Byzantine Christianity

“ Whereas the Byzantine Rome built avowedly upon Christianity as its own basis, and consecrated its own nativity by the sublime act of founding the first provision ever attempted for the poor, considered simply as poor, (i.e. as objects of pity, not as instruments of ambition.)
II. Secondly, as the great ægis of western Christendom, nay, the barrier which made it possible that any Christendom should ever exist, this Byzantine empire is entitled to a very different station in the enlightened gratitude of us western Europeans from any which it has yet held. ”

“ The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer’s name per century which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that Christianity was not the determining cause of the arrest. Civilization progresses by the contact of cultures ”

“ But it was by this long battle that she succeeded in saving from destruction, amid the universal cataclysm which overwhelmed the classical world, the civilization of the ancients, modified by the Christian religion. The moral and intellectual development of modern Europe are owing to the Byzantine Empire, if it be true that this development is the common offspring of antiquity upon the one hand and of Christianity upon the other. ”

“ We have had a glimpse of the luxury with which the Empress Eudoxia surrounded herself in her palace on the Bosporus, and our curiosity and interest may be satisfied concerning the domestic surroundings of a woman of rank during the period of the Byzantine decadence. The only truly original Christian art, down to the eleventh century, was the Byzantine; it dominated both Christian and pagan artists. ”

“ The Byzantine Empire came to an end more than 500 years ago, but if you were to go into the Balkans or Greece today, you would find that the work done by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius still remains. Even after forty years of communism, you might find that the seeds of Christianity, and particularly Greek Orthodox Christianity, which had been sown by Vladimir’s conversion, were still living in some Russian communist hearts. ”

“ Sicily, southern Italy, Rome, Ravenna, and Venice contain many examples of Byzantine churches. Italian painting in the Middle Ages seems to have been derived directly from the mosaic pictures of the artists of Constantinople. Russia received not only its religion but also its art from Constantinople. The great Russian churches of Moscow and Petrograd follow Byzantine models. Even the Arabs, in spite of their hostility to Christianity, borrowed Byzantine artists and profited by their services. ”

“ Egypt was certainly an important centre in the development of the Byzantine style.
The course of the transition to Byzantine, the first mature Christian style, cannot be satisfactorily traced while, guided by Roman archaeologists, we continue to regard Rome as a source of Christian art apart from the rest of the world. Christianity itself was not of Rome, it was an eastern leaven in Roman society. Christian art even in that capital was, we may say, an eastern leaven in Roman art. ”

“ Yet its imitative tendency induced the genius of the Eastern Empire to borrow from all its neighbors, and especially from Greece, whose art had greatly retrograded even before the accession of Constantine. The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the state was most unfavorable to sculpture, which was associated by the ignorant with the representation and worship of the gods of antiquity. The term “Byzantine,” as applied to decoration, is most comprehensive, and, employed by writers at will, has become indefinite. ”

“ The earliest style which may fairly be called Christian was the Byzantine. In the East no sudden revolution had affected art or civilisation, but the Greek empire, founded at the moment when Christianity became the established religion, went on quietly adapting its arts and institutions to its new religion. ”

“ Leo III., the Isaurian, the most remarkable of the Byzantine emperors since the days of the great Justinian, made his long reign from 717 to 740 memorable by his victories over the Saracens and his long and bitter conflict against the image worship and relic worship which had developed rapidly throughout the Empire and had assumed the aspect of fetichism.
The early Christians, owing to their Jewish proclivities, had felt an unconquerable repugnance to the use of images, and their religious worship was uniformly simple and spiritual. ”

“ What have been the effects of Christianity on what we call national character in Eastern Christendom? ... The Greeks of the Lower Empire are taken as the typical example of these races, and the Greeks of the Lower Empire have become a byword for everything that is false and base. The Byzantine was profoundly theological, we are told, and profoundly vile. ... Those who wish to be just to [it] ... will pass ... to the ... equitable and conscientious, but by no means, indulgent, judgments of Mr. Finlay, Mr. Freeman, and Dean Stanley. ”

“ Even before there had been riots with the “democracy in rags,” the poor people, joining the monks and abbots to make certain that the old-time religion of the Byzantines was kept true and pure even if this made the empire fall.
Nevertheless the old-time Orthodox Byzantine faith did not come into being just as it was and all at once. Since religion was so important, and since the Greeks loved to argue, the whole history of the Byzantines is filled with violent discussions and bitter differences of opinion about exactly what a man was supposed to believe. ”

“ It would hardly be possible to find an accusation that would offend them more, or be more unjust, than to say that they are not purest of the pure Byzantines, in their rites, habits, rule, and everything. At the same time Leo XIII founded, in the monastery, a college for Italo-Greeks, youths who are to become priests of their rite. These boys serve the church and sing the offices with the monks most beautifully. Any traveller who goes out from Rome on a Sunday morning may assist here at the Byzantine Liturgy, celebrated perfectly and sung exquisitely. ”

“ The French professors keep their Roman rite; [159] but all the students are Melkites; the Byzantine rite dominates the whole house. All the ceremonies carried out in the church are Byzantine; the prayers and devotions of the students are scrupulously formed on Byzantine model They are taught their rite by the Fathers who have become experts in its history and rules. Perhaps nowhere in the East will you see the Byzantine liturgy carried out so carefully and with such reverence as at St Anne's Church, or when the students go to serve and sing at the Patriarchal Church. ”

“ In the turn of the ages we are confronted by new Pagans who adhere to an obsolete religion; and the philosopher can only hope for an era when every one will have sufficient sense and science to think according to the laws of nature and civilization.
The history of the disintegrating and moribund Byzantine Empire has been explored by modern scholars with untiring assiduity; and the exposition of that debased political system will always reflect more credit on their brilliant researches than on the chequered annals of mankind. ”

“ The origin of the Byzantine church is somewhat uncertain: the modern Greeks, in their zeal not to yield to the Latins the advantage of antiquity, attribute its foundation to the Apostle St. Andrew. It is certain that during the time of Severus there were many Christians at Byzantium. ”

“ The manner of building and painting, the tradition of jewellery, metal work and decoration that we call Byzantine, are so closely connected with the history and liturgy of the Orthodox Eastern Church, that we ought not to pass them over here without some notice. The Byzantine question is one of those that are most disputed by archaeologists. When the Romans had come under the influence of Greece, they, or their Greek artists, covered the Empire with the buildings and statues that we call Roman-Greek. ”

“ This is proved by what we have seen in the historic controversies of the Byzantine age. Relics were deemed more important than ritual, icons than liturgy. To treasure a saint's bone or kiss a picture of Christ—this was what most concerned the Greek Christian of the Byzantine period in the matter of religion. The best teachers of the Church deprecated the fetishism of relic worship ”

“ The uniformity which pervades everything Byzantine prevented the development of such salient characters as are found in the West. It is difficult, no doubt, to form a true estimate of the influence of religion on men's lives in Eastern countries, just as it is of their domestic relations, and even of the condition of the lower classes, because such matters are steadily ignored by the contemporary historians. ”

“ The importance of Byzantine culture and literature in the history of the world is beyond dispute. The Christians of the East Roman empire guarded for more than a thousand years the intellectual heritage of antiquity against the General significance of Byzantine literature. ”

“ The great Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of our Lord. ”

“ They must have been forms of the many rites in Greek, presumably akin to that of Antioch, of which the Byzantine rite itself is one. Because of the close connection of Greater Greece with Constantinople, no doubt these rites developed in much the same direction as that of Constantinople. There would naturally be constant Byzantine influence over bishops who had so much to do with the capital. But the formal imposition of the Byzantine rite is part of the work of the Emperors from the eighth century. ”

“ In Russia and other eastern portions of Europe the Byzantine style still exists, though in a sad state of decay, not as an antiquarian revival, but as the latest link in a chain of unbroken tradition, going back without interruption to the age of Constantine, the early part of the fourth century after Christ. ”

“ And so cogent is the argument that the orthodox theologians are fain to hunt up the scanty list of beardless saints to be found in Byzantine iconography. Whatever the force of the arguments drawn from divinity, at bottom the opposition was only the simple folks' one way of seeing things—the same clinging to forms, the same compound of symbolism and realism. ”

“ In 1592 the Jesuit rector made a great pretence of introducing the Byzantine rite "to be observed exactly in all things possible by all the Greek students." [31] Yet they still had to attend his Latin Mass every morning, and were bound to receive Holy Communion from him at least once a month "in azyme, according to the Latin manner." [32] This is, of course, the cardinal matter of all. It is absurd to say that a man observes the Byzantine rite when he receives Communion in one species and in azyme. ”

“ The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed—this if only external peace could have been secured. ”

“ These zealous efforts for winning converts were rendered the more effective by certain conditions of Christian society itself. Foremost among these was the degraded condition of the Greek Church. Side by side with the civil despotism of the Byzantine empire, had arisen an ecclesiastical despotism which had crushed all energy of intellectual life under the weight of a dogmatism that interdicted all discussion in matters of morals and religion. ”

“ Nothing has ever surprised us more, we will frankly own, than this coincidence of authors in treating the Byzantine empire as feeble and crazy. On the contrary, to us it is clear that some secret and preternatural strength it must have had, lurking where the eye of man did not in those days penetrate, or by what miracle did it undertake our universal Christian cause, fight for us all, keep the waters open from freezing us up, and through nine centuries prevent the ice of Mahometanism from closing over our heads for ever? ”

“ Byzantine, equally with Italian art, sprang from the last floraison of Roman Art, and grew up at Constantinople, the New Rome, but much modified by Greek and Syrian influences. At first the culture of the two Empires was so linked together, that it is the merest shade which distinguishes Roman Art in the East and West. The division widens, and the two branches stretch out, one, the purely Latin, soon to wither and almost perish, and the other to grow into that spreading tree of Byzantine Art, whose branches have scattered fruit in every part of Europe and the Levant. ”