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Wednesday, March 16, 2022

The West Underappreciates the Place of Constantinople in the History of Christendom

 

A very helpful corrective from Laurent Guyénot:

 

Unknown Byzantium

 

We, Westerners, don’t know what Russia is, because we don’t know what Byzantium was. The Byzantine civilization was at the center of the known world during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, yet you can spend years studying “the Middle Ages” at university without ever hearing about it. Nothing has really changed since Paul Stephenson complained in 1972: “The excision of Byzantine history from medieval European studies does indeed seem to me an unforgivable offense against the very spirit of history.”[8]

 

When Western historiography mentions the Byzantine Empire, it is almost as a ghost of the Western Roman Empire. According to the paradigm of the translatio imperii fabricated by Catholic historiography, the Eastern Roman Empire is only the transfer of the Roman Empire from Italy to the Bosphorus, soon to be transferred again to Aachen. But this representation is misleading. When Constantine established his capital at Byzantium, Rome had ceased to be the capital of the Empire for half a century, having been replaced by Milan after the “Crisis of the Third Century”. It is admitted that Constantine himself set foot in Rome only once, to conquer it from Maxentius. Like his father Constantius Chlorus, Constantine was from the Balkans (born in Naissus, today Niš in Serbia), in the region then called Moesia. So did his predecessor Diocletian, who is given as Duke of Moesia” in Byzantine chronicles, and whose palace can still be seen in Split, today in Croatia.

 

The common idea that Constantinople is a pale copy of Rome is therefore singularly lacking in historical perspective. Constantinople was the daughter of Athens, not Rome. Its philosophical, scientific, poetic, mythological and artistic traditions came directly from classical Greece, without any Roman contribution. It was Constantinople that transmitted the cultural wealth of Greece to Rome. Without the conservation work of the Imperial Library of Constantinople, we would not know Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or Euclid. In Constantinople, the light of classical Greece has never suffered an eclipse. While Constantinople knows the conflict between Christianity and humanism, the dual culture has never been questioned,[9] and it was Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 867, who became the best advocate of the Macedonian Renaissance by his work of conservation of ancient Greek books.

 

Greek culture radiated from Constantinople to the confines of the known world, from Persia to Egypt and from Ireland to Spain. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a vast movement of translation from Greek into Latin of philosophical and scientific works (medicine, mathematics, geography, astronomy, etc.). In Aristote au mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne (translated in German and Greek, but not in English), historian Sylvain Gouguenheim debunks the common opinion that the spread of Greek philosophy and science in the Middle Ages is to be credited mostly to Muslims. The Greek heritage was transmitted to Italian cities directly from Constantinople.[10] Between the fifth and thirteenth centuries, Europe gravitated towards Constantinople.

 

If this reality escapes us today, it is because of our incurable eurocentrism, that Oswald Spengler denounced, but in vain:

 

The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it — and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets. We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West-European conceit alone that this phantom “world-history,” which a breath of scepticism would dissipate, is acted out.[11]

 

To understand what separated Constantinople from Rome, let’s first keep in mind that Constantinople was born Christian, while in Rome, Christianity was an imported Oriental cult. It was Constantinople that gave Christianity to Rome, not the other way around. The doctrinal unity of the Church was elaborated and agreed near Constantinople, through the so-called “ecumenical councils” (connecting the Oikoumene, that is, the world placed under the authority of the emperor), whose participants were almost exclusively Easterners. Christopher Dawson reminds us of this evidence in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950), and insists:

 

Thus, unlike Christian Byzantium, Christian Rome represents only a brief interlude between paganism and barbarism. There were only eighteen years between Theodosius’ closing of the temples and the first sack of the Eternal City by the barbarians. The great age of the Western Fathers from Ambrose to Augustin was crammed into a single generation, and St. Augustine died with the Vandals at the gate.”[12]

 

The political structure of Constantinople is also very different from that of Rome. The Latin military terms of imperium and imperator are inadequate to describe the Byzantine world. What we now call the Byzantine Empire called itself a basiliea, a kingdom, headed by a basileus, a king — a Persian-style “king of kings” of sorts. Byzantium scholars describe the Byzantine world as a “Commonwealth”, that is, in the words of Dimitry Obolensky, “the supra-national idea of an association of Christian peoples, to which the emperor and the ‘ecumenical patriarch’ of Constantinople provided a symbolic leadership — even if each of these peoples was fully independent politically and economically.”[13] Contrary to Romans, says Anthony Kaldellis, “The Byzantines were not a warlike people. […] Money, silk, and titles were the empire’s preferred instruments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies.”[14]

 

Byzantine power has a two-headed structure, which Western historians pejoratively call “Caesaropapism”, but which Byzantines defined as a symphonia, a harmonious collaboration; supreme authority is held by the basileus, but on the condition of the blessing of the patriarch of Constantinople. The patriarch is the protector of orthodoxy, but the basileus is the keeper of all Christians. This balance of political and spiritual power means that, while the patriarch may occasionally play a diplomatic role, he does not exercise direct political power, and has never called for a “holy war”, nor for the burning of heretics. Thus coexist, on the margins of the Orthodox Church, a variety of independent Churches, such as the Armenian or the Maronite Churches. Even fully “Orthodox” churches still maintain a strong national identity, like the Serbians, with for example their family feast of Slava, a survival of ancestor worship.

The whole essay is here:

https://www.unz.com/article/a-byzantine-view-of-russia-and-europe/

Via the Russian Faith web site:

https://russian-faith.com/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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