Sailing from Byzantium Page 5

  Despite the monks’ hostility, this most Christian of societies always retained a secular educational system based on the Outside Wisdom, which it had inherited from its pre-Christian past. This sharply distinguishes the Byzantine East from the Latin West. As Christianity triumphed throughout the empire over the fourth to sixth centuries, various forces—doctrinal disputes, barbarian invasions, and in the seventh century the rise of Islam—shattered the old unity of the Greco-Roman world. Both East and West entered Dark Ages in which the classics came as close to vanishing as they ever would. In the Latin West, the future Catholic world, the break with the past was severe. In the Byzantine East, the future Orthodox world, continuity prevailed—after a fashion. Rome and the West fell to incoming barbarians, but Constantinople and the East endured, though not without suffering their own travails.

  The Dark Age of Byzantium

  By the seventh century, when those travails were at their worst, Greek had replaced Latin as the language of government, reflecting the new capital's Greek milieu. By that time, too, the long struggle between Christianity and paganism was drawing to a close. A landmark came in 529, when the emperor Justinian closed the last major stronghold of pagan philosophy, the venerable Platonic Academy in Athens. There Neoplatonist writers and teachers had struggled to stem the Christian tide by developing and codifying Platonic doctrine.∗

  A century after Justinian closed the Platonic Academy, the Dark Age of Byzantium began. For the next 150 years, Byzantium suffered a break in its secular traditions of cultivated literacy and higher education in the pagan classics. The remaining academies closed, and no longer did Byzantine historians, for example, schooled in the craft of Herodotus and Thucydides, practice their reasoned inquiries into human activities. Pressed in the east by the Arab conquests that followed the rise of Islam and in the north by the incursions of Slavs into the Balkans as far as southern Greece itself, the Byzantines lacked the resources, the leisure, and above all the will to indulge in such pursuits.

  Still, there is dark, and there is dark. While classical learning died off in the West, in Byzantium it merely lay ill, ignored and unloved by a society in desperate need of the unity and simple comfort that Christianity offered. Even during Byzantium's Dark Age, which began later and ended earlier than the West's, a strong central state survived, which cannot be said of the West. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and the other ancient authors continued to be read in school. They may also have been taught privately on a higher level by a handful of learned individuals, though no names of any such teachers survive. Meanwhile, like Italian, spoken Greek had long been evolving into simpler forms: reading and especially writing ancient Greek required hard study even for Byzantines who were native Greek-speakers. Byzantine humanists were always a tiny minority. Even at the best of times, the leisure to pursue the Outside Wisdom was reserved for wealthy elites. In the Dark Age, if the humanists were there at all, their numbers were so small as to have left no impression.∗

  Despite the breakdown in higher education, Homer was always “the poet” to Byzantine schoolchildren—and his works, the beginnings of Western literature, survive today because they stayed on the Byzantine educational curriculum. The same holds true for other ancient Greek authors. Like the bones of dinosaurs, ancient Greek literature survived by becoming fossilized.

  The end of the Dark Age and the revival of interest in ancient Greek learning came during a period of expansion and renewed prosperity that for convenience (and in homage to Sir Steven) we'll call the First Byzantine Renaissance.† Byzantinists know it as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the imperial dynasty that presided over it.

  The First Byzantine Renaissance

  This was the age in which visitors such as Liudprand of Cremona beheld with awe the throne of Byzantine emperors. Byzantine prestige provided the model of imperial Christian rule for the West, even if Western kings like Otto the Great chafed to outdo it. Byzantium was also an art school, a repository of techniques old and new, lost or never known, that the West now began discovering. From Hungary and Austria to Spain and Portugal, from Sicily and Naples to Britain and France, Byzantine artists (and art objects) traveled to European courts. With them came precious knowledge of mosaic, painting, carving, book illumination, and other techniques. Cloisonné enamel came to Limoges from Byzantium.

  Within a newly confident, outward-looking Byzantine society, secular learning and Christian piety now embarked upon the period of their closest and most fruitful partnership. An aristocratic mastery of classical Greek literary style reasserted itself as the criterion for service in the imperial bureaucracy (Byzantium's overeducated civil servants are often compared to the Confucian mandarins of imperial China). Byzantium's historians again took up the pen, doing their utmost to imitate the dense, rationalistic Thu-cydidean style. The scribes and scholars of this era preserved everything we have of ancient Greek literature, for the oldest surviving manuscripts were copied in these years. The collaboration also resulted in Orthodoxy's farthest-reaching victory, the conversion of the eastern and southern Slavs.

  In the eleventh century, internal and external difficulties again beset the empire. Weakened by social divisions that the strong emperors of the Macedonian era had held in check, Byzantium suddenly faced incursions by fierce enemies on all its borders. Petchenegs raided from the north; Normans (still just Frangoi to the Byzantines) invaded from southern Italy; and the populous Seljuk Turks, in the process of displacing the Arabs as leaders of the Islamic world, began pouring into Asia Minor from the east.∗

  Desperate measures ensued, and under the inspired leadership of a brilliant emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, who founded a new imperial dynasty in the late eleventh century, the empire managed to survive. Much was owed to Alexius’ fortitude and determination, as his talented daughter and chronicler, the historian Anna Comnena, makes clear in her paean to him, the Alexiad. On the run and cobbling together one rabble army after another from scratch, Alexius endured a series of blistering thrashings at the hands of the Normans. Much was owed also to his skillful negotiations with the Venetians, former Byzantine subjects from whom Alexius secured military aid in exchange for valuable trade privileges in Constantinople. It must have seemed like a winning proposition then, and no doubt it was, although at a time not too far distant the Venetians would extract their pound of flesh, and more, from the empire's flagging body.

  Survival would exact another price, as the partnership between secular learning and Christian piety, between reason and faith, began to crumble under the burden of social and military disintegration. Taking advantage of the prevailing uncertainty, and of the monks’ traditional suspicion of the humanist intellectuals, Alexius browbeat a reluctant church administration into condemning a critic of his, the philosopher John Italus, for heretical Neoplatonic beliefs. Other such trials would follow. Historians have associated them with an upsurge of mysticism in the Byzantine monastic community. The example of John Italus weighed heavily on Byzantine humanists of succeeding generations, and for centuries his fate essentially closed the door on the independent pursuit of Greek philosophical ideas within Byzantine society.

  The stand taken against such inquiry by Byzantium's powerful monks was soon reinforced by a succession of historical circumstances that further stressed the empire's already tattered social fabric. The worst of these was the Fourth Crusade, when the Latins occupied Constantinople for over half a century. Under the house of Paleologos the Byzantines recovered some of their morale with their capital in 1261, and for a few short decades Athens and Jersusalem found harmony again.

  Then, as Seljuk power waned around the turn of the fourteenth century, an aggressive new Turkish power arose along the Byzantine border in western Asia Minor. Named for its founder, Osman, the growing Osmanli or Ottoman state soon pushed the Byzantines onto the defensive for the last time.

  The Last Byzantine Renaissance

  Several times in the fourteenth century, crippli
ng civil wars wracked the dwindling Byzantine empire. Often there were multiple claimants to the throne, with the Venetians and Genoese each sponsoring their own competing members of the Paleologan dynasty, and the Turks acting as kingmakers. In strategic terms, the last part of Byzantine history makes a dreary tale, as Genoese, Venetians, Turks, and others contentiously scavenged what they could from the remains of the empire.

  Paradoxically, Byzantium's culture seemed to flower more insistently each time its military power was pruned back. This defiant cultural florescence was the Paleologan or Last Byzantine Renaissance, in which Theodore Metochites played such an important part. We have now described a circle, back to the springboard from which Byzantium's humanists launched the ancient Greek classics on their westward trajectory.

  In the century or so before the fall of Constantinople, Theodore Metochites and his successors made a partial comeback within Byzantium. Yet, this time there would be no fruitful partnership with the monks. In the mid-fourteenth century, even as the humanists gathered momentum, the monks enjoyed their own renewal. It deliberately excluded the literary humanism of Metochites’ intellectual heirs. Championed by the monks, a spiritual resurgence ultimately invigorated the whole Byzantine church, whose authority and power seemed to grow as those of the imperial government diminished. This great awakening is known as Hesychasm, and it, too, was a vital part of the Last Byzantine Renaissance.

  The name comes from the Greek noun hesychia, originally simply “quiet,” later “holy quiet,” “peace,” and “solitude” rolled into one; the Hesychast monks believed that meditation with controlled breathing and repetitious prayer could lead to theosis, “divinification,” mystical union with the Godhead, bathing its practitioners in the same divine light that had bathed Christ at Mt. Tabor in the transfiguration. The Hesychasts would eventually win dominance of the Orthodox church, and religious scholars today view their movement as the last major phase in the development of Orthodox theology.

  Byzantium's humanists found themselves once again opposed by its monks, this time in the monks’ new Hesychast incarnation. They boldly challenged the monks in a bitter public dispute that historians call the Hesychast controversy.

  The humanists were more conscious of shared history and eventually became more open to the West, which reciprocated with a flattering interest in their beloved ancient literature. Many would convert to Catholicism. To them, Christian solidarity seemed the reasonable, obvious—indeed only—way to escape political extinction at Turkish hands, and appeared to be attainable only if the Orthodox church was willing to compromise with the Catholics.

  But they were out of step with the Byzantine mainstream and its champions, the monks. A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. This is what happened to the Byzantines. In that sense, Byzantium chose its fate. Military conquest by the Turks was less of an evil than spiritual submission to the hated Catholics. Without strict adherence to Orthodoxy there could be no hope of spiritual salvation, and spiritual salvation came before political survival.

  As their empire edged closer to extinction, the Hesychasts and the humanists became often bitter ideological enemies, in a spectacular clash of values and beliefs that frequently spilled over into politics. It was not a simple situation, and much of the time there were no clearly marked lines of separation between the factions. There was much common ground. Both were patriots who wished to save Byzantium and its heritage. The question, inevitably, became which heritage, classical or Christian, and at what price? With tragic inexorability, the antagonists came to act as if the price of survival for one tradition must be the death of the other.

  Now we can grasp Theodore Metochites’ ultimate significance. His life, which lasted from 1270 to 1332, spanned the years of good morale, the last hurrah that came with Constantinople's recovery. Metochites lived during the last historical moment when Athens and Jerusalem would coexist peacefully with each other in Byzantine civilization.

  In the decades after Metochites’ death, what was originally a doctrinal dispute snowballed into a culture war to the death. At times the monks and humanists seemed to put their differences aside, but more often they ignored the common ground and treated each other with contemptuous inflexibility. Under the stresses of the looming Turkish conquest, the great rift between the pagan Greek and Christian Greek traditions—a fault line that rumbled ominously through Byzantium for long centuries—burst to the surface with a vengeance. The Hesychast controversy contributed to the civil wars of the mid-fourteenth century, at a time when unity was Byzantium's only hope of hanging on against the Turks.

  Yet, this very tension drove the gears that spread Byzantine influences abroad, even as the Turks closed in at home. For this reason, the Hesychast controversy proved as fertile for us as it was destructive for the Byzantines. That strange and complex process lies at the heart of the story that follows, as the Byzantine champions of Athens and Jerusalem each found new horizons beyond a dying empire.

  *Platonism refers to the ideas of Plato, while Neoplatonism refers to the interpretation and augmentation of Plato's ideas by later philosophers. Often described as “emanationist,” Platonic and Neoplatonic theory hold that meaning emanates from a single divine source, that the material world is unreal, and that true reality resides in immaterial “forms” or “ideas.” Plato also taught that the soul is immortal. Plato and his later interpreters had a huge impact on the development of Christian theology.

  *The continuity of classical literature during the Dark Age remains a controversial question in Byzantine studies. Little is known, and much remains speculative. A few leading scholars have argued that the break was severe. Yet, it seems hard to believe that the mastery of ancient Greek demonstrated by the Byzantine humanists of the ninth century could have arisen from a complete void.

  *Sir Steven Runciman, who until his death in 2000 was the grand old man of English Byzantinists. His book The Last Byzantine Renaissance was mentioned in the Prologue.

  *A loose confederation of Turkic tribes that had migrated westward from Central Asia, the Seljuks ruled from Baghdad.

  Chapter Three

  How Petrarch and Boccaccio Flunked Greek

  he Byzantine humanist who triggered the Hesy-chast controversy was a brilliant but sharp-tongued Greek from southern Italy named Barlaam. An Orthodox monk himself (though he later converted to Catholicism), Barlaam was also thoroughly versed in the classics, an astronomer and mathematician as well as a philosopher and theologian. Unfortunately for him, his formidable learning was coupled with an arrogant, sarcastic manner, so caustic at times that he put off even his friends and allies.

  Born about 1290 in Calabria in southern Italy, Barlaam came to Constantinople in the 1320s.∗ His learning immediately won him a wide reputation and a post as abbot of an important monastery. In 1334, two Catholic missionary bishops in Constantinople on their way from Genoa to the Crimea challenged the patriarch to a public disputation.

  Such debates were a common and favorite spectacle. Not willing to take on the bishops himself, the patriarch turned to Barlaam.

  Barlaam's assignment was to defend the Orthodox position that the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father and not from the Son. He chose an approach that was aggressively rationalistic, invoking Aristotelian logic to argue that matters concerning God could never actually be demonstrated but could only be rationally inferred. Even at the time, Barlaam's rationalism antagonized some in the crowd; afterward he wrote several tracts in the same vein.

  Barlaam's arguments drew the attention of a stern Hesychast monk named Gregory Palamas. In particular, Barlaam's use of pagan philosophy—which Palamas likened to snake poison—inflamed Palamas, who attacked Barlaam in tracts of his own. The problem with Barlaam's rational position was that although he meant it to refute the Catholics, it went equally against the beliefs of the Orthodox. In Barlaam's hand
s, Aristotelian rationalism was a double-edged sword.

  Provoked, Barlaam now loosed his considerable powers of invective not merely on Palamas, which he might have gotten away with, but on Hesychasm itself and, most outrageously, on the revered monks of Mt. Athos, the community of monasteries in northern Greece where Hesychasm was strongest.∗ The Hesychasts’ meditative practices included gazing at their navels as a way of focusing their contemplative powers. Barlaam singled out this practice for his derision, calling the monks omphalopsychoi, which might be loosely translated as “navelheads.” He also attacked them on doctrinal grounds. Palamas leapt to the Hesychasts’ defense, incidentally sharpening Hesychast doctrine as he defended it against Barlaam's attacks.

  In responding to Barlaam, Palamas drew an important distinction between God's “essence” and His “energy.” This distinction, implicit in earlier Orthodox theology but never fully ironed out, was necessary in order to defend the Hesychasts’ mystical approach, because to suggest the possibility of human participation in God's essence would be heretical. It was not reason that was the key to enlightenment, Palamas’ argument went, but the possibility of partaking in God's divine energy directly, through meditation, controlled breathing, and repetitive prayer. God could indeed be demonstrated, Palamas said, but not rationally known, experienced but not articulated—roughly the reverse of the position taken by the rational Barlaam and his followers. Posing mystical spirituality against human reason, this balanced antithesis of belief was the knot at the heart of the matter.