Averintsev S. The Other Rome

AT THE CROSSROADS OF LITERARY TRADITIONS

(Byzantine Literature: Origins and Creative Principles) [1]

At the beginning of my life, I remember school...

A. S. Pushkin

As is known, at the beginning of the paths of our national literature there was a school, and the authoritative teachers in this school were the Byzantine scribes. The school imprint did not fade for a long time. Even at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Nil of Sorsky was pleased and flattered to inscribe his name in Greek[2]; and those who have studied the works of Greek-language rhetoric in the original can experience the "joy of recognition" more than once, reading such Old Russian authors as Cyril of Turov or Epiphanius the Wise, and feeling in every twist of their convolutions a truly Mediterranean attitude to the noble material of speech. When, for example, the Russian monk Sergius the Old, at the end of the fifteenth century, addresses the holy patron of his monastery: "Oh, sacred head!" – these words echo the "divine Hellenic speech"; the Hellenist will remember that even in Sophocles, Antigone called out to her sister: "Oh, the sisterly head of Ismene..." Thus, in Russia, they adopted the thousand-year-old sharpness and pretentiousness of the southern verbal gesture. And the connection with Byzantium is a connection with world culture in the most responsible sense of the word, for Constantinople was precisely the "world," a whole cultural ecumene that gradually shrank and fit within the walls of one city; From him emanated the universal, universally valid laws of aesthetic taste and aesthetic creativity, raised high above any provincial narrowness and limitation. That which is in accordance with the norms adopted in Constantinople is in accordance with what we would call in our language "world standards." It was not for nothing that one of the bookish people of the Byzantine capital bore the title of "universal teacher"[3]; in itself, this title in its concrete use did not mean God knows how much, but it is symbolic: the whole of Constantinople as a whole was such a universal pedagogue, at whose feet sat the students. For the pioneers of young national literature, and even more so for literature of the medieval type, one practical question is most pressing at first: how is literature supposed to behave? If the hero of the prince's retinue strove to cross his forehead and bow "in a learned way" and "in a written way", according to the customs of the Greek land, then for the scribe the same concern extended to his literary "behavior". It was necessary to be able to decently and decently enter the spiritual space of book literature, to bow "according to order" to all the shrines that dwelt in this space, and then, in compliance with all the rules, to perform the rite of narration, or instruction, or inquisitiveness[4]. And so the Byzantines, those most competent masters of ceremonial, who devoted entire treatises to the ceremonies of the court of Constantinople — suffice it to recall the compendium of Constantine Porphyrogenitus — could best meet this need. All Byzantine literature, mainly of ecclesiastical content, which was translated to the needs of the Old Russian reader, on the whole was, as it were, one thorough lesson in verbal "knowledge."

Epiphanius the Wise knew his place in the universe incomparably more confidently.

The mentoring role that Byzantium played in the fate of Russian literature is self-evident; This can also be said about such literatures of the Eastern European, Orthodox circle as Georgian, Serbian or Bulgarian. But even for Latin-language literary creativity in the medieval West, the verbal culture of Byzantium was an example and a model, especially significant within the first millennium AD, but which influenced (at least indirectly) later. Now we know for sure that the Akathist to the Mother of God, this incomparable masterpiece of Byzantine ecclesiastical poetry, the fruit of a truly jewelry work on the word, was completely translated into Latin no later than the ninth century, came into use among the monks of St. Gallen, and could not but influence the poetic initiative of the latter, which led to the birth of the classical form of the Western medieval hymn, the so-called sequence. The influence coming from the East was even more noticeable in the field of prose genres, for example, the apocrypha and hagiography. Anyone who has read the famous "Golden Legend" (a collection of lives of saints compiled for the Catholic reader in the middle of the thirteenth century by the Genoese Dominican James of Voragin) knows how much of the Eastern Christian material retold "close to the text" was included in this compilation.

The pedagogical influence of Byzantine culture, in particular verbal culture, spread both in space and in time unusually far, everywhere asserting more or less stable canons. This could not have happened if this culture had not possessed, along with maturity, richness and the unconditional superiority of its "level" over everything that surrounded it, also some special internal properties.

This is what we are talking about. Generally speaking, not every culture that has achieved primacy and superiority within the boundaries of the ecumene observable from its circle is fit to become the subject of school development for others. As long as it finds its fundamental values and experiences the dramatic vicissitudes of decision and choice, it is not yet able to clothe itself in an authoritative-doctrinal, abstract-universally significant form and in this form instruct all those who wish to learn. For example, the phenomenon of Hellenism (which has such a direct bearing on the genesis of Byzantium) was made possible not only by the conquests of Alexander the Great, but also because it was precisely at the time of these conquests that Greek culture had had time to finally choose itself; in the days of Aeschylus and Pindar, the Greeks would not have undertaken to teach the Oriental barbarians what fine literature was, but they still had to find it out for themselves, and by the efforts of their best geniuses. It is not to be said that a culture that has achieved the academic stability of its core values and is therefore capable of the mission of teaching is paying the price by entering a "non-creative" period. Did not the philosophers, poets, and scholars of Hellenism "create"? But they worked within a ready-made "philosophy," a ready-made "poetry," ready-made "sciences," and, most importantly, within a ready-made system of "education." What is "education" has been clarified; The time has come to establish education on a supra-ethnic scale and to cover the ecumene with a network of "Hellenic" schools, to create textbooks for these schools – and what textbooks! (Let us remember that our elementary manuals on grammar are still based on the Art of Grammar by Dionysius the Thracian, and our elementary manuals on geometry are based on Euclid's Elements, both of which are the fruit of Hellenism.)

Let us try to look at Byzantine culture from this point of view. When it began to be studied immediately after the time of Gibbon, it seemed "motionless" out of habit - and this, of course, was a trick of the eye. When she was looked at better, she turned out to be unusually mobile, extremely diverse and changeable; One modern specialist even sees in the "passion for innovation" one of the cardinal features of the Byzantine aesthetic temperament. But, being neither "immobile" nor "non-creative", Byzantine culture appears from the very beginning to be essentially "ready" in a certain sense of the word; It will have to vary and fully realize the initially given possibilities, but not the choice of itself. It is subject to the subtlest whiffs of fashion and presents a very dynamic succession of "periods", but not epochs that would differ from each other in their deep idea, like the Romanesque and Gothic eras; And if we consider the entire Byzantine millennium as one great epoch in the history of culture, we must be struck by the complete absence of anything resembling a smooth trajectory from the birth of a style to its flowering and then its decline. Is the era of Justinian "archaic"? Is the time of the Palaiologos a decline in style? And when exactly did Byzantine culture experience its culmination? Positively, the historical time of Byzantine culture is not as irreversible as the time of ancient culture or the culture of the medieval West, not to mention the modern European era. The literature and art of Byzantium[7] used the millennium generously allotted to them not so much for irrevocable decisions as for the gradual unfolding of their possibilities, magnificent as a peacock's tail (a Byzantine would not have been offended by such a comparison: for him, a lover of festive luxury, the peacock symbolized not the vice of vanity, but the incorruptibility of holiness). "Yesterday" and "today" are surprisingly easy to swap here. Let us cite two significant examples.

There is such a fact in the history of Byzantine literature as a drama for reading, known under the title Christ the Passion-Bearer, which presents pictures of the events of the Gospel in the forms of ancient tragedy, a work which has come down under the grand name of Gregory the Theologian, and scholars are still arguing[9] whether it belongs to the time of Gregory, that is, the second half of the fourth century, or whether it should be dated to about eight centuries later and regarded as a characteristic product of the late Byzantine classicism of the XII century. And after all, we are not talking about a small verbal trinket (for example, an epigram), within the narrow limits of which a cunning stylizer can still somehow eradicate all the signs of the time; no, "Christ the Passion-Bearer" is a very voluminous work, creating which, it seems, is impossible not to give oneself away, not to show the tastes of one's age. And yet the dispute about dating has not yet been resolved, and all hopes to resolve it are connected exclusively with the linguistic analysis of the text, while the literary and aesthetic criteria proper turn out to be useless. It is hard to believe, and yet it is true: the inner attitude and taste of the poet in the twilight of Byzantium could be fundamentally the same as in the pre-Byzantine ("proto-Byzantine") era! Who can imagine such a monumental and representative work of Western medieval poetry, the dates of which would fluctuate between, say, the time of Pope Gregory the Great and the era of Dante, between the beginning and the end of the Middle Ages? Or a Greek tragedy, which could have belonged with equal probability to a contemporary of Aeschylus and a subject of the Roman Caesars[10].

Eight centuries are more than enough for the very composition of culture to be irreversibly restructured, but in Byzantium the irreversible was not entirely irreversible, and the second example of this is the dialogue "Friend of the Fatherland"[11], the time of origin of which science has been able to find out this time, since it is connected with the situation of the 60s of the tenth century (a short-term conflict between the government and the monasteries). But if the connection of this dialogue with the topical issues of the day is clear, all the more mysterious is its detachment from a more meaningful connection with historical time. How did the inhabitant of the God-preserved city of Constantinople, born half a millennium after the final victory of the Christian faith, manage to put on the mask of a pagan with such ease and so naturally act out disgusted bewilderment before the sight of the pale faces of the monks? What is striking is not the mocking attitude towards the shrine (not at all uncommon in the Middle Ages), but the ability to effortlessly accept a position of endless alienation from what the author's contemporaries lived. The vagants of the medieval West were not afraid to mock the most revered things, but their freethinking and their debauchery are essentially correlated with the style of the churchliness of their time, presupposing it, just as a carnival in the cathedral square presupposes a council: a Archbishop is the antipode of Bernard of Clairvaux, but it is precisely his antipode, revealing the same fundamental structures of the "modeling of the world." There we are dealing with a struggle of opposites within a homogeneous cultural epoch. Here we have something completely different: the author of "A Friend of the Fatherland" does not oppose the world of contemporary mystics and ascetics, but simply has no inner connection with this world. And this writer is by no means a lonely rebel, not a renegade, but a spokesman for the government's point of view. How this is possible remains one of the mysteries of Byzantine social psychology, in any case, we are dealing with an extremely significant feature of "Byzantinism", and a feature without which the latter would not be able to fulfill its mentoring mission.