EMPIRE OF SADNESS
This essay has FOUR parts AND A POSTSCRIPT. Click here for the SECOND part, “HISTORY AND PROPHECY”. Click here for the third part, “SUSPICION”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “A POET REMEMBERS”. CLICK HERE FOR THE POSTSCRIPT.
ThIS ESSAY IS THE SECOND IN the ENCOUNTERS WITH CHRISTIANITY series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST ESSAY, “ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL”.
1. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, tr. Mark Musa (1292–94; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 40, p. 81.
2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2 (1781; London: Methuen, 1905), p. 2.
3. See Steven Runciman, “Gibbon and Byzantium”, Deadalus, vol. 105 no. 3, summer 1976, e.g. p. 109: “it would have been impossible for an educated eighteenth-century gentleman to comprehend the Byzantine character, with its illogical mixture of worldly ambition, cynicism, and intense mystical religion”. This was surely a valuable description of the imperial culture, but my reason for quoting it here is as another example of the typical historian’s progressive claim. See also note 8 below for another example.
4. Erik Peterson, “Witness to the Truth” (1937), in Theological Tractates, ed. and tr. Michael J. Hollerich (1951; Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 166.
5. Steven Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy (1977; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 164.
6. See the twenty-third homily on Romans (discussed below), in Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistle to the Romans, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 11 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889), pp. 511–16.
7. Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy, p. 162.
8. See Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (1971; London: Sphere Books, 1974), p. 15: “With characteristic semantic ambiguity, the Byzantines applied the terms used to describe their own state—basileia (‘empire’), oikoumene (‘the inhabited universe’), politeuma (‘government, community’)—to the group of nations over which they claimed sovereignty. The word ‘commonwealth’, likewise ambiguous, is used in this book as a rough equivalent of at least the last of these Greek terms. No precise constitutional significance should be ascribed to it, nor is its purpose to suggest any modern parallel. It is offered as a convenient and, it is hoped, not inappropriate description of a society whose structure and bonds were seldom wholly visible to men of the Middle Ages, but which the historian of today, with his greater awareness of the unifying effect of culture and human institutions, values and behaviour, can perceive much more clearly.” For an example of the usage in a translation, see Saint Chrysostom: Homilies, p. 511. See also Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, trans. Jean Birrell (1996; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 9, for a useful discussion of anachronistic terms. See also Hobbes’s definition of “commonwealth” in Leviathan (1651; Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), p. 134: “the multitude so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth, in Latin Civitas. This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence”. This reference in turn points to the work of Carl Schmitt who was, as well as being a Nazi apologist, a leading interpreter of Hobbes and an interlocutor of Erik Peterson (discussed further below). The debate about political theology between the two scholars seems to me immensely important. See the works by Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, György Geréby, and Jacob Taubes listed in the bibliography.
9. Reproduced in David Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), p. 122.
thinking perhaps of things that are not here1
I
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
In the true spirit of the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon described his task of chronicling the rise of Christianity in the first millennium as one of demystification. For him, churchmen were superstitious and unreliable sources. As he wrote in volume two of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”2 Such claims of superior understanding have been part and parcel of modern, western historiography ever since. The trained historian’s methods—his (or her) synthesis of source documents in several languages, and so forth—are typically accompanied by the statement that the work is a step forward in rescuing the past from obscurity. It is no surprise then that in the twentieth century the pre-eminent British historian of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, Steven Runciman, claimed to look back at Gibbon’s own errors, and to correct them much as Gibbon himself claimed to correct the mistakes of theologians.3 This is how rational, empirical historiography supposedly progresses, with one historian revising his predecessor but at the same time reinforcing the shared scholarly methodology. Is there really much difference between Gibbon and Runciman when it comes to the premise that writing history is reasoned and analytical work, as opposed in particular to the stranger business of religion? UNDER THE INFLUENCE
The strangeness that matters here is not so much the corruption Gibbon mentioned, but rather the seemingly illogical Christian view that history (the word now being used very lightly) is not primarily a matter of events and documents—is not even a matter of chronology. Christianity sees time operating much more mysteriously, as I shall indicate later in this essay as part of my overall purpose, which is to confront modern Church historiography with both theology and art. The discussion of art in the conclusion, however, will in its turn challenge theology with a sad and quiet feeling of the way time passes despite all the hope and longing of eschatology.
Historians no less than other investigators work under influence. The theological scholar Erik Peterson stated the basic limitation when he wrote that “human thinking is never independent of the hic et nunc of a political order of some kind”.4 For an historian to study the Byzantine political order from the vantage point of the western, post-Enlightenment political order is for this reason a more troublesome task than professional, progressive historiography usually allows. Not only have the forms of government and the corresponding power relations changed drastically, but so have the very concepts used to discuss them. Runciman’s book The Byzantine Theocracy is a case in point. Its conclusions reflected a modern and therefore anachronistic view of politics. For example, Runciman wrote (without evidence) that “the ordinary man and woman in Byzantium believed their Empire to be God’s holy empire on earth”,5 as though he were describing the opinionated and politically involved citizenry of a modern society. But such a populace (indeed the very idea of a citizen) was unthinkable to a Byzantine religious leader such as Saint John Chrysostom, who addressed his flock as reluctant slaves with no legitimate political role whatsoever apart from loyal submission to rulers.6
The problem of conceptual projection is further revealed by Runciman’s statement that Byzantium was “a genuine attempt to set up a Christian commonwealth on earth that would be in harmony with Heaven”.7 The use of the word “commonwealth” by English-speaking historians and translators in this context is in fact frequent, but the word’s native associations once more do not fit the old Christian empire. The word gained significance and even the force of law in England as a republican concept, in the context of the English regicide and Civil War. In 1649 parliament passed An Act Declaring and Constituting the People of England to be a Commonwealth and Free-State “for the good of the People, and that without any King or House of Lords”. Such a form of government, which was underpinned by the modern principle of popular sovereignty, was inconceivable in the later Roman empire. Chrysostom taught that the faithful looked to the next world, beyond politics, even though emperors and hierarchs had to govern for the time being. The use of the word “commonwealth”—to translate several Greek and Latin words connoting ancient, incongruous forms of social organisation8—therefore slants Byzantine historiography towards the political, this-worldly understanding of society and of life which is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon culture even when it appears religious on the surface.
To look at Byzantine art is to perceive by contrast that epoch’s other-worldliness. There is, for example, a miniature made in 1078 to illustrate a manuscript of Chrysostom’s homilies. On the left stands the blessed archbishop himself, who is passing a volume (perhaps it is the very same collection of his own sermons) to the bejewelled Emperor Nicephorus Botiniates depicted in the centre. On the right is Archangel Michael, dressed in resplendent robes, who is looking in the emperor’s direction. (There is another, tiny figure between and below the ruler and the angel. Probably it is a little fiend under the mighty ones’ feet—unless it is the politically insignificant “ordinary man” invoked randomly by Runciman.) The beauty of this image is meaningful in itself, for the way it evokes a religious sublime with artistic technique, but what I wish to emphasise is that the picture does not acknowledge historical time. Nicephorus lived 1002–81, reigning only briefly 1078–81; Chrysostom lived 347–407; it is of course meaningless to speak of Michael’s age. It is not just that the saint has returned from the dead, it is also that the emperor is depicted as being middle-aged at most (the archangel looks much younger), whereas he was an elderly man when he occupied the throne. The picture is in other words as much eternal as it is historical: the rules of earthly time do not apply in it. As in many similar depictions there is more of heaven than of earth in this depiction of imperial rule, more immortality than mortality—which makes it precisely a Christian image rather than a rational, worldly one.
GO TO PART 2