Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 34

The historians who attribute the final division of the Church wholly to contradictions between East and West, as a result of a supposed primal and absolute dualism between its Greek and Latin elements, are not only “naturalizing” Christianity but simply forgetting that it is impossible to derive any such dualism from the facts. For example, until the third century the language of the Roman Church was Greek; the father of all Western theology, St. Augustine, simply cannot be understood if we forget that he was rooted in Greek philosophy. And finally, the theology of the Eastern Fathers — Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Cyril — was accepted and adopted in the West as completely as the theology of Leo the Great was accepted in the East. On the other hand, while Latin secular literature and Roman art were born under the influence of Hellas, Justinian’s Code was still written in Latin, and Latin was still the official language of the Byzantine chancellery.

The unity of the Roman world was not destroyed by an internal division between East and West but by external catastrophe; the movement of peoples who flooded the western half of the empire and tore it from the East. This split, at first chiefly political and economic, led indeed to the obvious if gradual individualization of each world and its transformation from a half of an integrated whole into a self-contained unit, each increasingly inclined to interpret its tradition and development as a break from the original Roman universalism.

It was at this time that the second Hellenization of Byzantium took place, the beginning of a development which would finally transform it into a wholly Greek world. It can be traced in the change in official terminology, when Greek terms were replacing Latin; in the appearance of Greek inscriptions on coins; and in the change of legislative language from Latin to Greek. Though the Byzantines styled themselves officially “Romans” up to the downfall of the empire, the term acquired a completely new meaning. While the break from the West would never be complete or final, the triumph of Islam defined forever the boundaries of Byzantinism in the East. All that was not Greek, or was insufficiently Hellenized, fell outside the Byzantine orbit and opposed it as something alien and hostile.

 

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