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

the Slavs and other Eastern nations. But its later theological development
took place in an exclusively Greek setting. Still bearing the title of
"Great Church of Constantinople-New Rome," it became known to both its Latin
competitors and its Slavic disciples as the "Greek" Church.

b. Whatever role was played in the Orthodox victory over the
iconoclasts by high ecclesiastical dignitaries and such theologians as
Patriarch Nicephorus, the real credit belonged to the Byzantine monks who
resisted the emperors in overwhelming numbers. The emperors, especially Leo
III and Constantine V, expressed more clearly than any of their predecessors
a claim to caesaropapism. Thus, the iconoclastic controversy was largely a
confrontation between the state and a non-conformist, staunchly independent
monasticism, which assumed the prophetic role of standing for the
independence of the Gospel from the "world." The fact that this role was
assumed by the monks and not by the highest canonical authority of the
Church underlines the fact that the issue was the defence not of the Church
as an institution but of the Christian faith as the way to eternal
salvation.
The monks, of course, took their role very seriously and preserved even
after their victory a peculiar sense of responsibility for the faith, as we
saw it in the case of Theodore the Studite. Theologically, they maintained a
tradition of faithfulness to the past as well as a sense of the existential
relevance of theology as such. Their role in later-Byzantine theological
development remained decisive for centuries.

c. The theological issue between the Orthodox and the iconoclasts was
fundamentally concerned with the icon of Christ, for belief in the divinity
of Christ implied a stand on the crucial point of God's essential
indescribability and on the Incarnation, which made Him visible. Thus, the
icon of Christ is the icon far from excellence and implies a confession of
faith in the Incarnation.
The iconoclasts however objected on theological grounds not only to
this icon but also to the use of any religious pictures, except the cross
because, as their Council of 754 proclaims, they opposed "all paganism." Any
veneration of images was equated with idolatry. If the goal pursued by
Constantine V to "purify" Byzantine Christianity, not only of the image
cult, but also of monasticism, had been achieved, the entire character of
Eastern Christian piety and its ethos would have evolved differently. The
victory of Orthodoxy meant, for example, that religious faith could be
expressed not only in propositions, in books, or in personal experience, but
also through man's power over matter, through aesthetic experience, and
through gestures and bodily attitudes before holy images. All these implied
a philosophy of religion and an anthropology; worship, the liturgy,
religious consciousness involved the whole man, without despising any
functions of the soul or of the body, and without leaving any of them to the
realm of the secular.

d. Of all the cultural families of Christianity - the Latin, the
Syrian, the Egyptian, or the Armenian, the Byzantine was the only one in
which art became inseparable from theology. The debates of the eighth and