Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 5

The first breach in this universalism was the division of the empire itself, which ended with the separation of its Western part. Still, the authority of the empire was recognized by the barbarians who came to power in the West, even if only nominally, so that the Byzantine theory remained inviolate. The conflict with the West in the period of the Crusades had tragic consequences, as we have seen. Byzantine patriotism, which had previously fed upon the imperial universal dream, was gradually transformed into nationalism; from an affirmative feeling it became a negative passion, a rejection of everything alien and a morbid sense of what was native.

This transformation became particularly obvious in the period of the kingdom of Nicaea in the thirteenth century, when the Latins ruled in the consecrated capital of the empire. Orthodoxy itself, which had consistently been accepted as the universal truth, able to subdue all peoples in the period of the Fathers, was now emerging as something Greek, in contrast to the Latin, Western faith.
“Hellenism,” which the Fathers had regarded as a synonym for paganism, acquired a new meaning in the late Byzantine period; it was conceived to be the source of national tradition, and the revival of it under the Paleologi was strongly colored by nationalistic feelings.

We may see that while the official ideology of Byzantium remained unalterably universal, despite specific historical failures, the progressive geographical shrinking of the empire increasingly injected a national Greek element into its ideology, the final value of which was Hellenism and not the Christian empire. While Byzantium resisted any division into independent kingdoms and autocephalies on the grounds of its “universalism,” in practice it imposed Greek culture on the Slavs — and this in the most concrete way, as we see from the domination of Greek bishops in conquered Bulgaria and their scornful attitude toward any native differences, even in language. This made the decay of the Orthodox world inevitable and forced the Slavs, like the Armenians and Syrians before them, to hate the Greeks. While the decay of Byzantine Christian universalism was an accomplished fact by the time of the Turkish conquest, the Turkish yoke, paradoxically enough, restored it. Since they made no distinction between religion and nationality, the Turks regarded the Christians primarily as a people, as a single whole led by the patriarch of Constantinople. (They would indeed be one people if they recalled the early Christian experience of the Church as a “new people,” and the definition of the Christian as the “layman” — from Greek laos, the people, meaning one of them.)

 

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