Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (74 page)

The heirs of Heraclius did succeed in preventing the whole empire from being swallowed up. Constantine IV beat off Muslim armies from Constantinople itself in 678, saved by the city's formidable walls and by the innovative use of a terrifying incendiary device known as 'Greek fire' (whose composition was always successfully kept undisclosed, a true Byzantine secret weapon) to destroy Arab ships.
¹⁷
While in hindsight we can see this Byzantine victory as a decisive move blocking westwards Islamic advance into Europe for centuries, there would have been little reason to feel relief at the time. The miseries of repeated warfare were compounded by a long-drawn-out natural catastrophe: from the 540s a major plague spread westwards through the empire and beyond, and it recurred right through to the eighth century. Population plummeted, including in Constantinople itself, and the general impact can still be seen dramatically in Syria, until then an area of continuing vigorous Classical urban civilization, where town after town was sucked dry of life and was never reoccupied, leaving a series of ruins in semi-desert wilderness to the present day. Constantinople itself was a city of ruins, a ghost of its former self.
¹⁸
This weakening of both Byzantine and Sassanian society by the plague must have been another reason why the Arabs found it so easy to overwhelm such large areas of mighty empires. Archaeologists have noted a remarkable fall in the number of coins recovered from excavations datable to the period from around 650 to around 800: economic activity must have drained away.
¹⁹
A Mediterranean-wide society faced ruin; no wonder that Byzantium was ready to listen with respect and longing to those who sought to bring it closer to its God.

BYZANTINE SPIRITUALITY: MAXIMUS AND THE MYSTICAL TRADITION

Under the circumstances, the preservation of Byzantine culture in the empire was increasingly the business of the one vigorous and expanding institution outside the Court. Just as in the fragmented kingdoms of the West, monasteries became the safe-deposits and factories of learning, and also strongholds of interference in imperial policy. Increasingly, the imperial Church chose monks to be bishops: there were no Christian equivalents of the vanished Academy of Athens, and no schools of theology like those which the Emperor Zeno had expelled from Edessa in 489 (see pp. 245-6). So there was nowhere else but a monastery to learn how to defend the faith, or discuss with spiritual men how to exercise pastoral care. A series of major Church historians in the fifth century produced pen-portraits of some of the great champions of Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Prominent among these figures were monks such as Basil of Caesarea, or even the Westerner Martin of Tours, who had bridged that gap which in the beginnings of monasticism might have seemed impossibly wide, combining monastic and episcopal vocations. As a result, by the eleventh century, it was overwhelmingly the convention in the East that bishops should always be monks, and so it has remained in Orthodoxy.
²⁰
The convention has led to a two-track career for Orthodox clergy, for in complete contrast to the medieval West, clergy with no intention of hearing a call to either monasticism or the episcopate have customarily continued to follow the practice of the early Church; they have been married men with families, and minister to the laity in their local churches.

By Justinian's time, certain key monasteries were celebrated throughout the imperial East. The first Christian emperors had discouraged the foundation of monasteries in the capital itself, but the convention was breached in the mid-fifth century by Stoudios, a wealthy senator, who paid for a monastery on his own estate within the city walls. Bolstered by its possession of the head of John the Baptist, this Stoudite community was to prove a major force in the life of Constantinople for nearly a thousand years.
²¹
On the frontiers of the empire too, in lands soon lost to the Muslim Arabs, two of the most important early foundations have managed to survive all the disasters of later history to the present day. The monastery of St Sabas near Jerusalem was from its inception in the 480s a large community (the 'Great Lavra') with a fleet of subsidiary houses. The founder Sabas, a monk from Cappadocia, died in his nineties in Justinian's reign. More remote and older was the community of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, a far-flung beneficiary of Justinian's enthusiasm for church-building. Besides the massive granite walls of the monastery, the dry conditions have preserved extraordinary woodwork; there are monumental doors in the church from Justinian's time, and behind later panelling there lurk roof timbers preserved in their original setting, inscribed with memorials to the generosity of the Emperor and his covertly Miaphysite empress, Theodora, in refounding and fortifying this key Orthodox monastery.

In the wretchedly anxious era which followed Justinian, certain key monastic writers not greatly known or appreciated in the West until modern times created a spirituality distinctive to the Orthodox world. St Catherine's was home to one of the most important shapers of Byzantine monasticism: its abbot John of the Ladder (
tis Klimakos
, Climacus), so called from the work of spirituality which he created, the
Ladder of Divine Ascent
. Climacus is as shadowy a figure as the Western St Benedict, who (since so little is certain about either of them) may have been a near-contemporary of his in the sixth century. Likewise Climacus is known only through his written work, which is not a monastic rule like Benedict's, but a collection of sayings conceived as a guide for monks. Its metaphor of progress in the ascetic life through the steps of a ladder is a characteristic feature of Christian mysticism in both East and West. Many mystics through the centuries have spoken and written about the impulse to move towards a goal, to travel onwards, even though frequently to the worldly eye they are people steeped in stillness and immobility. Stillness may be the goal; on the way, there is much labour.

The Ladder
distils much from the past. That is another feature of mystical writing, which repeatedly sets up echoes of past works, many of which the author is most unlikely to have known directly (while on occasion, the same mystical themes emerge quite independently in very varied settings). Climacus's texts resonate with pronouncements of Egyptian ascetics, including Evagrius of Pontus (see pp. 209-10), at that stage not yet condemned as heretical, from whom Climacus takes the concept of
apatheia
, passionlessness or serenity, as one of the main ladder steps into the union with the divine in
theosis
. There is a sharp perceptiveness and even humour in Climacus's writings which is very personal. One of the most original of his themes, much repeated later, is his paradoxical insistence that mourning is the beginning of a Christian's divine joy: 'I am amazed at how that which is called
penthos
[mourning] and grief should contain joy and gladness interwoven within it, like honey in the comb'.
²²
Orthodox monasteries still customarily have the
Ladder
read through during their meals in Lent.

In the next generation, another monk gave further lasting shape to Orthodox spirituality, and is indeed often regarded as the greatest theologian in the Byzantine tradition: Maximus or Maximos (
c
. 580-662), known as 'the Confessor' from the sufferings he endured at the end of his long life in defence of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy.
²³
His writings could guide a monk in almost every aspect of his life - doctrine, ascetic practice, worship and the understanding of scripture - and all is suffused with Maximus's constant return to the theme of union with the divine. Like Climacus, Maximus did not seek to be original: he restated and enriched the message of the past, but his choices set directions for the future. One of his sources was Cyril of Alexandria - whom he chose to see as a firm defender of the theology on the natures of Christ which the Council of Chalcedon had later affirmed - and, once more, Origen and Evagrius rather more discreetly than was necessary in a previous generation. But Maximus also looked to a writer who went under the name of one of the few converts whom Paul of Tarsus is said to have made in Athens, Dionysius the Areopagite.
²⁴
The books of this 'Pseudo-Dionysius' were in fact probably compiled in Syria around eighty years before Maximus's time, by a Christian steeped in Neoplatonist philosophy, and moreover a sympathizer with the Miaphysites - an irony in view of Maximus's strong Chalcedonianism.
²⁵
In fact the career of Pseudo-Dionysius is remarkable: he is a constant presence behind the mystical writings of Orthodox Christianity, and from the ninth century, when his writings were translated into Latin by the Irish philosopher John Scotus Erigena, he became a powerful voice in a Western Latin mystical tradition as well.

Dionysius the Areopagite drew on the thought of Neoplatonists (see pp. 169-70) in his exploration of how divinity could intimately combine with humanity through a progress in purging, illumination and union. These stages are to be found in many subsequent treatments of mystical Christianity long after Maximus, and their origins in such a dubiously provenanced work are a testimony to the way in which Christian mysticism reaches beyond the careful boundaries drawn by the councils of the Church.
²⁶
Dionysian theology was also Neoplatonic in its view of the cosmos as a series of hierarchies; it viewed these hierarchies not as an obstacle to God, but as the means of uniting the remoteness and unknowableness of God with the knowable particularity of lower creation, just as courtiers might be intermediaries for humble people to approach a monarch. God could be known in precisely opposite ways: by what could not be said about him (the 'apophatic' view of God) and what could be affirmed about him (the 'kataphatic' view). Pseudo-Dionysius, like so many writers in mystical traditions, loved expressing in terms of light the relationship between unknowable transcendence and the tiers of being which represented knowable divinity:

Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendour, they can then pass on this light generously.
²⁷

Maximus eagerly absorbed these themes and applied them in much greater detail to many different aspects of spirituality and worship. For him,
theosis
or deification was the destination for human salvation, whose attainment Adam's sin in Eden had imperilled but not rendered impossible; in fact all the cosmos was created to arrive at deification. A ground-bass of Maximus's meditation on
theosis
is
Logos
, the word that is Word and echoes through so much ancient philosophy to re-echo in John's Gospel prologue and the writings of the first Apologists (see pp. 1 and 142-3). For Maximus, the central moment in the whole story of the cosmos was the coming of the Word in Flesh, a union of uncreated and created, and that was why the latter half of his career was devoted to a bitter public struggle to assert his own Chalcedonian understanding of what that meant. But there were so many depths to the meaning of
Logos
beyond this event of incarnation. God's creation contained multiple 'words',
logoi
, which were God's intentions for his creation, and the source of differentiation behind all created things: God the One and Simple designed his creation in multiplicity and complexity, so 'it is said that God knows all beings according to these
logoi
before their creation, since they are in him and with him; they are in God who is the truth of all'. Rational created beings were destined and commanded to move back to meet their God through their
logoi
.
²⁸

The
Logos
was thus to be met both in Jesus and in all creation; it was also to be met in scripture. In a remarkably physical picture of the 'Word', Maximus said, 'The Word is said to become "thick". . . because he for our sakes, who are coarse in respect to our mentality, accepted to become incarnate and to be expressed in letters, syllables and words, so that from all these he might draw us to himself.'
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Maximus relished the approach to scripture that Origen had pioneered, seeing behind the veil of the literal meaning of the text a great sea of spiritual truths. Among their other gifts to the faithful, they could explain and give positive value to the literal discrepancies and oddities to be found throughout the sacred books. To seek after these meanings was yet another pathway back to the Creator, and it was a path directed by love. Love 'is the producer
par excellence
of deification'. By whatever route, the goal was 'to become living images of Christ, or rather to become identical with him or a copy, or even, perhaps, to become the Lord himself, unless this seems blasphemous to some'.
³⁰
Repeatedly, Maximus referred to Christians as gods through grace.
³¹

One can see why some Christians might indeed find this language hard to accept, but Maximus escaped any later censure and has remained a voice of authority in the Eastern Church. This was partly because of his passionate belief that the Church's liturgical ceremonies served as a chief means of deification: his writing is at its most personally intense in his celebration of the liturgy's spiritual riches. He ties every part of its observation into the ascent towards God, culminating in the reception of the eucharistic bread and wine in which 'God fills [communicants] entirely and leaves no part of them empty of his presence'.
³²
So alongside all the instruction which he provided for the interior life of the individual monk, Maximus's greatest eloquence was reserved for the communal drama which bound together clergy and laity. Of equal importance was that through his writing and sufferings at the end of his life Maximus became a chief symbol of Orthodoxy's resistance to yet another attempt by the emperors to conciliate Miaphysite opinion in the Church by developing a common theology on the basis of Cyril of Alexandria.