Alexander Schmemann

4. Byzantium (22 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 22

Without doubt the liturgical contributions were the highest achievement of Byzantine Orthodoxy; they indicate the profound understanding and assimilation of the dogmatic insights of the preceding age and the inner continuity of life and tradition. Nevertheless, this theology is only the expression in beautiful forms of the experience of the past, fixing it in a system of divine services. Everything really new that was introduced into this pattern in the Byzantine period was usually very much weaker and more rhetorical, or only decoration in a certain sense — the luxuriant flowering of liturgical symbolism, the elaboration of ceremonies, the sometimes unnecessary prolongation of prayers and hymns of an earlier period which had been classic in their succinctness and expressiveness. Mutatis mutandis, later Byzantine liturgical contributions were baroque by comparison with the transparent simplicity of pure Byzantinism.

An analogous effort to systematize tradition may be seen in the work of Simeon Metaphrastes of the tenth century, the codifier of the lives of saints; or that of Oecumenius, a well-known Byzantine exegete.
Here everything is Orthodox and traditional, very frequently beautiful and ingenious, but nothing is added to what has already been said by the ancient authors.
Still more typical is the celebrated document of the twelfth century, era of the Comneni: the Panoply of Euthymius Zigabenus, a model of official theology.
After that time such works became more frequent; they were theological collections of answers and arguments for all occasions. In the capital and at court there were many disputes on theological themes, but they were glitteringly poetic debates, not genuine discussions of “the one thing necessary.” “It was the fashion to speak about theology,” wrote an historian. “The court competed with the clergy, professional theologians were zealous in searching for new themes and in searching the Scriptures for problems with which to confound their opponents . . .”

 

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