A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Court language of the Khazars remained Hebrew and their mass conversion became one of the most significant (though often overlooked) moments in Jewish history.

Glagolitic did have a long-term survival, but mainly in relation to Slavonic liturgical texts. It was also adopted alongside Cyrillic for the Bulgarian liturgy by Khan Boris-Michael, who is likely to have seen the value of these innovative alphabets and the vernacular literature which they embodied as a way of keeping a convenient distance from both the Franks and also his eventual patrons in the Church of Constantinople.

Opponents objected that there were ‘only three tongues worthy of praising God in the Scriptures, Hebrew, Greek and Latin’, on the grounds that these were the three languages affixed to Christ’s cross.

Yet that tangled history does not render totally absurd Orthodoxy’s pride in its uniformity of doctrine. Schism is not the same as heresy. The doctrinal disagreements and affirmations from the time of Justinian to the Triumph of Orthodoxy have (partly by dint of a good deal of selective writing of Church history) produced a profound sense of common identity across cultures. They are bound together by the memory of the worship in the Great Church in Constantinople, by a common heritage in the theology of such exponents of theosis as Maximus the Confessor, and by the final crushing of iconoclasm in 843.

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.1 The scale of the area comprehended by the ancient and medieval walls still has the power to astonish as one walks across it: in societies which were overwhelmingly rural, the first experience of ‘the City’ must have been like a moon landing.

He emphasized the tradition of his day that monks who were not ordained could offer forgiveness to penitents, as part of a wider theme that ‘ordination by men’ was not the same as appointment by God through the Holy Spirit – not a comfortable theme for the Church hierarchy.

Behind the course of the Fourth Crusade lay the ambitions of Venice for expansion in the eastern Mediterranean.

As before in Byzantine history, when secular administration decayed, monasteries flourished. Mount Athos, now the most prominent survivor of the holy mountains, remained independent of Ottoman rule until as late as 1423, assiduously cultivating the Muslim authorities which had by then encircled it for more than half a century.

It is significant that, when given the choice in 1423, the Athonian monks preferred the Muslim overlordship of the sultan to a chance which they were offered of rule by the Venetians: the thought of Latin overlordship by the conquerors of 1204 was repulsive to them.

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. It aids the spiritual eye to see something more real than that which it conceals from the human eye. Moreover, in developed form, the iconostasis is the culmination of a set of steps which symbolize the ascent of the soul towards heavenly joy.

Influences went in both directions, with Venice and its newly acquired colonies as one of the main conduits – literally in the case of a large number of art objects, which in Venice included not merely the famous four antique bronze horses stolen from Constantinople during the sack of the city, but a huge number of marble blocks and carvings which were shipped around the Greek coast and up the Adriatic to transform the exterior and interior of St Mark’s Cathedral.

Naturally, that meant that he translated Augustine’s views on Filioque, although in a puzzle which has not yet been resolved, he also wrote two treatises attacking the doctrine.35

my kind of thinker

an Orthodox monk from Calabria, the religious frontier land in Italy where Byzantine and Latin monasticism existed side by side.

For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo-Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence. 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 itself. To expect to achieve this was to confuse creator and creation.

and even wholly rejecting the control of reason in their search for God. Such excesses would jettison a tradition of purposeful meditation which ran back all the way to Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth century, and which Orthodox mystics had treasured ever since, even when the memory of Evagrius himself had been blackened.

In retaliation, Palamas and his admirers said that Barlaam was a mere rationalist who was reducing any talk of God to the human capacity to grasp only what God was not.

When Prochoros Kydones, who was one of Palamas’s admirers as well as a translator from Latin, tried to use Augustine to defend his deceased master’s theology, he was put on trial for heresy and excommunicated, and henceforward Augustine resumed his role as a non-person in the theology of the East.43

They were very serious in their intentions: the party from Constantinople numbered seven hundred, and included both the Patriarch Joseph and the Emperor John VIII Palaeologos. In fact such a widespread representation of contemporary Christianity had not been seen since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and would not be seen again until the ecumenical meetings of the twentieth century.

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.47 To call it a struggle of Muslims against Christians would ignore the fact that the majority of those fighting for the Sultan were Christian mercenaries.

Throughout former Byzantine territories, as in Constantinople itself, the churches left in the hands of the Christians had to be lower in external profile than any nearby mosques, and church bells or clappers to summon congregations to worship were banned.

greater catastrophe at the hands of the Nazis.56 As had been the case throughout the gradual and piecemeal formation of the Ottoman territories in Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire retained an extraordinary variety of cultures and jurisdictions, with no attempt being made to impose sharia or the customary law codes of Islam as an overall system (although in legal disputes which involved one Muslim contender, Islamic law would apply to the case).

Some became crypto-Christians, and generations were able to sustain such a life for extraordinary lengths of time.

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

Photios’s reaction was characteristically far-sighted: he proposed a religious solution for a political problem. He laid plans for a Christian mission to the Rus’, just as he did for the troublesome Khazars or the Bulgars and Slavs.

conversion as social political control

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 (Vasilii in Russian) in allusion to his new brother-in-law.

And it does sum up two truths: Byzantine Christian culture had created the single most magnificent building in the European and West Asian world, and Kiev was now enthralled by Byzantine Christian culture.

Once Vladimir had secured his bride from a distinctly reluctant Emperor Basil and brought her in triumph to Kiev, he provided her with a setting worthy of her heritage. Kiev soon boasted a stone-built palace complex and the beginnings of a proliferation of stone churches amid its fleet of wooden buildings, remaking the city in a Christian mould. Byzantine in style were the monumental architecture, mosaics and frescoes – naturally no statues – together with the liturgy which they sheltered, but individual features took on a local life of their own.

cultural conversion

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.

injustice over faith?

The polarity in his career between foolery and contemplation is significant, because both approaches to the divine reveal an instinct to look beyond the rational in spirituality.

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

another way of inserting authority into religion. a blessing for the czar

Unsurprisingly, the princes of Moscow modelled many of their political institutions on those of Mongol society, but they also paraded their devotion to the Church traditions of Constantinople. By the fourteenth century, as their territories and influence expanded, the Tatars allowed them to take the title of Grand Prince, and across Europe rulers began hearing of this distant realm called Muscovy.

The grand princes of Lithuania were the last major rulers in Europe to resist making a choice between the three great monotheisms, proudly keeping to their ancestral animist faith.

Yet from the late thirteenth century the metropolitan based himself either in Moscow or Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma, which was also in Muscovite territory, and it became the ambition of the Muscovites to make this arrangement permanent.

a single metropolitan bishop for the whole of russia?

Diplomatic pressure on the Byzantine emperor from Lithuania’s ally the Republic of Genoa (by now a major force sustaining Constantinople’s fragile prosperity) then secured Olgerd a consolation prize in the shape of a metropolitan bishopric specifically consecrated for Lithuania alone.

From 1375 to 1378 there were even two rival Metropolitan Bishops of Kiev, both appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch, but at the solicitation of Muscovy and Lithuania respectively: a strange if temporary anticipation of the Great Schism of Popes which was about to erupt in the Latin Church of the West (see p. 560).

was a significant turning point for Orthodoxy and for the future of Rus’. The claim of the Lithuanian grand princes to be natural successors to the princes of Rus’ now looked much less convincing even to their Ruthenian Orthodox subjects, let alone to anyone Orthodox further east, and the way was open for the prince of Muscovy to take on that role.

loneliness was part of everyday experience even more than is normal for human beings.

huh?

Nevertheless, Sergei’s preference for the life of a hermit was not forgotten, and encouraged others to follow his first example, to the extent that hermits remained much more common in the Russian Church than in the West. Their way of life was generally not much fenced in by a rule: the ordered monastic discipline of the Lavra became one end of a polarity in which, at the other extreme, wandering holy men represented a spirituality hardly in touch with the Church hierarchy. Such maverick figures had a personal charisma which, like that of prophets in the first days of the Christian Church (see pp. 131–2), gave them their own authority, and the institutionally ordered Church in Russia treated them with similar suspicion.

Russian Orthodoxy was in the course of time to develop some surprising identities, in which ordinary people reinterpreted their faith and worship in ways which made perfect sense to them, but took them further and further from the spiritual order and liturgical correctness envisaged by bishops and abbots.

a hermit built his hut in a lonely place and made the place holy, later to be joined by others who created a monastery under some variant of a Stoudite rule. In turn, monks who felt ill at ease in that sort of communal discipline and life were likely to leave, to become hermits in an even more remote area, and perpetuate the cycle once more.

Artists took their models from the Church art of Byzantium, and showed virtually no interest in the rediscovery of pre-Christian Greek and Roman art which was at the same time transforming culture in the Latin Western Renaissance. Originality was not prized; genius was measured by the painterly eloquence and moral fervour with which the tradition could be presented.

It was such a firm conviction in educated Muscovite circles that the Church did not think to prepare any liturgical kalendars for the years after 1492; these kalendars were essential guides to knowing when the movable feast days of Orthodoxy should be celebrated in any given year. Given the absence of any end to the world in 1492, the task had to be hastily undertaken by Metropolitan Zosima himself. But as is usually the way with the non-appearance of the End Times, the disappointed made the best of their disappointment. God’s mercy in sparing Muscovite society confirmed that he approved of the arrangements which Church and emperor were making for its future governance; it

surely there were sceptics

The opposing sides adopted as their symbolic champions Nil Sorskii and Iosif Volotskii, two leading fifteenth-century monks.

tensoons between official structure nd individual retreat

Much of what the sixteenth-century Muscovite Church leadership condemned was simply the energy of popular devotion, creatively extending or modifying the liturgy to suit local needs, or experiencing its own unregulated encounters with the divine.

withoit a strong pastoral system was individual drift encouraged?

and the language of its liturgy and devotion was Old Church Slavonic, which, despite its ancient contribution to rooting Christianity in Slavic lands, now managed to be both increasingly regionalized in usage and remote from the Slavic language of ordinary people.

From 1686, an extremely reluctant Oecumenical Patriarch had little choice but to accept the transfer of allegiance by the Metropolitan of Kiev to the Patriarch of Moscow.

Before 1700, no more than about five hundred printed books had been published in Muscovy, most of them devotional works. By the time he died in 1725, there were around thirteen hundred more, 80 per cent of them on secular subjects.

Church was an organ of government, symbolized by Peter’s decree of 1722 which required priests hearing sacramental confessions to disregard the sacred obligation of confidentiality and report any conspiracies or insulting talk about the tsar to the security officials of the state, under severe punishments for non-compliance.

Russian society was exceptional in contemporary Christendom in the degree of separation between its government and its people. Authority and conformity were the watchwords of both the dynasty and the smallest village, but once local communities had paid their taxes to the tsar, raised troops for his armies, and weeded out troublemakers and criminals, they were left largely to their own devices and to their own traditions of making sense of their often desperately harsh environment.

and also, in a specialized form of welfare relief, free indulgences were offered to the destitute. There were good reasons to cherish indulgences and their sale: they were very useful for fund-raising for good causes, such as the rebuilding of churches or the support of the charitable homes for the elderly and infirm called hospitals (themselves a part of the Purgatory industry, since their grateful inmates were expected to pass their time praying for the welfare of the souls of their benefactors).