A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Dionysian theology was also Neoplatonic in its view of the cosmos as a series of hierarchies; it viewed these hierarchies not as an obstacle to God, but as the means of uniting the remoteness and unknowableness of God with the knowable particularity of lower creation,

Repeatedly, Maximus referred to Christians as gods through grace.31

This was partly because of his passionate belief that the Church’s liturgical ceremonies served as a chief means of deification: his writing is at its most personally intense in his celebration of the liturgy’s spiritual riches. He ties every part of its observation into the ascent towards God, culminating in the reception of the eucharistic bread and wine in which ‘God fills [communicants] entirely and leaves no part of them empty of his presence’.

For his opposition, Maximus suffered appallingly on the orders of Emperor and Patriarch: the Confessor is said to have had his tongue cut out and his right hand amputated, to stop him speaking or writing.

Accordingly, Leo began to implement iconoclast policies. The struggle which followed over more than a century was not simply inspired by Islam; it exposed one of the great fault lines within Christianity itself, reflecting its dual origins in Hebrew and Greek culture.

Iconoclasts said that we meet holiness in particular situations where the clergy represent us to God, such as in the Church’s liturgy, so icons are at best irrelevant;

Iconophiles had more to offer. They thought that no officially sanctioned initiative is needed to bring something into the realm of the holy: the sacred can be freely encountered by everyone, because all that God has created is by nature sacred. Everyone can reach God through icons whenever they feel that God calls them.

it would often be mothers or grandmothers who exercised their customary power within the home to take the decision to save the image, and then impressed their love for this private source of divine power on their children.

To begin with, the campaign against imagery and icons probably did not amount to much, little more than a few token removals of prominent icons from imperial buildings and the application of a good deal of whitewash to mosaics. As Leo was succeeded by his equally iconophobic but much more theologically literate son Constantine V, further action was taken.

However much popular support there was for iconophobia, the iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. The policy caused deep offence in Rome, driving popes into increasingly close alliance with the Frankish monarchy

John of Damascus (see pp. 263–4), after a lifetime contemplating and criticizing Islam at close quarters, saw the developing conflict as a familiar struggle. If Muslims despised the veneration of the Cross, he asked in his dialogue with a straw-man Muslim opponent, how did they justify the veneration of a black stone in the Ka’aba?

John was the last Eastern theologian to have a continuous impact on Western Christian thinking until modern times. John was famed in the centuries

he separated a usage between absolute and relative worship. Latreia, worship as adoration, is appropriate only when offered to God; the veneration appropriate to God’s creations is proskynēsis,

Constantine V might nevertheless have carried the day and set patterns for his successor had it not been for the intervention of the Empress Irene, widow of his son Leo IV. Irene became regent for her son Constantine VI on Leo’s death in 780.

when the twenty-six-year-old Emperor Constantine showed signs of wishing to exercise real power, she ordered him to be blinded in the same palace chamber where she had given birth to him, leaving her free to become the first sole-ruling empress in Byzantine history.

This was one of the last occasions when a pope would thus hail the work of a patriarch in Constantinople,

Charlemagne was impelled to condemn the theology of the East which promoted images, and he authorized theological statements which minimized the value of images; they have been known in history as the ‘Caroline Books’

rulers would not stand against the tide.56 The medieval Western Church became as fixated on visual images as Easterners, and given its alternative numbering of the Ten Commandments, it had no inhibitions about continuing to develop a vigorous tradition of figural sculpture. Statues rather than icons became the centre of Latin Western devotion, particularly in cults of Our Lady

The two iconophile empresses had effectively closed down the possibility of alternative forms of worship in the Orthodox tradition. They made veneration of icons a compulsory part of it, an essential badge of Orthodox identity

The liturgical form of hymn which replaced the kontakion was the canon, a set of nine hymns. These sets of hymns originated in Palestinian monasteries

the Orthodox approach the Bible and its meaning with much less inclination to separate out the activity of biblical scholarship from meditation and the everyday practice of worship

There were good reasons for tension between the two outsize egos now presiding over the Church in Rome and Constantinople: at stake was the future Christian alignment of a vast swathe of southern central Europe in the Balkans and along the Adriatic

originally set by Diocletian. The great contribution to the Orthodox future from Cyril and Methodios (and, behind them, their patron Photios) was to establish the principle that the Greek language did not have a monopoly on Orthodox liturgy. So, from the late ninth century, Churches of Orthodoxy

Around the millennium, Constantinople was the biggest city in the world that Europeans knew, with around 600,000 inhabitants. It surpassed Islam’s greatest city, Baghdad, and dwarfed the Latin West’s best attempts at urban life such as Rome or Venice, which at best might each muster a tenth of such numbers.

Nearly all the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine liturgy date from the tenth century, even though they are copying much earlier texts: clearly there was an intense urge now to establish norms behind all

these new texts.3

This was a great age of colonization of ‘holy mountains’, the chief active survivor of which is the monastic republic of Mount Athos, a peninsula thrusting into the Aegean Sea in Greek Macedonia.

now enjoying autonomy within the Republic of Greece. It is the only the state in the world with an entirely male population, including any animal or bird within human control.

the east, a new coalition of Muslim tribes under the leadership of a family of Turks called the Seljuks first overwhelmed the Muslim rulers of Baghdad and then swept into the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire; their Seljuk ruler took the title of Sultan, the Arabic for ‘power’.

The Crusades proved a long-term disaster for the empire, despite the competence of Alexios and his Komnenian successors, who did their best to restore the fortunes of the Byzantine imperial machine during the twelfth century.

That mutual ill-will strengthened as the Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149 failed to achieve its objectives in Palestine and Damascus.

The growing claims of the papacy to universal monarchy were offensive not merely to the Oecumenical Patriarch, but to any Eastern churchman, since the East had remained closer to the older idea of the collective authority of bishops throughout the Church.

One symptom of the growing insecurity in the empire which went right back to the death of Basil II in 1025 was a new-found intolerance of any dissidence to the imperial Church.

By that time, the Second Rome had fallen to the Ottoman Sultan. The roots of its fall lay in the disaster of the Fourth Crusade.

a consortium of Western European crusaders struck an ambitious deal with Venice to build them a fleet and transport them to attack Cairo. It was a reasonable proposition if they wanted to knock out Islam’s chief power and proceed to Jerusalem, and if there were no military operations in Palestine itself, the agreement would respect a truce of 1198 with the Ayyubid ruler in Damascus.

Much worse followed: attacks on Constantinople in 1203 and 1204, horrible deaths in quick succession for a series of Byzantine emperors, including the little-regarded Alexios, the trashing of the Christian world’s wealthiest and most cultured city – in short, countless incentives for centuries of Orthodox fury against Catholics.

Decree 62 of Innocent’s Lateran Council forbade sales and ordered (completely ineffectively) that all newly appearing relics should be authenticated by the Vatican.

1231, when thirteen Greek monks were burned at the stake as heretics for upholding their traditional rejection of the Western use of unleavened

the sense of theological alienation between Greeks and Latins: the Western Church’s elaboration of the doctrine of Purgatory

The balance of forces in Orthodox Christianity was never the same again after 1204. Orthodoxy beyond the Greeks could now fully emerge from the shadow of the empire which had once both created and constrained

Above all, Sava’s immense spiritual prestige gave a continuing sacred quality to the Serbian royal dynasty amid the poisonous divisions of Serbian power politics. His memory became so much part of Serb identity that when the conquering Ottoman Turks wanted to humiliate and cow the Serbs in 1595, they dug up Sava’s bones in Belgrade and publicly burned them.

During the fourteenth century, the Ottomans extended their power through Asia Minor and the Balkans, overwhelming the Bulgarians and encircling Byzantine territory. More and more Orthodox Christians found themselves under Islamic rule,

Already in the 1330s, the shift to Islamic dominance seemed so irreversible that the Patriarch of Constantinople issued informal advice to Christians in Asia Minor that it would not necessarily imperil their salvation if they did not openly profess their faith.31 As before

It was in this age that one of the most familiar features of the Orthodox church interior arrived at its developed form: the iconostasis, a wall-like barrier veiling altar and sanctuary area from worshippers. The word means ‘stand for images’, because now the barrier is covered in pictures of saints and sacred subjects, in patterns which have become fixed in order and positioning.

But the screens in Latin churches were generally open above waist-height to afford views of the high altar; they rarely presented themselves as solid walls in the Eastern manner, except in monastic or cathedral churches where clergy were carrying out their own round of liturgy in an enclosed space inside the church building.

It shelters and defines those liturgical actions only performed at the altar. When it first grew beyond the

Some congregations concluded that it would be more reverent to veil the central parts of worship at the altar, and curtains filled the arcade spaces, to be pulled across at particular times. In other churches, icons were hung from the arcade, or against the curtains if they were now in place, and the screen now took on its character of an ‘icon stand’.

sanctuary, to venerate the icons of the iconostasis. A gateway needs doors. The doors of the iconostasis are important: basic to the structure is a central entrance – the ‘Beautiful Gates’ – which, when open, affords the sight of the altar, and which is flanked by smaller doors – again, of course, all appropriately bearing their icons.

they mark punctuation points in the liturgy which retains the processional quality so important in Byzantine worship from the earliest days of New Rome.

In the charged atmosphere of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, a Greek canon lawyer, John, Bishop of Kytros, could still say that the texts of chants and their melodies were common to East and West.