Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 33

Breakup of the Empire — Rise of Islam.

Although Justinian’s dream of empire was briefly realized, it was still only a dream; almost immediately after his death in 565 the empire began to fall apart. In 568 the wave of the Lombard invasion swept over Italy, the pressure of the Moors in Africa increased, and war never ceased in Spain. Islands of Byzantine influence would long be maintained in the West, but one could no longer speak of a Western empire. The eternal war with Persia, from which Justinian had ransomed himself in order to free his hands in the West, was renewed in 572. In about twenty years the Persians conquered part of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 619 the Persian fleet appeared before Constantinople and a hostile army occupied Chalcedon. From the north came invasions of Slavs, who were to be one of the main military and political problems of the empire in later times. In 626, when the Emperor Heraclius was gathering forces far from the capital to fight against Persia, the Avars, whose empire included the Slavs, surrounded Constantinople, and the Byzantines were to regard their deliverance from this siege as a miracle. The last favorable turn of events was Heraclius’ victorious campaign against the Persians in 626-29, which brought the Byzantine army as far as Ctesiphon and liberated the whole East. In 630 he ceremoniously returned the Cross of Christ, which had been captured by the Persians, to Jerusalem.

But this was only a breathing spell. That same year, in remote Arabia, which had never previously been of interest, a band of fanatics around Mohammed conquered Mecca, united the scattered Arab tribes through the new religion of the one God, and created a source of inspiration, faith, and religious dynamism that became for many centuries the chief and most terrible rival of Christianity. Mohammed died in 632, and ten years later the empire of his followers included Persia, Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. When Heraclius, the last emperor of the still great empire, was dying in 641, the empire had already lost the whole East forever.

Thus the fate of Byzantium itself in the seventh century was finally decided in the East, and the emergence of Islam marks the borderline that divided the early empire, which was still Roman and universal in concept and thinking, from later Byzantium. The empire was becoming an Eastern state with a population homogeneous in cultural tradition, if not in blood, which lived under the unceasing pressure of alien worlds. Heraclius began the governmental reform, completed in the next century, which would enable Byzantium to survive for eight more centuries. This was the militarization of the state and its adaptation to its new situation as an island surrounded by enemies on all sides.

Still more important was the psychological and cultural evolution of the empire at the time. It has been defined as the “Hellenization” of Byzantium, but it would be more accurate to call it a second Hellenization. Rome itself, when it was building its empire, was quite Hellenized, and its climax in a cultural sense was also the climax of the Hellenistic period of world history.
The Roman Empire performed a sort of synthesis here, and it was truly a Greco-Roman world. This is quite clear from the history of the Church in the time when it was spreading throughout the empire. Until the seventh century the state tradition of the empire remained this final Roman tradition. Although its center was gradually transferred from West to East, and however clear it became year by year that the West was lost, the empire still continued to be the direct heir of the principate of Augustus, the Antonines, and Diocletian.

 

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