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The Byzantine Empire - the Christianized Roman Empire - very soon defined itself in terms of correct theological belief, 'orthodoxy'. The terms of this belief were hammered out, for the most part, by bishops, but doctrinal decisions were made in councils called by the Emperors, many of whom invol ved themselves directly in the definition of 'orthodoxy'. Iconoclasm was an example of such imperial involvement, as was the final overthrow of iconoclasm. That controversy ensured that questions of Christian art were also seen by Byzantines as implicated in the question of orthodoxy.
The papers gathered in this volume derive from those presented at the 36th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Durham, March 2002. They discuss how orthodoxy was defined, and the different interests that it represented: how orthodoxy was expressed in art and the music of the liturgy: and how orthodoxy helped shape the Byzantine Empire's sense of its own identity, an identity defined against the 'other' - Jews, heretics and, especially from the turn of the first millennium, the Latin West. These considerations raise wider questions about the way in which societies and groups use worldviews and issues of belief to express and articulate identity. At a time when, with the enlargement of the European Union, questions of identity within Europe are once again becoming pressing, there is much in these essays of topical relevance. Byz.amine Orthodoxies is volume 12 in the series published by Ashgate/Variorum on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.
Preface
Andrew Louth
This volume arises from the Thirty-sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at the University of Durham in March 2002. The title of the Symposium itself posed the question: 'Was Byzantium Orthodox?'; but for the published proceedings it was thought that the title 'Byzantine Orthodoxies' would cause less confusion. The symposiarch was asked to organize the Symposium at barely twelve months' notice, and is grateful to all the help he received from 'old hands' in arranging such symposia. Speed in preparation has, however, been matched by extreme tardiness in publication of the proceedings, for which I apologize, though I could cast the blame elsewhere ... !Nothing, however, would have come of any of my efforts without help from others.
For help in organizing registration, etc., I am indebted to Anne Parker, the Senior Secretary of the Department of Theology (as it then was) in Durham. My (then) graduate students were also unstinting in their help, especially Augustine Casiday, who has provided invaluable help in editing the proceedings, though his assistance extended well beyond that, and Adam Cooper, who more or less took over the welcome of the participants in his gracious Australian manner. The staff of Collingwood College, where the conference was held, was unfailingly helpful, coping without a word of complaint with the constantly fluctuating arithmetic for meals; Collingwood also proved to have an excellent wine cellar! I am also grateful to Canon David Kennedy, among his many duties chaplain of Grey College, for allowing us to use his chapel. The conference was made possible by generous help from a number of foundations. A grant from the British Academy enabled us to bring the Russian Academician, Sergei S. Averintsev, over from Vienna; both his lecture and his presence at the conference were deeply appreciated.
As mentioned elsewhere, since the conference he has sadly died, and this volume is dedicated to his memory. We also received grants from the Leventis Trust, the Hellenic Foundation and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. These enabled us to contribute to speakers' travel costs and to the subsidies needed for students to be able to attend a symposium in today's market-driven world. The tangible, indeed potable, support from John Smedley and Variorum/Ashgate was also much appreciated.
Illness prevented a number of intended speakers being present, and it has not been possible to include here the papers given at the symposium by Glenn Peers and Malgorzata Dabrowska; we are nonetheless grateful for their contribution to the symposium. Two of the papers that appear here were presented to the symposium as communications; I am grateful to Caroline Mace and Dimitra Kotoula for reworking their communications into papers, and especially to Caroline and Fiona Nicks for agreeing at the conference, at a few minutes' notice, to give their papers in the slot vacated by one of the speakers who was - fortunately only temporarily - taken ill. As ever, the communications given by other scholars were integral to the symposium, and abstracts can be found in the Bulletin of British Byzantine Studies 28 (2002), 65-71. There are, as is well known, different conventions for transliterating Greek and Slavonic words and especially names; no attempt has been made to impose an artificial uniformity.
Introduction
Andrew Louth
The notion of orthodoxy is one closely associated with the Byzantine Empire - the Christian continuation of the Roman Empire, as it thought of itsele It was through councils or synods called by the Byzantine or Roman Emperor that orthodoxy was defined and, so defined, it was the system of belief required for full membership of the Empire. Those who failed to subscribe to orthodoxy, thus defined, were scarcely even secondclass citizens of the Empire, the only exception to this being the Jews, who had a clearly defined status as, precisely, second-class citizens: formally permitted to exist and officially free from persecution, they were allowed to practise their religion and continue to worship in their synagogues, but they were not allowed to have Christians as slaves, nor to proselytize, work for the government, teach in public institutions, or serve in the army; nor were they allowed to build new synagogues, or even (in practice) to make major repairs to existing ones - they were to exist, until the second coming of Christ, as a standing witness to the truth of the Gospel they had rejected. Other than the Jews, those who failed to embrace orthodox Christianity were not even granted such second-class status; they had no right to exist, and if they did exist, did so either clandestinely, or because the inefficiency of the Byzantine State was not able to close the gap between theory and reality. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that no significant number of Manichees survived Justinian's persecution of them in the sixth century. Even in the case of the Jews, there were periods, during which serious attempts were made to force on the Jewish community a choice between Christian baptism and death.
The Byzantine Empire was, then, in aspiration at least, an oppressive regime, and if its record of oppression does not match that of such twentieth-century regimes as the Soviet Union under Stalin that may only be because it lacked the machinery of oppression open to modern governments. The place of orthodoxy in the Byzantine Empire raises many questions. There are questions specific to the Byzantine Empire itself: What was this orthodoxy? How was it defined? How did it function within that society? How did it affect relations between the Byzantine Empire and other societies with which it had to do? There are more general questions about why some societies come to value and embrace orthodoxy, while others do not (among which is included the very society of which Byzantium claimed to be the Christian continuation, namely the Roman Empire, which, though oppressive, was not prescriptive in matters of religious belief). The question of orthodoxy can also be subsumed under the question of the place of orthodoxy in Christianity: Why did Christianity come to evolve the notion of orthodoxy (not all religions do - in fact, most do not, including those religions most closely related to Christianity, namely the other great monotheistic religions of Judaism and Islam)? Is it an essential aspect of Christianity (as over the centuries Christians have believed), or is it something accidental that evolved in the peculiar circumstances of the development of Christianity in the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity?
This latter question has been the subject of prolonged debate in recent decades, especially since Walter Bauer's Rechtgliiubigkeit und Ketzerei im iiltesten Christentum,2 first published in 1934, suggested that most early forms of Christianity were heterodox by later standards, 'orthodoxy' being a response to the various forms of 'gnosticism' that prevailed in the second century. A recent collection of essays on the question of Orthodoxy in the early centuries of Christianity formed a Festschrift for Henry Chadwick (1989).3 Another collection on the subject of orthodoxy within Christianity, covering a somewhat wider field, forms the fruits of a collaborative venture between groups of French and American scholars.4
The present collection, consisting of papers given at the Thirty-Sixth Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in Durham in the spring of 2002, concentrates on Byzantine Orthodoxy, principally in its historic form, that is, the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire, understood as existing from the beginning of Constantine's sole rule in 324 until the fall of the city he founded, Constantinople, to the Turks in 1453, nearly eleven and a half centuries later, although a number of papers are either directly or indirectly concerned with the continued, and continuing, vitality of that tradition in the centuries after the fall of Constantinople, and indeed today. The papers have been arranged in three sections: Defining orthodoxy, Orthodoxy in art and the liturgy, and Orthodoxy and the other. A defining moment in definition and proclamation of Orthodoxy for the Byzantine Empire, as well as in its own self-conscious sense of itself as an Orthodox society, was the promulgation of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy in 843, as part of the final repudiation of iconoclasm. This Synodikon - a formal declaration, issued by the Home Synod in Constantinople, presided over by the new Patriarch Methodios - reaffirmed the decisions of the Seventh (Ecumenical Synod that a little more than half-a-century earlier had declared the making and veneration of icons orthodox.
The Synod ikon was largely based on the records of the (Ecumenical Synod, and therefore, not only reaffirmed the veneration of icons, but set that affirmation in the context of a recapitulation of the whole sequence of orthodox definitions and declarations that had occupied those synods accepted as cecumenical, from the first held at Nicaea in 325 under the Emperor Constantine to the last, also held at Nicaea, in 787 under the Empress Irene. It was therefore as much concerned with the doctrines of . the Trinity and of Christology, both of which had been expressly invoked in the debates about the icons, as with a true understanding of the icons themselves. Indeed the debate about icons during the period of iconoclasm had never been simply a debate about the legitimacy of icons.
The very first response to the iconoclast edict of the Emperor Leo III - the work known as the first of StJohn Damascene's treatises Against those who attack the holy images - seeks to present the position of the iconoclasts, not as a mere attack on icon-veneration as idolatry, which is probably what it was to begin with, but a much more comprehensive attack on the fundamentals of Christianity: undermining the key role played by the concept of image or icon in Christian theology, seeking to ignore the significance of the Incarnation, whereby God, in himself beyond any circumscription or depiction, took on a particular human form, which could be circumscribed and depicted, and, in bypassing God's embrace of material, creaturely humanity, offering a purely spiritual conception of Christianity, which John argued concealed an underlying dualism comparable to that of the Manichees. The early iconodule emphasis on the Incarnation, which John made central to his attack on iconoclasm, provoked the rejoinder of the iconoclasts in the reign of Leo III's son, Constantine V, that the very attempt to depict Christ the God-man entailed Christological heresy: Nestorianism, if it was maintained that the icon depicted Christ's humanity apart from his divinity, Monophysitism, if it was maintained that what was depicted was Christ's humanity fused with his divinity.
These arguments, found in Constantine V's Peuseis or Inquiries and reaffirmed iri. the Horos or Definition of the iconoclast synod of Hiereia (754), turned the question of the icons into a matter of Christology, and as such it was to be debated right through to the second period of iconoclasm, introduced in 815 by Leo V. Icons, then, are not just an aspect of what is, or came to be, distinctive about Byzantine Orthodoxy; rather, icons became an emblem of what is, on any reckoning, central to Christian Orthodoxy, namely the confession as Christ as true God and true man. The articles in the first part address various questions raised by the notion of Orthodoxy and its definition. John Behr addresses the fundamental theological issue, arguing against what is becoming a commonplace among patristic scholars, namely that orthodoxy is something that can only be held to have evolved in the fourth century, and is dependent on methods of theological argumentation and, in particular, scriptural exegesis that find little echo in current ways of theological thinking. In a closely argued paper - which is an epitome of something set out on a much broader canvas in the second volume of his multi-volume project The Formation of Christian TheologJ/ - John Behr argues that Christian orthodoxy is rooted in the acceptance of Scripture as the fundamental and indispensable witness to Christ, of which Christ himself is the final interpreter: an understanding - and acceptance - of Scripture, fundamental to Christianity from the time of the Apostles, only lost sight of in the excitement of the last couple of centuries of historical criticism, which still informs the criteria of much English-speaking patristic scholarship, though increasingly questioned by present-day biblical scholarship.
In John Behr's paper detailed historical analysis bears directly on issues of direct relevance for Christian theology today, and in particular on the appeal and challenge of Byzantine Orthodoxy in today's world. For the rest of this volume the discussion is primarily historical, either unconcerned with the continuing tradition of which Byzantine Orthodoxy formed a distinctive part, or leaving such concern for the most part implicit. Caroline Mace's paper addresses an issue that is likely to come to be seen as of defining significance as patristic scholarship seeks to understand the dynamics of theological reflection in the period after the Council of Chalcedon (451), a period that has been opened up by the various parts of volume 2 of Aloys Cardinal Grillmeier's life work- still continuing and being brought to completion after his death by the devoted labours and fine scholarship of Theresia Hainthaler - known in English as Christ in Christian Tradition. 6 For Caroline Mace is concerned with the way in which, in the sixth century, the works of Gregory Nazianzen, by then known as 'St Gregory the Theologian', came to acquire doctrinal authority. The wider significance of Gregory's growing authority, on which Caroline Mace's paper sheds signal light, lies in the fact that the central question for Orthodoxy, in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon, lay in matters of Christological definition, which had been defined at that council in the terms used in the debate between Cyril and Nestorius, terms rather different from those in which Gregory had discussed Christology. That council had, notoriously, settled very little with its Christological Definition, which left the Church in the Eastern provinces of the Empire divided, and also, because of the relatively uncomplicated support it found in the Church of the Latin West, made difficult to the point of impossibility any reconciliation of the Eastern Christians by attempts to reach back behind Chalcedon (such an attempt having provoked the Acacian schism that divided East from the West in the years 492-519).
Gregory was also, perhaps more naturally, involved in the other great question that raised questions of orthodoxy in the sixth century, namely speculations, mainly about the origin of the created order and its final destiny (protology and eschatology), that were associated with the theological speculations of Origen, in which Gregory had interested himself. Gregory's growing authority - witness to which is found in various collections of scholia on his works, far more than are found with any other Father of the Church/ beginning with the so-called Ambigua (or Difficulties) of St Maximus the Confessor, which themselves constitute a theological work of immense stature - had a profound effect on the shaping of later Orthodoxy, something that is still only imperfectly understood. The events of the sixth century make clear the extent to which orthodoxy was defined, on the one hand, in relation to what can either be seen as heresies, or sometimes, more usefully, as competing definitions of orthodoxy, and, on the other hand, by imperial authority, often, though not always, through councils deemed recumenical, convoked by Emperors. In the sixth century, both those whom the Orthodox called monophysites - that is, those who regarded Chalcedon' s language of 'two natures' as entailing a dangerously divided account of Christ and also, perhaps just as important, as constituting a betrayal of St Cyril of Alexandria, soon to be acclaimed throughout the East as the 'seal of the Fathers'- and also the Latins of the West represented alternative ways of defining orthodoxy.
But with this difference: the monophysites were regarded as beyond the pale of orthodoxy, while the Latins were still regarded as within the pale, despite their different doctrinal emphasis (in the sixth century, their adherence to Chalcedon was unproblematic, in contrast to the qualified acceptance in the East, sometimes called NeoChalcedonianism, that represented the kernel of Justinian's religious policy, finding expression, for instance, in the 'Three Chapters controversy' - the condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia and the attacks on Cyril by Theodoret of Cyrus and lbas of Edessa - that was scarcely controversial at all in the East).
How very slowly the differences between 'Greek East' and 'Latin West' developed into something amounting to schism is one of the underlying themes in this volume. Norman Russell's paper on Prochoros Kydones shows how, even as late as the fourteenth century, there were those in the East whose openness to Latin ideas, by now the quite distinctive Latin ideas that found expression in Western Scholasticism, was not intended as any betrayal of Byzantine Orthodoxy, but rather a way of exploring its riches. Byzantine Orthodoxy was, however, a matter for the Emperor. Patricia Karlin-Hayter's paper is concerned with the questions that lay behind the promulgation of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, and in particular with how it functioned as a standard of Orthodoxy. Patriarch Methodius, who had supplanted the iconoclast patriarch, John the Grammarian, is often regarded as a moderate; he was certainly regarded by the Stoudite monks as not sufficiently rigorous in his orthodoxy. However, as Karlin-Hayter points out, his restoration of Orthodoxy was not in the least moderate. Unlike Tarasius after the second Council of Nicaea in 787, Methodius showed little or no mercy towards those who had compromised over iconoclasm; very many bishops and priests were deposed. Karlin-Hayter explores the extent to which Methodius' action was at the behest of the imperial throne, that is the Empress Theodora, acting for her infant son, Michael III.
Though it was often maintained that the triumph of Orthodoxy, celebrated by the overthrow of iconoclasm, was a victory for the monks - an idea enshrined in the Triumph of Orthodoxy icon in the British Museum - the period of iconoclasm in fact saw a strengthening of the power both of the Emperor, despite the fact that iconoclasm had been an act of imperial policy, and also of the patriarchal court, which was closely allied with the imperial court. From 843 onwards, the celebration of the Triumph of Orthodoxy became an annual celebration on the First Sunday of Lent, known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy, at first probably only in Constantinople, but later in all churches throughout the Byzantine world, and later still throughout the whole Orthodox world; it continues today.8 This celebration, with the crowds gathered in Hagia Sophia presumably joining in the roared responses of Anathema, in the case of the condemnation of heretics, named or described, and Eternal memory!, in the case of the acclamation of the Orthodox, must have constituted a kind of act of complicity in imperial Orthodoxy. For the first two centUries, the Synodikon of Orthodoxy remained largely unchanged, but with the accession of Alexios Komnenos additions began to be made to the Synodikon to bring it up to date. First, there were the additions made after the condemnation of John Italos in 1082. Later, further additions were made under Manuel Komnenos, concerning the various theological debates he had fostered during his reign. In both these cases, the additions to the Synodikon highlighted the claim of the Komnene emperors to be guardians of Orthodoxy: an area not covered in the papers of the conference, as it has been thoroughly dealt with in recent works by Paul Magdalino and Michael Angold.9 Still later, in the fourteenth century, final additions were made to the Synodikon, acclaiming the triumph of the Palamites over Barlaam and Gregory Akindynos in the hesychast controversy. The manuscripts Couillard drew on in his edition of the Synodikon show, too, that there were local versions of the Synodikon in which other heretics, such as the Bogomils, were condemned.
A point, relevant to the form of the Synodikon, is explored in Dirk Krausmiiller's paper. For the Synodikon was not simply a matter of doctrinal definition, it was a public dramatic event, involving directly those who participated. The extent to which late antique and Byzantine theological literature is self-consciously literary, deliberately adopting literary genres and employing rhetorical skills, is something that has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. Krausmiiller explores a particular case - the employment of the term BEo-roKos by Theodore of Petrae in his Life of St Theodosius the Camobiarch - suggesting that rhetorical forms are being used to undermine the surface meaning of the text. This is perhaps an example of something one needs to be more aware of in the Byzantine period, namely the use of the theological terminology of Orthodoxy as a disguise for expressing other concerns.
The Synodikon of Orthodoxy was, then, more than a synodal document; as celebrated on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, it became a focus for expressions of Orthodoxy in which, at least in principle, all the citizens of the Byzantine Empire could participate. The second part of this book gathers together papers that discussed the expression of Orthodoxy in art and in the liturgy. One paper consists of a lively discussion by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash) of the curious phenomenon among Byzantine liturgical songs of what he called 'Hymns of Hate', that is hymns in which heresies are attacked and heretics reviled: a phenomenon that seems to be unique to the Byzantines within the Christian tradition, neither the other Oriental Christians - neither those who rejected Chalcedon, now called the Oriental Orthodox family, nor those who refused to accept the condemnation of Nestorius at the synod of Ephesus in 431, the 'Church of the East'- nor the Christians of the West indulge in such 'hymns of hate'. Fr Ephrem's own invention of a Catholic 'hymn of hate', memorably set - and sung - to the tune of Tallis's Canon, only demonstrated how incongruous such a song seemed in Western dress! It is, however, maybe the obverse side of another feature of Byzantine liturgical poetry that is uncommon in the West, at least, namely the precision with which many troparia express Orthodox doctrine.
Take, for example, almost at random, the first Theotokion in the sixth tone: Who does not bless you, All-holy Virgin? Who does not praise your giving birth without travail? For the only-begotten Son, radiating timelessly from the Father, the same made flesh proceeded ineffably from you the pure one, being God by nature, and for our sake having become human by nature, not divided into a duality of persons, but acknowledged unconfusedly in a duality of natures. Beseech him, august all-blessed One, to have mercy on our souls. However, such a difference in content discernible between Eastern and Western hymnography took a long time to develop any strictly musical forms, despite the fact that the contrast between Byzantine chant and Western liturgical music is nowadays, perhaps, what most immediately strikes one about the two religious cultures. Alexander Lingas, in a lecture that cannot be represented in this volume with its full impact, as there were many musical examples, mostly sung by Alex himself, demonstrated how modern musical scholarship has discovered much greater commonality between the liturgical music of the Byzantine East and the Latin West than is suggested by the retrojection into the medieval period of assumptions about music that go back no further than the late eighteenth century - assumptions that see Western medieval music as part of a progression leading through Palestrina and Monteverdi to Bach and Beethoven, in contrast to Byzantine music where no such easy (though misleading) transition to classical and romantic music is possible. In fact, as Alexander Lingas demonstrates, even as late as the fourteenth century, the musical traditions of East and West were closely related and subject to mutual influence. But it was art that provided the immediate occasion for the decisions proclaimed in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, and a central part of the conference concerned the Byzantine understanding of religious art from the first official utterance on religious art, at the Synod in Trullo to the end of the Byzantine period.
In three closely related papers, Leslie Brubaker, Liz James and Robin Cormack took their cue from the central affirmation of the relationship of the Word to God, found in the first verse of StJohn's Gospel. Issues raised include the Trullan Synod's concern for purity in art, which perhaps lay behind the concerns of the iconoclasts, the emphasis placed on tradition by the Seventh CEcumenical Synod and its implications for the role of the individual artist, and the way in which art expressed Orthodoxy in the context of the attempts to heal the schism in the late Byzantine period. The interaction of Orthodoxy and art was a mutual one, in which both sides were affected, for neither Orthodoxy nor artistic style were immutable. A further paper, by Dimitra Kotoyla, discussed the Triumph of Orthodoxy icon in the British Museum and related it to traditions of illustration of the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God, bringing out, amongst other things, something that will come as no surprise to the attentive reader of these papers, that the Orthodoxy proclaimed by the repudiation of icons was deeply bound up with the fundamental doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The third section concerns 'Orthodoxy and the other'. In preparing for the conference, the inclusion of such a section seemed obvious: orthodoxy is a way of defining a community or society through its beliefs in order to mark it off from 'others' or 'the other'. The other could take various forms: Jews, as has been already remarked, constituted an other within Byzantine society; but there were also the 'others' beyond the frontiers of Byzantium. The most important of these was, doubtless, Islam, which in the seventh century had robbed Byzantium of its eastern and southern provinces, and destroyed its traditional 'other', the Persian empire. In supplanting Persia, Islam did more than replace it: its encroachment on traditional Byzantine territory altered the historical geography of the Mediterranean and the East in ways that still endure, as well as at least contributing to, if not (as Pirenne argued) creating, the division between eastern and western Christendom. Islam, as Byzantium's 'other', is a theme worth a conference in itself, and could not have been done justice to in a single paper. There were, however, papers on other signilicant 'others' - the Latins and the Armenians - both of whom threatened Byzantium's claim to Orthodoxy by their own claims to a different understanding of such orthodoxy. But what was not anticipated, at least by the symposiarch, was the way in which all the papers on 'Orthodoxy and the other' discovered an 'other' within, rather than without. Nicholas de Lange's paper on 'Judaism and Orthodoxy' demonstrates how the Christian/Byzantine concern with orthodoxy rubbed off on the Byzantine Jews, who evolved their own notion of orthodoxy, almost as a kind of mirror image: something that seems to be true generally of Judaism within Christian societies.
Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev's paper- the fruit of his prolonged doctoral studies concerning the negotiations between Photios and the Armenians in the ninth century, the evidence for which is preserved much more fully in Armenian - shows how in these negotiations both Byzantines and Armenians were appealing to a largely common group of traditions, conciliar and patristic, in their attempts to express their understanding of orthodoxy, and, to a considerable extent, sought to highlight what they held in common. The Armenians were crucially, though episodically, important for the Byzantines: they were a Christian kingdom, or even empire, that constituted a kind of buffer-state between Byzantium and Islam, at one point reaching through Cilicia to the Mediterranean. Armenian bishops were present at the Council of Ephesus, but not at Chalcedon, and so although they accepted the Formulary of Union of 433, which had been agreed between John of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria as representing the decision of Ephesus, they had not accepted the modification of this that formed the Definition of Chalcedon. Later they threw in their lot with the so-called monophysites (or 'Oriental Orthodox'), but theirs was a tradition that did not so much reject Chalcedon, as one that had never reached it.
The conciliatory attitude towards the monophysites found in such an Orthodox theologian as John Damascene, who maintained that, apart from their refusal to accept the Chalcedonian Definition, they were orthodox, paved a path for Photios to follow. It might almost be said that the aim was so to define orthodoxy that it included, rather than excluded, the Armenians. Tia Kolbaba, who has done signal work on the way in which the Byzantines formulated the 'errors' of the Latins, is concerned in her paper to show how dangerous it is to speak too prematurely of any 'anti-Latin' movement among the Byzantines. Rather it is the case that the Latins were seen to constitute a position within Orthodoxy, though with differing customs on non-essential matters, at least until the twelfth century, when as a result of the crusades the Latin presence in the East made such largely liturgical customs a practical, rather than a merely theoretical matter.
I have left to last mention of what for many was the high point of the conference in Durham: the lecture by the noted Russian academician, Sergei Averintsev. This is partly because it was a high point of the conference, but also because this introduction is being written within days of hearing of his tragic death. Just over a year after the conference - in May 2003- Averintsev suffered a stroke and went into a coma. He never came out of that coma, and died in Vienna, where he had been living for some years, on 21 February 2004. His death is a great loss. Beqmm llaMHTb! May his memory be eternal! During the Soviet period, through sheer scholarship, Averintsev kept the flame of the Orthodox faith alive at the heart of Soviet scholarship. He was primarily a literary scholar, with an astonishing range of learning from the classical literature in which he was trained through biblical and patristic literature to Byzantine, Western medieval and modern, especially, Russian literature; he was a pupil of Losev and Bakhtin, and like them intimations of his faith glimmered through his exacting scholarship (though in his case that glimmer was more a steady flame). His paper at our conference explored what he called, following Pavel Florensky, 'Orthodox taste', a sense, expressed in a predilection for certain themes or values, that seems to characterize the Byzantine articulation of Orthodoxy. For many, he managed, as so often in his articles, to capture the essence of the matter: it was this that lay at the heart of, in this case, the notion of Orthodoxy, something difficult to pin down, betrayed when turned into concepts, but evoked with seemingly unerring sensitivity by the precise examples and comparisons that Averintsev suggested we consider in his lecture.
The papers gathered together here represent a variety of very different perspectives, illuminating, it is hoped, the ways in which Byzantium conceived of Orthodoxy, and valued it, from various angles. It makes no claim to completeness: some of the more obvious gaps have been indicated in the introduction, but completeness in a matter so fundamental but elusive -elusive, perhaps, in fundamental ways -would be beyond the scope of a conference. If it raises questions and suggests different ways of approaching the subject and what it entails, it will have fulfilled its purpose. Durham, 27 February 2004
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