Byzantine Church Quotes

It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside--airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked was something beautiful--Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels--a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and

…is there anyone so deaf that he cannot hear in Byzantine churches some echo of the Catacombs? What could be more natural than that just as martyrs made paintings for martyrs, latter-day bureaucrats paint for bureaucrats?

Across the broken apses and shattered naves of a hundred ruined Byzantine churches, the same smooth, cold, neo-classical faces of the saints and apostles stare down like a gallery of deaf mutes; and through this thundering silence the everyday reality of life in the Byzantine provinces remains persistently difficult to visualise. The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated. Yet through the pages of The Spiritual Meadow one can come closer to the ordinary Byzantine than is possible through virtually any other single source. Dalrymple, William (2012-06-21). From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (Text Only) (Kindle Location 248). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

the whole idea of a “holy” war was an alien concept to the Byzantine mind. Killing, as Saint Basil of Caesarea had taught in the fourth century, was sometimes necessary but never praiseworthy, and certainly not grounds for remission of sins. The Eastern Church had held this line tenaciously throughout the centuries, even rejecting the great warrior-emperor Nicephorus Phocas’s attempt to have soldiers who died fighting Muslims declared martyrs. Wars could, of course, be just, but on the whole diplomacy was infinitely preferable. Above all, eastern clergy were not permitted to take up arms, and the strange sight of Norman clerics armed and even leading soldiers disconcerted the watching hosts.

When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family.

Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as "people of the book," began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.

on that last Monday of the empire’s history, the mood changed. There was no rest for the weary, of course, and work continued, but for the first time in weeks, the inhabitants of the city began to make their way to the Hagia Sophia. There, for the first and last time in Byzantine history, the divisions that had split the church for centuries were forgotten, Greek priests stood shoulder to shoulder with Latin ones, and a truly ecumenical service began. While the population gathered in the great church, Constantine gave a final speech—a funeral oration, as Edward Gibbon put it—for the Roman Empire. Reminding his assembled troops of their glorious history, he proudly charged them to acquit themselves with dignity and honor: “Animals may run from animals, but you are men, and worthy heirs of the great heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome.”* Turning to the Italians who were fighting in defense of Constantinople, the emperor thanked them for their service, assuring them that they were now brothers, united by a common bond. After shaking hands with each of the commanders, he dismissed them to their posts and joined the rest of the population in the Hagia Sophia.

From there Ari took her to the church which marked the place of the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes a short distance from Capernaum. The floor of the church held a Byzantine mosaic depicting cormorants and herons and ducks and other wild birds which still inhabited the lake. And then they moved on to the Mount of Beatitudes to a little chapel on the hill where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. These were His words spoken from this place. As she

After 1,123 years and 18 days, the Byzantine Empire had drawn to a close. The Divine Liturgy that had echoed from the great dome of the Hagia Sophia for nearly a millennium fell silent, and the clouds of incense slowly cleared from the desecrated churches of the city. The shocked and shattered Byzantines were now in permanent exile, but they could at least reflect that their empire had come to a glorious and heroic end. Their last emperor had chosen death over surrender or a diminishment of his ideals, and in doing so he had found a common grave among the men he led. Proud and brave, the iconic eighty-eighth emperor of Byzantium had brought the empire full circle. Like the first to rule in the city by the Bosporus, he had been a son of Helena named Constantine, and it was fitting that in his hour of need he had a Justinian by his side.

At the heart of Byzantium was its capital, Constantinople, now modern Istanbul. Today it may look like a Turkish city but it contains an old city that was once a huge Roman metropolis and the largest city in Europe for nearly 1,000 years. Even today it has the remains of almost as many Roman buildings as Rome itself – towering walls and aqueducts, huge pillared underground cisterns, and churches that still dominate the modern skyline.

In the third paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups.

a Greek monk and theologian (today revered as a saint by the Orthodox Church) who was imprisoned for a time by the Turks, remarked trenchantly about Muslims: “These infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [i.e., Byzantines] by their love of God…They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil…and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves of them.”18

The shrine derived its sanctity from the Book of Genesis, which recounts how Abraham bought the cave from a certain Ephron the Hittite (for “four hundred shekels of silver”) as a burial site for his wife, Sarah. Eventually, Abraham is interred alongside his wife and later other Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs are buried there as well—Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Leah. Over the centuries, the appeal of this Old Testament narrative to all three monotheistic religions made the cave a trophy for competing empires. It served as a Jewish shrine under Herod the Great, who surrounded it with huge stone walls, a basilica in the Byzantine era, and a mosque after the invasion of the Muslims. The Crusaders made a church of the site in 1100 but it reverted to a mosque when Saladin conquered the area in 1188.

Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.

There was no pope in the Nicene and pre-Nicene churches. The Roman Catholic Church as an organization that rules all of western Christendom was not a product of apostolic teaching. The papacy was not a product of the blessing that Jesus conferred upon Peter. The Roman Catholic Church is, instead, the product of the conquest of the western Roman empire by the barbarian hordes in the fifth century. Their conquest politically isolated the bishop of Rome from the other major bishops of the Roman empire and led to his having sole authority over all the churches west of the Byzantine empire. It is that political isolation which would cause the bishops of Rome to begin to imagine that they had entitlement to such authority over all the churches of the world. No one concurred, and eventually the bishop of Rome simply excommunicated eastern Christianity, isolating his own private Christian world. That separation from eastern Christianity and their rejection of papal primacy continues to this day.

faith in progress was fundamental to western Christianity. As for Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine East, it prohibited both clocks and pipe organs from its churches.51

and into the western parts of Asia Minor, where his successful activities attracted the attention of the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Pogonatus. This Emperor issued a decree (684) against the congregations of believers and against Constantine in particular, sending one of his officers, named Simeon, to put it into effect. In order to give special significance to the execution of Constantine, Simeon supplied a number of his personal friends with stones and ordered them to stone the teacher whom they had so long revered and loved. Risking their own lives by their refusal, they dropped the stones, but there was a young man present named Justus, who had been brought up by Constantine as his adopted son and treated with especial kindness; he flung a stone at his benefactor and killed him, thus earning high praise and reward from the authorities, who compared him to David slaying Goliath. Simeon was profoundly moved by all that he saw and heard at Kibossa, and, conversing with the Christians there, was convinced of the truth of their doctrines and the Tightness of their practice.

in the Taurus Mountains, Leo was born, who became Emperor of the Eastern, or Byzantine Empire, and is known as Leo the Isaurian. He was one of the best and most successful of the Byzantine Emperors, defending Constantinople from the Saracens and strengthening the Empire internally by his vigorous and wise reforms. Perceiving that the prevalent idolatry and superstition were among the chief causes of the miseries that were so evident in both East and West, he set himself to root out the evil. In 726 he issued his first edict against the worship of images, and followed it by a campaign of forcible destruction of images, and persecution of those who held to them.

It is no wonder that historians trace the birth of Western civilization to these jewels of the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean seas. The Greek Isles are home to wide-ranging and far-reaching cultural traditions and mythic tales, not to mention the colorful history and unforgettable vistas that still draw thousands of tourists to the region every year. Minoan ruins stand alongside Byzantine churches and Crusader fortresses. Terra-cotta pots spilling over with hibiscus flowers adorn blinding-white stucco houses that reflect the sun’s dazzling light. Fishing villages perched upon craggy cliffs overlook clusters of colorful boats in island harbors. Centuries-old citrus and olive groves dot the hillsides. Lush vegetation and rocky shores meet isolated stretches of sand and an azure sea. Masts bob left and right on sailboats moored in secluded inlets. Each island is a world unto itself. Although outsiders and neighbors have inhabited, visited, and invaded these islands throughout the centuries, the islands’ rugged geography and small size have also ensured a certain isolation. In this environment, traditional ways of life thrive. The arts--pottery, glass blowing, gem carving, sculpture, and painting, among others--flourish here today, as contemporary craft artists keep alive techniques begun in antiquity. In the remote hilltop villages of Kárpathos, for example, artisans practice crafts that date back eons, and inhabitants speak a dialect close to ancient Greek. Today, to walk along the pebbled pathways of a traditional Greek mountain village or the marbled streets of an ancient acropolis is to step back in time. To meander at a leisurely pace through these island chains by boat is to be captivated by the same dramatic landscapes and enchanted islets that make the myths of ancient Greece so compelling. To witness the Mediterranean sun setting on the turquoise sea is to receive one of life’s greatest blessings.

Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece and Turkey. In its origins, this war stemmed from aggressive Greek claims to territory in Asia Minor, which at their most extreme amounted to a return to something like the Byzantine Empire. As matters turned out, the Turks turned the conflict into their own war of independence, in which they evicted foreign invaders. In the process, the Turks purged the Greek Christians of Asia Minor, as ethnic cleansing continued through the early 1920s. The campaign reached its horrifying peak in the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, allegedly causing the deaths of a hundred thousand Greek and Armenian Christians in what had been the City of the Giaour. The area around Trebizond was the setting for what Greeks and Armenians today recall as the Pontic Genocide of Christians.36

Worldly success was a potent force in the growth of Islam, and in the shriveling of Christianity. That fact may be troubling to Christians, whose faith so often extols the triumph of the meek and humble while rejecting worldly success, and who are so familiar with the concept of defeat as the root of long-term victory. In practice, though, Christians often had used material successes as proofs of their faith. As we have seen, church writers pointed to miracles and healings to vouch for the power of Christ, and such events often explained important conversions. Though such claims continued to be made, they were increasingly outweighed by the obvious successes of Muslim states and armies. At several critical moments, Muslim victories proved enormously damaging to the Christian cause, from the early triumphs over the Byzantine Empire onward. As the early Islamic convert 'Ali Tabari explained, “[Muhammad’s] victory over the nations is also by necessity and by undeniable arguments a manifest sign of the prophetic office.”20 If God had not been on his side, how could Muhammad’s followers possibly have won such stunning victories over ancient empires?

The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution. New Masters Reading sympathetic accounts of the spread of Islam, we can forget that this was a movement of armed conquest and imperial expansion, which on occasion involved ferocious violence. The battle of Yarmuk in 636, which gave the Muslims control of Syria, was one of the great military massacres of antiquity, costing the lives of perhaps fifty thousand soldiers of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And while cities were generally spared, the invaders showed little mercy to surrounding villages and settlements.

The fathers Martin and Cahier at Bourges alone left her true value. Had the Church controlled her, the Virgin would perhaps have remained prostrate at the foot of the Cross. Dragged by a Byzantine Court, backed by popular insistence and impelled by overpowering self-interest, the Church accepted the Virgin throned and crowned, seated by Christ, the Judge throned and crowned;

the Abyssinian church and the church of the Sudan were once part of the Eastern church of Byzantium. Thus African music found its way into the Byzantine liturgy, which later filtered out into Europe and colored the Gregorian chants of the early Roman Catholic Church.

Lily Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of. A one minute reading test I am dog --Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007 Allergies disclaimer: One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash? He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling. ‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers. Nope, she’s allergic to stupid. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl. A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg --Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904 Ding-dong! --Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907 It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female. --Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories Right! She turned her nose up at his advances: Idiot! I hate strawberries! --Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya Pavlova, Mrs, My Husband and I – Memoirs The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy. Just saying! In the words of our hero: Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it? And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.” Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused. Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute! Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament. Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats: All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals. ..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them. Men are so stupid! And then.. She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt. --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gratuitous use of one particular French vulgarism nested in the English language since the Norman conquest of 1066 is well demonstrated by this Milan Kundera translation. One has to wonder if the original 1984 edition contained the word “pizda”? It is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock. --Scholar Germaine Greer But of course a cunt, in French, as much as el coño in Spanish does not carry near enough as much uncouth weight as in English. The English language doesn’t exist. It’s just badly pronounced French. --Bernard Cerquiglini Quelle conne! Un con reste un con! --William Shakespeare, Last Words, Holy Trinity Church, Gropecunt Lane, Stratford upon Avon, April 23rd 1616

The Orthodox intellectuals of the commonwealth, long without a king of their own, embraced the opportunity to enter an idealized Orthodox world inspired by the Byzantine vision of symphony between an autocratic ruler and the one true church.

For the first seventy years, Muslims worshipped alongside Christians in the existing Byzantine basilica. According to historical reconstructions, Muslims prayed in the southeastern end of the complex, in a special space known as a masalla, outfitted with a mihrab that pointed the faithful toward Mecca. Meanwhile, Christians continued to conduct their liturgy at the western end of the church, around the existing altar and apse. Scholars believe that the blocked doorway mentioned above served as an entrance for both groups, with Christians turning left and Muslims right into their respective sections of the complex. This arrangement was not so unusual: we know about similar arrangements at other sites from the early Islamic period, where the first generation of Muslims prayed in spaces borrowed from their Christian subjects.

Maximus the Confessor (580–662) lived, historically and to some extent geographically, betwixt and between. Historically, he lived in the indefinite transition between “early” and “medieval” Christianity: after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire and the zenith of the Byzantine Christian Empire under Justinian, but before the schism of Byzantine and Roman Churches had reached the point of no return; after the crucial Councils of Nicea (325), Constantinople (381), and Chalcedon (451), but before the age of the Ecumenical Councils had ended; after the most creative epoch in patristic thought, stretching from Origen to the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine, but before the tendency toward theological scholasticism East or West had fully gained momentum.

The 4th century church was later replaced by the building that exists in present-day Bethlehem. Between 530 and 533, Emperor Justinian I dedicated a second Church of the Nativity upon the site, and according to the Egyptian Patriarch Eutychius of Alexandria, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was destroyed and rebuilt by Justinian because the Byzantine emperor felt that the old church was too small.[43] This is the oldest Christian church that has remained in constant use throughout history.

In 591, the Byzantines were puzzled to find that Turkish envoys from Kyrgyzstan had crosses tattooed on their foreheads: “They had been assigned this by their mothers; for when a fierce plague was endemic among them, some Christians advised them that the foreheads of the young be tattooed with that sign.

allowing for a stable central government. The church and the government largely worked together

Byzantium was an agricultural society, a hub of world trade, and the center of the Eastern Church.

She also negatively impacted the empire’s stability by encouraging a controversial doctrine within the Church.

At last, he turned to the Church. He asked the Church’s leader, the Patriarch Sergius

Irene worked hard to put the icon back in its revered place in the Eastern Church,

The history of the medieval era brings to mind the feudal system with its handful of nobles constantly fighting for territory and the competing forces of various kingdoms and the all-powerful church. But these are pictures of Western Europe.

and the competing forces of various kingdoms and the all-powerful church. But these are pictures of Western Europe.

Father Alex Karloutsos, who was at the dinner with his son Michael. “Joe Biden, a Roman Catholic, also has a long history of working with the Greek Orthodox Church.” It’s a weirdly byzantine explanation

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

The island of Sicily is the largest in the Mediterranean. It has also proved, over the centuries, to be the most unhappy. The stepping-stone between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, the link between the Latin world and the Greek, at once a stronghold, observation-point and clearing-house, it has been fought over and occupied in turn by all the great powers that have at various times striven to extend their dominion across the Middle Sea. It has belonged to them all—and yet has properly been part of none; for the number and variety of its conquerors, while preventing the development of any strong national individuality of its own, have endowed it with a kaleidoscopic heritage of experience which can never allow it to become completely assimilated. Even today, despite the beauty of its landscape, the fertility of its fields and the perpetual benediction of its climate, there lingers everywhere some dark, brooding quality—some underlying sorrow of which poverty, Church influence, the Mafia and all the other popular modern scapegoats may be the manifestations but are certainly not the cause. It is the sorrow of long, unhappy experience, of opportunity lost and promise unfulfilled; the sorrow, perhaps, of a beautiful woman who has been raped too often and betrayed too often and is no longer fit for love or marriage. Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spaniards, French—all have left their mark. Today, a century after being received into her Italian home, Sicily is probably less unhappy than she has been for many centuries; but though no longer lost she still seems lonely, seeking always an identity which she can never entirely find.

I came to the realization that the Byzantine employment of religious rituals around war – inviting priests to bless troops and weapons, to pray before battles – was not a blessing of warfare as such (although they certainly prayed for victories, partly because they saw them as the quickest route to peace). Rather the reverse: the primary purpose of such prayers was to inoculate the soldier against a particular kind of damage that could occur to his soul during war – what we would refer to as traumatic stress.3 These acts of blessing, still retained in Orthodox countries, are not to be understood as the Church pronouncing war good, but exist precisely because she knows that war is always evil.

Another Byzantine miracle was an original version of Shylock. Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists plundered the Church legends as freely as their masters plundered the Church treasuries, yet left a mass of dramatic material untouched.

The Chair [Justice Peter McClellan, former Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] seemed to see where he was going with this. 'Cardinal, you keep referencing back to authority and structural responsibility, but it is the case, isn't it, that within the Church you would expect and indeed might I suggest the community would expect - that each priest would act responsibly, regardless of their position?" He was met again with some vintage obfuscation, capped off with a familiar Pell trope: you people just don't understand my Church. 'To understand the Catholic Church's structure and who has authority, you go to Church law, and according to the canon law of the Church, you can there identify the different levels of responsibility - it might be a jurisdictional responsibility; it might be a moral responsibility at different levels. But it's from the canon law that you decide what the situation is within the Church.' And here the Chair got to the nub of Pell's true thinking on this, the bubble he finds himself in, where the ordinary rules of morality, decency and even criminal responsibility are leavened to varying degrees by byzantine Church structures. (p.203)

As Arab armies conquered Syria (which had been part of the Roman and Byzantine empires), they found Syriac translations of Greek philosophical works. These writings were translated into Arabic, and for a time they became the foundation of Muslim philosophy. Eventually, they were rejected as being inconsistent with Islam. The mullahs decided that Muslims could accept practical works from the conquered people, but speculative thought was out. Christians, however, had long since made their peace with integrating pagan philosophy with the Bible. In fact, since the time of the early Christian writers, theologians had argued that just as the Hebrew prophets were the Jewish world’s road to the truth best expressed in Christianity, philosophers were the pagan world’s road to that same truth. So when Christian scholars found out about the works of Aristotle in Spain, they began to translate them into Latin, the language of the church and of scholarship. These new texts immediately caused a buzz in the scholarly community, because here was a complete, well-developed worldview that answered all of the key philosophical questions that medieval scholars had grappled with. The only question was how to integrate the “New Aristotle” into the intellectual synthesis already in place with the advent of Platonic humanism.

Critics who deny the primacy of the Byzantine text, preferring to view it as a fourth century revision, often refer to the fact no Early Church Father before Chrysostom (347-407 AD) appears even to refer to it, let alone quote from it. Now this is simply not true. Painstaking scholarly research has shown that Justin Martyr (100-165 AD), Irenaeus (130-200 AD), Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD), Tertullian (160-220 AD), Hippolytus (170-236 AD), and even Origen (185- 254 AD) quote repeatedly from the Byzantine text. Edward Miller, after classifying the citations in the Greek and Latin Fathers who died before 400 AD, found that their quotations supported the Byzantine text 2,630 times (and other texts only 1,753 times). Furthermore, subjecting thirty important passages to examination, he found 530 testimonies to the Byzantine text (and only 170 in favour of its opponents). This was his conclusion: “The original predominance of the Traditional Text is shewn in the list of the earliest Fathers. Their record proves that in their writings, and so in the Church generally, corruption had made itself felt in the earliest times, but that the pure waters generally prevailed… The tradition is also carried on through the majority of the Fathers who succeeded them. There is no break or interval: the witness is continuous”.[21] The plain fact of the matter is that by the fourth century the Byzantine text was emerging as the authoritative text of the New Testament and for the next twelve hundred years (and more) it held undisputed sway over the whole of Christendom.

As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine.

For that reason, we stick to the AV Bible, 1611, taken from the Textus Receptus, which was not written between A.D. 346 and 500, when this seventh head of Satan assumed a religious “holy” form. Bible‑believing Christians go by the Greek Textus Receptus of the Eastern Greek Church—not the Western Roman Church. Bible‑believers go back to the original Christian religion of the Bible‑believing Christianity, which used a Syrian‑type Text from papyrus of the first, second, and third centuries, and preserved these in Byzantine manuscripts of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, in Asia through Asia Minor, and then through the Balkans to Germany and England.

He was the leader of the Prophet David’s army,’ said the Sheikh. ‘David had him killed so that he could marry Nebi Uri’s beautiful wife. Two angels, Mikhail and Jibrael, appeared and asked David why he needed an extra wife when he already had ninety-nine others. You know this story?’ ‘Yes. I think we Christians know Nebi Uri as Uriah the Hittite.’ It was an unlikely tangle of tales: a medieval Muslim saint buried in a much older Byzantine tomb tower had somehow been confused with the Biblical and Koranic Uriah; perhaps the saint’s name was Uriah, and over the passage of time his identity had been merged with that of his scriptural namesake. More intriguing still was the fact that in this city, long famed for the shrines of its Christian saints, the Muslim Sufi tradition had directly carried on from where Theodoret’s Christian holy men had left off. Just as the Muslim form of prayer, with its bowings and prostrations, appears to derive from the older Syriac Christian tradition that I had seen performed at Mar Gabriel, and just as the architecture of the earliest minarets unmistakably derives from the square late-antique Syrian church towers, so the roots of Islamic mysticism and Sufism lie with the Byzantine holy men and desert fathers who preceded them across the Near East. Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern Western incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet’s armies, they assumed that Islam was merely a heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets. Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonisation of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West’s repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.

While Byzantium drew its deepest identity from the belief that it was perpetuating the true tradition of the Roman Empire, it increasingly came to view the Western Church as a geopolitical rival whose power was ultimately as threatening to Byzantine power and identity as Islam itself. The Middle East was thus quite capable, without Islam, of developing aversion to the West.

The pope, furthermore, insisted on arrogating to himself immense secular powers in ways that the Byzantine patriarch did not. The history of the European Middle Ages is replete with just such massive power struggles between the pope and worldly princes. This reminds us that there is, in fact, a much deeper tradition of religious interference into Western secular politics by the Roman Catholic Church than has ever been the case in Islam and its consistently secular (nonclerical) rulers (until modern Iran).

The philosophy they had lived for starts to die itself. Some strands of ancient philosophy live on, preserved by the hands of some Christian philosophers – but it is not the same. Works that have to agree with the pre-ordained doctrines of a church are theology, not philosophy. Free philosophy has gone. The great destruction of classical texts gathers pace. The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ – and brilliant – ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away. Centuries later, an Arab traveller would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum,’ he wrote – meaning the Roman and Byzantine Empire – ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum; this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced.