"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

lose their connection with this world just as the Virgin Mary did not cease
to be part of humanity by becoming the Mother of God. "We confess," writes
Nicephorus, "that by the priest's invocation by the coming of the Most Holy
Spirit the Body and Blood of Christ are mystically and invisibly made
present...;" and they are saving food for us "not because the Body ceases to
be a body, but because it remains so and is preserved as body."21
Nicephorus' insistence upon the authenticity of Christ's humanity at
times leads him away from classical Cyrillian Christology. He evades
Theopaschism by refusing to admit either that "the Logos suffered the
passion or that the flesh produced miracles... One must attribute to each
nature what is proper to it,"22 and minimizes the value of the communication
of idioms, which, according to him, manipulates "words."23 Obviously,
Theodore the Studite was more immune to the risk of Nestorian-izing than
Nicephorus was. In any case, the necessity of reaffirming the humanity of
Christ and thus of defending His describability led Byzantine theologians to
a revival of elements of the Antiochian tradition and thus to a proof of
their faithfulness to Chalcedon.

Lasting Significance of the Issue.

The iconoclastic controversy had a lasting influence upon the
intellectual life of Byzantium. Four aspects of this influence seem
particularly relevant to theological development.

a. At the time of the Persian wars of Emperor Heraclius in the seventh
century, Byzantium turned away culturally from its Roman past and toward the
East. The great confrontation with Islam, which was reflected in the origins
and character of iconoclasm, made this trend even more definite. Deprived of
political protection by the Byzantine emperors, with whom they were in
doctrinal conflict, the popes turned to the Franks and thus affiliated
themselves with the emerging new Latin Middle Ages. As a result, the social,
cultural, and political background of this separation became more evident;
the two halves of the Christian world began to speak different languages,
and their frames of reference in theology began to diverge more sharply than
before.
Byzantium's turn to the East, even if it expressed itself in a certain
cultural osmosis with the Arab world, especially during the reign of
Theophilus, did not mean a greater understanding between Byzantine
Christianity and Islam; the confrontation remained fundamentally hostile,
and this hostility prevented real dialogue. John of Damascus, who himself
lived in Arab-dominated Palestine, spoke of Mohammed as the "forerunner of
the Anti-Christ." Giving second-hand quotations from the Koran, he presented
the new religion as nothing more than gross superstition and immorality.
Later-Byzantine literature on Islam rarely transcended this level of pure
polemics.
However, even if this orientation eastward was not in itself an
enrichment, Byzantium remained for several centuries the real capital of the
Christian world. Culturally surpassing the Carolingian West and militarily Ї
strong in resisting Islam, Byzantine Christianity kept its universalist
missionary vision, which expressed itself in a successful evangelization of