Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (72 page)

Other dimensions of mysticism freed the mystic from the centralizing impulse of the Church. Much of the writings which conveyed mystical experience was in various European vernaculars - the
Cloud of Unknowing
being one example - and so was directed towards those whose command of Latin, the international language of culture, was shaky or non-existent. Perhaps that was why mystics hit on themes which were familiar in Orthodox spirituality, but which had not been given nearly as much official encouragement by the Western Church. The mystic met God beyond the mediation of the male Church hierarchy, and in ways which can be remarkable metaphorical or imaginative appropriations of physical contact with the divine. Characteristic in mystical writings of the period are expressions which emphasize the human vulnerability, frailty, virginity of the subject, but which also celebrate the capacity of this frailty to unite with the divine. Not only women were attracted to these themes. One of the most remarkable mystical writings of the period is a Latin text by a Franciscan friar who was a spiritual adviser and scribe to a probably illiterate woman beguine in Vienna, Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315); the work may be regarded as a joint venture in spiritual conversation between the two. The two hundred or so visions of Agnes which the friar recorded during the early 1290s make a good deal of use of the metaphor of clothing and unclothing to signify her contact with God (there are naked dancing nuns and friars in her Heaven). Her relish in the Feast of the Circumcision, which led her to imagine swallowing the foreskin of Christ, was one of the issues which raised a good deal of worry when the manuscript was first put into print in the eighteenth century. Agnes's visions were infused with everyday perceptions transformed into symbol; in one of them, Christ appeared to her in quick succession as a bishop, a chef, a pharmacist and the keeper of a general store.
⁴¹

It is not surprising that in the age when official Christianity clashed with the Spiritual Franciscans, such mysticism, springing from free choices by individuals which might owe little to the priorities of the Church authorities, attracted hostile attention from inquisitors. One of the most well-known beguine mystics, Marguerite Porete, who wrote of her experiences in a work in French entitled
The Mirror of Simple Souls,
was burned in France as a 'Free Spirit' heretic in 1310: there was a fine line between such a fate and eventual honour in the Church. The German Dominican Meister Eckhart, an associate of Marguerite during his years in France, was similarly accused of heresy and died while inquisition proceedings against him were proceeding; yet because his works eventually escaped full condemnation, they remained widely influential. Eckhart, writing in vigorous and multi-layered German, introduced the idea that after abstracting the particular 'this' or 'that' and achieving 'detachment',
Gelassenheit,
the soul can meet God in the 'ground',
Grunt
, of all reality. There she can achieve an inseparable union with the divine, 'the unplumbed depth of God [which] has no name': 'Life can never be perfected till it returns to its productive source where life is one being that the soul receives when she dies right down to the "ground", that we may live in that life where there is one being.' It could be said (and Eckhart did say) that 'God begets His only begotten Son in the highest part of the soul.'
⁴²

At the other end of the scale of acceptance from Porete was Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century Swedish noblewoman, who founded the monastic order for women and attendant priests which came to take her name; she derived the considerable detail of her foundation from a single vision of Christ, who had considerately spoken to her in Swedish. The Bridgettine Order became much favoured by Bridget's fellow nobility and monarchs all over northern Europe and came to represent late medieval piety at its most lavishly funded, intense and sophisticated. It is nevertheless noticeable that despite all this rich flowering of female spirituality, hardly any women were canonized (officially declared to be saints) in the two centuries after 1300. One of them was indeed Bridget, and the other her Italian contemporary and fellow visionary Catherine of Siena. Both canonizations were deeply controversial - in fact in the case of Bridget, the process had to be repeated three times.

One compelling motive for Catherine and Bridget achieving such exceptional promotion was that it suited the Vicar of Christ in the generations after their deaths. Prominent among the prophecies of both women was their insistence that the popes who had relocated from Rome to Avignon in the early fourteenth century (see pp. 558-9) were destined to return to the city of St Peter: predictions whose fulfilment did not harm their chances of long-term favour from the papacy.
⁴³
There was good reason for the popes who had returned to Rome to be grateful for such affirmations. Their claims in the Church were seriously challenged in this period, and were to be given more serious challenges still in the sixteenth-century Reformation. The consequences were profound for all Christianity, and take the story of the Western Church into new territory. Before exploring it, there is another story to tell. We will return to the East: to the Orthodox Churches, which never experienced any reformations like the two which convulsed the Western Church in the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and which, in contrast to the project of papal monarchy, preserved and promoted the Roman imperial ideal in new forms, in new settings.

PART V

Orthodoxy: The Imperial Faith (451-1800)

13

Faith in a New Rome (451-900
)

A CHURCH TO SHAPE ORTHODOXY: HAGIA SOPHIA

The charisma of the Bishops of Rome is twofold, springing from the tomb of St Peter and from Europe's equally long-standing fascination with Roman power and civilization. Gradually, in the series of accidents which we have followed from the first century to the thirteenth, Peter's successors revived the aspirations of Roman emperors to rule the world, and they managed to prevent the successors of the Emperor Charlemagne from gaining a monopoly on this monarchical role in the Christianity of the West. In Constantinople the balance was different. The newly promoted bishop of the city took advantage of a favourable conjunction of politics at the first Council of Constantinople in 381 (see pp. 218-20) to get himself 'the primacy of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is the new Rome',
¹
while his Church did its best to trump Rome in apostolicity by declaring that it had been founded by the first-recruited among Christ's Apostles, Andrew. Even by early Christian standards, this was an implausible shot, and Andrew never really achieved much for his putative episcopal successors, the Patriarchs of Constantinople. Instead, the Byzantine emperors and the ideal of Christian governance which they represented became the vital distinguishing force in the Churches later known as Orthodox, long after the last emperor had died defending Constantinople in 1453.

Orthodox Christianity prides itself on its faithfulness to tradition: its majestic round of worship, woven into a texture of ancient music, sustained with carefully considered gesture and choreography amid a setting of painting following prescribed artistic convention, can be seen as reflecting the timelessness of Heaven. Its history has customarily been written with that self-image in mind, and in telling the Orthodox story there is a real problem in recovering the reality of personalities or events which at particular moments provided alternative routes to the future, and who have accordingly won a negative presentation from later Orthodox historians. It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.
²
Take, for instance, these lines from the fifth sticheron (hymn) for Great Vespers on the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension. In celebration of the first Council of Nicaea, the liturgy describes with relish (and one malevolent theological pun) the wretched end of Nicaea's arch-villain in fatal diarrhoea on the privy:

Arius fell into the precipice of sin,
Having shut his eyes so as not to see the light,
And he was ripped asunder
by a divine hook so that along with his entrails
he forcibly emptied out
all his essence [
ousia
!] and his soul,
and was named another Judas
both for his ideas and the manner of his death.

Such liturgical performance of hatred is embarrassing for modern ecumenical discussions among Eastern Christians when it is directed at cherished saints of one of the Churches participating, but it is probably to be preferred to the Western practice of burning heretics. There were very few burnings in the Byzantine Empire and they ceased soon after the West resumed burnings in the eleventh century, although in later centuries burnings resumed in Orthodox Muscovy - apparently first thanks to prompting from envoys of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1490.
³
In fact there was a long tradition in the Orthodox Church of leading churchmen criticizing burnings at the stake, which has little or no parallel in medieval Western Catholicism.
⁴
Once the Orthodox Churches of the East and the Balkans were in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, persecuting Christian heretics was in any case no longer a practical proposition for Orthodox Christians - but the hymns of hate remained, liturgical affirmations that there was one truth in Orthodoxy which had fought its way past a series of satanic temptations to error.

Continuity is not the same as changelessness. The Church of Constantinople and the Churches which sprang from it were wedded to imperial politics and the politics of the empire's successor-states: their spirituality has moved in rhythms set by these chances of history. The destruction of the empire in 1453 did not merely encourage the Church to cling fiercely to its evolved theological identity, denying that any other could be or had been possible; it also led Churches which escaped the catastrophe to reaffirm the role of sacred monarchy in the mould of Byzantium, and it was only at the end of the twentieth century that the last monarch of an Orthodox country was sent packing from his throne - the King of Greece, who happened to bear the name of both the first 'Orthodox' monarch and the last Byzantine monarch, Constantine. In post-Communist Orthodox cultures there are still rulers who aspire to something of the same role.

Orthodoxy has to a remarkable extent been moulded round one single church building, far more influential than even those crucial Western sacred places, the Basilica of St Peter in Rome and the Abbey Church of Cluny. This is the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, whose fabric has fared better than Cluny's, but whose fate as a church converted to a mosque encapsulates the traumas of Orthodox history (see Plate 5). It owes its present form to the partnership of a Latin-speaking boy from the Balkans and a former circus artist of dauntingly gymnastic sexual prowess: the Emperor Justinian I and his consort, Theodora.
⁵
We have already encountered this heroic if unlikely imperial couple as we have visited the stories both of the Western Church and of the Churches which rejected the Christological formula of Chalcedon after 451. Even before Justinian succeeded his Balkan-born soldier-uncle Justin in 527, they were contemplating the reuniting of the old empire through a twofold strategy of theological negotiation with Miaphysite enemies of Chalcedon and military conquests in East and West.

Justinian and Theodora were the last Christian monarchs before the nineteenth-century British Queen Victoria to wield an influence throughout all sections of the Christian world in their age, and their influence was far more personal and less purely symbolic than hers. It was Justinian who presided over the fifth Council of Constantinople in 553 when it condemned the theological tradition of Origen, sought to intensify the Church's rejection of the Dyophysites and in the process humiliated Pope Vigilius (see pp. 209-10 and 326-7); it was Theodora who provided patronage for those who secretly built up a Miaphysite Church hierarchy to challenge the Chalcedonians (see pp. 235-6). One would not realize how colourful their lives had been from the mosaic portraits of the pair as majestic and universal rulers, breaking iconographical convention to stand in pious harmony with their clergy and attendants in the very sanctuary of the imperial church of San Vitale in Ravenna (see Plate 27). The colour is revealed through the unusually triangulated writings of the Court historian Procopius (or Procopios). To balance his eloquent celebration of the Emperor's public achievements and buildings, Procopius vented his frustrations at his own courtliness by furtively penning a poisonous denunciation of Justinian and Theodora in a gossipy account of the same events,
The Secret History
, whose rediscovery by the pope's Vatican librarian in the seventeenth century much enhanced historical enjoyment of the period.
⁶

Justinian's rebuilding of Hagia Sophia resulted from a political upheaval which nearly ended his rule only five years after his accession. His lavish expenditure and his vigorous pursuit of frontier wars, and the attendant taxation to pay for them, had united the active citizens of Constantinople in fury against him. In 532 the sporting factions of Greens and Blues, who played a leading part in city politics because they organized public entertainment in the capital's stadium, the Hippodrome, suspended their normal rivalry in an effort to overthrow Justinian, pushing one of his nephews into claiming imperial power. The crowds' shouts of 'Victory' (
Nika
) filled the city as they set fire to major buildings. Procopius maintained that, amid the blaze and panic, it was only Theodora's steely declaration to her husband that 'Royalty is a fine burial shroud' that steadied his nerve, pulled him back from flight and dispatched troops to slaughter the Nika rebels and hack their way to the submission of the city.
⁷
Around the shaken Emperor, much of the city lay in ruins, not least the two-centuries-old basilica of Hagia Sophia next to the Hippodrome and the palace.