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October 27, 2019
From the eleventh century to the twentieth, the second half of Christianity’s existence so far, the parish was the unit in which most Christians experienced their devotional life. Only now has that ceased to be the case.
at a time when everyone was being called to be holy, celibacy guaranteed that clerics still stole a march in holiness on laypeople.
In many different ways, then, the clergy asserted their power to regulate the lives of the laity, as well as establish their distinction from laypeople, and they took major initiatives to seize and harness the profound changes in European society.
Gregory’s successors took a new title, more comprehensive than ‘Vicar of Peter’, more accurately to express his ideas: ‘Vicar of Christ’. Not merely the successor of Peter, the pope was Christ’s ambassador and representative on earth.
The chief collection of existing laws and papal decisions which codifies canon law comes from mid-twelfth-century Bologna, and goes under the name of Gratian, about whom nothing else is known and who may only have been the mastermind behind one draft of what remained an unwieldy and disjointed document.
After all, the great attraction of pilgrimage was that it opened up the possibility of spiritual benefit to anyone who was capable of walking, hobbling, crawling or finding friends to carry them. But Cluny was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power.
While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers (see pp. 156–7), now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes.
The newly promoted bishop of the city took advantage of a favourable conjunction of politics at the first Council of Constantinople in 381 (see pp. 218–20) to get himself ‘the primacy of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is the new Rome’,1 while his Church did its best to trump Rome in apostolicity by declaring that it had been founded by the first-recruited among Christ’s Apostles, Andrew.
Orthodox Christianity prides itself on its faithfulness to tradition: its majestic round of worship, woven into a texture of ancient music, sustained with carefully considered gesture and choreography amid a setting of painting following prescribed artistic convention, can be seen as reflecting the timelessness of Heaven.
Such liturgical performance of hatred is embarrassing for modern ecumenical discussions among Eastern Christians when it is directed at cherished saints of one of the Churches participating, but it is probably to be preferred to the Western practice of burning heretics.
What Hagia Sophia did do was decisively to promote the central dome as the leading motif of architecture in the imperial Church of the East and in those Churches which later sought to identify with that tradition.
Moreover, following the precedent of Hagia Sophia, the dome became a major Islamic feature in mosques, once mosques became covered spaces rather than open courtyards.
In the East, the celebration was done because it needed to be done – at the worst times in Orthodox history, it has been just about all that the Church has been able to do. Moreover, from an early date, Eastern Christians seem to have concluded that it was enough for worshippers to be present at the Eucharist without receiving bread and wine.
What Justinian was doing in his major programme of building in the capital and the creation of a constant round of sacred ceremony around Hagia Sophia was to make himself and the imperial Court the focus of a society where every public activity which formerly had been part of the non-Christian structure of the empire was now made holy and consecrated to the service of God.
This slow liturgical dance through scripture means that, for better or worse, 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 than is the case in the Western tradition.
Photios was responsible for a literary work without parallel in the ancient world, a summary review of around four hundred works of Christian and pre-Christian literature which he had read in his first three decades of literate life – a feat of reading itself probably unparalleled at the time.
Photios’s periods of patriarchal power coincided fruitfully with the coming of a succession of capable emperors who did much to restore the fortunes of the empire after two hundred years of miseries.
Orthodoxy owes its present cultural extent to his initiatives, which partly account for the dismal reputation that this patriarch long enjoyed in the Christian West.
they devised an alphabet in which Slav language usage could be accurately conveyed. It was given the name Glagolitic, from an Old Slav word for ‘sound’ or ‘verb’. Constantine and Methodios did more than create a method of writing,
They and the Christianized Slavonic language which they represented were to be used not simply to produce translations of the Bible and of theologians from the earlier centuries of the Church, but with a much more innovative and controversial purpose. They made it possible to create a liturgy in the Slavonic language, translating it from the Greek rite of St John Chrysostom with which the brothers Constantine and Methodios were familiar. This was a direct challenge to the Frankish priests working in Moravia, who were leading their congregations in worship as they would do in their own
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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.
On the eve of Western Europe’s rediscovery of Aristotelian dialectic in scholasticism’s creative exploitation of Classical learning (see pp. 398–9), the Byzantine authorities were turning away from the same intellectual resources.
Because each icon in its theologically appointed place reveals and refracts the vision of Heaven, the iconostasis becomes not so much a visual obstruction in the fashion of the Western rood screen, but is actually transparent, a gateway to Heaven, like the altar beyond it.
The word ‘Hesychasm’ probably seems one of the more intimidating fragments of theological jargon to those first encountering it, but it simply comes from the Greek verb hēsychazö, ‘to keep stillness’ (or silence).
Gregory Palamas maintained that in such practice of prayer, it is possible to reach a vision of divine light which reveals God’s uncreated energy, which is the Holy Spirit.
Barlaam wanted to defend his own understanding of monastic spirituality as being true to Orthodox tradition. For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence.
