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

"ecumenical patriarch." Theodore, of course, never formally denied the
canonical texts, which reflected it but, in practice, often referred to the
principle of apostolicity as a criterion of authority in the Church, rather
than to the political pre-eminence of certain cities. The support given to
the Orthodox party during the iconoclastic period by the Church of Rome, the
friendly correspondence, which Theodore was able to establish with Popes Leo
III (795-816) and Paschal I (817-824), contrasted with the internal
conflicts that existed with his own patriarchs, both iconoclastic and
Orthodox. These factors explain the very high regard he repeatedly expressed
toward the "apostolic throne" of old Rome. For example, he addressed Pope
Paschal as "the rock of faith upon which the Catholic Church is built." Ї
"You are Peter," he writes, "adorning the throne of Peter."3 The numerous
passages of this kind carefully collected by modern apologists of the
papacy4 are however not entirely sufficient to prove that Theodore's view of
Rome is identical to that of Vatican I. In his letters side by side with
references to Peter and to the pope as leaders of the Church, one can also
find him speaking of the "five-headed body of the Church"5 with reference to
the Byzantine concept of a "pentarchy" of patriarchs. Also addressing
himself to the patriarch of Jerusalem, he calls him "first among the
patriarchs" for the place where the Lord suffered presupposes "the dignity
highest of all."6
Independence of the categories of "this world" and therefore of the
state was the only real concern of the great Studite. The apostolic claim of
Rome, no less real but much less effective, claims of the other Eastern
patriarchs, provided him with arguments in his fight against the Byzantine
state and Church hierarchies. Still, there is no reason to doubt that his
view of the unity of the Church, which he never systematically developed,
was not radically different from that of his contemporaries including
Patriarch Photius who, as we shall see, was always ready to acknowledge the
prominent position of Peter among the apostles but also considered that the
authority of Peter's Roman successors was dependent upon (not the foundation
of) their orthodoxy. In Rome, Theodore the Studite saw that foremost support
of the true faith and expressed his vision and his hope in the best
tradition of the Byzantine superlative style.
The ancient monastic opposition to secular philosophy does not appear
in Theodore's writings. Theodore himself seemed even to have liked exercises
in dialectics as his early correspondence with John the Grammarian, a
humanist and later an iconoclastic patriarch, showed. But the anti-humanist
tendency would clearly appear among his immediate disciples, the
anti-Photians of the ninth century.

Photius (ca. 820 Ї ca. 891).

The dominant figure in Byzantine religious and social and political
life in the ninth century, Photius, is also the father of what is generally
called Byzantine "humanism." In his famous Library, an original and
tremendously important compilation of literary criticism, he covers
Christian writers of the early centuries as well as a number of secular
authors; similarly in his Responses to Amphilochius, a collection of
theological and philosophical essays, he displays a wide secular knowledge