Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes

Excerpts from

“Byzantine Theology,”

Historical trends and doctrinal themes

By John Meyendorff

(Please get the full version of this book at your bookstore)

Content:

Byzantine Theology after Chalcedon.

Exegetical traditions.Philosophical trends.The Problem of Origenism.Pseudo-Dionysius.Liturgy.

The Christological Issue.

The Monophysites.The Strict Dyophysites.The Cyrillian Chalcedonians.The Origenists.

The Iconoclastic Crisis.

Appearance of the Movement.Iconoclastic Theology.Orthodox Theology of Images: John of Damascus and the Seventh Council.Orthodox Theology of Images: Theodore the Studite and Nicephorus.Lasting Significance of the Issue.

Monks and Humanists.

Theodore the Studite.Photius (ca. 820 ― ca. 891).Michael Psellos (1018-1078).The Trials of John Italos (1076-1077, 1082).

Monastic Theology.

The Origins of Monastic Thought: Evagrius and Macarius.The Great Spiritual Fathers.Opposition to Secular Philosophy.Christian Faith as Experience: Symeon the New Theologian.Theology of Hesychasm: Gregory Palamas.

Ecclesiology: Canonical Sources.

The Councils and the Fathers.Imperial Legislation.Codifications of Ecclesiastical Law.Authoritative Commentaries and Criticism.Synodal and Patriarchal Decrees.Οικοnοmιa.

The SchismBetween East and West.

The Filioque.Other Controversies.Authority in the Church.Two Ideas of Primacy.The Meaning of the Schism.

Encounter with the West.

The Circle of Cantacuzenos.Humanists.Palamite Theologians: Nicholas Cabasilas.Florence.

Lex orandi.

The “Great Church” of Constantinople.The Liturgical Cycles.Hymnology.

Doctrinal Themes.

Creation.

Creator and Creatures.The Divine Plan.The Dynamism of Creation.Sanctification of Nature.

Man.

Man and God.Man and the World.Original Sin.The New Eve.

Jesus Christ.

God and Man.Redemption and Deification.The Theotokos.

The Holy Spirit.

The Spirit in Creation.The Spirit and Man’s Redemption.The Spirit and the Church.The Spirit and Man’s Freedom.

The Triune God.

Unity and Trinity.Hypostasis, Essence, and Energy.The Living God.

Sacramental Theology:The Cycle of Life.

Number of Sacraments.Baptism and Chrismation.Penance.Marriage.Healing and Death.

The Eucharist.

Symbols, Images, and Reality.Eucharist and Church.

The Church in the World.

Church and Society.The Mission of the Church.Eschatology.

Conclusion.

Antinomies.

Byzantine Theology after Chalcedon.

Constantinople, the great cultural melting pot, the “New Rome” and capital of the empire, did not produce any real outstanding theologian in the fifth and sixth centuries; but the city witnessed the great theological debates of the day since their conclusion often depended upon imperial sanction. Bishops, monks, exegetes, and philosophers coming to the capital to seek favour and support created around the Episcopal see of the imperial city, from which the government’s theological advisers were usually drawn, a convergence of ideas, and a predisposition to syncretic and compromise solutions. The bishops of Constantinople and their staffs however were still able to defend explicit theological convictions, even against the imperial will, as the lonely pro-Chalcedonian stand adopted by the patriarchs, Euphemius (489-495) and Macedonius II (495-511), under the reign of the Monophysite emperor Anastasius, bears witness. Thus, a theology, which can be termed specifically “Byzantine” in contrast to the earlier currents of Eastern Christian thought and centred mainly in Egypt and Syria, comes into being during the post-Chalcedonian period. It would receive an official sanction under Justinian (527-565) and an expression in the balanced synthesis of Maximus the Confessor (†662).

It would have seemed that no individual figure played a decisive role in the formation of this theology, and one could be equally hard-pressed to locate any school or other intellectual centre in the capital where the theological thought was creatively elaborated. Though it seemed reasonable to assume that a theological school for the training of higher ecclesiastical personnel was connected with the patriarchate, sources about its character or the levels of its teaching were wanting. A centre of theological learning was attested at the famous monastery of the Akoimetai (the “Non-Sleepers”), and others certainly existed elsewhere, but very little was specifically known about them. Theologians, who were active during the fifth and sixth centuries, often received their training in distant parts of the empire, such as Syria or Palestine. The Lavra of St. Sabbas near Jerusalem, for example, was the scene of violent debates between competing Origenist factions.

The imperial, secular University of Constantinople, founded by Constantine and reorganized by a decree of Theodosius II (408-450), did not include theology among its subjects; yet it certainly served as a channel for the perpetuation of ancient Greek philosophical ideas. The university remained bilingual (Greek and Latin) until the seventh century and until the reign of Justinian and included pagans among its professors. But the drastic measures taken by Justinian in excluding both, pagans and non-Orthodox Christians, from the teaching profession and in closing the pagan University of Athens must have emphasized that the role of secular studies in Christian Byzantium was purely ancillary. Even if a small circle of intellectuals perpetuated the philosophical traditions of the ancient Greeks, the official position of both, Church and state, now considered philosophy as at best a tool for expressing Revelation, but it never admitted that philosophy was entitled to shape the very content of theological ideas. In practice, one might readily admit that Aristotelian logic is to be taught in the schools, but one would be consistently distrustful of Platonism because of its metaphysical implications. Yet Platonism would subsist through patristic literature mainly and especially through the Origenist tradition; but it would never be formally acknowledged as a valid expression of religious ideas.

Conservative in form and intent, Byzantine theology in the age of Justinian continually referred to tradition as its main source. In particular, the Christological debates of the period consisted chiefly of a battle between exegetes of Scripture about philosophical terms adopted by Christian theology in the third and fourth centuries and about patristic texts making use of these terms. Liturgical hymnology, which began to flourish at this time, incorporated the results of the controversies and often became a form of credal confession. The various elements of Byzantine theological traditionalism dominated in the fifth and sixth centuries, constituted the basis of further creativity in the later periods, and required very special attention.

Exegetical traditions.

“It is necessary for those who preside over the churches... to teach all the clergy and the people... collecting out of divine Scripture the thoughts and judgments of truth but not exceeding the limits now fixed, nor varying from the tradition of the God-fearing Fathers. But, if any issue arises concerning Scripture, it should not be interpreted other than as the luminaries and teachers of the Church have expounded it in their writings; let them [the bishops] become distinguished for their knowledge of patristic writings rather than for composing treatises out of their own heads.”

This text of Canon 19 of the Council in Trullo (692) reflects the traditionalist and conservative character of the Byzantine, approaches to theology and to exegesis in particular, and explains the presence in all monastic and private libraries of Byzantium, of innumerable copies of patristic catenae, and “chains” of authoritative interpretations of particular Biblical texts expressing or claiming to express the continuity of exegetical tradition.

Even though the consensus patrum reached by this method was in some instances partial and artificial, the standard Church teaching came to rely on it especially when it was sanctified by liturgical and hymnographical usage. The Bible was always understood not simply as a source of revealed doctrinal propositions or as a description of historical facts but as a witness to a living Truth, which had become dynamically present in the sacramental community of the New Testament Church. The veneration of the Virgin, Mother of God, for example, was associated once and for all with a typological interpretation of the Old Testament temple cult: the one who carried God in her womb was the true “temple,” the true “tabernacle,” the “candlestick,” and God’s final “abode.” Thus, a Byzantine, who on the eve of a Marian feast listened in church to a reading the Book of Proverbs about “Wisdom building her house” (Pr 9:1 ff.) naturally and almost exclusively, thought of the “Word becoming flesh” — i.e., finding His abode in the Virgin. The identification of the Old Testament Wisdom with the Johannine Logos had been taken for granted since the time of Origen, and no one would have thought of challenging it. As early as the fourth century, when much of the Arian debate centred on the famous text “The Lord created me at the beginning of his works” (Pr 8:22), it was quite naturally interpreted by the Arians in favour of their position. Athanasius and other members of the Nicaean party declined to challenge the identification between Logos and Wisdom preferring to find references to other texts supporting the uncreated character of the Logos-Wisdom. No one questioned the established exegetical consensus on the identification itself.

Much of the accepted Byzantine exegetical method had its origin in Alexandrian tradition and its allegorism. St. Paul, in describing the story of Abraham’s two sons as an allegory of the two covenants (Ga 4:23), gave Christian sanction to a non-literal method of interpreting Scripture known as Midrash, which had developed among Palestinian rabbis in pre-Christian times. Thus, in pushing the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture to its very extremes, the Alexandrian Hellenistic milieu, common to Philo, Clement, and Origen, could refer to the illustrious precedent of St. Paul himself. Allegory was first of all consonant with the Hellenic and especially the Platonic concern for eternal things as the opposite to historical facts. The Greek intellectual’s main difficulty in accepting Christianity often lay in the absence of direct speculation on the Unchangeable since his philosophical training had led him to associate changeability with unreality. The allegorical method however allowed the possibility of interpreting all concrete, changeable facts as symbols of unchangeable realities. Thus, history itself was losing its centrality and in extreme cases simply denied.

But consonance with Hellenism was not the only element, which contributed to the widespread use of allegory in exegesis. The method provided an easy weapon against Gnosticism, the main challenge of Christianity in the second century. The major Gnostic systems — especially those of Valentinus and Marcion — opposed the Demiurge, the Yahweh of Judaism, to the true God manifested in the New Testament. Christian apologists used allegory to “redeem” the Old Testament and counteracted the Gnostic dualism with the idea that the Old and the New Testaments have the same “spiritual” meaning and reflect a continuous Revelation of the same true God.

Origen also made use of this concept of the “spiritual meaning” in his notion of Tradition. The Spirit, which had inspired the Biblical writers, was also present in the “spiritual men” of the Christian Church. The saint alonetherefore could decipher the authentic meaning of Scripture.

The Scriptures [Origen writes] were composed through the Spirit of God, and they have not only that meaning which is obvious, but also another, which is hidden from the majority of readers. For the contents of Scripture are the outward forms of certain mysteries and the images of divine things. On this point, the entire Church is unanimous, that while the whole Law is spiritual, the inspired meaning is not recognized by all, but only by those who are gifted with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the word of wisdom and knowledge.1

Although it raises the important problem of authority in exegesis, this passage certainly expresses a view largely taken for granted in Medieval Byzantine Christendom and explains the concern for a consensus patrum expressed in a formal way in the canon of the Council in Trullo quoted at the beginning of this section.

In addition to Alexandrian allegorism, the Byzantine tradition of exegesis incorporated the more sober influence of the School of Antioch. The opposition between Alexandria and Antioch —, which found a well-known and violent expression in the Christological debates of the fifth century — should not be exaggerated on the level of exegesis. The chief minds of the Anti-ochian school — Diodore of Tarsus (ca. 330-ca. 390), Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350-428), and Theodoret of Cyrus (ca. 393-ca. 466) — did not deny the possibility of a spiritual meaning in Biblical texts; yet they reacted strongly against the elimination of the literal, historical meaning and against an arbitrary allegorism based on Platonic philosophical presuppositions foreign to the Bible. Thus, the notion of theory (“contemplation”), which implied the possibility of discovering a spiritual meaning behind the letter of the text, was not rejected, but the emphasis was placed upon what actually happened or said historically as well as upon the moral or theological implications of the text.

The theological authority of the School of Antioch was shattered by the condemnation of Nestorius, a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia, at Ephesus in 431 and by the anathemas against the Three Chapters (Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the anti-Cyrillian writings of Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa) pronounced by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. After 553, the scriptural commentaries of Theodore, one of the greatest exegetes of early Christianity, could be preserved only clandestinely in Syrian or Armenian translations while the Greek original survived only in fragments scattered in the catenae. But the tradition of Antiochian exegesis survived in the exegetical works of Theodoret, which were never prohibited, and even more so in the writings of Theodore’s friend John Chrysostom, by far the most popular of all Greek ecclesiastical writers. His definition of typology, as opposed to allegory, as “a prophecy expressed in terms of facts”2 and his concern for history served as safeguards against the spiritualizing excesses of the Alexandrian tradition in late-Byzantine exegetical literature, while still leaving room for theory, i.e., fundamentally a Christ-oriented typological interpretation of the Old Testament.

Philosophical trends.

The philosophical trends in post-Chalcedonian Byzantium were determined by three major factors: (1) the patristic tradition and its implications — the transfer, for example, of the Cappadocian Trinitarian terminology to the problem of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ, (2) the ever-reviving Origenism with its implied challenge to the Biblical doctrine of creation and to Biblical anthropology, and (3) the continuing influence of non-Christian Neo-Platonism upon intellectuals (Justinian’s closing of the University of Athens put a physical end to a centre of thought and learning only recently adorned by the last major figure of pagan Greek philosophy, Proclus, 410-485). In all three cases, the basic issue implied was the relation between ancient Greek thought and Christian Revelation.

Some modern historians continue to pass very divergent judgments on the philosophy of the Greek Fathers. In his well-known Histoire dc la philosophic, Emile Brehier writes, “In the first five centuries of Christianity, there was nothing that could properly be called Christian philosophy and would have implied a scale of intellectual values either original or different from that of the pagan thinkers.”3 According to Brehier, Christianity and Hellenic philosophy are not opposed to each other as two intellectual systems, for Christianity is based on revealed facts, not on philosophical ideas. The Greek Fathers, in accepting these facts, adopted everything in Greek philosophy, which was compatible with Christian Revelation. No new philosophy could result from such an artificial juxtaposition. A seemingly opposite view, more in line with the classical appraisal of Adolf Harnack, has been expressed by H. A. Wolfson whose book on The Philosophy of the Church Fathers presents the thought of the Fathers as “a recasting of Christian beliefs in the form of a philosophy, [which] thereby produc[ed] also a Christian version of Greek philosophy.”4 Finally, the monumental work of Claude Tresmontant La Metaphysique du Christianisme et la naissancc de la philosophic chretienne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961) strongly maintains the historical existence of a Christian philosophy, which the Fathers consistently defended against the Hellenic synthesis. This philosophy implies basic affirmations on creation, on unity and multiplicity, on knowledge, freedom, and all other incompatible with Hellenism, and is fundamentally Biblical. “From the point of view of metaphysics,” he writes, “Christian orthodoxy is defined by its fidelity to the metaphysical principles found in Biblical theology.”5 Therefore, if the Greek Fathers were orthodox, they were not, properly speaking, “Greek.” Actually, in modern historical and theological writing, there is no term more ambiguous than “Hellenism.” Thus, Georges Florovsky makes a persistent plea for “Christian Hellenism” meaning by the term the tradition of the Eastern Fathers as opposed to Western Medieval thought,6 but he agrees fundamentally with Tresmontant on the total incompatibility between Greek philosophical thought and the Bible, especially on such basic issues as creation and freedom.7

Therefore, Tresmontant’s and Florovsky’s conclusions appear to be fundamentally correct, and the usual slogans and clichés, which too often serve to characterize patristic and Byzantine thought as exalted “Christian Hellenism,” or as the “Hellenization of Christianity,” or as Eastern “Platonism” as opposed to Western “Aristotelianism” should be avoided.

A more constructive method of approaching the issue and of establishing a balanced judgment consists in a preliminary distinction between the systems of ancient Greek philosophy — the Platonic, the Aristotelian, or the Neo-Platonic — and individual concepts or terms. The use of Greek concepts and terminology were unavoidable meanings of communication and a necessary step in making the Christian Gospel relevant to the world in which it appeared and in which it had to expand. But the Trinitarian terminology of the Cappadocian Fathers and its later application to Christology in the Chalcedonian and post-Chalcedonian periods clearly show that such concepts as ousia, hypostasis, or physis acquire an entirely new meaning when used out of the context of the Platonic or Aristotelian systems in which they are born. Three hypostases united in one “essence” (ousia) or two “natures” (physeis), united in one hypostasis cannot be a part of either the Platonic or Aristotelian systems of thought and imply new personalistic (and therefore non-Hellenic) metaphysical presuppositions. Still the Trinitarian and Christological synthesis of the Cappadocian Fathers would have dealt with a different set of problems and would have resulted in different concepts if the background of the Cappadocians and the audience to which they addressed themselves had not been Greek. Thus, Greek patristic thought remained open to Greek philosophical problematics but avoided being imprisoned in Hellenic philosophical systems. From Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century to Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, the representatives of the Orthodox tradition all express their conviction that heresies are based upon the uncritical absorption of pagan Greek philosophy into Christian thought.