Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (77 page)

It was Theophilos's empress, Theodora, who finally reversed the iconoclastic policy, from motives which, like those of Irene, are now permanently obscured by grateful Orthodox hagiographers. Once Theophilos was dead, Theodora as regent ordered the Patriarch Methodios to restore the icons to the churches. The occasion of this restoration, the first Sunday in Lent, 11 March 843, is commemorated as one of the most significant feasts of the Eastern Church, the 'Triumph of Orthodoxy'. On that day icons are paraded around Orthodox churches with particular ceremony, and a document enshrining the ninth-century decision and composed about that time is solemnly read out. This
Synodicon
theatrically includes a list of the chief personalities who could be seen as the defenders of icons, each followed by the acclamation 'eternal memory!' The Empress, worried about the reputation of her son, made sure that the parallel list of those condemned in the
Synodikon
did not include his father, her husband, Theophilos, and that broad hint prevented any campaign of revenge attacks on iconoclasts, who continued to argue their case throughout the later ninth century, but never again enjoyed official patronage.

The two iconophile empresses had effectively closed down the possibility of alternative forms of worship in the Orthodox tradition. They made veneration of icons a compulsory part of it, an essential badge of Orthodox identity (see Plate 33). They and their supporters not merely pronounced on a question of aesthetic preference, but also transformed the nature of the art which the Eastern Church produced. The special nature of Orthodox icons was emphasized by the growth of a notion, much encouraged by these bitter disputes, that there was one quite exceptional class of art:
acheiropoieta
, images of Jesus not made by human hands, the archetype of which was the now-mysterious
Mandylion
given by Christ himself to King Abgar of Edessa (see pp. 180-81) - the developed form of the
Mandylion
legend probably dates from the years of iconoclastic controversy. Such objects certainly defeated the iconoclast argument that icons had not received a specific blessing by the Church: a specifically divine creation trumped any such cavils.
⁶⁰

One modern commentator crisply sums up what had happened during the iconoclast controversy: 'In the course of almost 180 years of debate, Greek theologians produced a radical change in the language with which they framed the icon. In so doing, they raised the status of the work of art to that of theology and the status of the artists to that of the theologian.'
⁶¹
Art had become not a means of individual human creative expression, but an acclamation of the corporate experience of the Church. It was something to be approached with meditation and an acute sense of tradition. A technical change furthered this. The earliest icons, for instance, two majestic sixth-century portraits of Christ and St Peter preserved in St Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai - from one point of view, fine examples of late Roman naturalistic art - are executed in encaustic fashion, paint employing hot wax. By its nature, this technique encourages speed, an almost impressionistic technique, before the wax becomes unworkable, and in these works naturalism is an ally of individualistic talent. Quick decisions, boldness are at a premium. Later icons are executed in tempera, the mixing of colours in egg white. The technique encourages tiny strokes, meticulously applied with care and thought: a highly appropriate medium for meditation and careful attention to detail. The artist in tempera could rely on increasingly formal conventions for representation of the holy, turning all his individual skill to illuminate an increasingly elaborate set of conventions which carried choreographed theological messages.

Not all monks had opposed the destruction of images, but the leading figures in campaigning for their restoration apart from the empresses had been monks like Theodore the Stoudite. They were also energetic in placing the restoration in a wider context: the renewal and enriching of worship and its music in Constantinople. It was done just at the time when the Carolingians and their bishops were greatly enriching the liturgy of Francia, but with a different reference point, Rome. In a parallel fashion, Byzantium looked eastwards: the ninth-century renewal of the city's liturgical tradition drew inspiration from a source beyond itself, in Jerusalem. Now that the city was in the hands of Muslims, there was a natural desire to preserve its spiritual tradition from possible extinction, as the iconoclasts' devotion to the Cross had demonstrated. Many Palestinian monks found that, at the end of the eighth century, Muslim rule was becoming a good deal more burdensome than in the past and they moved inside the empire to practise their faith. Theodore was an admirer of Palestinian monk-saints like St Sabas, and the Stoudite monastery became a laboratory for experiments with the ceremonies and texts of the worship from the monasteries of Palestine. Soon the liturgies used by monasteries, lovingly commented on in treatises by a sequence of monks from the time of Maximus the Confessor onwards, merged with the liturgy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia to create a liturgy for the whole Church.
⁶²

What the Palestinian monasteries offered the Church of Constantinople was a tradition of music and hymnody which has remained at the heart of Byzantine liturgy; it was also in Palestine that the eight musical modes were developed. They were not only now used in Constantinople, but were soon adopted by the Carolingians and the Western Church as a whole to organize its musical composition and chant, and so they stand at the origin of the whole Western musical tradition.
⁶³
Previously the music of churches in Constantinople had been dominated by the set sung narrative sermon in verse known as the
kontakion
, a dialogue between chanter and choir or congregation who sing a refrain. Now only one
kontakion
is customarily sung in full, in praise of the Virgin on the fifth Saturday in Lent, known as the
Akathistos
('unseated'), since it is given the particular honour of being the one part of the liturgy for which all must stand. The other
kontakia
which still appear in the liturgy are much abbreviated. The liturgical form of hymn which replaced the
kontakion
was the
canon
, a set of nine hymns. These sets of hymns originated in Palestinian monasteries as meditations on themes from the Bible which were performed in the liturgy; the nine climaxed in an ode to the
Theotokos
.

The canon is only one element making Orthodox liturgy a constant refraction of scriptural texts, a web of interpretations and elaborations, especially in the non-eucharistic liturgical offices in the morning and the evening. To quote fragments gives only a taste of the effect: here are two
kontakia
from the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the first from the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, appropriately penitential in mood as the weeks approach Lent, the second sung during the days of festival in high summer commemorating the moment when Christ's Transfiguration revealed his face full of divine light, and he conversed with Moses and Elijah:
⁶⁴

I have foolishly run away, O Father, from your glory; I have squandered in evil deeds the riches you entrusted to me; therefore I offer you the words of the Prodigal: I have sinned before you, compassionate Father: take me now repentant and make me as one of your hired servants.

You were transfigured on the mountain, and your Disciples beheld your glory, O Christ God, as far as they were able; that when they saw you crucified they might know that your suffering was voluntary, and might proclaim to the world that you are truly the brightness of the Father.
⁶⁵

So the worshipping congregation which hears the first chant joins the Prodigal of Christ's parable in penitence (Luke 15.11-32). The worshippers in a different season stand besides the awed disciples on Mount Tabor, reassured that even those privileged first followers could only see Christ's divinity in part; they also look forward through the year from this moment of glory to the next commemoration of the Saviour's earthly death, which he had predicted for them on the high mountain. This slow liturgical dance through scripture means that, for better or worse, the Orthodox approach the Bible and its meaning with much less inclination to separate out the activity of biblical scholarship from meditation and the everyday practice of worship than is the case in the Western tradition.

The ninth-century 'Triumph of Orthodoxy' should not obscure the fact that a very different strand of Christianity persisted both in the empire and to the east in the Armenian lands. These dissenters were opposed far more radically to the official hierarchy than were the iconophile monks, nuns and layfolk to the iconoclast bishops. They were dualist in belief, like gnostics and Manichees, although it is difficult to see any direct links with the earlier dualism. It seems that like Marcion (see pp. 125-7), from their own reading of the Christian New Testament and Paul in particular, they built up their theologies of a deep gulf between flesh and spirit. As we have seen, there were actually Marcionites surviving far to the east of the Byzantine Empire at this period, but the new dualism looks independent of them too, and is first to be found in late-seventh-century Armenia. Their enemies gave them the contemptuous name Paulicians, possibly from an early founder, but it is also noticeable that their admiration for the Apostle Paul was strong enough for them to follow Marcion's example and cut down the canon of the New Testament by dropping the two epistles attributed to Peter. This was apparently because they were infuriated at the feline statement in II Peter 3.16 that in the epistles of Paul 'there are some things . . . hard to understand'.
⁶⁶

Logically in view of their belief that matter was created by evil, the Paulicians despised fleshly aspects of imperial religion such as the cult of Mary or of a physical ceremony of baptism. Naturally they were also iconophobes - unlike the Byzantine iconoclasts, they extended their hatred to the Cross itself - and like the iconoclasts, they seem to have attracted soldiers to their beliefs. Iconoclastic emperors such as Constantine V saw no problem not merely in tolerating Paulicians but in recruiting them for military service. Even iconophile emperors recognized their worth as soldiers and later employed them on Byzantium's Balkan frontiers, thus unwittingly spreading their message westwards. By the ninth century, the group was dangerous enough to the imperial Church to provoke the Archbishop of Bulgaria into commissioning a refutation of their teachings, which did not prevent the development in tenth-century Bulgaria of a further dualist sect, much more ascetic in character, known from the name of their ninth-century founder as Bogomils (Bogomil means 'beloved of God' in Slavonic, and so in Greek would have been 'Theophilos'). The Bogomils rapidly spread through the empire, and it was a Bogomil, Basil, who around 1098 was one of the very few known victims of burning for heresy in Byzantium - maybe the last.
⁶⁷
There was a grim symmetry to Basil's burning, both because burnings for heresy intensified in the West just when they were disappearing in the East, and also because the Bogomils seem to have been the inspiration for the similarly ascetic Cathars of the western Mediterranean, who during the thirteenth century, in the Albigensian Crusade, became the victims of one of the Latin Church's most ruthless ever persecutions (see p. 388).

This was an unexpected export for what had supposedly become such a monolithic Orthodox culture in Byzantium. The Bogomils have a modern legacy in the Balkans, apart from the now discredited supposition that a haunting collection of enigmatic intricately carved monolithic gravestones concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina are legacies of their culture. Although there are no reliable references to Bogomils in Bosnia after the thirteenth century, in 1990s Oxford I met a Bosnian refugee who claimed to be one, and such a consciousness among Bosnians reflects the part which the much-reconstructed memory of the Bogomils played in the ethnic conflicts which so appallingly wounded Bosnia in that decade (see pp. 1004-5). Amid the various claims to ethnic priority in the region was that of Bosnian Muslims who, if they were descended from Bogomils, could counter Orthodox or Catholic assertions that they were incomers imported by the Ottomans. Besides, Bosnians might take pride in the memory of an independent Church which had Bogomilism behind it, regardless of whether or not they were now Muslim. All sides were inclined to use the scanty and contested history of the Bogomils to further their various and incompatible arguments.
⁶⁸

PHOTIOS AND NEW MISSIONS TO THE WEST (850-900)

The extension of this story of religious dissidence into the Balkans opens up another dimension of ninth-century Byzantium which proved crucial in the formation of Orthodox identity: a sudden expansion of mission west into central Europe, both into areas which had formerly been Christian in the Roman Empire and into new territories beyond the old imperial frontiers. The development was the result both of a new vigour in the Byzantine Empire after years of struggle and of the vision of one man, Photios, who took charge as Patriarch at a time of continuing crisis. In the wake of the iconophile victory of 843, the bitterly divided Church desperately needed strong leadership, and it was not going to be provided by the compromised Patriarch Methodios, who lasted only four years before being deposed. His successor, Ignatios, did not look much more promising: a castrated imperial prince who was Empress Theodora's puppet nominee, and was accordingly dismissed when she was ousted from power in 856.
⁶⁹

In Ignatios's place, Photios came as a more obviously qualified choice. He was the son of a wealthy layman who had died in exile in wretched circumstances because of his iconophile commitment, and the great-nephew of the patriarch who had presided at the iconophile second Council of Nicaea; but besides the resonance provided by his family history, he was one of the most gifted and creative men ever to occupy the patriarchal throne. Photios was responsible for a literary work without parallel in the ancient world, a summary review of around four hundred works of Christian and pre-Christian literature which he had read in his first three decades of literate life - a feat of reading itself probably unparalleled at the time.
⁷⁰
Indeed, Photios's exceptional learning aroused suspicions among monks who accused him of being a closet pagan - it was claimed that he recited secular poetry under his breath during the liturgy. They also found it difficult to believe that a priest who, albeit celibate, was not a monk had any right to rule the Church, and their hostility combined with the anger of the former Patriarch, Ignatios, who proved to have remarkable staying power as a rival for the patriarchal throne.