Civilization

Byzantine Empire

The Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople from the fourth century until 1453 — the medieval keeper of classical Greek learning and of a distinctive Christian mysticism.

The Byzantine Empire is the modern name for the Eastern Roman Empire: the Greek-speaking, Christian continuation of Rome that was governed from Constantinople for more than a thousand years, until the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Its people did not call themselves Byzantine. They were Rhōmaioi — Romans — and held, with reason, that they were not the heirs of the Roman state but the thing itself, unbroken, merely relocated east. The emperor in Constantinople was the Roman emperor; his law was Roman law; his city was the New Rome, named so in the conciliar canons. To them the western provinces had not preserved Rome after the deposition of the last western emperor in 476 — they had lost it, and barbarian kings ruled where Caesars once had. Rome had not fallen. Rome had moved.

The break the name marks is a historian’s convenience, coined long after the empire was gone. Constantine refounded the old Greek town of Byzantium as his capital and dedicated it in 330; the western provinces fell away over the following centuries while the east held. There is no year in which Rome became Byzantium. What slowly changed was the texture. Latin gave way to Greek as the language of state and church — by the seventh century the emperor Heraclius had dropped the old Latin titles for the Greek basileus — and Roman law and administration fused with Greek thought and Orthodox Christianity into something with its own character: a polity that governed by Roman statute, argued in Greek, and worshipped in a liturgy of overwhelming ceremonial weight, ruled by an emperor who was at once head of state and the earthly image of a heavenly order. It was a Christian Roman empire that thought of its politics as a mirror of the cosmos and of itself as the single legitimate empire on earth.

Justinian and the sixth-century settlement

The institutional shape of the medieval empire was set, more than by any other single reign, under Justinian I in the sixth century. He had the whole inheritance of Roman jurisprudence digested and reordered into the Corpus Juris Civilis — the Codex of imperial constitutions, the Digest of juristic opinion, the Institutes for students, and the Novellae of his own new laws — a codification that fixed Roman law as a coherent body and that, when it was rediscovered in the West centuries later, became the foundation of the European legal tradition. He sent his general Belisarius to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths, briefly restoring imperial rule across much of the Mediterranean. And he raised the Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, whose vast dome on its ring of windows seemed to contemporaries to hang from heaven rather than rest on the earth — for nearly a thousand years the largest church in Christendom and the architectural emblem of the empire’s marriage of Roman engineering to Greek liturgy.

It was the same emperor who, in 529, ordered the Neoplatonic school at Athens to cease teaching — the institutional descendant of Plato’s Academy, last directed by the pagan Neoplatonist Damascius, whose teachers and pupils withdrew for a time to Sassanid Persia. The same reign thus presides over two emblematic acts: the closing of the last openly pagan philosophical school of antiquity, and the raising of the supreme monument of Christian Constantinople. The two were not unconnected. The empire was deciding, in stone and in statute, what kind of inheritor of the classical world it meant to be.

The keeper of the Greek inheritance

The empire’s lasting weight, for the history of ideas, lies in what it kept. Byzantine scribes copied and recopied the Greek classics through centuries when the Latin West had largely lost the language; the great majority of ancient Greek texts that survive at all survive because Byzantine hands preserved them — Plato and Aristotle, Homer and the tragedians, Euclid and Ptolemy, the historians and the orators, transmitted across a millennium of minuscule manuscripts copied in monastic and imperial scriptoria. The conversion from the old majuscule script to the more compact minuscule in the ninth century, and the scholarly recovery associated with the patriarch Photios and his vast reading-catalog the Bibliotheke, were acts of custodianship on which much of what is now called the classical canon depends.

In the empire’s last generations this custodianship became a transmission. Greek scholars carrying manuscripts and the living knowledge of Greek westward — Manuel Chrysoloras, who taught Greek in Florence from 1397; Bessarion, who left his great library of Greek codices to Venice; and others in the generation of the Council of Ferrara–Florence in 1438–39 and of the fall of the City — fed the recovery of Greek letters that helped set off the Italian Renaissance, and with it the Renaissance Hermetic and Platonic revival that followed in Florence under Marsilio Ficino. The corpus attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite — anonymous Greek writings of around 500 that wed Neoplatonist metaphysics to Christian worship, surveyed under Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite — was a Byzantine inheritance, glossed by Byzantine scholiasts and carried west, long before it became a foundation of Western Christian mysticism and the European tradition of apophatic theology that descends from it.

Platonism and the Chaldean thread

Within that custodianship ran a more particular and more dangerous current: the continued reading of Plato himself, the most suspect of the ancient authorities, in a culture whose theology was nonetheless saturated with him. This Byzantine Platonism was never a school with a creed, but it produced moments of intense revival. In the eleventh century Michael Psellos, who held the court title “consul of the philosophers,” set himself to recover Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, and in three short treatises he epitomized and expounded the Chaldean Oracles — the late-antique theurgical verses on which Proclus had written a lost commentary. Psellos read them as an antiquarian, not a celebrant; his profession of faith insists on it. But it is through his epitome that roughly a third of the surviving hexameter fragments of the Oracles came down at all, and through which most of Proclus’s exegetical scheme can be reconstructed. The cost of such reading was real: Psellos’s pupil John Italos was condemned at a synod in 1082 for applying Greek dialectic to dogma, his anathemas written into the liturgical Synodikon of Orthodoxy. The same charged inheritance reached its strangest flowering in the fifteenth century in George Gemistos Plethon, who at Mistra re-edited the Oracles under the name of Zoroaster’s Magi and dreamed of a restored Hellenic religion — and whose lectures in Florence in 1439 helped move Cosimo de’ Medici to found a Platonic academy there.

The light of Tabor: hesychasm and the Palamite settlement

Byzantium also developed a contemplative tradition of its own, with its own theological grammar. Hesychasm, from the Greek hēsychia, stillness, was the monastic discipline of inner quiet and ceaseless invocation of the name of Jesus, cultivated above all on Mount Athos and reaching back through John Climacus and the desert fathers to the imageless prayer of Evagrius and the heart-centered piety of the Macarian homilies. Its aim was direct, transforming communion with God. In the fourteenth century the practice became a public controversy when Barlaam of Calabria mocked the monks as navel-gazers and argued, from a strict reading of Dionysian apophasis, that the divine essence is wholly unknowable and any claim to perceive God’s light must be either fraud or confusion of the created with the uncreated.

Gregory Palamas, a monk of Athos and later archbishop of Thessaloniki, answered in his Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts with the distinction on which Eastern theology has rested since. The human person is a unity of soul and body, so prayer is rightly bodily; and what the saints behold is not a created symbol but God himself — the same uncreated light, Palamas held, that the disciples saw on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. To hold this together with the unknowability of God, he distinguished the divine essence (ousia), forever beyond participation, from the divine energies (energeiai), in which God genuinely makes himself known and is truly shared by the deified. The empire’s church affirmed his position in a sequence of synods at Constantinople, the decisive one at the palace of Blachernae in 1351; the Palamite acclamations were written into the Synodikon read on the First Sunday of Lent. The essence–energies distinction became, and remains, the settled dogmatic grammar of Eastern Orthodox theology — the point at which the Eastern road through Dionysian apophasis diverges most sharply from the Latin scholastic one.

Iconoclasm and the image

Two centuries before the hesychast controversy, the empire had torn itself over a different question about the divine and the visible: whether holy images might be venerated at all. The iconoclast emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries, beginning with Leo III, ordered the destruction of icons and the persecution of those who kept them, condemning their veneration as idolatry; the iconophiles, with the monks of the empire and theologians such as John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite at their head, defended the image as a window to its prototype and a consequence of the Incarnation itself — God having taken visible flesh, he could be depicted. The Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 restored the images; a second iconoclast wave was ended in 843, the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” still commemorated annually. The dispute was, from the inside, a contest over heresy and the limits of the sayable about God, and it left the Orthodox world with a theology of the icon as central to its worship as any verbal creed.

The long estrangement and the fall

The relations between Eastern and Western Christendom soured across the same centuries that produced these settlements. The estrangement was doctrinal — the Latin addition of the filioque to the creed, the claims of the Roman papacy over the whole church — and it hardened from the mutual excommunications conventionally dated to 1054 into open wound when a Western crusading army, diverted from the Holy Land, stormed and sacked Constantinople in 1204, installing a Latin emperor in the City and carrying off its relics and bronzes to the West. The empire was restored in 1261, but it never recovered the wound; the reconquered state was a fraction of its old self, hemmed by Latin powers and by the rising Ottoman Turks, and the attempts to heal the schism by submission to Rome — at Lyon in 1274 and at Florence in 1439 — were rejected by an Orthodox population that would not buy survival at the price of its faith.

When the Ottoman cannon finally breached the land walls on 29 May 1453 and the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died in the fighting, an institution that traced an unbroken line of Roman emperors back to Augustus came to its end, eleven centuries after Constantine had dedicated his city. Hagia Sophia became a mosque; the imperial purple was extinguished. But the two things the empire had carried longest did not end with it. Its learning had already gone west, into the libraries and lecture-halls of Italy. And its faith continued in the Orthodox churches that survived under Ottoman rule and beyond it — the hesychast prayer still kept on Mount Athos, the Palamite dogma still confessed, the icons still venerated, the liturgy of the New Rome still sung in churches that had outlived the throne it was written for.

Sources and scholarship

The standard narrative history remains George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State (German 1940; English from the 3rd edition, Rutgers, 1969), the indispensable single-volume political account. The three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Alexander Kazhdan (Oxford University Press, 1991), is the standard reference work. Anthony Kaldellis’s Hellenism in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2007) reframes the empire’s relation to its classical and Roman inheritance and argues for the depth of its Roman self-understanding (worldcat.org/oclc/successive editions). On the theological tradition, John Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (Fordham University Press, 1974) and his A Study of Gregory Palamas (Faith Press, 1964; from the French of 1959) remain the historical- critical foundation for the Palamite controversy, while Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke, 1957; French 1944) frames the whole tradition as constitutively apophatic. For the recovery of the Athonite contemplative corpus, the eighteenth-century Philokalia of Nikodimos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth (Venice, 1782) is the canon- forming anthology of the hesychast fathers.

Among the primary sources hosted here, the complete English Dionysius is available in John Parker’s translation, The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (London, 1897–99), at the Library; the Platonic dialogues that the Byzantine scribes preserved are in Benjamin Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1892), at the Library; and the Chaldean Oracles that Psellos transmitted are collected in G. R. S. Mead’s The Chaldæan Oracles (London, 1908), at the Library. The standard public-domain Greek of Psellos’s Chaldean treatises and of the Dionysian corpus alike is in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (Paris, 1857–66), volumes III–IV for Dionysius and volume 122 for Psellos’s Expositio in oracula Chaldaica; the Synodal Tomos of the 1351 council vindicating Palamas is printed in the same series at volume 151. The first modern critical study of the Oracle fragments, structured on Psellos’s summaries, is Wilhelm Kroll’s De oraculis Chaldaicis (Breslau: Koebner, 1894).

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

Sources

Ostrogorsky 1969
Kazhdan 1991
Kaldellis 2007
Meyendorff 1974