A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

particular, the Orthodox were never seized by the enthusiasm for the pipe organ which, in the era of Constantinople’s fall,

Linked with the idea of stillness was the characteristic mystical idea of light as the vehicle of

The Transfiguration, already commemorated with greater elaboration in Orthodoxy than in the Latin West, therefore became a favourite Hesychast choice of subject for icons

There may indeed be a direct relationship between the Hesychast approach and Sufism, though there remains controversy as to which way the influence travelled.

If so, it was foolish to suppose that, simply by concentrating in prayer, an individual could perceive something which was part of God’s essence, the Holy Spirit

Barlaam was prepared to affirm in the Western manner that it was permissible to speak of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, even though he loyally affirmed that the original version of the Creed of 381 should be recited without its Western addition.

Augustine resumed his role as a non-person in the theology of the East.43

The last emperors of Constantinople survived as long as they did because of the strength of their city walls, and because between repeated Ottoman sieges, from the end of the fourteenth century, they had agreed to become vassals of the Ottoman sultan.

With ill timing, Westerners were nevertheless beginning to come to the uneasy realization that the Ottoman Turks presented a threat not merely to schismatic Eastern Christians but to themselves,

Filioque clause (this simple Latin word or three Greek words occupied discussions for six months),

Purgatory, the use of unleavened bread, the wording of the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist and the powers of the

the pope’s name was now included in the diptychs, the official lists of those for whom the Church prayed,

Now there were only months left before the Ottomans closed in on Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine had at best eight thousand soldiers to defend it against Sultan Mehmet II’s besieging army of more than sixty thousand, backed by many more miscellaneous supporters.

this final day, 29 May 1453, matins was still in progress in the Great Church at the summit of a city overwhelmed with murder, rape and looting, when the Ottoman soldiers battered down the massive door reserved for imperial processions and overwhelmed the worshippers during their defiant last act of divine praise. The Emperor’s head was stuffed with straw and paraded around the cities of the Muslim world; his dynasty was scattered from the city of Constantine.

despite the usual papal efforts to summon a crusade to attack the city, really there was nothing now to be done apart from mourn for the city and fight to stop the Ottomans moving any further west.

restricted dhimmi status (see p. 262) as a millet (distinct community) with the Oecumenical Patriarch at their head, and soon they found themselves ranged in Constantinople, Greece and Asia Minor alongside another rapidly growing group under a dhimma, Jews from Western Europe.

In Thessalonica, Jews remained a majority of the population until the arrival of huge numbers of Greek refugees in the tragic events of 1922–3 (see pp. 924–5), prior

sources of irritation to Orthodox such as Serbs, Bulgars or Romanians, who were also placed under the ultimate jurisdiction of the patriarch. Meanwhile the patriarch’s supposed authority was constantly undermined by the fact that he was at the mercy of the sultan.

The disaster only confirmed the end of the period of radical innovation in Orthodoxy, which had lasted from the iconoclast controversies of the eight and ninth centuries down to the affirmation of Hesychasm in 1351. It is worth speculating on how different the Orthodox mood might have been, how much openness to change and new theological speculation might have developed, if Byzantine Orthodoxy had not been so much on the defensive from the fourteenth century down to modern times.

Lucaris was unusually cosmopolitan for a senior Orthodox churchman.

Lucaris was one of those creative figures condemned to live at the wrong moment. His enemies fomented a poisonously anti-Protestant mood in the Orthodox Church, and the Jesuits sealed their triumph over Lucaris as Greek Orthodoxy moved closer to Roman Catholicism during the seventeenth century, encouraged by steady investment by the Catholic monarchy of France, both commercial intervention and discreet royal diplomatic support of Eastern Christians within the Ottoman domains (see p. 715). In the sixteenth century, while the Ottomans remained a vigorous and expansive military power, Western ability to intervene in the eastern Mediterranean remained limited.

Repeatedly in his text he found the concept of universal Christianity, and wondered how to translate it; he came up with a new Anglo-Saxon word, ‘Cristendom’.

The perpetrators sailed across the North Sea from Scandinavia, and in England they were called Norsemen, Danes or Vikings. They murdered kings, raped nuns, torched monasteries

860 the Rus’ streamed southwards and laid siege to Constantinople itself.

Prince Vladimir was not going to let the remarkable and unprecedented gift of a Byzantine princess slip from

him, and in 988, to reinforce his new alliance with the Emperor, he abruptly ordered the conversion of his people to Christianity, himself taking the baptismal name Basil

The churches of Kiev and its imitators sprouted multiple domes or cupolas in a fashion which went beyond their more sober Byzantine models, perhaps because in the first instance timber buildings made this elaboration a more practical possibility, and then the developing architectural fashion gave a spur to stonemasons to reproduce the same effect.

time from its first development in the twelfth century, the iconostasis (see pp. 484–5) became an even more formidable feature in Russian churches than in the Greek tradition: where the Byzantine iconostasis customarily had three tiers of images of the saints, the Russian equivalent customarily had five by the fifteenth century, and as many as eight two centuries after that

Cathedrals of the Dormition appeared all over the Russian world, each taking its distinctive (and, it must be said, basically unimaginative) cuboid design from the original in Kiev.

Boris and Gleb can be seen as an example of a phenomenon common in the popular religion of medieval northern Europe generally, Latin as well as Orthodox: the feeling that those who met a violent and premature end for no good reason deserved to be regarded as saints.

A parish priest in Moscow familiar with both East and West once observed to me that the Western reaction to a problem is to look for a solution; the Orthodox are more inclined to live with it.

It was easier for the Eastern tradition of ‘synergy’, or cooperation with divine grace, to warm to the theme of self-emptying than for Westerners drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s crystallization of the doctrine that original sin had irredeemably tainted all human effort.

the Holy Fool.

The first recorded local fool was Isaakii (d. 1090), who thoroughly disrupted life in Kiev’s Caves Monastery before lapsing into passive introspection as a hermit.

look beyond the rational in spirituality.

Individual introspection and wild individual extroversion pointed to a common core in kenotic spirituality, and they both complemented the ordered corporate solemnity of the Orthodox liturgy.

thirteenth century, once Latin bishops in eastern Europe made it quite clear that they regarded the Church of Kiev as heretical and started poaching on territories within its jurisdiction.19 By that time, Rus’ had been transformed by that same force which so devastated Asian Christianity: the westwards sweep of the Mongols, or, as they were known in northern Europe, the Tatars.

Their assault in Hungary has been estimated to have caused the premature death of around 15–20% of the population, obliterating a whole set of relationships between Kievan Rus’ and communities and networks of trade on the trans-Danubian Hungarian plain.

They demanded little more than regular infusions of tribute and an equally valuable commodity: prayers for their khan from the Christian clergy.

crucially making no effort to curb the Christian use of icons.

They assiduously cultivated the Kipchak Khan, regularly visiting him and leaving their sons as hostages; right into the fifteenth century they paid tribute to the khan and customarily maintained prayers for him in the Church’s liturgy. Similarly in the late fourteenth century, when Moscow started minting its own coinage, many of its coins bore Arabic inscriptions

Of all the various powers in the Baltic region and the east to the Urals, an informed observer of east-central Europe in the late fourteenth century would have pointed to Lithuania as the most likely to emerge as supreme.

from 1363 Kiev itself was in the hands of the Lithuanians.

known to anglophone history as ‘the Terrible’.56 Even by the poisonous standards of the Muscovite Court, few rulers have had an experience of brutality in their formative years appalling enough to equal Ivan’s. A

Around 1560 Ivan’s reign took a dark turn amid growing political crisis. The death of his first wife, whom he seems to have loved genuinely and deeply, was soon followed by the death of his brother and of Metropolitan Makarii. There was plenty in Ivan’s previous career to anticipate the violence which he now unleashed, but the scale of it all was insane, worthy of the ancestors of the Tatars over whom he had triumphed

Tsar poured resources into new monastic foundations in what is likely to have been an effort to assuage his spiritual anguish (exacerbated by his murder of his own son in 1581),

it became the Patriarchate of Moscow. The occasion was an unprecedented visit to northern Europe by the Oecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II, desperate to raise money for the Church of Constantinople. When Jeremias eventually reached Moscow in 1588, he was given a fine welcome, but after nearly a year of entertainment, it became clear to him that his parting might be even more considerably delayed if he did not give his blessing to a new promotion for the metropolitan to patriarch.

Moscow was the only centre of power in the Orthodox Church which was free of Muslim rule.

Given the commanding political position of the nobility, principally thanks to the fact that it would now collectively choose the monarchs of Poland-Lithuania by election, it was impossible to impose uniformity on the patchwork of the Commonwealth as many Western political authorities were trying to do, with varying degrees of success.

Protestantism made strong advances in the 1560s and 1570s, but mostly in a restricted social sphere of landowners and prosperous and educated people.