did - on the lives of the great majority of the population.
Then again any transition or transformation which happened in an urban society on a large scale we would naturally expect to find reflected in the art and architecture of the time; more specifically, we need to examine whether the transformation of pagan urban life in the late antique period affected architecture, monuments and other artistic productions in the sixth century, and where possible to make sense of these changes against the background of the fifth and seventh centuries in particular. A further consideration in any modem approach to the sixth century is the extent to which climate affected, contributed to or was responsible for historical events. While these avenues of investigation are by no means exhaustive, they are a tall order. All of them are addressed in the present volume. In the first paper by Philip Rousseau, with which the conference opened, we find the scene set for an examination of the sixth century by means of a wide-framed picture of the fifth century, its geopolitical axes, and the major problems raised by the Vandals and the Ostrogoths which became Justinian's legacy.
Here it is argued that the division between East and West was not of major significance; a much deeper conflict existed concerning the nature and control of authority in the Mediterranean world, •a conflict carried forward partly under the banner of Christianisation•. Since the reign of Justinian is inescapably a focal point in the study of the sixth century, it is not surprising that the next four papers, which are historico-textual in nature, set about either re-assessing aspects of this reign or of literary works produced in it. Roger Scott proposes a case for modifying our implicit ranking of our sources for the period, in particular recognising Theophanes' Justinian as a later construct and preferring Malalas as the author who tells us most about sixth-century attitudes. Procopius, the official historian of Justinian's reign, is presented by Katherine Adshead in her re-assessment of Procopius' writings not as a Jew, a pagan or a pious and conventional Christian, but as a crypto-Samaritan, a member of a sect which in the sixth century comes close to a disastrous end itself.
Michael Jeffreys, noting that the sixth century marks the end of reliance on histories and the beginning of dependence on chronicles, challenges two long-standing conclusions of J.B. Bury over Malalas' account of the Nika riot. For her part, Elizabeth Jeffreys stresses that Malalas' Chronicle is the end of late antique chronographical writing and a beginning as well, in that Malalas in his tum was recycled by subsequent chroniclers. As a concrete example of how Malalas worked, she offers a detailed commentary on Book I. In the second group of papers we find literary and cultural developments in the sixth century assessed on the basis of epic and epigram. Wolfgang Liebeschuetz takes the mid-fifth-century epic of Nonnus as a case study, in order to show how first mythological poetry and pagan imagery disappeared from secular writing, then secular writing itself evaporated. The crucial period in this dramatic transformation, he argues, is the second half of the sixth century. Some of the literature which came to fill the vacuum left by the demise of pagan writing is treated by Barry Baldwin in his examination of Book I of the Greek Anthology - a collection of one hundred and twenty-three epigrams, mostly anonymous, devoted to Christian themes.
Here the links in the history of the Greek epigram are traced from classical times to the period in which the Anthology was compiled, and the author observes: • As so often, the sixth century is Janus-like, looking to the pagan past and the Christian future-. In the late flowering of the Greek epigram in the second half of the sixth century, particularly in the compositions of Paul the Silentiary, Ian Martlew detects a living form of poetry, albeit restricted to a literary elite with close connections to Constantinople, which continued to exercise an influence on Byzantine intellectuals well into the seventh century. The growing maturity of the monastic movement in the sixth century forms the backdrop of the third group of papers. One of the great •discoveries• of modem sixth-century scholarship, the works of Ps. Denys, are compared by Daniel Callam with earlier monastic writings, where hermits are represented as achieving Christian perfection outside the sacramental system. In the more mystical and theoretical works of Ps. Denys, on the contrary, the emphasis is on sacramental integration, such that monasticism ceases to function as a structure parallel to the Church as a whole.
This interpretation is substantiated by Kathleen Hay's case study of the workings of power in monasticism, in which she argues for the impact of St Sabas and his Palestinian monasteries on the wider Christian community. By assuming a leading role in theological, political and social affairs, far from being removed from society like some earlier monastic groups, monks and their hegoumenoi were able to influence decisions and events in their own times. None of this, to be sure, eliminated the one-to-one role of the monk and holy person in spiritual direction, which is the topic of John Chryssavgis' contribution to this volume. He points out that sixth-century monasticism in Palestine constitutes a link between the earlier Egyptian movements of the third and fourth centuries and the later Byzantine developments of the seventh and eighth centuries. With regard to spiritual direction the Palestinian tradition is very much a continuation of fifth-century desert spirituality.
Various aspects of the sixth-century transformation in religious thinking and practice are brought together in the next group of papers. Michael Maas makes a study of the lnstituta, a treatise on biblical exegesis composed by Junillus Africanus, one of Justinian's quaestors, and demonstrates how, even while using exegetical methods appropriated from the Syrian School, Junillus is able to arrive at doctrinal and legal positions which conformed to those of Justinian's court. The Jnstituta are presented in this paper as an illustration of the fusion of Christianity and political identity in early Byzantium. Also writing on the subject of exegesis, Corrie Molenberg asks why, with the exception of the works of Narsai, no specimen of East-Syrian (Nestorian) exegesis from the sixth century has come down to us in its original form. In reconstructing what happened between the fifth and the eighth centuries she suggests that the sixth century was a turning-point, at which East-Syrian theology was strong enough to stand alone, and even to incorporate spiritual interpretations. At the less learned end of the theological spectrum the homily was also undergoing changes in the sixth century, as Pauline Allen points out in a study of the homilies of Severus of Antioch. In the mariology and angelology found in these homilies we have a blend of formal and "popular- theology which seems to be part of a homiletic phenomenon in evidence particularly in the sixth century.
In her paper on Byzantine homiletics, Mary Cunningham develops this point, proposing that the varied nature of sixth-century homilies perhaps indicates a period in transition. She notes a loss of variety, spontaneity and topical relevance after this time and concludes that the surviving homiletic corpus after this turning-point is •1argely dependent on a process of selection which probably began in the eighth and early ninth centuries•. In his investigation of the process of transformation in sixth-century dogmatic theology Patrick Gray uses the image of the tunnel, at the end of which we perceive a new kind of scholastic dogmatic discourse, of which the works of Leontius of Jerusalem are an example. While this radical development represents an end to the age of the Fathers, it also opens the way to the Byzantine future and an emphasis on spiritual and liturgical theology. The interaction between theology and art is the subject of the next paper, in which KarlHeinz Uthemann explores whether neo-Chalcedonian christology had an impact on pictorial representations of Christ during the reign of Justinian. He discusses the influence of imperial iconography on depictions of Christ, particularly as Pantocrator, as crucified one or transcendent one, and concludes that these images characterise the sixth century as the threshold of an epoch. We have now made the transition to the art and architecture of the sixth century, which are discussed in the following three papers. Joan Barclay Lloyd shifts our focus from New Rome to Old Rome in order to discuss the seeming contradiction between the physical decline of the ancient city and the new monuments which were provided through papal artistic patronage.
She contends that the pontificate of Gregory the Great marks a significant point of transition between the world of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. By contrast, the picture which the ninth-century abbot Agnellus paints retrospectively of mid-sixth-century Ravenna is almost that of a golden age, as Ann Moffatt demonstrates in the next paper. In relating the history of the orthodox bishops of Ravenna and manipulating his sixth-century evidence in order to exclude Ostrogothic activity, Agnellus was at pains to show that the sixth century was not an end, much less a beginning, but part of the Roman Empire, the end of which he saw looming in his own day. Perhaps the abbot can be excused for failing to detect the •accelerated transformation• of urban space that Michael Milojevic argues in the next paper was part of the proto-Byzantine phenomenon. For although in sum the change effected in the sixth century was momentous, the transformation of late antique urban space occurred throughout the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries through the definition or construction of urban peripheries, the re-use of key buildings and the •incremental compartmentalisation and interiorisation of public space•.
That no modem approach to ancient times is complete without recourse to historical geography or climatology is demonstrated by the final contributions to the volume, made by Paul Farquharson and Johannes Kotler. Paul Farquharson's interim report on his analysis of literary accounts of atmospheric and climatic phenomena discloses that the upper-atmosphere event of 536-537, when, according to the sources, the sun and moon were darkened, had a great impact on communities in the northern hemisphere. This phenomenon, he suggests, may also have influenced Byzantine history in the remainder of the sixth century. By adducing palaeogeographical and palaeobotanical data Johannes Kotler contends that the coincidence of natural and remarkable climatic phenomena with political and military events in the first half of the sixth century is important.
He argues further that, in assessing this period, we should note the effects which immigration from central Asia, caused by even insignificant climatic oscillations, could have on the long-term demography of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterraean. Yet no ringing and unanimous conclusions are reached in these papers. Some argue that the sixth century does indeed mark a decisive moment when new patterns emerge; for others it is a period of transition and transformation; for yet others no significant change can be observed. We hope, however, that these varied approaches will contribute to further developments in our understanding of this period.
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