Introduction

The Main Features and Main Sources of Theology in Byzantium

It would take centuries of struggle and superhuman efforts to transcend Hellenism, freeing it from natural attachments and ethnic and cultural constraints, before Hellenism would finally become the universal form of Christian Truth.

Vladimir Lossky. The Vision of God, 581

Ancient culture turned out to be flexible enough to allow for internal "transformation"... Christians, on the other hand, proved that it is possible to reorient the cultural process without going back to the past and to develop culture in a new spirit. The very process that is variously defined as the "Hellenization of Christianity" can rather be interpreted as the "Christianization of Hellenism."

Georgy Shlorovsky. Faith and Culture, St. Vladimir's Quarferly, 4,1–2 [1955–1956],40.

Emperor Constantine (324–337) put an end to the period of confrontation between Christianity and the Roman Empire. He left the ancient capital of the empire and moved the center of political and cultural life of the "civilized world" of that time to the shores of the Bosphorus, where the ancient Greek city of Byzantium was located. The city was officially called Constantinople, the "New Rome," and it remained the capital of the empire that was called "Roman" for more than eleven centuries, until it came under Turkish rule in 1453.

Constantinople became the undisputed center of Eastern Christianity, especially after the disappearance of ancient Christian centers in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The bishop of Constantinople took the title of "Ecumenical Patriarch." In the Balkans, in the vastness of Eastern Europe, in the Caucasus, Constantinople missionaries converted the population of vast territories to the Christian faith. In fact, the "New Rome" was the cradle of civilization for the Middle East and Eastern Europe, just as the "Old Rome" was for the Latin West.

This book describes the categories of theological thought, how they were formed within the framework of Byzantine Christian civilization, its philosophy of life, its Liturgy and art, and how they have been preserved in modern Eastern Orthodoxy. The central theme of Byzantine theology, or intuition, is the conviction that human nature is not a static, "closed," autonomous entity, but a dynamic reality, defined in its existence by its relationship to God. This relationship is seen as a process of ascent and communion – man, created in the image of God, is called to voluntarily attain the "divine likeness", his relationship to God is both a given and a task, as well as a direct spiritual experience and expectation of an even greater vision achieved in the free effort of love. The dynamism of Byzantine anthropology is easily contrasted with the static categories of "nature" and "grace" that dominated the thinking of post-Augustinian Western Christianity; This dynamism may prove to be an essential criterion for the modern theological search for a new understanding of man.

As a culture and civilization, Byzantium is long dead; But the peculiarities of its influence on the historical development of human society remain open for research. Since the time of Gibbon, historians have pointed to the inertia of the social system, the paucity of creativity in the scientific and technical sphere, and the sacralization of ideas about the state as the main shortcomings of Byzantine reality. But in the present book we assert that Byzantium made a genuine and enduring contribution to the history of mankind in the sphere of religious thought. The constant attraction of Byzantine art and the remarkable fact that Eastern Christianity survived the most dramatic social changes are the clearest signs that Byzantium had indeed discovered something fundamentally true about human nature and its relation to God.

In order to express such a "theocentric" view of man, which is quite close to modern attempts to construct a "theocentric" anthropology, Byzantine theologians used some concepts of ancient Greek philosophy, in particular, the concept of theosis, i.e., theosis. "deification". In the last century, Adolphe Harnack made harsh judgments about the "Hellenized Christianity" of the Greek Fathers, but today he is unlikely to find many followers. The inevitability of a new exposition and reinterpretation of the Christian faith in the light of changing cultural realities is now widely recognized, and the desire of the Greek Fathers to present Christianity in the categories of Hellenism seems quite legitimate. In reality, Byzantine theology, as Lossky observed, was only an unceasing effort and struggle to express the Tradition of the Church in the living categories of Greek thought, so that Hellenism could be converted to Christ.