THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

EASTERN CHRISTIANITY

This volume brings together in one compass the Orthodox churches of the ecumenical patriarchate – the Russian, Armenian, Ethiopian, Egyptian and Syrian churches. It follows their fortunes from the late Middle Ages until modern times – exactly the period when their history has been most neglected. Inevitably, this emphasises differences in teachings and experience, but it also brings out common threads, most notably the resilience displayed in the face of alien and often hostile political regimes. The central theme of this volume is the survival against the odds of Orthodoxy in its many forms into the modern era. The last phase of Byzantium proves to have been surprisingly important in this survival. It provided Orthodoxy with the intellectual, artistic and spiritual reserves to meet later challenges. The continuing vitality of the Orthodox churches is evident for example in the Sunday School Movement in Egypt and the Zoë brotherhood in Greece.

MICHAEL ANGOLD is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent publications include The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (2003), Byzantium: The Bridge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2001) and Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081–1261 (1995).

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

CHRISTIANITY

The Cambridge History of Christianity offers a comprehensive chronological account of the development of Christianity in all its aspects – theological, intellectual, social, political, regional, global – from its beginnings to the present day. Each volume makes a substantial contribution in its own right to the scholarship of its period and the complete History constitutes a major work of academic reference. Far from being merely a history of Western European Christianity and its offshoots, the History aims to provide a global perspective. Eastern and Coptic Christianity are given full consideration from the early period onwards, and later, African, Far Eastern, New World, South Asian and other non-European developments in Christianity receive proper coverage. The volumes cover popular piety and non-formal expressions of Christian faith and treat the sociology of Christian formation, worship and devotion in a broad cultural context. The question of relations between Christianity and other major faiths is also kept in sight throughout. The History will provide an invaluable resource for scholars and students alike.

List of volumes:

Origins to Constantine
EDITED BY MARGARET M. MITCHELL AND FRANCES M. YOUNG

Constantine to c. 600
EDITED BY AUGUSTINE CASIDAY AND FRED NORRIS

Early Medieval Christianity c. 600–c. 1100
EDITED BY THOMAS NOBLE AND JULIA SMITH

Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100–c. 1500
EDITED BY MIRI RUBIN AND WALTER SIMON

Eastern Christianity
EDITED BY MICHAEL ANGOLD

Reform and Expansion 1500–1660
EDITED BY RONNIE PO-CHIA HSIA

Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815
EDITED BY STEWART J. BROWN AND TIMOTHY TACKETT

World Christianities c. 1815–1914
EDITED BY BRIAN STANLEY AND SHERIDAN GILLEY

World Christianities c. 1914 to c. 2000
EDITED BY HUGH McLEOD

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

CHRISTIANITY

VOLUME 5

Eastern Christianity

Edited by

MICHAEL ANGOLD

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521811132

© Cambridge University Press 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-81113-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-81113-9 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In Memory of Steven Runciman
Dimitri Obolensky and Sergei Hackel

Contents

Illustrations

Maps

Contributors

MICHAEL ANGOLD is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History, University of Edinburgh. Among his publications is Church and society in Byzantium under the Comneni (1081–1261) (1995).

REVD JOHN BINNS is Vicar of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge. Among his publications is An introduction to the Christian Orthodox churches (2002).

CANON MICHAEL BOURDEAUX is Founder and President of Keston Institute, Oxford. Among his many publications are Opium of the people: the Christian religion in the USSR (1965) and Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel (1990).

CHRIS CHULOSis Director of Foundation Relations and Adjunct Professor of History at Roosevelt University, Chicago. He is also a permanent member of the History Faculty at Helsinki University. Among his publications is Converging worlds: religion and community in peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (2003).

S. PETER COWEholds the Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies at UCLA. Among his publications are Mxit’ar Sasnec’i’s theological discourses (1993); Catalogue of the Armenian manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library (1994). He is the editor of Ani: world architectural heritage of a medieval Armenian capital (2001).

DONALD CRUMMEY is Professor of African History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among his publications are Land and society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia from the 13th to the 20th century (2000) and African savanna environments: global narratives and local knowledge of environmental change (with T. J. Bassett, 2003).

ROBERT O. CRUMMEY is Emeritus Professor of Russian History, University of California, Davis. Among his publications are The Old Believers & the world of Antichrist: the Vyg Community and the Russian state, 1694–1855 (1970) and Aristocrats and servitors: the Boyar elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (1983).

SIMON DIXON Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds. Among his publications are The modernisation of Russia 1676–1825 (1999) and Catherine the Great (2001).

SHARON E. J. GERSTELis Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, UCLA. Among her publications is Beholding the sacred mysteries: programs of the Byzantine sanctuary (1999).

ALEXANDER GRISHIN is Head of Art History, Australian National University. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Among his publications are his two-volume The art of John Brack (1990) and A pilgrim’s account of Cyprus: Bars’kyj’s travels in Cyprus (1996).

†ARCHPRIEST SERGEI HACKEL died on 9 February 2005. He combined the work of a parish priest with teaching Russian at the University of Sussex and was a well-known broadcaster. For thirty years he was editor of Sobornost, the journal of the Anglican-Orthodox Fellowship of St Sergius. He was the author of A pearl of great price: the life of Mother Maria Skobstova, 1891–1945 (revised edition 1982).

LINDSEY HUGHES is Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. Among her publications is Russia in the age of Peter the Great (1998).

PASCHALIS M. KITROMILIDES is Professor of Political Science at the University of Athens and Director of the Institute of Neohellenic Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Among his publications are The Enlightenment as social criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek culture in the eighteenth century (1992) and Enlightenment, nationalism, orthodoxy: studies in the culture and political thought of south-eastern Europe (1994).

DIRK KRAUSMÜLLER is a Research Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and an Honorary Fellow of Queen’s University Belfast. Among his publications is ‘Conflicting anthropologies in the Christological discourse at the end of Late Antiquity: the case of Leontius of Jerusalem’s Nestorian adversary’, Journal of Theological Studies 56 (2005).

FRANÇOISE MICHEAU is Professor of Medieval Islamic history at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and director of CNRS (UMR8167): Islam médiéval-éspaces, réseaux et pratiques culturelles. She is the co-translator of the important Christian Arab chronicles of Yahya ibn Sa id of Antioch and of al-Makin ibn al-’Amid. She has published widely on Arabic medicine and is co-author of Communautés chrétiennes en pays d’Islam (1997).

ANTHONY O’MAHONYis Director of Research at the Centre for Christianity and Interreligious Dialogue, Heythrop College, University of London. Among his publications is Palestinian Christians: religion, politics and society in the Holy Land (1999). He is the editor of Eastern Christianity: studies in modern history, religion and politics (2004).

ALEXANDRU POPESCU is Research Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of Petre Ţuţea: between sacrifice and suicide (2004).

STELLA ROCK was a research fellow at the University of Sussex. She is the co-editor of Nationalist myths and modern media: contested identities in the age of globalization (2006). Her Popular religion in Russia: ‘double belief’ and the making of an academic myth will shortly appear.

NANCY ŠEVČENKOis a Vice President of the Association internationale des études byzantines and Associate Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Among her publications are The life of Saint Nicholas in Byzantine art (1983) and Illustrated manuscripts of the Metaphrastian menologion (1990).

JONATHAN SHEPARDis a former Fellow of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, and University Lecturer in Russian History. He is the author with Simon Franklin of The emergence of Rus 750–1200 (1996) and is the editor of the Cambridge History of Byzantium.

ALICE-MARY TALBOTis Director of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Executive Editor of the Oxford dictionary of Byzantium. She edited The correspondence of Athanasius Ⅰ Patriarch of Constantinople (1975) and is the author of Faith healing in late Byzantium (1983) and Women and religious life in Byzantium (2001).

ELIZABETH A. ZACHARIADOUis a Fellow of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, University of Crete. Among her publications are Trade and crusade: Venetian Crete and the Emirates of Menteshe and Aydin (1300–1415) (1983) and Romania and the Turks (c.1300–c.1500) (1985).

Foreword

by The Archbishop of Canterbury

The average educated westerner is still quite likely to think of Christianity in terms of a basically western Europe-dominated history: the church gradually builds up a centralised system of authority, filling the vacuum left by the fall of the Roman Empire; its ideological monopoly is challenged at the Reformation, and the map of the Christian world is reconfigured; and all the various territories on that map are now engaged in a doubtfully successful struggle with global modernity, except where the newer churches of Africa are mounting a vigorous counter-offensive. Even in some good and sophisticated surveys of world Christianity published in recent years, this remains the dominant picture.

   But Christianity is more various than this begins to suggest. The essays in this volume introduce us to a variety of contexts substantially different from what has just been described. The faith of the Byzantine world had nothing to do with the filling of a political gap; the Roman Empire continued, with an educational system and a lay civil service which did not yield to the clergy the kind of cultural closed shop familiar in the mediaeval west. What is intriguing in this particular story is the spread of Byzantine Christianity not as a tool of ‘empire’ in the crude sense but as the carrier and the ally of a much more subtle process of cultural convergence – the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ over whose character a good deal of controversy continues. The Byzantine Christian heartland continued, even when Byzantium was in steep political decline, to nourish kindred but diverse cultural and intellectual projects, of which Muscovite Russia is probably the most influential (and in many ways the most eccentric). It is a record which does not easily fit into most of the ‘faith and culture’ typologies familiar in western theological and historical writing.

   The ‘commonwealth’ of Byzantine Christianity was not only about material culture, political rhetoric and artistic style. It was also a commonwealth of spiritual practice – the liturgy, but also, no less importantly, the monastic life. ‘Hesychasm’, the practice of silent prayer free of ideas and images and grounded in a set of physical disciplines, became, from the fourteenth century to the present day, as clear a sign of the convergent Christian culture of eastern Europe as anything. How far it represented the resurgence and refocusing of a classical spiritual practice and how far it was innovatory and indeed in some ways subversive of such a tradition is a matter of keen debate, and the evidence of this debate can be traced in the pages that follow. In the twentieth century, the hesychast tradition, in ways that might surprise those who know it only through versions of the medieval disputes, has been one of the engines driving intellectual renewal and fresh cultural engagement in historically Orthodox societies like Romania, Greece and Russia.

   But the Byzantine world is only part of the story. For most of their history, nearly all those churches that broke with Byzantium for doctrinal reasons or that had always been outside the political reach of the Empire lived as minorities in a Muslim society. It was not always a nakedly hostile environment, but it brought severe pressures to bear in all kinds of ways. Not least, it meant a continuing tradition of intellectual life conducted in the medium of non-European languages; only relatively recently has the world of Christian Arabic begun to receive the attention it merits. And the importance of these Christian communities in mediating classical Europe to the nascent Islamic culture is hard to exaggerate. No ‘clash of civilisations’ model will do justice to the complex interactions of all these universes of thought. A history of relative isolation and public marginality should not blind us to the substantive role of Christian minorities beyond the Roman and classical frontiers. And the same needs to be said about those churches like the Armenian and Ethiopian that did not live consistently as minorities in a non-Christian environment but experienced something of the same challenge in thinking and expressing their faith in the languages of cultures outside the ‘classical’ world. Looking at their history helps us make some better sense of the phenomena of marginal Christianities in the west, especially in the Celtic context.

   Nor should we be lured into thinking that the schisms of the fifth to the eleventh centuries created hermetically sealed units of Christian discourse. Armenians, Byzantines and Latins participated in the same arguments in the Byzantine court; nearly all the churches of the east at one time or another faced difficult decisions about how far to go in rapprochement with Rome; the choices they made continue to affect relations between the modern churches in acute ways. Whether in the Council of Florence or in the embassy sent from Mongol Iran by Mar Yabh’allaha III to the courts of the west in the thirteenth century, there was always an uncomfortable sense of unfinished business about how to relate with those on the other side of doctrinal and political divisions. Modern ecumenism has roots in a large number of missions and negotiations in the past, and these essays will show something of the variety in that history.

   In modern times, eastern Christianity has suffered once again from being the victim of an imposed minority status in many countries; the trauma of communist domination and persecution has indelibly marked the churches of eastern Europe. But at the same time, many of the most creative theological elements in contemporary western theology can trace their origins to eastern sources, thanks partly, though not exclusively, to the Russian diaspora. For both Roman Catholic and Reformed thinkers, the eastern world has opened new pathways which relativise, even if they do not always solve, the historic standoffs between diverse western concerns, and offer a different and often more flexible vocabulary. Throughout the eastern Christian world today, Byzantine and non-Byzantine, there is an upsurge of new thinking, new artistic energy (think of the extraordinary development in the last few decades of Coptic iconography), and ressourcement in the monastic life. The final chapter in this volume gives a clear picture of the vitality and the wide impact of this renewal. Despite the unhappy and often violent symbiosis in some contexts between Christian rhetoric and uncritical nationalism, despite the fresh difficulties of Christian minorities that have developed as a result of contemporary geopolitics and a high level of tone-deafness in the west to the needs of these minorities, there is plenty of vigour and sophistication. If it is a cardinal temptation of our time to indulge in crass and destructive stereotyping of both Christian and Muslim worlds, forgetting the variety and wealth of their histories, this book, written out of the most painstaking contemporary scholarship, will be an indispensable aid in resisting that temptation. It is an academic tour de force; but far more than a simple academic exercise.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Abbreviations