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Constantinople, the great cultural melting pot, the "New Rome" and capital of the empire, did not produce any real outstanding theologian in the fifth and sixth centuries; but the city witnessed the great theological debates of the day since their conclusion often depended upon imperial sanction. Bishops, monks, exegetes, and philosophers coming to the capital to seek favour and support created around the Episcopal see of the imperial city, from which the government’s theological advisers were usually drawn, a convergence of ideas, and a predisposition to syncretic and compromise solutions. The bishops of Constantinople and their staffs however were still able to defend explicit theological convictions, even against the imperial will, as the lonely pro-Chalcedonian stand adopted by the patriarchs, Euphemius (489-495) and Macedonius II (495-511), under the reign of the Monophysite emperor Anastasius, bears witness. Thus, a theology, which can be termed specifically "Byzantine" in contrast to the earlier currents of Eastern Christian thought and centred mainly in Egypt and Syria, comes into being during the post-Chalcedonian period. It would receive an official sanction under Justinian (527-565) and an expression in the balanced synthesis of Maximus the Confessor (†662).

It would have seemed that no individual figure played a decisive role in the formation of this theology, and one could be equally hard-pressed to locate any school or other intellectual centre in the capital where the theological thought was creatively elaborated. Though it seemed reasonable to assume that a theological school for the training of higher ecclesiastical personnel was connected with the patriarchate, sources about its character or the levels of its teaching were wanting. A centre of theological learning was attested at the famous monastery of the Akoimetai (the "Non-Sleepers"), and others certainly existed elsewhere, but very little was specifically known about them. Theologians, who were active during the fifth and sixth centuries, often received their training in distant parts of the empire, such as Syria or Palestine. The Lavra of St. Sabbas near Jerusalem, for example, was the scene of violent debates between competing Origenist factions.

The imperial, secular University of Constantinople, founded by Constantine and reorganized by a decree of Theodosius II (408-450), did not include theology among its subjects; yet it certainly served as a channel for the perpetuation of ancient Greek philosophical ideas. The university remained bilingual (Greek and Latin) until the seventh century and until the reign of Justinian and included pagans among its professors. But the drastic measures taken by Justinian in excluding both, pagans and non-Orthodox Christians, from the teaching profession and in closing the pagan University of Athens must have emphasized that the role of secular studies in Christian Byzantium was purely ancillary. Even if a small circle of intellectuals perpetuated the philosophical traditions of the ancient Greeks, the official position of both, Church and state, now considered philosophy as at best a tool for expressing Revelation, but it never admitted that philosophy was entitled to shape the very content of theological ideas. In practice, one might readily admit that Aristotelian logic is to be taught in the schools, but one would be consistently distrustful of Platonism because of its metaphysical implications. Yet Platonism would subsist through patristic literature mainly and especially through the Origenist tradition; but it would never be formally acknowledged as a valid expression of religious ideas.

Conservative in form and intent, Byzantine theology in the age of Justinian continually referred to tradition as its main source. In particular, the Christological debates of the period consisted chiefly of a battle between exegetes of Scripture about philosophical terms adopted by Christian theology in the third and fourth centuries and about patristic texts making use of these terms. Liturgical hymnology, which began to flourish at this time, incorporated the results of the controversies and often became a form of credal confession. The various elements of Byzantine theological traditionalism dominated in the fifth and sixth centuries, constituted the basis of further creativity in the later periods, and required very special attention.

This text of Canon 19 of the Council in Trullo (692) reflects the traditionalist and conservative character of the Byzantine, approaches to theology and to exegesis in particular, and explains the presence in all monastic and private libraries of Byzantium, of innumerable copies of patristic catenae, and "chains" of authoritative interpretations of particular Biblical texts expressing or claiming to express the continuity of exegetical tradition.

Even though the consensus patrum reached by this method was in some instances partial and artificial, the standard Church teaching came to rely on it especially when it was sanctified by liturgical and hymnographical usage. The Bible was always understood not simply as a source of revealed doctrinal propositions or as a description of historical facts but as a witness to a living Truth, which had become dynamically present in the sacramental community of the New Testament Church. The veneration of the Virgin, Mother of God, for example, was associated once and for all with a typological interpretation of the Old Testament temple cult: the one who carried God in her womb was the true "temple," the true "tabernacle," the "candlestick," and God’s final "abode." Thus, a Byzantine, who on the eve of a Marian feast listened in church to a reading the Book of Proverbs about "Wisdom building her house" (Pr 9:1 ff.) naturally and almost exclusively, thought of the "Word becoming flesh" — i.e., finding His abode in the Virgin. The identification of the Old Testament Wisdom with the Johannine Logos had been taken for granted since the time of Origen, and no one would have thought of challenging it. As early as the fourth century, when much of the Arian debate centred on the famous text "The Lord created me at the beginning of his works" (Pr 8:22), it was quite naturally interpreted by the Arians in favour of their position. Athanasius and other members of the Nicaean party declined to challenge the identification between Logos and Wisdom preferring to find references to other texts supporting the uncreated character of the Logos-Wisdom. No one questioned the established exegetical consensus on the identification itself.

Much of the accepted Byzantine exegetical method had its origin in Alexandrian tradition and its allegorism. St. Paul, in describing the story of Abraham’s two sons as an allegory of the two covenants (Ga 4:23), gave Christian sanction to a non-literal method of interpreting Scripture known as Midrash, which had developed among Palestinian rabbis in pre-Christian times. Thus, in pushing the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture to its very extremes, the Alexandrian Hellenistic milieu, common to Philo, Clement, and Origen, could refer to the illustrious precedent of St. Paul himself. Allegory was first of all consonant with the Hellenic and especially the Platonic concern for eternal things as the opposite to historical facts. The Greek intellectual’s main difficulty in accepting Christianity often lay in the absence of direct speculation on the Unchangeable since his philosophical training had led him to associate changeability with unreality. The allegorical method however allowed the possibility of interpreting all concrete, changeable facts as symbols of unchangeable realities. Thus, history itself was losing its centrality and in extreme cases simply denied.

But consonance with Hellenism was not the only element, which contributed to the widespread use of allegory in exegesis. The method provided an easy weapon against Gnosticism, the main challenge of Christianity in the second century. The major Gnostic systems — especially those of Valentinus and Marcion — opposed the Demiurge, the Yahweh of Judaism, to the true God manifested in the New Testament. Christian apologists used allegory to "redeem" the Old Testament and counteracted the Gnostic dualism with the idea that the Old and the New Testaments have the same "spiritual" meaning and reflect a continuous Revelation of the same true God.

Origen also made use of this concept of the "spiritual meaning" in his notion of Tradition. The Spirit, which had inspired the Biblical writers, was also present in the "spiritual men" of the Christian Church. The saint alone therefore could decipher the authentic meaning of Scripture.

Although it raises the important problem of authority in exegesis, this passage certainly expresses a view largely taken for granted in Medieval Byzantine Christendom and explains the concern for a consensus patrum expressed in a formal way in the canon of the Council in Trullo quoted at the beginning of this section.

In addition to Alexandrian allegorism, the Byzantine tradition of exegesis incorporated the more sober influence of the School of Antioch. The opposition between Alexandria and Antioch —, which found a well-known and violent expression in the Christological debates of the fifth century — should not be exaggerated on the level of exegesis. The chief minds of the Anti-ochian school — Diodore of Tarsus (ca. 330-ca. 390), Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350-428), and Theodoret of Cyrus (ca. 393-ca. 466) — did not deny the possibility of a spiritual meaning in Biblical texts; yet they reacted strongly against the elimination of the literal, historical meaning and against an arbitrary allegorism based on Platonic philosophical presuppositions foreign to the Bible. Thus, the notion of theory ("contemplation"), which implied the possibility of discovering a spiritual meaning behind the letter of the text, was not rejected, but the emphasis was placed upon what actually happened or said historically as well as upon the moral or theological implications of the text.

The theological authority of the School of Antioch was shattered by the condemnation of Nestorius, a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia, at Ephesus in 431 and by the anathemas against the Three Chapters (Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the anti-Cyrillian writings of Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa) pronounced by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. After 553, the scriptural commentaries of Theodore, one of the greatest exegetes of early Christianity, could be preserved only clandestinely in Syrian or Armenian translations while the Greek original survived only in fragments scattered in the catenae. But the tradition of Antiochian exegesis survived in the exegetical works of Theodoret, which were never prohibited, and even more so in the writings of Theodore’s friend John Chrysostom, by far the most popular of all Greek ecclesiastical writers. His definition of typology, as opposed to allegory, as "a prophecy expressed in terms of facts"² and his concern for history served as safeguards against the spiritualizing excesses of the Alexandrian tradition in late-Byzantine exegetical literature, while still leaving room for theory, i.e., fundamentally a Christ-oriented typological interpretation of the Old Testament.

The philosophical trends in post-Chalcedonian Byzantium were determined by three major factors: (1) the patristic tradition and its implications — the transfer, for example, of the Cappadocian Trinitarian terminology to the problem of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ, (2) the ever-reviving Origenism with its implied challenge to the Biblical doctrine of creation and to Biblical anthropology, and (3) the continuing influence of non-Christian Neo-Platonism upon intellectuals (Justinian’s closing of the University of Athens put a physical end to a centre of thought and learning only recently adorned by the last major figure of pagan Greek philosophy, Proclus, 410-485). In all three cases, the basic issue implied was the relation between ancient Greek thought and Christian Revelation.

Some modern historians continue to pass very divergent judgments on the philosophy of the Greek Fathers. In his well-known Histoire dc la philosophic, Emile Brehier writes, "In the first five centuries of Christianity, there was nothing that could properly be called Christian philosophy and would have implied a scale of intellectual values either original or different from that of the pagan thinkers."³ According to Brehier, Christianity and Hellenic philosophy are not opposed to each other as two intellectual systems, for Christianity is based on revealed facts, not on philosophical ideas. The Greek Fathers, in accepting these facts, adopted everything in Greek philosophy, which was compatible with Christian Revelation. No new philosophy could result from such an artificial juxtaposition. A seemingly opposite view, more in line with the classical appraisal of Adolf Harnack, has been expressed by H. A. Wolfson whose book on The Philosophy of the Church Fathers presents the thought of the Fathers as "a recasting of Christian beliefs in the form of a philosophy, [which] thereby produc[ed] also a Christian version of Greek philosophy."⁴ Finally, the monumental work of Claude Tresmontant La Metaphysique du Christianisme et la naissancc de la philosophic chretienne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961) strongly maintains the historical existence of a Christian philosophy, which the Fathers consistently defended against the Hellenic synthesis. This philosophy implies basic affirmations on creation, on unity and multiplicity, on knowledge, freedom, and all other incompatible with Hellenism, and is fundamentally Biblical. "From the point of view of metaphysics," he writes, "Christian orthodoxy is defined by its fidelity to the metaphysical principles found in Biblical theology."⁵ Therefore, if the Greek Fathers were orthodox, they were not, properly speaking, "Greek." Actually, in modern historical and theological writing, there is no term more ambiguous than "Hellenism." Thus, Georges Florovsky makes a persistent plea for "Christian Hellenism" meaning by the term the tradition of the Eastern Fathers as opposed to Western Medieval thought,⁶ but he agrees fundamentally with Tresmontant on the total incompatibility between Greek philosophical thought and the Bible, especially on such basic issues as creation and freedom.⁷

Therefore, Tresmontant’s and Florovsky’s conclusions appear to be fundamentally correct, and the usual slogans and clichés, which too often serve to characterize patristic and Byzantine thought as exalted "Christian Hellenism," or as the "Hellenization of Christianity," or as Eastern "Platonism" as opposed to Western "Aristotelianism" should be avoided.

A more constructive method of approaching the issue and of establishing a balanced judgment consists in a preliminary distinction between the systems of ancient Greek philosophy — the Platonic, the Aristotelian, or the Neo-Platonic — and individual concepts or terms. The use of Greek concepts and terminology were unavoidable meanings of communication and a necessary step in making the Christian Gospel relevant to the world in which it appeared and in which it had to expand. But the Trinitarian terminology of the Cappadocian Fathers and its later application to Christology in the Chalcedonian and post-Chalcedonian periods clearly show that such concepts as ousia, hypostasis, or physis acquire an entirely new meaning when used out of the context of the Platonic or Aristotelian systems in which they are born. Three hypostases united in one "essence" (ousia) or two "natures" (physeis), united in one hypostasis cannot be a part of either the Platonic or Aristotelian systems of thought and imply new personalistic (and therefore non-Hellenic) metaphysical presuppositions. Still the Trinitarian and Christological synthesis of the Cappadocian Fathers would have dealt with a different set of problems and would have resulted in different concepts if the background of the Cappadocians and the audience to which they addressed themselves had not been Greek. Thus, Greek patristic thought remained open to Greek philosophical problematics but avoided being imprisoned in Hellenic philosophical systems. From Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century to Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, the representatives of the Orthodox tradition all express their conviction that heresies are based upon the uncritical absorption of pagan Greek philosophy into Christian thought.

Among the major figures of early Christian literature, only Origen, Nemesius of Emesa, and pseudo-Dionysius present systems of thought, which can truly be defined as Christian versions of Greek philosophy. Others, including even such system-builders as Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, in spite of their obvious philosophical mentality, stand too fundamentally in opposition to pagan Hellenism on the basic issues of creation and freedom to qualify as Greek philosophers. Origen and pseudo-Dionysius suffered quite a distinct posthumous fate, which will be discussed later, but the influence of Nemesius and of his Platonic anthropological "system" was so limited in Byzantium, in contrast to its widespread impact on Western Medieval thought, that the Latin translation of his work Peri physeos anthropou (De natura hominis) was attributed to Gregory of Nyssa.⁸

Thus, as most historians of Byzantine theology should admit, the problem of the relationship between philosophy and the facts of Christian experience remains at the centre of the theological thought of Byzantium, and no safe and permanent balance between them has ever been found. But is really such a balance possible if "this world" and its "wisdom" are really in permanent tension with the realities of the kingdom of God?

Recent research has cast a completely new light on the history of Origenism in the fifth and sixth centuries. The publication of the works of Evagrius Ponticus has in particular clarified the issues, which divided rival monastic parties in Egypt, in Palestine, and in other areas of Eastern Christendom.

While the Trinitarian problematics of Origen served as one of the starting points for the Arian controversies of the fourth century, his views on creation, the Fall, man, and God-man relations fascinated the first Greek intellectuals to the point of inducing them to join the monastic movement. In his system, monastic asceticism and spirituality find a justification, but contradict the basic presuppositions of Biblical Christianity. As a result, Origen and his disciple Evagrius were condemned in 400 by Theophilus of Alexandria and in 553 at Constantinople II. But even these condemnations did not preclude the lasting influence of their systems, which served as background for the integrated Christian philosophy of Maximus the Confessor. Origenism thus remained at the centre of the theological thought of post-Chalcedonian Eastern Christianity, and its influence on spirituality and theological terminology did not end with the condemnation of the Origenistic system in 553 but continued at least until the iconoclastic crisis of the eighth century.

Origen was undoubtedly the most successful of the early apologists of Christianity. His system made the Christian religion acceptable to Neo-Platonists, but the acceptance of Christianity on Origenistic terms does not necessarily imply the rejection of the basic Neo-Platonic concepts of God and of the world. If the Cappadocian Fathers, for example, after reading Origen in their student years, were finally led to orthodox Christianity, others, such as their friend and contemporary Evagrius Ponticus, developed Origenism in a quite different direction.

In his famous De principiis, Origen first postulates creation as an eternal act of God. God has always been the all-powerful Creator, and "we cannot even call God almighty if there are none over whom He can exercise His power." But since Origen is very careful to refute the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter, he maintains that the ever-existing created world is a world of "intellects," not of matter. The basic Platonizing spiritualism implied here will always appeal to monastic circles looking for a metaphysical justification of asceticism. The next step in Origen’s thought is to consider that the "intellectual" world, which includes "all rational natures — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Angels, the Powers, the Dominions, and other Virtues as well as man himself in the dignity of his soul — are one unique substance."¹⁰ A later patristic tradition will oppose to this idea the notion of the absolute transcendence of God expressed in apophatic theology; but for Origen, the monistic structure encompassing God and the "intellects" in one single substance is broken only by the Fall. Misusing their "freedom," the intellects committed the sin of revolting against God. Some sinned heavily and became demons; others sinned less and became angels; others did still less and became archangels. Thus, each received a condition proportionate to its own sin. The remaining souls committed sins neither heavy enough to rank with the demons nor light enough to become angels, and so it was that God created the present world and link the soul with a body as a punishment.¹¹ The present visible world, which includes man — understood as an intellect transformed through sin into a body — is the result of the Fall; man’s ultimate destiny is dematerialization and a return to a union with God’s substance.

Evagrius Ponticus significantly developed this Origenistic system by applying it to Christology. According to Evagrius, Jesus Christ was not the Logos taking flesh but only an "intellect" that had not committed the original sin and thus was not involved in the catastrophe of materialization. He assumed a body in order to show the way toward a restoration of man’s original union with God.¹² Around this teaching of Evagrius’, serious conflicts, which lasted until the reign of Justinian, arose between feuding monastic parties. At the centre of these disturbances, which was the Lavra of St. Sabbas in Palestine, some monks claimed to be "equal to Christ" (isochristot) since in them through prayer and contemplation there is the original relationship with God, which also existed in Christ, had been restored. This extreme and obviously heretical form of Origenism was condemned first by imperial decree, then by the ecumenical council of 553. The writings of Origen and Evagrius were destroyed and preserved only partially in Latin or Syrian translations or protected by pseudonyms. Ancient Hellenism had to give way once again to the basic principles of Biblical Christianity.

The condemnation of Origen and Evagrius did not mean however the total disappearance of the Platonic world-view from Byzantine Christianity. The Hellenic concept of the world as "order" and "hierarchy," the strict Platonic division between the "intelligible" and the "sensible" worlds, and the Neo-Platonic grouping of beings into "triads" reappear in the famous writings of a mysterious early-sixth-century author who wrote under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite. The quasi-apostolic authority of this unknown author went unchallenged in both East and West throughout the Middle Ages.

Historians of Eastern Christian thought usually emphasize the role of Dionysius — together with that of Gregory of Nyssa and of Maximus the Confessor — in expounding apophatic theology. According to Vladimir Lossky, Dionysius, far from being "a Platonist with a tinge of Christianity," is the very opposite: "a Christian thinker disguised as a Neo-Platonist, a theologian very much aware of his task, which was to conquer the ground held by Neo-Platonism by becoming a master of its philosophical method."¹³ And, indeed, several elements of Dionysius’ thought appear as successful Christian counterparts both to Neo-Platonic and to Origenistic positions. Dionysius specifically rejects Origen’s notion of knowledge of God "by essence" since there cannot be "knowledge" of God, for knowledge can apply only to "beings," and God is above being and superior to all opposition between being and non-being. With God, there can be a "union," however: the supreme end of human existence; but this union is "ignorance" rather than knowledge for it presupposes detachment from all activity of the senses or of the intellect since the intellect is applicable only to created existence. God therefore is absolutely transcendent and above existence and — as long as one remains in the categories of existence — can be described only in negative terms.¹⁴ God does however make Himself known outside of His transcendent nature: "God is manifested by His ‘powers’ in all beings, is multiplied without abandoning His unity." ¹⁵ Thus, the concepts of beauty, being, goodness, and the like reflect God but not His essence, only His "powers" and "energies,"¹⁶ which are not however a diminished form of deity or mere emanations but themselves fully God in whom created beings can participate in the proportion and analogy proper to each. Thus, the God of Dionysius is again the living God of the Bible and not the One of Plotinus; and in this respect, Dionysius will provide the basis for further positive developments of Christian thought.

One must remember however that Dionysius’ theology property — i.e. his doctrine of God and of the relationship between God and the world — is not wholly original (in fact, its essential elements appear in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers), and that, through his hierarchical view of the universe, Dionysius exercised a highly ambiguous influence, especially in the fields of ecclesiology and sacramental theology.

If for Origen, the hierarchy of created beings — angels, men, demons — are the result of the Fall, for Dionysius it is an immovable and divine order through which one reaches "assimilation and union with God."¹⁷ The three "triads" — or nine orders — of the celestial hierarchy and the two "triads" of the ecclesiastical hierarchy are essentiality a system of mediations. Each order participates in God "according to its capacity," but this participation is granted through the order immediately superior.¹⁸ The most obvious consequences of that system occur in the field of ecclesiology; for Dionysius, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which includes the triads "bishops (hierarchs)-priests-deacons" and "monks-laymen-catechumens (sinners)," is nothing but an earthly reflection of the celestial orders; each ecclesiastical order, therefore, is a personal state, not a function in the community. "A hierarch," Dionysius writes, "is a deified and divine man, instructed in holy knowledge."¹⁹ And since the hierarch is primarily a gnostic, an initiator there is fundamentally no difference between his role and that of a charismatic. The same applies of course to the other orders.²⁰

And since Dionysius also holds very strictly to the Platonic divisions between the intellectual and material orders, the material being only a reflection and a symbol of the intellectual, his doctrine of the sacraments is both purely symbolic and individualistic; the function of the Eucharist, for example, is only to symbolize the union of the intellect with God and Christ.²¹

Our conclusion to these brief comments on Dionysius must be therefore that. In areas where he transcends Neo-Platonism — the area of the theologia — he is a real Christian without however being truly original; but that his doctrine of the hierarchies, even if it represents a genuine attempt to integrate the Neo-Platonic world-view into the Christian framework, is an obvious failure, the consequences of which have led to much confusion, especially in the fields of liturgy and of ecclesiological formulations. One wonders too if the Western Scholastic doctrine of the sacerdotal "character" and, to a lesser extent, the confusion, frequent in the Byzantine East, between the role of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and that of "holy men" do not go back ultimately to Dionysius.

The appearance of the Dionysian writings coincides chronologically with a turning point in the history of Christian liturgy. When Justinian closed the last pagan temples and schools, Christianity became unquestionably the religion of the masses of the empire. The Christian liturgy originally conceived as the cult of small-persecuted communities now came to be celebrated in immense cathedrals — such as the magnificent "Great Church," Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, one of the glories of Justinian’s reign — with thousands of worshippers in attendance. This completely new situation could not help but influence both the practice and the theology of the liturgy. The Eucharist, for example, could no longer really retain the external character of a community meal. The great mass of the people in attendance consisted of nominal Christians who could hardly meet the standard required of regular communicants. Starting with John Chrysostom, the clergy began to preach that preparation, fasting, and self-examination were the necessary prerequisites of communion and emphasized the mysterious, eschatological elements of the sacrament. The eighth and ninth centuries witnessed such additions as the iconostasis-screen between the sanctuary and the congregation and the use of the communion spoon, a means to avoid putting the sacramental elements into the hands of laymen. All these developments were aimed at protecting the mystery, but they resulted in separating the clergy from the faithful and in giving to the liturgy the aspect of a performance, rather than of a common action of the entire people of God.

The writings of pseudo-Dionysius contributed to the same trend. The author’s ideas about God’s grace descending upon the lower ranks of the hierarchy through the personal mediation of the hierarchs did much to shape new Byzantine liturgical forms, which he considered only as symbols revealing the mysteries to the eyes of the faithful. Appearances and disappearances of the celebrant, veiling and unveiling of the elements, opening and closing of the doors, and various gestures connected with the sacraments often originated in the rigid system of the hierarchical activity as described by Dionysius and found ready acceptance in a Church otherwise concerned with preserving the mysterious character of the cult from profanation by the masses now filling the temples.

Fortunately, Dionysian theology has had practically no effect upon such central texts as the baptismal prayer and the Eucharistic canons. It served principally to develop and explain the extremely rich fringes with which Byzantium now adorned the central sacramental actions of the Christian faith, without modifying its very heart, and thus leaving the door open to authentic liturgical and sacramental theology, which would still inspire the mainstream of Byzantine spirituality.

Another very important liturgical development of the fifth and sixth centuries was the large-scale adoption of hymnography of a Hellenistic nature. In the early Christian communities, the Church hymnal was comprised of the Psalter and some other poetic excerpts from Scripture with relatively few newer hymns. In the fifth and sixth centuries however with the insistence on more liturgical solemnity (often copied from court ceremonial) in the great urban churches and the unavoidable Hellenization of the Church, the influx of new poetry was inevitable.

This influx met strong opposition in monastic circles, which considered it improper to replace Biblical texts of the liturgy with human poetic compositions, but the resistance was not a lasting one. In fact, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the monks took the lead in hymnographical creativity.

But as early as the sixth century, the religious poetry of Romanos the Melody was regarded as revolutionary in Constantinople. The models of his poetry and music were generally localized in Syria where poetic religious compositions had already been popularized by Ephraem († 373).

Born in Emesus, Romanos came to Constantinople under Anastasius (491-518) and soon attained great fame by composing his fantasia. Generally based upon a Biblical theme or, in other words, exalting a Biblical personality, the kontakion is essentially a metrical homily recited or chanted by a cantor and accompanied by the entire congregation singing a simple refrain. It follows a uniform pattern beginning with a short prelude and followed by a series of poetic strophe.

Romanos’ poetry generally relies on imagery and drama and contains little or no at all theology. The Christological debates of the period, for example, are not at all reflected in his kontakya. Written in simple popular Greek, they must have played a tremendous role in bringing the themes of Biblical history to the masses; they undoubtedly strengthened profoundly that understanding of Christianity centred on the liturgy, which became so characteristic of the Byzantines.

Some of Romanos’ kontakya remain in the liturgical books in an abridged form, and the pattern, which he established, was reproduced almost exactly in the famous Akathistos hymnos, one of the most popular pieces of Byzantine hymnography. Although, as we shall see later, subsequent hymnographical patterns formed in the monasteries were quite different from those of Romanos, the work of the great melody of the sixth century played a central role in shaping Byzantine Christianity as distinct from the Latin, the Syrian, the Egyptian, and the Armenian.

The cultural framework of Byzantine theology after Chalcedon was increasingly limited to the Greek-speaking world. The wealth of the various non-Greek traditions of early Christianity — especially the Syrian and the Latin — was less and less taken into account by the theologians of the imperial capital. One should remember however that until the emergence of the twelfth-century revival of theology in the West, Constantinople remained the unquestioned intellectual centre of Christendom, with very little competition. One understands therefore that it developed a sense of increasing, though regrettable, and self-sufficiency.

1. Origen, De principiis, Praefatio 8; ed. B. Koetschau, GCS 22 (1913), 14.6-13; trans. G. W. Butterworth, On the First Principles (London: SPCK, 1936), p. 5.

2. John Chrysostom, De paenitentia, horn. 6, 4; PG 49:320.

3. fcmile Brehier, Histoire de la philosophic (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1931), II, 494.

4. H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), I, VI.

5. Claude Tresmontant, La Mέtaphysique du christianisme et la naissance de la philosophic chretienne (Paris: du Seuil, 1961), p. 23.

6. Georges Florovsky, "The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement," Theology Today 7 (April 1950), 74-76.

7. Georges Florovsky, "The Idea of Creation in Christian Philosophy," Eastern Church Quarterly 8 (1949), 53-77.

8. See fctienne Gilson, La philosophic an Moyen-Age (2nd ed., Paris: Payot, 1952), pp. 72-77.

9. Origen, De principiis, I, 2, 10; ed. Koetschau, p. 42; trans. Butterworth, p. 23.

10. Quoted by Jerome in Ep. 124, ad Avit., 15.

11. See anathemas of the Council of Constantinople (553) as given in F. Dickamp, Die origenistischen Streitigt^eiten im sechsten Jahrhundert und das junjte allgemeine Concil (Munstcr, 1898), pp. 90-96.

12. The essential texts are found in A. Guillaumont, Les "Kephalaia Gnostica" d’tvagre le Pontique et I’histoire de I’origenisme chez les Grecs et les Syriens (Paris: du Seuil, 1962), esp. pp. 156-160.

13. Vladimir Lossky, Vision of God (London: Faith Press, 1963), pp. 99-100.

14. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, V; PG 3:1045p-1048A.

15. Lossky, Vision, p. 102.

16. See, chiefly, pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, II; PG 3:636ff.

17. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy, III, 2; PG 3:165λ.

18. See R. Roques, L’univers dionysien: Structure hierarchique du monde scion le pseudo-Denys (Paris: Aubier, 1954), p. 98ff.

19. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, I, 3; PG 3:373c.

20. See the analysis of Roques, L’univers dionysien, pp. 172ff.

21. Ibid., pp. 267, 269.

Throughout the millennium between the Council of Chalcedon and the fall of Constantinople, Byzantine the theological thought was dominated by the Christological problem as it was defined in the dispute between Cyril and Nestorius and in the subsequent discussions and conciliar decrees. It must be remembered however that the central issue in these debates was the ultimate fate of man.

Western Christological thought since the early Middle Ages has been dominated by the Anselmian idea of redemption through "satisfaction;" the idea that Jesus offered to the Father a perfect and sufficient sacrifice, propitiatory for the sins of mankind, has been at the centre of Christological speculation playing a prominent role in modern historical research on the patristic age. The result is that Christology has been conceived as a topic in itself, clearly distinct from pneumatology and anthropology. But if one keeps in mind the Greek patristic notion that the true nature of man means life in God realized once and for all through the Holy Spirit in the hypostatic union of the man Jesus with the Logos and made accessible to all men through the same Holy Spirit in the humanity of Christ and in His body, the Church, Christology acquires a new and universal dimension. It cannot be isolated any longer from either the doctrine of the Holy Spirit or the doctrine of man, and it becomes a key for the understanding of the Gospel as a whole.

The issue of "participation in God’s life" and "deification" stands as a necessary background to the clash between Alexandrian and Antiochian Christology in the fifth century. When the great exegetes of Antioch — Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, and even Theodoret of Cyrus — emphasize the full humanity of the historical Jesus, they understand this humanity not merely as distinct from the divinity but as "autonomous" and personalized. If "deified," Jesus could no longer be truly man, he must simply be the son of Mary if he is to be ignorant, to suffer, and to die. It is precisely this understanding of humanity as autonomous, which has attracted the sympathies of modern Western theologians toward the Antiochians, but which provoked the emergence of Nestorianism and the clash with Alexandria. For the concept of "deification" was the very argument with which Athanasius had countered to Arius: "God became a man, so a man may become God." The great Cappadocian Fathers also shared this argument, and by it, they were convinced, as were the vast majority of the Eastern episcopate, of the truth of the Nicaean faith in spite of their original doubts concerning the term "consubstantial."

Thus, the essential "good news" about the coming of new life — human because it is also divine — was expressed by Cyril of Alexandria and not by the more rational scheme defended by Nestorius. Cyril lacked the vocabulary however and the flexibility to satisfy those who feared the Monophysite temptation of seeing in Jesus a God who ceased to be also man. Cyril’s formula of "one nature [or hypostasis] incarnated" was still polemical in leaving the door open to the Orthodox distinction between the divine nature per se and the "divine nature incarnated" and therefore recognizing the reality of the "flesh;" it was anti-Nestorian not balanced formula and positive definition of who Christ is. The Chalcedonian definition of 451 — two natures united in one hypostasis yet retaining in full their respective characteristics — was therefore a necessary correction of Cyril’s vocabulary. Permanent credit should be given to the Antiochians — especially to Theodoret — and to Leo of Rome for having shown the necessity of this correction, without which Cyrillian Christology could easily be, and actually was, interpreted in a Monophysite sense by Eutyches and his followers.

But the Chalcedonian definition balanced and positive as it was lacked the soteriological charismatic impact, which had made the positions of Athanasius and Cyril such appealing. Political and ecclesiastical rivalries, personal ambitions, imperial pressures aimed at imposing Chalcedon by force, abusive interpretations of Cyril in the Monophysite sense as well as misinterpretations of the council by some Nestorianizing Antiochians who saw in it a disavowal of the great Cyril — all provoked the first major and lasting schism in Christendom.

Understandably, the Byzantine emperors tried to restore the religious unity of the empire. In the second half of the fifth century, they made several unhappy attempts to heal the schism by avoiding the issue. But the issue proved to be real, and the passions — high. Thus, Justinian I (527-565), the last great Roman emperor, after several attempts to achieve unity by imperial decree again turned to conciliar procedure.

In the age of Justinian, four major theological positions can be easily discerned:

Although most of the Monophysites were ready to anathematize Eutyches as well as the idea that Christ’s humanity was "confused" with His divinity, they held steadfastly to the theology and terminology of Cyril of Alexandria. Just as the "old Nicaeans" in the fourth century had refused to accept the formula of the three hypostasis introduced by the Cappadocian Fathers because Athanasius had not used it, so the leaders of fifth- and sixth-century Monophysitism — Dioscoros of Alexandria, Philoxenus of Mabbugh, and the great Sever us of Antioch — rejected the Council of Chalcedon and the Christological formula of "one hypostasis in two natures" because Cyril had never used it and because they interpreted it as a return to Nestorianism. The danger of Eutychianism that they claimed was not serious enough to justify the Chalcedonian departure from Cyril’s terminology. They objected most violently — and this objection may be the real serious difference between their Christology and Chalcedonian orthodoxy — to the idea that the two natures after the union "retain in full their proper characteristics."

The strict Dyophysites were Chalcedonians, which still rigidly maintained the Antiochian Christology and objected to some of Cyril’s propositions such as the Theopaschite formula: "One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh." For them, the subject of suffering is Jesus, the son of Mary, not the divine Logos. But, one may ask, is there not then a duality of subjects in Christ? The existence of this party in the Chalcedonian camp and the influence exercised by its representatives — Theodoret of Cyrus until his death around year 466, Gennadios of Constantinople (458-471), his successor Macedonios (495-511), and others — provided the Monophysites with their main arguments for rejecting Chalcedon as a Nestorian council and as a disavowal of Cyril.

The Cyrillian Chalcedonians, who were obviously the majority at the council itself, never admitted that there was a contradiction between Cyril and Chalcedon. Neither terminology was considered an end in itself but only the appropriate way of opposing Nestorianism and Eutychianism respectively. The position of the Cyrillian Chalcedonians as distinct from the strict Dyophysite position is symbolized by the acceptance of the Theopaschite Cyrillian formula. The representatives of this tendency — the "Scythian monk" John Maxentios, John the Grammarian, Ephraem of Antioch, Leontius of Jerusalem, Anastasius of Antioch, Eulogius of Alexandria, Theodore of Raithu — dominated Byzantine theology in the sixth century and won the support of Justinian I. Recent historians (Joseph Lebon and Charles Moeller among them) often designate this tendency as "neo-Chalcedonian," implying that the strict Dyophysite understanding of Chalcedon is the only correct one and that Antiochian Christology is preferable to Cyrillian. The implications of the debate on this point are very broad in both Christological and anthropological fields, for it questions the very notion of "deification."

The Origenists involved in violent controversies but influential at the court in the beginning of Justinian’s reign offered their own solution based upon the quite heretical Christology of Evagrius Ponticus. For them, Jesus is not the Logos but an "intellect" not involved in the original Fall and thus united hypostatically and essentially with the Logos. The writings of Leontius of Byzantium, the chief representative of Origenist Christology in Constantinople, were included in the pro-Chalcedonian polemical arsenal however and his notion of the enhypostaton was adopted by Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, who, of course, rejected the crypto-Origenistic context in which it originally appeared.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) convoked by Justinian in order to give formal ecclesiastical approval to his attempts at making Chalcedon acceptable to the Monophysites was a triumph of Cyrillian Chalcedonianism. It approved Justinian’s earlier posthumous condemnation of the Three Chapters, and, though Theodore was personally condemned as a heretic and the teacher of Nestorius, Ibas and Theodoret, whom the Council of Chalcedon had officially accepted as orthodox, were spared as persons; their writings directed against Cyril however fell under the anathemas of 553. Thus, the authority of Chalcedon was formally preserved, but the strict Dyophysite interpretation of its decisions was formally rejected. The council very strongly reaffirmed the unity of subject in Christ (anathemas 2, 3, 4, 5) and, hence, formally legitimized the Theopaschite formula (anathema 10). This formula was henceforth chanted at every liturgy in the hymn "The Only-Begotten Son of God," which has been attributed to Justinian himself. Though anathema 13 gave formal approval to the Twelve Chapters of Cyril against Nestorius, anathema 8 specified that if one should use the Cyrillian formula "one nature incarnated," the word "nature" would stand for hypostasis. Thus, in joining the Orthodox Church, the Monophysites were not required to reject anything of Cyrillian theology but only to admit that Chalcedon was not a Nestorian council.

Unfortunately, by 553, the schism was too deeply rooted in Egypt and Syria, and the conciliar decision had no practical effect. The decision represents however a necessary pre-condition for any future attempts at reunion and an interesting precedent of a reformulation of an article of faith and already defined by a council for the sake of "separated" brethren who misunderstand the previous formulation.

The Council of 553 also adopted a series of anathemas against Origen and Evagrius Ponticus. The Gnostic’s Chapters of Evagrius helped greatly in understanding of the meaning of these decisions, which were directed not as it was previously thought against non-existent heresies attributed to Origen but against an active group of Evagrians closely connected with the Christological debates of the day. Despite these condemnations however some aspects of the thought of Origen, Evagrius, and Leontius of Byzantium continued to exercise an influence on the development of the theological thought and of spirituality.

The condemnation of Origenism in 553 was, therefore, a decisive step in Eastern Christian theology, which then committed itself to a Biblical view of creation, of an anthropocentric universe, of man as a coherent psychosomatic whole, of history as a linear orientation toward an ultimate eschaton, and of God as a personal and living being independent of all metaphysical necessity.

The decision of 553 however did not close the Christological debate. Actually by solving some issues, each doctrinal definition — at Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II — had raised new ones. The schism of the Monophysites remained a political nuisance to the empire and a threat to the Church, which would have soon been faced in the East with the Persian Zoroastrian and the Moslem challenges. The reaffirmation of Cyrillian orthodoxy in 553 raised the permanent issue of the two stages in Cyril’s personal attitude: his proclamation, against Nestorius, of Christ’s unity (especially the Twelve Anathemas), and his later stand, more appreciative of Antiochian fears. Thus, in 430, Cyril did not admit that a distinction could be drawn in Christ’s actions between those who were divine and those who were only human; but in his famous letter to John of Antioch in 433, he admits that such a distinction is inevitable.

Monophysites after Chalcedon generally preferred the "first Cyril" to the "second." Severus, their great theologian, admitted duality in Christ’s being, but for him this duality was a duality "in imagination" while "in actuality" there was only one nature or being. This position leads directly to Monoenergism: "one is the agent," writes Severus, "and one is the activity."¹ For terminological reasons however the Monophysites were generally reluctant to speak of "one will" in Christ because of the possible Nestorian associations. In Antiochian Christology, it was possible to say that the two natures were united by one common "will."

The Persian wars of Emperor Heraclius (610-641) again deeply involved the Byzantine government in unionist policies with the Monophysites, especially with the Armenians. Patriarch Sergius (610-638), Heraclius’ friend and theological adviser, devised a formula of union, according to which the Monophysites would accept the Chalcedonian formula of the "two natures" with the specification that they were united into one "energy" and one will. The policy reached a measure of success both in Armenia and in Egypt, and local unions were concluded. Monoenergism and Monotheletism met however staunch opposition on the part of some Chalcedonians, led by Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and by Maximus the Confessor. In spite of the support given to it by Heraclius and his successors, Monotheletism was finally condemned in 680 by the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which restated the Chalcedonian affirmation that each nature keeps in Christ the entirety of its characteristics; and therefore, there are two "energies" or wills, the divine and the human in Christ.

Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662), the architect of this decision, dominates the period intellectually and, in many respects, may be regarded as the real Father of Byzantine theology; for in his system, one finds a Christian philosophical counterpart to Origen’s myth of creation and, as the real foundation of Christian spiritual life, a doctrine of "deification" based on Cyril’s soteriology and on Chalcedonian Christology.

Maximus never had or even tried to have the opportunity to compose an ordered analysis of his system. His writings include only a large collection of Ambigua, a most unsystematic compilation of commentaries on obscure passages from Gregory of Nazianzus or from pseudo-Dionysius, a collection of "Answers to Questions" by Thalassius, several series of Chapters (short sayings on spiritual or theological matters), and a few polemical treatises against the Monothelites. In these membra disjecta however one discovers a most coherent view of the Christian faith as a whole formed quite independently of the Monothelite controversy. His attitude against the Monothelites thus acquires even greater strength precisely because its roots go much deeper than the casual historical circumstances in which it had to be expressed and which led Maximus himself to torture and a martyr’s death.

In Origen’s, system immobility is one of the essential characteristics of true being; it belongs to God but also to creatures as long as they remain in conformity with God’s will. Diversity and movement come from the Fall. For Maximus however "movement," or "action," is a fundamental quality of nature. Each creature possesses its own meaning and purpose, which reflect the eternal and divine Logos "through whom all things were made." The Logos of every creature is given to it not only as a static element but also as the eternal goal and purpose, which are called to achieve.

At this point, Maximus’ thought uses the Aristotelian concept of each nature’s having its own "energy" or existential manifestation. The Cappadocian Fathers had applied the same principle to their doctrine of the three hypostaseis in God. Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, had to defend himself against the accusation of tritheism; the three hypostaseis are not three Gods because they have one nature, as is evident from the fact that there is only one "energy" of God. Already then in Cappadocian view, the concept of "energy" is linked with that of nature. Maximus could therefore refer to tradition in opposing the Monothelite contention that "energy" reflects the one hypostasis, person, or actor; and therefore, Christ could have only one "energy."

In Maximian thought, man occupies quite an exceptional position among the other creatures. He not only carries in himself a Logos; he is the image of the divine Logos, and the purpose of his nature is to acquire similitude with God. In creation as a whole, man’s role is to unify all things in God and thus to overcome the evil powers of separation, division, disintegration, and death. The "natural," God-established "movement," "energy," or will of man is therefore directed toward communion with God, "deification," not in isolation from the entire creation, but leading it back to its original state.

One could understand at this point why Maximus felt so strongly that both Monoenergism and Monotheletism betrayed the Chalcedonian affirmation that Christ was fully man. There cannot be a true humanity if there is no natural, authentic human will or "movement."

But if the human will is nothing but a movement of nature, is there a place for human freedom? And how can the Fall and man’s revolt against God be explained? These questions to which Origen gave such great importance find in Maximus a new answer. Already in Gregory of Nyssa, true human freedom does not consist in autonomous human life but in the situation, which is truly natural to man’s communion with God. When man is isolated from God, he finds himself enslaved — to his passions, to himself, and ultimately to Satan. Therefore, for Maximus, when man follows his natural will, which presupposes life in God, God’s co-operation, and communion, he is truly free. But man also possesses another potential, determined not by his nature, but by each human person, or hypostasis, the freedom of choice, of revolt, of movement against nature, and therefore of self-destruction. This personal freedom was used by Adam and Eve after the Fall in separation from God and from true knowledge ¾ from all the assurance secured by "natural" existence. It implies hesitation, wandering, and suffering; this is the gnomic will (gnomĕ opinion), a function of the hypostatic or personal life, not of nature.

In Christ, human nature is united with the hypostasis of the Logos and while remaining fully itself is liberated from sin, the source of which is the gnomic will. Because it is "en-hypostasized" in Logos Himself, Christ’s humanity is perfect humanity. In the mysterious process, which started with His conception in the Virgin’s womb, Jesus passed through natural growth, ignorance, suffering, and even death — all of experiences of the fallen humanity, which He had come to save, and He fulfilled through the resurrection the ultimate human destiny. Christ could thus be truly the saviour of humanity because in Him there could never be any contradiction between natural will and gnomic will. Through the hypostatic union, His human will, precisely because it always conforms itself to the divine, also performs the "natural movement" of human nature.

The doctrine of "deification" in Maximus is based upon the fundamental patristic presupposition that communion with God does not diminish or destroy humanity but makes it fully human. In Christ the hypostatic union the communication of idioms (perichõresis tõn idiõmatõn). The characteristics of divinity and humanity express themselves "in communion with each other" (Chalcedonian definition), and human actions, "energies," have God Himself as their personal agent. Therefore, it can be said that "God was born," that Mary is the Theotokos, and that the "Logos was crucified" while birth and death remain purely human realities. But it can and must also be said that a man rose from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father having acquired characteristics, which "naturally" belong to God alone: immortality and glory. Through Christ’s humanity deified according to its hypostatic union with the Logos, all members of the Body of Christ have access to "deification" by grace through the operation of the Spirit in Christ’s Church.

The essential elements of Maximian Christology provided the permanent terminological and philosophical framework for Byzantine thought and spirituality. They were adopted with the Trinitarian doctrine of the great Cappadocian Fathers together in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of John of Damascus (first half of the eighth century), which served as a standard doctrinal textbook in Byzantium. They also provided the most authoritative frame of reference in most of the doctrinal controversies, which arose in the East during the Middle Ages.

The following chapter, which is concerned with iconoclasm, will show that the Christological issue recurred indirectly in the eighth and ninth centuries. But even later, Christological debate was reopened quite specifically, especially in the Comnenian period, and conciliar decisions on the matter were included in the Synodikon.

Around 1087, a Constantinopolian monk named Nilus, who was involved in theological discussions with the Armenians, was condemned for holding that the humanity of Christ was united with God "by adoption" (thesei) only.² The Monophysite Armenians were of course maintaining the concept of a union "by nature" (physei). In opposing them, Nilus had apparently weakened the Orthodox doctrine of "hypostatic" union to the point of making it sound Nestorian. In 1117, the Synod of Constantinople dealt with the similar case of Eustratius, Metropolitan of Nicaea, who like Nilus had engaged in polemics with Armenians and expressed orthodox Christology in terms very similar to those of Theodore of Mopsuestia. The humanity by Christ was assumed not only distinct from His divinity but found itself in a position of "servitude;" it was in a position of "worshipping God," of being "purified," and to it alone belongs the human title of high-priest, a term unsuitable to God. In condemning the opinions of Eustratius, the synod reiterated the decisions of the Fifth Council against the Christology of the Three Chapters.³

The very Cyrillian conclusion of the council against Eustratius led to further Christological debates, which this time centred on the meaning of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The deacon Soterichos Panteugenos, Patriarch-Elect of Antioch, affirmed that the sacrifice could not be offered to the Holy Trinity, for this would imply that the one Christ performs two opposing actions, the human action of offering and the divine action of receiving, and would mean a Nestorian separation and personalizing of the two natures. Nicholas, Bishop of Methone in the Peloponnese, a major Byzantine theologian of the twelfth century, responded to Soterichos with an elaboration of the notion of hypostasis based on the ideas of Leontius of Byzantium and Maximus the Confessor. The hypostatic union is precisely what permits one to consider God as performing humanly in the act of offering while remaining God by nature and therefore receiving the sacrifice. To Soterichos, Nicholas opposed the conclusion of the prayer of the Cheroubikon, whose author, as modern research shows, is none other than Cyril of Alexandria himself, but which is a part of both Byzantine liturgies (attributed respectively to Basil and to John Chrysostom): "For it is Thou who offerest and art offered, who receivest and art Thyself received." Nicholas, whose views were endorsed by the Council of 1156-1157, shows that neither the Eucharist nor the work of Christ in general can be reduced to a juridical notion of sacrifice conceived as an exchange. God does not have to receive anything from us: "We did not go to Him [to make an offering]; rather He condescended toward us and assumed our nature, not as a condition of reconciliation, but in order to meet us openly in the flesh."⁴

This "open meeting in the flesh" received further emphasis in 1170 in connection with the condemnation of Constantine of Kerkyra and his supporter, John Eirenikos, as crypto-Monophysites. Their point was to refuse to apply John 14:18 ("My Father is greater than I") to the distinction between the divinity and the humanity of Christ. The text, they said, concerned the hypostatic characteristics in the Holy Trinity, fatherhood being by definition "greater" than sonship while the humanity of Christ, which according to the Council of 553 is distinguishable from the divinity only "in our mind," is deified and wholly "one" with the divinity. It cannot therefore be "smaller" than the divinity in any sense. By rejecting this view, the Council of 1170 reaffirmed once again the decisions of Chalcedon and Constantinople II about the divinity of Christ hypostatically united to a real and active humanity, "created, depictable, and mortal." Than such humanity, divinity is certainly "greater."

The very technical Christological discussions of the twelfth century, in fact, reconsidered all the major issues, which had been debated in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. The Byzantine Church remained fundamentally faithful to the notion of what George Florovsky once called an "asymmetrical union" of God and man in Christ: while the hypostatic source of life — the goal and pattern — remains divine, man is not diminished or swallowed by the union; he becomes again fully human. This notion is also expressed in the Eucharistic sacrifice, a unique act in which no single action of Christ’s is represented in isolation or reduced to purely human concepts, such as an "exchange," or a "satisfaction." Christ as the Synodikon proclaims every year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, "reconciled us to Himself by means of the whole mystery of the economy, by Himself, and in Himself and reconciled us also to His God and Father and of course to the most holy and life-giving Spirit."⁵

1. Quoted by J. Lebon, Le Monophysitisme severien, etude historique, litter are et theologique sur la resistance monophysite au Concile de Chalcedoine jusqu’a la constitution de I’Uglisc Jacobite (Louvain dissertation, 1909), pp. 445-446.

2. Anna Comnena, Alexiad, X, 1; ed. B. Leib (Paris, 1943), II, 187-188; Synodikpn, ed. J. Gouillard, Travaux et memoires 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), pp. 202-206. On possible connections between several Byzantine theological trends and Paulician dualism, see N. G. Gersoyan, "Byzantine Heresy: A Reinterpretation," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 25 (1971), 87-113.

3. See P. Joannou, "Der Nominalismus und die menschliche Psychologic Christi: das Semeioma gegen Eustratios von Nikaia (1117)," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 47 (1954), 374-378.

4. Nicholas of Methonc, Treatise Against Soterichos, ed. A. Demetrakopoulos, Bibliothekc Ekklesiastikc (repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), pp. 337-338.

5. Fifth Anathema Against Soterichos in Synodifon ed. Gouillard, p. 75.

the long iconoclastic struggle, which recurred frequently in Byzantine theology, was intimately connected with the Christological issue, which had divided Eastern Christianity in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.

The emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries initiated and supported the iconoclastic movement; and from the start, issues of both a theological and a non-theological nature were inseparably involved in this imperial policy.

From contemporary sources and modern historical research, three elements within the movement seem to emerge:

a. A Problem of Religious Culture. From their pagan past, Greek-speaking Christians had inherited a taste for religious imagery. When the early Church condemned such art as idolatrous, the three-dimensional form practically disappeared, only to reappear in a new, Christian two-dimensional version. Other Eastern Christians, particularly the Syrians and the Armenians, were much less inclined by their cultural past to the use of images. It is significant, therefore, that the emperors who sponsored iconoclasm were of Armenian or Isaurian origins. Moreover, the non-Greek-speaking East was almost entirely Monophysite by the eighth century and, as we shall see, Monophysitism tacitly or explicitly provided the iconoclasts with the essence of their theological arguments.

b. Confrontation with Islam. After the Arab conquest of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, the Byzantine Empire found itself in constant confrontation militarily and ideologically with Islam. Both Christianity and Islam claimed to be world religions of which the Byzantine emperor and the Arab caliph were respectively the heads. But in the accompanying psychological warfare, Islam constantly claimed to be the latest and therefore the highest and purest, revelation of the God of Abraham and repeatedly levelled the accusations of polytheism and idolatry against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the use of icons. It was to the charge of idolatry that the Eastern-born emperors of the eighth century responded. They decided to purify Christianity for better withstanding the challenge of Islam. Thus, there was a measure of Islamic influence on the iconoclastic movement, but the influence was a part of the cold war against Islam, not the conscious imitation of it.

c. The Heritage of Hellenic Spiritualism. The controversy begun by Emperors Leo III (717-741) and Constantine V (741-775) seems to have been determined initially by the non-theological factors described above. But the iconoclasts easily found in the Greek Christian tradition itself new arguments indirectly connected with condemned Monophysitism or with foreign cultural influences. An iconoclastic trend of thought, which could be traced back to early Christianity, was later connected with Origenism. The early apologists of Christianity took the Old Testament prohibitions against any representation of God just as literally as the Jews had. But in their polemics against Christianity, Neo-Platonic writers minimized the importance of idols in Greek paganism and developed a relative doctrine of the image as a means of access to the divine prototype and not as a dwelling of the divine himself and used this argument to show the religious inferiority of Christianity. Porphyry, for example, writes,

Porphyry obviously understood that the belief in an historical incarnation of God was inconsistent with total iconoclasm, for an historical Christ was necessarily visible and depictable. And, indeed, Christian iconography began to flourish as early as the third century. In Origenistic circles however influenced as they were by Platonic spiritualism, which denied a matter of permanent God-created existence and for whom the only true reality was intellectual," iconoclastic tendencies survived. When Constantia, sister of the Emperor Constantine, visited Jerusalem and requested an image of Christ from Eusebius of Caesarea, she received the answer that "the form a servant," assumed by the Logos in Jesus Christ, was no longer in the realm of reality, and her concern for a material image of Jesus was unworthy of true religion; after His glorification, Christ could be contemplated only "in the mind."² There is an evidence that the theological advisers of Leo III, the first iconoclastic emperor, were also Origenists with views most certainly identical to those of Eusebius. Thus, a purely "Greek" iconoclasm, philosophically quite different from the Oriental and the Islamic ones, contributed to the success of the movement.

It seemed that no articulate theology of iconoclasm developed in a written form before the reign of Constantine V Copronymos (741-775). The emperor himself published theological treatises attacking the veneration of icons and gathered in Hieria a council claiming ecumenicity (754). The Acts of this assembly are preserved in the minutes of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second of Nicaea, which formally rejected iconoclasm (787).

It is remarkable that Constantine, in order to justify his position, formally referred to the authority of the first six councils; for him, iconoclasm was not a new doctrine but the logical outcome of the Christological debates of the previous centuries. The painter, the Council of Hieria affirmed, when he makes an image of Christ, can paint either His humanity alone separating it from the divinity or both His humanity and His divinity. In the first case, he is a Nestorian; in the second, he assumes that divinity is circumscribed by humanity, which is absurd; or both are confused, in which case, he is a Monophysite.³

These arguments did not lack strength and must have impressed his contemporaries, but they failed to account for the Chalcedonian affirmation that "each nature preserved its own manner of being." Obviously, even if they formally rejected Monophysitism, the iconoclasts supposed that the deification of Christ’s humanity suppressed its properly human individual character. They also seem to have ignored the true meaning of the hypostatic union, which implies a real distinction between nature and hypostasis. In being assumed by the hypostasis of the Logos, human nature does not merge with divinity; it retains its full identity.

Another aspect of the iconoclasts’ position was their notion of the image, which they always considered identical or "consubstantial" with the prototype. The consequence of this approach was that a material image could never achieve this identity and was always inadequate. The only true "image" of Christ, which they would admit, is the sacramental one of the Eucharist as the "image" and "symbol" of Christ — a notion, which was drawn from pseudo-Dionysius.⁴

Some discussion about images must have taken place in Byzantium as early as the late-seventh century and was reflected in Canon 82 of the Council in Trullo. The importance of this text lies in the fact that it locates the issue of religious representation in the Christological context:

Thus, the image of Christ already implied for the fathers of the Council in Trullo a confession of faith in the historical Incarnation, which could not be properly expressed in the symbolic figure of a lamb and needed an image of Jesus "in His human form."

Before Leo HI had issued his formal decrees against the images, Germanus I (715-730), the Patriarch of Constantinople, used the same Christological argument against the incipient iconoclasm of the court:

Germanus thus became the first witness of Orthodoxy against iconoclasm in Byzantium. After his resignation under imperial pressure, the defence of images was taken over by the lonely and geographically remote voice of John of Damascus.

Living and writing in the relative security assured to the Christian ghettos of the Middle East by the Arab conquerors, this humble monk of the Monastery of St. Sabbas in Palestine succeeded by his three famous treatises for the defence of the images in uniting Orthodox opinion in the Byzantine world. His first treatise begins with the reaffirmation of the Christological argument: "I represent God, the Invisible One, not as invisible, but insofar as He has become visible for us by participation in flesh and blood."⁷ John’s main emphasis is on the change, which occurred in the relationship between God and the visible world when He became a Man. By His own will, God became visible by assuming a material existence and giving to the matter a new function and dignity.

In addition to this central argument, John insists on secondary and less decisive issues. The Old Testament, for example, was not totally iconoclastic but used images, especially in temple worship, which Christians are entitled to interpret as pre-figurations of Christ. John also denounced the iconoclasts’ identification of the image with the prototype, the idea that an icon "is God." On this point the Neo-Platonic and Origenist traditions, which were also used by the iconoclasts supported the side of the Orthodox, only the Son and the Spirit are "natural images" of the Father and therefore consubstantial with Him. But other images of God are essentially different from their model and therefore not "idols."

This discussion on the nature of the image, which provided the basis for the very important definition of the cult of images, was adopted by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. The image, icon, since it is distinct from the divine model, can be the object only of a relative veneration or honour, not of worship, which is reserved for God alone.⁹ This authoritative statement by an ecumenical council clearly excludes the worship of images often attributed to Byzantine Christianity.

The misunderstanding of this point is a very old one and partly the result of difficulties in translation. The Greek proskynests ("veneration") was already translated as adoration in the Latin version of the Conciliar Acts used by Charlemagne in his famous Libri Carolini, which rejected the council. And later, even Thomas Aquinas — who, of course, accepted Nicaea II — admitted a "relative adoration" (latrid) of the images, a position, which gave the Greeks an opportunity of accusing the Latins of idolatry at the Council of Hagia Sophia in 1450.¹⁰

In spite of its very great terminological accuracy in describing the veneration of icons, Nicaea II did not elaborate on the technical points of Christology raised by the iconoclastic Council of Hieria. The task of refuting this council and of developing the rather general Christological affirmations of Germanus and John of Damascus belongs to the two major theological figures of the second iconoclastic period — the reigns of Leo V (813-820), Michael π (820-829), and Theophilus (829-842) — Theodore the Studite and Patriarch Nicephorus.

Theodore the Studite (759-826) was one of the major reformers of the Eastern Christian monastic movement. In 798, he found himself at the head of the Constantinopolian monastery of Studios (the name of the founder), which by then had fallen into decay. Under Theodore’s leadership the community there rapidly grew to several hundred monks and became the main monastic centre of the capital. The Studite Rule (Hypotypõsis) in its final form is the work of Theodore’s disciples, but it applied his principles of monastic life and became the pattern for large cenobitic communities in the Byzantine and Slavic worlds. Theodore himself is the author of two collections of instructions addressed to his monks (the "small" and the "large" Catecheses) in which he develops his concept of monasticism based upon obedience to the abbot, liturgical life, constant work, and personal poverty. These principles were quite different from the eremitical, "hesychast," tradition and derived from the rules of Pachomius and Basil. The influence of Theodore upon later developments of Byzantine Christianity is also expressed in his contribution to hymnography. Many of the ascetical parts of the Triodion (proper for Great Lent) and of the Parakletike, or Oktoechos (the book of the "eight tones"), are his work or the work of his immediate disciples. His role in conflicts between Church and state will be mentioned in the next chapter.

In numerous letters to contemporaries, in his three Antirrhetics against the iconoclasts, and in several minor treatises on the subject, Theodore actively participated in the defence of images.

As we have seen, the principal argument of the Orthodox against the iconoclasts was the reality of Christ’s manhood; the debate thus gave Byzantine theologians an opportunity to reaffirm the Antiochian contribution to Chalcedonian Christology, and signalled a welcome return to the historical facts of the New Testament. From the age of Justinian, the humanity of Christ had often been expressed in terms of "human nature" assumed as one whole by the New Adam. Obviously, this platonizing view of humanity in general was insufficient to justify an image of Jesus Christ as a concrete, historical, human individual. The fear of Nestorianism prevented many Byzantine theologians from seeing a man in Christ, for "a man" implying individual human consciousness seemed for them to mean a separate human hypostasis. In Theodore’s anti-iconoclastic writings, this difficulty is overcome by a partial return to Aristotelian categories.

Humanity for Theodore "exists only in Peter and Paul," i.e., in concrete human beings, and Jesus was such a being. Otherwise, Thomas’ experience of placing his finger into Jesus’ wounds would have been impossible.¹² The iconoclasts claimed that Christ in virtue of the union between divinity and humanity was indescribable; and therefore, that no image of Him was possible. But for Theodore, "an indescribable Christ would be an incorporeal Christ… Isaiah [8:3] described him as a male being, and only the forms of the body can make man and woman distinct one from another."¹³

A firm stand on Christ’s individuality as on a man’s one again raised the issue of the hypostatic union; for in Chalcedonian Christology, the unique hypostasis or person of Christ is that of the Logos. Obviously then, the notion of hypostasis cannot be identified with either the divine or the human characteristics; neither can it be identical with the idea of human consciousness. The hypostasis is the ultimate source of individual, personal existence, which in Christ is both divine and human.

For Theodore, an image can be the image of an hypostasis only, for the image of a nature is inconceivable.¹⁴ On the icons of Christ, the only proper inscription is the personal God, "He who is" — the Greek equivalent of the sacred tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh) of the Old Testament, never such impersonal terms as "divinity" or "kingship," which belong to the Trinity as such and thus cannot be represented.¹⁵ This principle, rigidly followed in classical Byzantine iconography, shows that the icon of Christ is for Theodore not only an image of "the man Jesus" but also of the incarnate Logos. The meaning of the Christian Gospel lies precisely in the fact that the Logos assumed all the characteristics of a man including describability, and His icon is a permanent witness of this fact.

The humanity of Christ, which makes the icons possible, is a "new humanity" having been fully restored to communion with God, deified in virtue of the communication of idioms, and bearing fully again the image of God. This fact is to be reflected in iconography as in a form of art: the artist thus receives a quasi-sacramental function. Theodore compares the Christian artist to God Himself making the man in His own image: "The fact that God made man in His image and likeness showed that iconography was a divine action."¹⁶ At the beginning, God created man in His image. By making an icon of Christ, the iconographer also makes an "image of God," for what the deified humanity of Jesus truly is.

By position, temperament, and style, Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople (806-815), was the opposite of Theodore. He belonged to the series of Byzantine patriarchs between Tarasius and Photius who were elevated to the supreme ecclesiastical position after a successful civil career. As patriarch, he followed a policy of oikonomia and suspended the canonical penalties previously imposed upon the priest Joseph who had performed the "adulterous" marriage of Constantine VI. This action brought him into violent conflict with Theodore and the monastic zealots. Later deposed by Leo V (in 815) for his defence of icons, he died in 828 after having composed a Refutation of the iconoclastic council of 815, three Antirrhetics, one Long Apology, and an interesting treatise Against Eusebius and Epiphanius, the main patristic references of the iconoclasts.

Nicephorus’ thought is altogether directed against the Origenist notion found in Eusebius’ letter to Constantia that deification of humanity implies dematerialization and absorption into a purely intellectual mode of existence. The patriarch constantly insists on the New Testament evidence that Jesus experienced weariness, hunger, and thirst like any other man.¹⁷ In dealing with the issue of Jesus’ ignorance, Nicephorus also tries to reconcile the relevant scriptural passages with the doctrine of the hypostatic union in a way, which was for different reasons not common in Eastern theology. In Evagrian Origenism, ignorance was considered as coextensive with ― if not identical to ― sinfulness. The original state of the created intellects before the Fall was that of divine gnosis. Jesus was precisely the non-fallen intellect and therefore eminently and necessarily preserved the "knowledge of God" and of course any other form of inferior gnosis. The authors of the age of Justinian, followed by both Maximus and John of Damascus, denied any ignorance in Christ by virtue of the hypostatic union; but probably also under the influence of a latent Evagrianism, they interpreted the Gospel passages speaking of ignorance on the part of Jesus as examples of his oikonomia ― pastoral desire ― to be seen as a mere man and not as expressions of His real ignorance. Nicephorus stands in opposition to that tradition on this point although he admits that the hypostatic union could suppress all human ignorance in Jesus; but by virtue of the communication of idioms, the divine knowledge being communicated to the human nature. He maintains that divine economy in fact required that Christ assume all aspects of human existence, including ignorance: "He willingly acted, desired, was ignorant and suffered as a man."¹⁸ In becoming incarnate, the Logos assumed not an abstract, ideal humanity, but the concrete humanity, which existed in history after the Fall, in order to save it. "He did not possess a flesh other than our own, that, which fell as a consequence of sins; He did not transform it [in assuming it]... He was made of the same nature as we but without sin; and through that nature, He condemned sin and death."¹⁹

This fullness of humanity implied, of course, describability; for if Christ was indescribable, His Mother with whom He shared the same human nature would have been considered as indescribable as well. "Too much honour given to the Mother," Nicephorus writes, "amounts to dishonour her, for one would have to attribute to her incorruptibility, immortality, and impassibility if what by nature belongs to the Logos must also by grace be attributed to her who gave Him birth."²⁰

The same logic applies to the Eucharist, which, as we have seen, the iconoclasts considered only as the admissible image or symbol of Christ. For Nicephorus and the other Orthodox defenders of images, this concept was unacceptable because they understood the Eucharist as the very reality of the Body and Blood of Christ and precisely not as an "image," for an image is made to be seen while the Eucharist remains fundamentally food to be eaten. By being, it assumed into Christ the Eucharistic elements did not lose their connection with this world just as the Virgin Mary did not cease to be part of humanity by becoming the Mother of God. "We confess," writes Nicephorus, "that by the priest’s invocation by the coming of the Most Holy Spirit the Body and Blood of Christ are mystically and invisibly made present...;" and they are saving food for us "not because the Body ceases to be a body, but because it remains so and is preserved as body."²¹

Nicephorus’ insistence upon the authenticity of Christ’s humanity at times leads him away from classical Cyrillian Christology. He evades Theopaschism by refusing to admit either that "the Logos suffered the passion or that the flesh produced miracles... One must attribute to each nature what is proper to it,"²² and minimizes the value of the communication of idioms, which, according to him, manipulates "words."²³ Obviously, Theodore the Studite was more immune to the risk of Nestorian-izing than Nicephorus was. In any case, the necessity of reaffirming the humanity of Christ and thus of defending His describability led Byzantine theologians to a revival of elements of the Antiochian tradition and thus to a proof of their faithfulness to Chalcedon.

The iconoclastic controversy had a lasting influence upon the intellectual life of Byzantium. Four aspects of this influence seem particularly relevant to theological development.

a. At the time of the Persian wars of Emperor Heraclius in the seventh century, Byzantium turned away culturally from its Roman past and toward the East. The great confrontation with Islam, which was reflected in the origins and character of iconoclasm, made this trend even more definite. Deprived of political protection by the Byzantine emperors, with whom they were in doctrinal conflict, the popes turned to the Franks and thus affiliated themselves with the emerging new Latin Middle Ages. As a result, the social, cultural, and political background of this separation became more evident; the two halves of the Christian world began to speak different languages, and their frames of reference in theology began to diverge more sharply than before.

Byzantium’s turn to the East, even if it expressed itself in a certain cultural osmosis with the Arab world, especially during the reign of Theophilus, did not mean a greater understanding between Byzantine Christianity and Islam; the confrontation remained fundamentally hostile, and this hostility prevented real dialogue. John of Damascus, who himself lived in Arab-dominated Palestine, spoke of Mohammed as the "forerunner of the Anti-Christ." Giving second-hand quotations from the Koran, he presented the new religion as nothing more than gross superstition and immorality. Later-Byzantine literature on Islam rarely transcended this level of pure polemics.

However, even if this orientation eastward was not in itself an enrichment, Byzantium remained for several centuries the real capital of the Christian world. Culturally surpassing the Carolingian West and militarily ― strong in resisting Islam, Byzantine Christianity kept its universalist missionary vision, which expressed itself in a successful evangelization of the Slavs and other Eastern nations. But its later theological development took place in an exclusively Greek setting. Still bearing the title of "Great Church of Constantinople-New Rome," it became known to both its Latin competitors and its Slavic disciples as the "Greek" Church.

b. Whatever role was played in the Orthodox victory over the iconoclasts by high ecclesiastical dignitaries and such theologians as Patriarch Nicephorus, the real credit belonged to the Byzantine monks who resisted the emperors in overwhelming numbers. The emperors, especially Leo III and Constantine V, expressed more clearly than any of their predecessors a claim to caesaropapism. Thus, the iconoclastic controversy was largely a confrontation between the state and a non-conformist, staunchly independent monasticism, which assumed the prophetic role of standing for the independence of the Gospel from the "world." The fact that this role was assumed by the monks and not by the highest canonical authority of the Church underlines the fact that the issue was the defence not of the Church as an institution but of the Christian faith as the way to eternal salvation.

The monks, of course, took their role very seriously and preserved even after their victory a peculiar sense of responsibility for the faith, as we saw it in the case of Theodore the Studite. Theologically, they maintained a tradition of faithfulness to the past as well as a sense of the existential relevance of theology as such. Their role in later-Byzantine theological development remained decisive for centuries.

c. The theological issue between the Orthodox and the iconoclasts was fundamentally concerned with the icon of Christ, for belief in the divinity of Christ implied a stand on the crucial point of God’s essential indescribability and on the Incarnation, which made Him visible. Thus, the icon of Christ is the icon far from excellence and implies a confession of faith in the Incarnation.

The iconoclasts however objected on theological grounds not only to this icon but also to the use of any religious pictures, except the cross because, as their Council of 754 proclaims, they opposed "all paganism." Any veneration of images was equated with idolatry. If the goal pursued by Constantine V to "purify" Byzantine Christianity, not only of the image cult, but also of monasticism, had been achieved, the entire character of Eastern Christian piety and its ethos would have evolved differently. The victory of Orthodoxy meant, for example, that religious faith could be expressed not only in propositions, in books, or in personal experience, but also through man’s power over matter, through aesthetic experience, and through gestures and bodily attitudes before holy images. All these implied a philosophy of religion and an anthropology; worship, the liturgy, religious consciousness involved the whole man, without despising any functions of the soul or of the body, and without leaving any of them to the realm of the secular.

d. Of all the cultural families of Christianity — the Latin, the Syrian, the Egyptian, or the Armenian, the Byzantine was the only one in which art became inseparable from theology. The debates of the eighth and ninth centuries have shown that in the light of the Incarnation art could not retain a "neutral" function, that it could and even must express the faith. Thus, through their style, through symbolic compositions, through the elaborate artistic programs covering the walls of Byzantine churches, and through the permanent system, which presided over the composition of the Byzantine iconostasis, icons became an expression and a source of divine knowledge. The good news about God’s becoming man and about the presence among men of a glorified and deified humanity first in Christ but also through Him and the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mary and in the saints — all this "adornment of the Church" was expressed in Byzantine Christian art. Eugene Trubetskoi, a Russian philosopher of the early-twentieth century, called this expression "contemplation in colors."²⁵

1. Porphyry, Against the Christians, fragment 77; ed. A. Harnack, AbhBerlAk (1916), 93.

2. Text of Eusebius’ letter in Nicephorus, Contra Eusebium, ed. J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense (Paris, 1852; repr. Graz, 1962), I, 383-386.

3. Mansi, XIII, 252AB, 256AB.

4. Ibid., 261p-264c. See pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, PG 3:124A.

5. Mansi, XI, 977-980.

6. Germanus I, De haeresibuf et synodis; PG 98:80A.

7. John of Damascus, Or. I; PG 94:1236c.

8. lbid.; PG 94:1245A.

9. Mansi, XIII, 377D.

10. Ibid., XXXII, 103.

11. Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetic 1; PG 99:332o-333A.

12.., III; PG 99:396c-397A.

13. Ibid., 409c.

14. Ibid., 405A.

15. Theodore the Studite, Letter to Naucratius, II, 67; PG 99:1296AB; see also Antirrh., III; PG 99:420o.

16. Antirrh., III; PG 99:420A.

17. Nicephorus, Antirrh., I; PG 100:272B.

18. Ibid., 328BD.

19. Nicephorus, Contra Eusebium, ed. Pitra, I, 401.

20. Antirrh., PG 100:268B.

21. Ibid., 440, 447.

22. Ibid., 252B.

23. Ibid., 317B.

24. John of Damascus, De Haer.; PG 94:764A.

25. E. Trubetskoi, Umozrenie ν Kraskakh (Moscow, 1915-1916; repr. Paris: YMCA Press, 1965); trans. Icons: Theology in Colour (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973).

In 843, the byzantine church celebrated the "triumph of orthodoxy" over iconoclasm, a triumph that was interpreted as a victory over all the heresies, which until that time had divided Christendom. The document composed for the occasion, the famous Synodikon, commemorates the champions of the true faith, condemns the heretics, and implicitly presupposes that Byzantine society had reached an internal stability, which would never allow further division. In fact, new conflicts and crises did occur, and the Synodikon would have to be expanded. But the tendency to freeze history for considering their empire and Church as expressing the eternal and unchangeable form of God’s revelation would be a permanent and mythological feature of Byzantine civilization even if though it was constantly challenged by historical realities. In the ninth century itself, Byzantine society was, in fact, a divided society — divided politically, intellectually, and theologically.

During the entire iconoclastic period, Byzantium had been culturally cut off from the West and fascinated with the military and intellectual challenge of Islam. When, in 787 and 843, communion was finally re-established with the Church of Rome, the hostile emergence of the Carolingian Empire prevented the restoration of the old orbis Christianorum. Moreover, the resumption of the veneration of icons was a victory of Greeks traditions as distinct from the Oriental, non-Greek cultural iconoclasm of the Isaurians. The result of these historical developments was the emergence of the Byzantine Church from the iconoclastic crisis as more than ever a "Greek" church. It might even have become a purely national church such as the Armenian if the empire had not expanded again in the ninth and tenth centuries under the great emperors of the Macedonian dynasty and if the evangelization of the Slavs and the subsequent expansion of Byzantine Christianity into Eastern Europe, one of the major missionary events of Christian history, had not taken place. Unlike the West however where the papacy "passed to the barbarians" after their conversions, Constantinople, the "New Rome," remained the unquestionable and unique intellectual centre of the Christian East until 1453. This "Rome" was culturally and intellectually Greek so much, so that Emperor Michael III, in a letter to Pope Nicholas I, could even designate Latin as a "barbarian" and "Scythian" tongue.

The Hellenic character of Byzantine civilization brought into theology the perennial problem of the relationship between the ancient Greek "mind" and the Christian Gospel. Although the issue was implicit in much of the theological literature in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, it had not been raised explicitly since the closing of the pagan universities by Justinian. In the ninth century following the intellectual renewal, which had taken place under Theophilus (829-842), the last iconoclastic emperor, Byzantine scholars undertook more vigorously the study of ancient pagan authors. The University of Constantinople endowed and protected by the Caesar Bardas and distinguished by the teaching of the great Photius became the centre of this first renaissance. Scholars such as Photius, Arethas, and Michael Psellos promoted encyclopaedic curiosity and encouraged the copying of ancient manuscripts. Much of our knowledge of Greek antiquity is the direct result of their labors. On the whole, their interest in ancient philosophy remained rather academic and coexisted easily with the equally academic and conservative theology, which predominated in the official circles of the Church. When John Italos in the eleventh century attempted a new synthesis between Platonism and Christianity, he immediately incurred canonical sanction. Thus, Byzantine humanism always lacked the coherence and dynamism of both Western Scholasticism and the Western Renaissance and was unable to break the widespread conviction of many Byzantines that Athens and Jerusalem were incompatible. The watchdogs in this respect were the leading representatives of a monasticism, which persisted in a staunch opposition to "secular wisdom."

This polarity between the humanists and the monks not only appeared on the intellectual level; it manifested itself in ecclesiastical politics. The monks consistently opposed the ecclesiastical "realists" who were ready to practice toleration toward former iconoclasts and imperial sinners and toward unavoidable political compromises and, at a later period, state-sponsored doctrinal compromises with the Latin West. Conflicts of this sort occurred when Patriarchs Tarasius (784-806) and Methodius I (843-847) accepted into the episcopate former supporters of official iconoclasm, when the same Tarasius and Nicephorus I (806-815) condoned the remarriage of Emperor Constantine VI, who had divorced his first wife, and when in 857 Patriarch Ignatius was forced to resign and replaced by Photius. These conflicts, though not formally theological, involved the issue of the Christian witness in the world and, as such, greatly influenced Byzantine ecclesiology and social ethics.

Theodore was in the ninth century both the model and the ideologist of the rigorist monastic party which played a decisive role in the entire life of Byzantine Christendom.

In the preceding chapter, Theodore’s contribution to the theology of images as an aspect of Chalcedonian Christological orthodoxy was discussed. His impact on the history of monasticism is equally important. Severely challenged by iconoclastic persecutions, Byzantine monasticism had acquired the prestige of martyrdom, and its authority in Orthodox circles was often greater than that of the compromise-minded hierarchy. Under Theodore’s leadership it became an organized and articulate bulwark of canonical and moral rigorism.

For Theodore, monastic life was, in fact, synonymous with authentic Christianity:

This passage is important not only because monasticism is counted among the sacraments of the Church — in a list strikingly different from the post-Tridentine "seven sacraments" — but also, and chiefly, because the monastic state is considered one of the essential forms of Christian perfection and witness. Through detachment, through the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and through a life projected into the already-given reality of the kingdom of God, monasticism becomes an "angelic life." The monks, according to Theodore, formed an eschatological community, which realizes more fully and more perfectly what the entire Church is supposed to be. The Studite monks brought this eschatological witness into the very midst of the imperial capital, the centre of the "world" and considered it as a normal being in almost constant conflict with the "world" and with whatever it represented. They constituted a well-organized group. Their abbot abhorred the spiritual individualism of the early Christian hermits and built Studios into a regimented, liturgical, working community in accordance with the best cenobitic traditions stemming from Basil and Pachomius.

For Theodore and his disciples, "otherworldliness" never meant that Christian action was not needed in the world. Quite to the contrary. The monks practised and preached active involvement in the affairs of the city so that it might conform itself as far as possible to the rigorous criteria of the kingdom of God as they understood it. The iconoclastic emperors persecuted the monks for their defence of the icons, of course, but also for their attempts to submit the earthly Christian empire to the imperatives and requirements of a transcendent Gospel. Their Orthodox successors obliged to recognize the moral victory of the monks and to solicit their support also found it difficult to comply with all their demands. The conflict over the second marriage of Constantine VI (795), which Patriarchs Tarasius and Nicephorus tolerated but which Theodore and the Studites considered "adulterous" ("moechian schism"), provoked decades of discussion over the nature of oikonomia — i.e., the possibility of circumventing the letter of the law for the ultimate good of the Church and of the individual’s salvation. This principle invoked by the council of 809 and discussed at greater length in the next chapter was challenged by Theodore not so much in itself as in the concrete case of Constantine VI. "Either the emperor is God, for divinity alone is not subject to the law, or there is anarchy and revolution. For how can there be peace if there is no law valid for all, if the emperor can fulfil his desires — commit adultery, or accept heresies, for example — while his subjects are forbidden to communicate with the adulterer or the heretic?"²

Theodore was certainly not an innovator in his attitude toward the state; for his was the attitude of Athanasius, of John Chrysostom, of Maximus the Confessor, and of John of Damascus, and it would be that of a large segment of Byzantine churchmen in later centuries; it merely illustrates the fact that Byzantine society was far from having found the "harmony" between the two powers about which Justinian spoke in his Novella 6. The action and witness of the monks was always present in Byzantium to demonstrate that true harmony between the kingdom of God and the "world" was possible only in the parousia.

Theodore’s ideology and commitments normally led him away from the Constantinian parallelism between the political structure of the empire and the structure of the Church, a parallelism endorsed in Nicaea and best exemplified in the gradual elevation of the bishop of Constantinople to "ecumenical patriarch." Theodore, of course, never formally denied the canonical texts, which reflected it but, in practice, often referred to the principle of apostolicity as a criterion of authority in the Church, rather than to the political pre-eminence of certain cities. The support given to the Orthodox party during the iconoclastic period by the Church of Rome, the friendly correspondence, which Theodore was able to establish with Popes Leo III (795-816) and Paschal I (817-824), contrasted with the internal conflicts that existed with his own patriarchs, both iconoclastic and Orthodox. These factors explain the very high regard he repeatedly expressed toward the “apostolic throne” of old Rome. For example, he addressed Pope Paschal as “the rock of faith upon which the Catholic Church is built.” ― “You are Peter,” he writes, “adorning the throne of Peter."³ The numerous passages of this kind carefully collected by modern apologists of the papacy⁴ are however not entirely sufficient to prove that Theodore’s view of Rome is identical to that of Vatican I. In his letters side by side with references to Peter and to the pope as leaders of the Church, one can also find him speaking of the "five-headed body of the Church"⁵ with reference to the Byzantine concept of a "pentarchy" of patriarchs. Also addressing himself to the patriarch of Jerusalem, he calls him "first among the patriarchs" for the place where the Lord suffered presupposes "the dignity highest of all."⁶

Independence of the categories of "this world" and therefore of the state was the only real concern of the great Studite. The apostolic claim of Rome, no less real but much less effective, claims of the other Eastern patriarchs, provided him with arguments in his fight against the Byzantine state and Church hierarchies. Still, there is no reason to doubt that his view of the unity of the Church, which he never systematically developed, was not radically different from that of his contemporaries including Patriarch Photius who, as we shall see, was always ready to acknowledge the prominent position of Peter among the apostles but also considered that the authority of Peter’s Roman successors was dependent upon (not the foundation of) their orthodoxy. In Rome, Theodore the Studite saw that foremost support of the true faith and expressed his vision and his hope in the best tradition of the Byzantine superlative style.

The ancient monastic opposition to secular philosophy does not appear in Theodore’s writings. Theodore himself seemed even to have liked exercises in dialectics as his early correspondence with John the Grammarian, a humanist and later an iconoclastic patriarch, showed. But the anti-humanist tendency would clearly appear among his immediate disciples, the anti-Photians of the ninth century.

The dominant figure in Byzantine religious and social and political life in the ninth century, Photius, is also the father of what is generally called Byzantine "humanism." In his famous Library, an original and tremendously important compilation of literary criticism, he covers Christian writers of the early centuries as well as a number of secular authors; similarly in his Responses to Amphilochius, a collection of theological and philosophical essays, he displays a wide secular knowledge and an extensive training in patristic theology.

In all his writings, Photius remains essentially a university professor. In philosophy, his main interests are