Download PDF | Michael Angold - Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081-1261 (1995).
622 Pages
In this major study the theme of'church and society' provides a means of examining the condition of the Byzantine Empire at an important period of its history, up to and well beyond the fall of Constantinople in 1204. Of all the Byzantine dynasties, the Comneni came closest to realising the Caesaro-papist ideal. However, Comnenian control over the Orthodox church was both deceptive and damaging: deceptive because the church's institutional strength increased, and with it its hold over lay society, damaging because the church's leadership was demoralised by subservience to imperial authority. The church found itself with the strength but not the will to assert itself against an imperial establishment that was in rapid decline by 1180; and neither side was in a position to provide Byzantine society with a sense of purpose.
This lack of direction lay at the heart of the malaise that afflicted Byzantium at the time of the fourth crusade. The impasse was resolved after 1204, when in exile the Orthodox church took the lead in reconstructing Byzantine society. '... an admirably comprehensive picture. [Angold's] canvas is broad, and so is his brush; he is the master of the vigorous stroke which blurs the line between evidence and interpretation ... this is not just a book for medievalists but essential reading for all who want to know why the Orthodox church survived the demise of the Byzantine empire, and is still with us.' Paul Magdalino, The Anglo-Hellenic Review 'In this fine work Michael Angold puts forward a major revision of our understanding of the relation of Church and society in the Byzantine empire under the Comneni ... Angold's book is a major achievement: it draws together a mass of scholarship and has an even-handedness that is based on a sure knowledge of the sources' Andrew Louth, Journal of Theological Studies
MICHAEL ANGOLD is Professor of History, University of Edinburgh.
INTRODUCTION
AS I understood it, this book was originally conceived as part of a series on Byzantine church and society. The inspiration was the success of Donald Nicol's Birkbeck Lectures for 1977. These appeared in print two years later under the title Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium.1 But the title is rather misleading. As the author explains in his preface, his book was intended as an exploration of the Byzantine identity, as 'a series of reflexions on the Byzantine character'.* It was not his objective to examine the relations of church and society. He outlined the difficulties that this would have presented. They lie in a blind spot the Byzantines had for the idea of society. Just as they had no word for 'Christendom' so they had no word for society. They thought in terms of Empire and Oecumene.
They assumed an identity of purpose of church and empire. These in their turn subsumed a Christian society, which consequently lacked any clear definition. It is a very real problem that Professor Nicol has outlined with his customary precision.3 It explains why relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of church and society in modern Byzantine historiography. It is easy enough to examine the relationship of church and state, but this is not the same as church and society. Byzantinists have long been aware of the need for a proper investigation of the relations between church and society. But they have come up against a major barrier. This takes the form of identifying orthodoxy and society. Orthodoxy is presented as the ideal, the motive force, and the cement of Byzantine society. The assumption is that the orthodox liturgy was the central fact of Byzantine life; that the orthodox church could count on the automatic devotion of the bulk of Byzantine society at all levels, from the emperor to the peasant and the urban proletariat But this is to subscribe to a Byzantine myth.
H.-G. Beck is the only major modern Byzantine historian to have consistently disputed such assumptions. He has devoted a series of articles to the clarification of different aspects of the relationship of Byzantine church and society. His findings lie at the heart of his Das byzantinische Jahrtausend (Munich, 1978), which has not been as influential as it deserves to have been.4 Perhaps he is too much of an iconoclast He has little time for Byzantine monasticism. Mount Athos is dismissed 'as almost a Nature Park, or better still a National Park'. His key concept is 'Political Orthodoxy'.
This provided the ideological foundation of a totalitarian regime which was identified with a divinely ordained order. For its articulation and enforcement it required the existence of an imperial elite and of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, who were its major beneficiaries and defenders. The 'guardians of orthodoxy' preached the ideal of a harmonious existence under the aegis of the emperor, but this was something of a fiction: there are many instances of friction between the imperial establishment and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 'Political Orthodoxy' was not quite as solid as it seemed.
If there was little open dissent, there was a degree of alienation from the imperial regime and a certain indifference to the hierarchical church in matters of worship and belief. Beck reminds us of the streak of nonconformity which ran through the religious life of the Byzantines. It emerged in a preference for private devotions. This was complemented, as J.P. Thomas has shown, by private control over churches and monasteries. At all levels the church was permeated by private interests. Thomas emphasises an important fact: that Byzantine society had its own stake in the orthodox church.5 Despite itself, orthodoxy was therefore forced to respond to the needs of society. This was not simply a matter of providing the necessary rituals to solemnise the critical moments of any life: birth, marriage, and death. It also involved accepting questionable myths and customs that had little to do with orthodoxy, but much to do with the rhythms of life.
The works of H.-G. Beck and J.P. Thomas allow us to put the history of the Byzantine church under the Comneni into a general context But they do not quite compensate for the lack of detailed studies of the Byzantine church in the period that runs from the triumph of orthodoxy in 843 to the mid-eleventh century. This deficiency can be explained in part by the poverty of the sources. By way of contrast, the Comnenian era is generously supplied. Pride of place should go to the commentaries of Theodore Balsamon on the canons of the church.6
His method required the citing of official documents, imperial and ecclesiastical. The result is that we not only have many official documents, but also a discussion of the problems of the day to which they applied. This gives Balsamon's commentaries an immediacy denied to most canon law. The twelfth century was a golden age of Byzantine canon law. This has been underlined by the invaluable work of Professor Dieter Simon and the Max Planck Institut at Frankfurt in discovering and editing new legal texts from the period.? Next in importance, given the prevalence of heresy under the Comneni, comes the synodikon of Orthodoxy. This was originally a statement of orthodoxy issued in 843 on the occasion of the liquidation of iconoclasm. Under the Comneni this was expanded to include the heresy trials of the era.8
The synodikon is supplemented by Zigabenos's Dogmatike PanopliaQ and by Nicetas Choniates's Treasury of Orthodoxy,10 which contain further accounts and documents of the trials for heresy under the Comneni. The realities of monastic life are exposed in the typika or rules granted to monasteries usually by their founders. These survive in comparatively large numbers from the middle of the eleventh century. They are the foundation of Alexander Razhdan's fundamental study of Byzantine monasticism in its relationship with secular society. He sees Byzantine monasteries reflecting or reduplicating in their organisation features of secular society.11 These typika normally contain a certain amount of autobiographical material about the founder. They therefore compensate for the comparative lack of saints' lives. The Comnenian period is very rich in all kinds of rhetorical and literary materials. The most important for our purposes are collections of the works and letters of a series of bishops: Theophylact of Ohrid,ia Michael Italikos,1 ^ George Tornikes,1 * Eustathius of Thessalonica/s and Michael Choniates.16 Much can be extracted from their works and letters about conditions in their sees, but they are not their working papers nor a record of their judicial and administrative work, of the kind that one might expect to find in a Latin episcopal register.
The nearest approximation to this is to be found in the papers of John Apokaukos'7 and the judgements and legal advice of Demetrius Chomatianos.18 These bishops were active during the period of exile after 1204. They provide the most detailed source of information for the day to day work of a Byzantine bishop. They were Comnenian bishops in the sense that they received their training and education before 1204. Their dossiers illuminate, like no other sources, the realities of the Comnenian episcopate. It was largely on their account that I chose 1261 as the closing date for this study, when 1204 seems so much more obvious a place to end an account of the Comnenian church. But there are other advantages to the choice of 1261: during the period of exile the meaning and direction of change occurring over the Comnenian era become far clearer than they had been in 1204. The period of exile provides a good vantage point from which to survey the developments of the previous century.
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