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

iconoclasm, a triumph that was interpreted as a victory over all the
heresies, which until that time had divided Christendom. The document
composed for the occasion, the famous Synodikon, commemorates the champions
of the true faith, condemns the heretics, and implicitly presupposes that
Byzantine society had reached an internal stability, which would never allow
further division. In fact, new conflicts and crises did occur, and the
Synodikon would have to be expanded. But the tendency to freeze history for
considering their empire and Church as expressing the eternal and
unchangeable form of God's revelation would be a permanent and mythological
feature of Byzantine civilization even if though it was constantly
challenged by historical realities. In the ninth century itself, Byzantine
society was, in fact, a divided society - divided politically,
intellectually, and theologically.
During the entire iconoclastic period, Byzantium had been culturally
cut off from the West and fascinated with the military and intellectual
challenge of Islam. When, in 787 and 843, communion was finally
re-established with the Church of Rome, the hostile emergence of the
Carolingian Empire prevented the restoration of the old orbis Christianorum.
Moreover, the resumption of the veneration of icons was a victory of Greeks
traditions as distinct from the Oriental, non-Greek cultural iconoclasm of
the Isaurians. The result of these historical developments was the emergence
of the Byzantine Church from the iconoclastic crisis as more than ever a
"Greek" church. It might even have become a purely national church such as
the Armenian if the empire had not expanded again in the ninth and tenth
centuries under the great emperors of the Macedonian dynasty and if the
evangelization of the Slavs and the subsequent expansion of Byzantine
Christianity into Eastern Europe, one of the major missionary events of
Christian history, had not taken place. Unlike the West however where the
papacy "passed to the barbarians" after their conversions, Constantinople,
the "New Rome," remained the unquestionable and unique intellectual centre
of the Christian East until 1453. This "Rome" was culturally and
intellectually Greek so much, so that Emperor Michael III, in a letter to
Pope Nicholas I, could even designate Latin as a "barbarian" and "Scythian"
tongue.
The Hellenic character of Byzantine civilization brought into theology
the perennial problem of the relationship between the ancient Greek "mind"
and the Christian Gospel. Although the issue was implicit in much of the
theological literature in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, it had
not been raised explicitly since the closing of the pagan universities by
Justinian. In the ninth century following the intellectual renewal, which
had taken place under Theophilus (829-842), the last iconoclastic emperor,
Byzantine scholars undertook more vigorously the study of ancient pagan
authors. The University of Constantinople endowed and protected by the
Caesar Bardas and distinguished by the teaching of the great Photius became
the centre of this first renaissance. Scholars such as Photius, Arethas, and
Michael Psellos promoted encyclopaedic curiosity and encouraged the copying
of ancient manuscripts. Much of our knowledge of Greek antiquity is the
direct result of their labors. On the whole, their interest in ancient
philosophy remained rather academic and coexisted easily with the equally
academic and conservative theology, which predominated in the official