Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (83 page)

Yet amid the various debates between Palamas and Barlaam about their own tradition, the recent emergence of Western theology in Byzantium fuelled their debate in unexpected ways. Palamas plundered Planudes's Greek translation of Augustine to expound his own ideas of the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between Father and Son, a concept which he would not have otherwise found in Orthodox theology, and he also quoted Augustine (unacknowledged) in arguing that the Spirit was the energy of God, the way in which the God unknown in essence still makes himself known in his creation.
⁴⁰
These were tendentious borrowings for Palamas's own purposes. Augustine would have found bizarre the Palamite idea that an individual with bodily eyes can see the divine light on Mount Tabor. Augustine's own experience of the divine is witnessed by a famous description in his
Confessions
of the moment when, in conversation with his mother in a garden in Rome's port of Ostia, they had together reached out 'in thought' and 'touched the eternal wisdom' - but for one moment only, and emphatically as the end result of loving thought and discussion.
⁴¹

Barlaam for his part read Thomas Aquinas as well as Pseudo-Dionysius, and because of his knowledge of Western theology, he was asked by the Patriarch of Constantinople to join in negotiations with papal delegates. In the course of these, Barlaam was prepared to affirm in the Western manner that it was permissible to speak of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, even though he loyally affirmed that the original version of the Creed of 381 should be recited without its Western addition.
⁴²
Unsurprisingly, Palamas criticized him for defending Orthodox Christianity by Western Latin means - an irony, considering the innovations which Gregory himself was introducing into Orthodoxy from the same source. The mood in which Augustine could be seen as an ally in Orthodox disputes proved indeed to be short-lived. When Prochoros Kydones, who was one of Palamas's admirers as well as a translator from Latin, tried to use Augustine to defend his deceased master's theology, he was put on trial for heresy and excommunicated, and henceforward Augustine resumed his role as a non-person in the theology of the East.
⁴³

In the end, a Church council repeated previous vindications of Hesychasm in 1351, ten years after Barlaam had been condemned as a heretic. The condemnations of Barlaam became the last to be added to the anathemas or condemnations which are solemnly proclaimed in the Orthodox liturgy at the beginning of Lent. He ended his days in exile at the papal Court in Avignon, a convert to Western Latin Catholicism, and in his last years he performed a singular service to Western culture by teaching Greek to the great Italian poet Petrarch.
⁴⁴
By contrast, Gregory Palamas had left behind any official worries about the dangers implicit in his spiritual teaching when he became Archbishop of Thessalonica, as part of a successful reaffirmation of imperial authority there against a powerful local faction backed by the Serbs.
⁴⁵
In fact, in what might seem like overkill on the part of Palamas's supporters, the Patriarch of Constantinople canonized him in 1368, less than a decade after the Hesychast champion's death. Mount Athos had been a strong (though never unanimous) source of support for the Hesychasts, and the affirmation of Hesychasm brought Athos new prestige and a new wave of foundations there. Gradually the Holy Mountain was experiencing a rebalance of power and esteem with the patriarchate in the city.

It is not difficult to see why Palamas and the Hesychast movement should have triumphed in this dispute. He offered definable procedures for approaching the divine. It would be easy to take comfort from such apparently straightforward ways of coming close to God in an age when the political institutions of the Byzantine world presented a picture of decay and corruption, when all the known world faced the baffling terror of the Black Death (see pp. 552-4) and when Islam pressed ever closer. For their part, the Ottomans were well disposed to a movement which encouraged their new Christian subjects to introspection and political passivity. A theology which asserted that it was possible for Taborite divine light to be seen with bodily eyes appealed to a Church which had fought so fiercely to defend icons; icons had become precisely the vehicle for contemplation of divine light. Moreover, when Palamas and the Hesychasts discounted the place of reason in theology, they echoed prominent themes in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian, now widely respected in monastic circles.

Barlaam by contrast presented no more than many honest and clear-minded theologians have offered across centuries when confronted by populist movements in Christianity: an openness to alternative Christian points of view, qualification, critique and nuance. He could be caricatured as pro-Western, and his ultimate decision in frustration and desperation to submit to the pope lent plausibility to that accusation. Once his efforts to accommodate East and West and his accusations against Palamas were swept aside, the way was open for Hesychasm to become embedded in Orthodox tradition, and it is certainly the case that its techniques of meditation and prayer, particularly the Jesus Prayer at its heart, have nourished countless Christians in travail and in tranquillity ever since.

HOPES DESTROYED: CHURCH UNION, OTTOMAN CONQUEST (1400-1700)

Now 'the City' was shrunken and full of ruins, fields stretching between what had become villages sheltering within its ancient defences - though over all still loomed the Great Church and the ancient monuments of the New Rome. The last emperors of Constantinople survived as long as they did because of the strength of their city walls, and because between repeated Ottoman sieges, from the end of the fourteenth century, they had agreed to become vassals of the Ottoman sultan. They seemed to have little choice in this humiliation: their efforts to enlist the West produced repeated failures, fiascos and rebuffs. One emperor, John V Palaeologos, whose mother was an Italian princess, had in desperation actually made a personal submission to the Roman Church in 1355, but he had done nothing to enforce the change on his Church. Then the fact that from the Great Papal Schism of 1378 there were first two, then three claimants for the papacy (see p. 560) for the time being ruined any credibility that reunion schemes might have possessed in the East.

With ill timing, Westerners were nevertheless beginning to come to the uneasy realization that the Ottoman Turks presented a threat not merely to schismatic Eastern Christians but to themselves, now that the Ottomans were pushing westwards into Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. In the midst of the Great Schism, a major spasm of crusading zeal had a spectacularly wretched end. In 1396 there gathered what was possibly the largest crusader army ever, made up of knights from France, Germany and even remote England and Scotland, all led by the King of Hungary. It was soundly defeated while it was besieging the Danubian city of Nicopolis (Nikopol, in the modern Bulgaria); thousands were massacred by the Turks. The disaster prompted the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologos to travel as far west as England appealing for renewed help; he got much sympathy and won much esteem for his dignity and courtliness, but no practical assistance.

It was only when the efforts of the Council of Konstanz had restored unity to the Church of the West in 1417 (see pp. 560-61) that it was possible once more to investigate whether a plan of union might bring any advantage to Constantinople. By the 1430s, with Byzantium's second city of Thessalonica newly in Ottoman hands, the search for a settlement took on fresh urgency. The Western Church was still split between the Pope and a continuing council of clergy meeting at Basel which was seeking to assert conciliar authority against the Vatican, and both sides earnestly wooed the Emperor for union negotiations, seeing how much prestige would follow for the party which constructed the long-lost unity. In 1437 two rival Latin fleets set out for Constantinople to pick up Byzantine delegates for a council rendezvous, and in this peculiar ecclesiastical naval race, the papal fleet sailed into port a month in advance of the Basel party.

The Byzantine delegates, sensing that the Pope's support was rather more broadly based than that of his opponents, accepted the papal invitation, and were brought to the Pope's council, reconvened first in Ferrara and then in Florence. They were very serious in their intentions: the party from Constantinople numbered seven hundred, and included both the Patriarch Joseph and the Emperor John VIII Palaeologos. In fact such a widespread representation of contemporary Christianity had not been seen since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and would not be seen again until the ecumenical meetings of the twentieth century. Among the welter of Eastern guests seeking help in their troubles who appeared at various times before the council's final dissolution in 1445 were representatives of the Georgian Church and other Churches of both the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian East, plus the Miaphysite Copts of Egypt - and to everyone's astonishment, even a couple of Ethiopians appeared (see p. 282).
⁴⁶

In the end the results for Byzantium were illusory. The problem throughout the council was not new: the Latins were not prepared to make any substantial concessions even on the limited range of issues debated - the
Filioque
clause (this simple Latin word or three Greek words occupied discussions for six months), Purgatory, the use of unleavened bread, the wording of the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist and the powers of the papacy. Nevertheless, the emperor, worn down by the incessant wrangling and isolated by the death of the much-respected patriarch during the council proceedings, agreed to a formula of union in 1439. When he returned to Constantinople the following year, it proved impossible to gain any unanimity as to whether the city would accept the deal. For many Byzantines, there seemed little point in accepting what looked like a fresh humiliation after yet another Western army gathered by the Pope went down to defeat at Varna on the Black Sea in 1444.

After that, there was little hope left for the survival of 'the City'. Yet still in 1452 the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos, eventually decided publicly to proclaim the union in Hagia Sophia: the pope's name was now included in the diptychs, the official lists of those for whom the Church prayed, both living and dead. That only intensified the quarrels which had raged in the city over the previous twelve years, and the deal never gained any wider recognition in the East. Far to the north, Muscovy had already repudiated it, in a move of great significance for the future of Russian Orthodoxy (see p. 518). Now there were only months left before the Ottomans closed in on Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine had at best eight thousand soldiers to defend it against Sultan Mehmet II's besieging army of more than sixty thousand, backed by many more miscellaneous supporters.
⁴⁷
To call it a struggle of Muslims against Christians would ignore the fact that the majority of those fighting for the Sultan were Christian mercenaries.

The ancient walls were not breached. The crucial Ottoman breakthrough into the city was only possible because the Byzantines' Genoese general, Giovanni Giustiniani, badly wounded in fighting outside the city wall, insisted that one gate should be unlocked to let him back into the city and down to his ship. When an entrance had thus fatally been offered, the Ottoman forces poured in after his retreating party. The Emperor by contrast fought on until he was cut down - exactly how or where is uncertain, but the Ottomans made sure that they secured his corpse. The previous day, the packed congregation in Hagia Sophia had 'cried out . . . wailed and moaned' as the Emperor took his leave with due traditional ceremony from his last reception of the sacrament, before preparing himself for battle. On this final day, 29 May 1453, matins was still in progress in the Great Church at the summit of a city overwhelmed with murder, rape and looting, when the Ottoman soldiers battered down the massive door reserved for imperial processions and overwhelmed the worshippers during their defiant last act of divine praise. The Emperor's head was stuffed with straw and paraded around the cities of the Muslim world; his dynasty was scattered from the city of Constantine.
⁴⁸

Just before the wreck of 1204, the Arab gazetteer Ali ibn Abi Bakr al-Harawi had commented admiringly and wistfully that Constantinople was a 'city greater than its name! May God make it [an abode] for Islam by His grace and generosity, God the exalted willing.'
⁴⁹
Now the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet had achieved that dream of Muslim conquerors since their first expansion out of Arabia. He had done what neither the Latin crusaders of 1204 nor the divided Greek successors to the shattered Komnenos inheritance had been able to do, and restore the boundaries of the Eastern Empire much as they had once been; there would be more Ottoman expansion to come. The shame and grief in Western Europe was immense and widespread, but despite the usual papal efforts to summon a crusade to attack the city, really there was nothing now to be done apart from mourn for the city and fight to stop the Ottomans moving any further west. So in 1455 the West's greatest living composer, Guillaume Dufay, far away in Italy in the service of the Duke of Savoy, composed four different polyphonic motets lamenting the end of Constantinople, to words which had been written in Naples. One of Dufay's motets dramatically reproaches God himself in the person of the Virgin Mary:

Most piteous one, O fountain of all hope,
father of the son whose weeping mother I am,
I come to lay my plaint before your sovereign court
about your power and Human Nature, which
have now allowed such grievous harm to be
Inflicted on my son, who has done me such honour.

And weaving around that cry of pain in French is the sonorous accusatory voice from a tenor in Latin, applying the Prophet Jeremiah's words about fallen Jerusalem familiar in the ceremonies of Holy Week: 'All her friends have dealt treacherously with her: among all her beloved, she hath none to comfort her.'
⁵⁰