Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (73 page)

Justinian now revealed his passion for building. With extraordinary speed he commissioned his architect to obliterate the remains of the old church. Its replacement would serve as cathedral of the city and symbol of unity in his empire, as well as a perpetual warning to future unruly crowds as it loomed over the Hippodrome. The overall design, completed and dedicated after only five years, outdid all previous precedents. It abandoned the basilican plan of its predecessor church and showcased a feature of imperial architecture which previously had rarely been more than a subsidiary theme in Christian building: the dome, a recreation of the canopy of Heaven. From the time of Constantine, domes had been used to roof circular or centrally planned Christian buildings which spoke primarily of the route to Heaven in death - mausoleum-churches for the burial of prominent people or baptisteries which witnessed Christians' death to sin (see p. 293). Here, the aim was different, creating a congregational space for emperor, patriarch and people which felt as if it encompassed the long east-west axis of a conventional basilica. This was achieved by building a dome of breathtaking width and height, pierced around its base by a row of windows through which shafts of light transfixed the church interior below; the dome seemed to float on two half-domes to east and west. They climaxed at the east in the altar, housed beyond them in a central semicircular (apsidal) sanctuary; that apse was topped by yet another half-dome. One sixth-century poet, Paul the Silentiary, tried to capture the effect: it 'is a great helmet, bending over on every side, like the radiant heavens . . . like the firmament that rests upon air'.
⁸

Paul's verse was actually commemorating an early restoration of Hagia Sophia after earthquake damage; the dome partially collapsed again in 1346. Few churches could risk trying to match its daring and complicated architectural form; none of Justinian's many foundations or rebuildings of other churches followed its model in full. What Hagia Sophia did do was decisively to promote the central dome as the leading motif of architecture in the imperial Church of the East and in those Churches which later sought to identify with that tradition. Moreover, following the precedent of Hagia Sophia, the dome became a major Islamic feature in mosques, once mosques became covered spaces rather than open courtyards. When the dome was used in other Eastern church buildings, it generally once more appeared as in earlier Christian buildings in the midst of a central plan, and now most commonly it rode over the centre of a cross with equal arms - a Greek cross. This plan could be adapted to the use of quite small communities like rural parishes or minor monasteries and still convey the impression of celestial splendour. In a much later development, a screen called an
iconostasis
customarily shut off the altar (see pp. 484-5), but this was not how such church interiors were originally conceived for five centuries or more after Justinian's time.

Nowhere was the Orthodox combination of architecture, art and liturgy seen more splendidly than in Hagia Sophia, often simply known as the 'Great Church', although its present rather dismal internal state does credit neither to its original incarnation nor to the care lavished on it in its subsequent life as a mosque. There was a moment in 612 when Patriarch Sergios decreed a reduction in what he regarded as an excessive staff and ceremony in the cathedral: the trimmed establishment which he allowed amounted to eighty priests, 150 deacons, forty deaconesses, seventy subdeacons, 160 readers, twenty-five cantors and a hundred doorkeepers.
⁹
Worshippers beyond this monstrous array of sacred courtiers could see Heaven above them in the dome and semi-domes. The images, still relatively simple in the original decoration of Hagia Sophia, became more and more elaborate. Those who looked up into the dome above a congregation would normally see the image of Christ the Ruler of All (the 'Pantocrator'), in glory and in judgement. They could also gaze east, to the table where bread and wine were made holy, normally presided over by the images of Christ's Mother, usually with her baby son, God made flesh. All around these representations of divinity enthroned and incarnate was more figural representation in mosaic or wall painting, in schemes which grew fixed throughout Orthodoxy not merely in arrangement but in content, all conceived as reflecting their archetypes, just as a particular object might reflect its Platonic form. The tiers representing rulers, saints, clergy, all in hierarchical but intimate relationship to God and Mary the
Theotokos
, were a constant assurance to the congregations who viewed them that God in his mercy allowed such intimacy to human beings.

Interestingly, the ordering of saints in Byzantine church interiors does not much reflect the passing of the seasons of Christian worship; they tend instead to be grouped in categories, such as martyrs or virgins.
¹⁰
The Church's year - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - tells a story which progresses in linear fashion through the months, centring on the life of Christ, and it is also punctuated by days commemorating particular historic events in the lives of saints. The Eucharist, by contrast, is timeless, reflecting the eternity of Heaven. It is that timelessness that the artistic schemes of the Orthodox Churches characteristically invoke - the only moment to which they point above the altar is the end of time, when Christ reigns in glory, the moment in which every Eucharist participates. Eastern congregations did not develop the attitude of the Carolingian West that the Eucharist was something to privatize, directing its power to particular ends and intentions, and therefore capable of being shortened into a said form (see pp. 356-7). In the East, the celebration was done because it needed to be done - at the worst times in Orthodox history, it has been just about all that the Church has been able to do. Moreover, from an early date, Eastern Christians seem to have concluded that it was enough for worshippers to be present at the Eucharist without receiving bread and wine. This seems to have been a measure of the awe which attached to the experience of eating the body and blood of Christ, which is how the Eucharist was now perceived. Laypeople's reception of these elements became a very occasional, perhaps once-yearly, experience, much earlier than the same development in the West. Indeed, in the late fourth century, Ambrose of Milan recorded his disapproval of this Eastern custom.
¹¹

The ordered worship of God was the means by which holiness could enfold everyone, under the protection of the great helmet of the dome above. The singing of the liturgy imitated the music of Heaven, with angels in the same choir alongside the worshippers, and much of that music was intended for processions, for all to sing. The tradition allowed for voices alone, without instruments, in contrast to the gradual medieval acceptance in the Latin West of musical instruments, as also far away in the Church of Ethiopia. The singing congregations were travelling towards holiness, protected in the fixed shape of the liturgy, bound into the processions which dominated not merely the drama of the Church but everyday life in the streets of Constantinople. Moments of entry and reception into the sacred precincts were of especial importance, not least to the emperor himself, and the goal was the drama of the Eucharist at God's altar. Music which began life in processions might end up having other uses. For instance, that most popular of Eastern musical acclamations the
Trisagion
(see pp. 239-40) was said to have been devised by a boy in the mid-fifth century as a comment on the penitential psalm that he was singing in procession, to pray for deliverance from a sequence of violent earth tremors. The chant's success in stilling the earthquakes embedded it in the liturgy and in the consciousness of Eastern Christians far beyond Byzantium.
¹²

Worship in the Orthodox fashion came to propel first monks, then laypeople beyond the monasteries, towards an idea which over centuries became basic to Christian Orthodox spirituality: union with the divine, or
theosis
- dizzyingly for humanity, and alarmingly for many Western Christians, the word can be translated as 'deification'. The concept was likely to take the Christian believer in a very different direction from Augustine's Western emphasis on the great gulf between God and humanity created by original sin. It asserted that human society could be sanctified through the ministry and liturgy of the Church, and by the meditations of those who were prepared to enter such difficult and testing labour. What Justinian was doing in his major programme of building in the capital and the creation of a constant round of sacred ceremony around Hagia Sophia was to make himself and the imperial Court the focus of a society where every public activity which formerly had been part of the non-Christian structure of the empire was now made holy and consecrated to the service of God.

The first major project of Justinian's reign, the codification of half a millennium of imperial legal decisions, might at first seem remote from the agenda of sacralizing Byzantine society, but Justinian's collections and abridgements were a deliberately Christian reshaping of the heritage of law from the empire, much more conscious in that objective than the previous harmonization of Roman law by an earlier Christian emperor of the fourth century, Theodosius II. This codification was one of Justinian's most lasting legacies. In the West it disappeared for centuries along with the empire itself, but its rediscovery in the eleventh century played a significant part both in the Gregorian remoulding of society and the creation of the first Christian universities (see pp. 377-8 and 398), and it provided the basis for most Western legal systems devised thereafter. It also remained the foundation for Eastern imperial justice until the Byzantine Empire disappeared in 1453, but the price of its survival was its rapid translation into Greek.

There was no future for Latin in the empire of Justinian's successors, for in the eastern Mediterranean it had only ever been an interloping language imposed by colonial administrators from the West. The people of Byzantium continued to call themselves 'Romans' (and that is also what the Arabs called them and their homeland of Asia Minor -
Rhum
), but they did so in Greek: they were
Rhomaioi
. They also lost the inclination to enjoy literature in Latin, until much later, at a time of renewed cultural contacts in the thirteenth century, they found new Greek translations of Latin poetry and philosophy to read.
¹³
The draining of what was Roman or non-Christian from New Rome was one of the irreversible effects of Justinian's reign and its aftermath: in the century and a half from his death in 565, a new identity was created for society in the Eastern Empire which can be described as Byzantine.

It was not merely that Justinian's military campaigns brought ruin to traditional Roman society in his new conquests in Italy and North Africa (see p. 320); he also undermined much of what remained from the past in the East. In 529 the Emperor closed the Academy of Athens, which in the great days of the 'Second Sophistic' at the height of Roman imperial self-confidence (see pp. 140-41) had been a self-conscious refoundation of the ancient Academy of Aristotle, and which still upheld the tradition of Plato. It was also during Justinian's time, in 550-51, that another institution of higher education in Berytus (Beirut) was closed after a major earthquake devastated the city; only Alexandria was left as a centre of ancient non-Christian learning until the Islamic conquest. With such losses, education became more and more the property of Christian clergy and reflected their priorities. Books were otherwise scarce, and one new sort of book became increasingly common:
florilegia
, which were collections of short extracts from complete works which would act as guides to a subject, particularly in religion. Usually they were gathered with some particular theological agenda in mind. Another sort of new book flourished too: in the model of the life of Antony of Egypt (see pp. 205-6), hagiographies (biographies of saints, their miracles and the wonders associated with their shrines) became the staple fare of Byzantine reading.
¹⁴

This was natural enough. The world felt increasingly out of human control, and the best hope seemed to be found in the hairline cracks between Heaven and earth provided by sacred places and holy people. The later sixth century saw the Byzantine Empire increasingly on the defensive on all fronts, with major losses in the western Mediterranean territories that Justinian had won and the seizure of imperial territory in the Balkans by Slavs and Avars. In 613 a Persian army encamped within sight of the city across the waters of the Bosphorus. In 626 came the greatest crisis yet, when a joint force of Avars, Slavs and Persians besieged the city. In the absence of the Emperor Heraclius on campaign, the Patriarch called together a procession of the whole civilian population bearing icons. During the siege, a woman, identified as the Virgin Mary herself, was reputedly seen leading the defenders: it was a major stimulus for the already lively cult of Mary in the Eastern Church.
¹⁵

Heraclius, one of the greatest if often maligned heroes of the whole Byzantine story, performed extraordinary feats in outfacing these cumulative military threats, and his accession in 610 marked the beginning of an imperial dynasty which was to last throughout the seventh century. Still there remains his greatest failure: in his preoccupation with defeating his enemies in east and west, Heraclius had missed the importance of the new invaders from the south, the Muslim Arabs. After the defeat of a Byzantine army in 636, all its southern provinces were soon lost, Jerusalem included. There was actually a six-year-period when the Emperor Constans II, desperate to defend his western provinces, abandoned Constantinople and took refuge with his Court in Sicily before being murdered in 668 by courtiers infuriated by his drastic efforts to secure revenue and his apparent intention to make this move permanent; ever afterwards, his name was reviled and made into the belittling 'Constans' rather than his baptismal 'Constantine'.
¹⁶