Some opponents of Palamism, feeling that the dogma must be defined, tried to work out a compromise. The monk Isaac Argyrus, for example, suggested that light was not uncreated, but existed as the originally created light and goodness by which the first man was created and to which the saved man can return. However, it was difficult to find texts to support this view. Among the followers of Palamism, however, John Kantakouzenos tried to weaken the emphasis on the distinction between essence and energy, in the vain hope of making the dogma more acceptable to the Latins. [243] The most eminent mystic of his time, Nicholas Cabasilas seems to have hesitated a little before accepting the teaching, but then fully embraced it, although his views on mysticism differ from those of the hesychasts. He was a humanist and a philanthropist, he did not feel that a mystic had to withdraw from the world. For him, the highest mystical experience was achieved through participation in the liturgy and Holy Communion. A person, taking communion, must necessarily prepare himself by repentance, prayer and contemplation. But, he says, there is no need to sweat and get tired, and there is no need to retire to a secluded place and exhaust yourself with an unaccustomed way of life. You can live in your home, you can keep your worldly possessions; for God is all around us, and will come to us, if we will only open the doors, contemplating His goodness, and using the connecting link which He has provided between Himself and man. Then we can reach Him by sharing the divine drama of His life, death and Resurrection, which is the Divine Liturgy; and we can be filled with love, the love of God, and the love of His creatures. Cabasilas considered the hermit's life too egocentric. The true Christocentric life is in the world, not in flight from it. Of all the Byzantine theologians, Cabasilas is the most attractive. His works, although full of elegance and classical reminiscences, inherent in all high Byzantine literature, are at the same time striking in their freshness and simplicity; his works, in the words of George Scholarius, are "a precious stone in the Church." On the few occasions when he entered into theological disputes, he showed himself to be an opponent of Latin theology and Latin scholasticism. The West, he believed, paid too little attention to the oikonomia of the Holy Spirit. But he was not a polemicist by nature, although his influence was great. He represented a link between mysticism and the world, between the humanism of his time and the ancient Orthodox tradition. [244]

The most remarkable of his disciples was Simeon, Metropolitan of Thessalonica, who died in 1429. but, like his teacher, he believed that the highest mystical experience could be found in the liturgy. He is the author of the most complete symbolic interpretation of the Church and its Sacraments. In disputes, he was distinguished by his conciliatory mood. Although he polemicized with the Latins, he clearly wanted to reach an understanding with them. At the same time, he was an energetic and talented administrator, who was so beloved in his diocese that when he died, six years before the sale of the city to the Venetians, he was mourned along with the Greeks not only by the Italians, but also by the Jews, a nation that had rarely had reason to love the Byzantine hierarchs, also joined in the mourning. The ease with which the Turks took possession of Thessalonica the following year was attributed by many to the feeling of despair that seized the city after the death of the great metropolitan. [245]

Cabasilas and Simeon were representatives of the humanist tradition in Eastern mysticism. But their humanism depended on the presence of a cultured secular society in Constantinople, which existed there until 1453. The representative of its most extreme trend was Gregory the Sinaite, who was born in Asia Minor in 1255, spent his youth on Mount Sinai, from where he received his nickname, then moved to Crete, and from Crete to Athos. He strove to follow the traditions of the desert-dwelling monks exactly. For him, hesychasm implied solitude, and the hermit's way of life is much more praiseworthy than life in a community. For a true mystic, he emphasized, participation in divine services is not necessary and can even be harmful. "Psalmody," as he called it, is too extensive to lead a person to the true memory of God. He told his disciples that they should rarely attend divine services. "Frequent psalmody," he said, "is good for active people... and not for the hesychasts, who are content to pray to God in their hearts and guard themselves from all thoughts." Partly because of the pirate raids that made life on St. Catherine's. Grief restless, partly because of the dislike of the monks, around 1325 Gregory moved to Bulgaria, to a cell in Paroria, in the Strandzha Mountains, where he died in 1346 at the age of 91. [246]

The example of Gregory led to the revival of the hermit's life on St. Woe throughout Greece; However, his views were too extreme to have much influence among the Greeks. It seems that Palamas never knew him and would hardly approve of his attitude to the liturgy. But Gregory's disciple, Isidore Buuccheras, who became patriarch after John Cripples, was a friend of Palamas and could have had a beneficial influence on him. In Palamas one can feel the echoes of Gregory's warnings that the mystic should not be deceived by easily obtained mystical visions. [247] The legacy of Gregory was most developed among the Slavs. After his removal to Bulgaria, his disciples moved north, crossed the Danube, and arrived in Russia. The most prominent of these was Cyprian of Tarnovo, who became Metropolitan of Kiev in 1390, who developed Gregory's views even further, preaching against the ownership of lands by monasteries, demanding absolute non-acquisitiveness™ from monks, and even speaking out against monastic communities in general. In his opinion, hermits and mendicant monks were closer to God. His teachings, as well as those of his followers over the next two or three generations, especially Nilus of Sorsky (1433-1508), led to the elders becoming the most beloved and deeply respected people in Russian society. The elder was a hermit, often wandering, and, as a rule, lonely, although there were cases when a group of disciples could gather around him; he rarely attended church services, but he enjoyed much greater honor than any bishop or abbot. His position was similar to that of the hermits of the early Byzantine period, although he was more consciously indulging in mystical exercises. One can doubt how much the elders really enriched the spiritual life of Russia. Being illiterate people, they could become sorcerers among the superstitious peasantry, as well as interfere in local and sometimes state politics, act as enemies of education and reforms; finally, we find the most famous of the elders, Grigory Rasputin. Meanwhile, for centuries, one of the main events in Russian church history was the struggle between the hierarchy, united with the large regular monasteries, and the defenders of religious non-acquisitiveness. [248]

Thanks to the cruel fact of the Turkish conquest, Byzantium was freed from such a struggle. Until the fall of the Empire, Byzantium was full of religious activity; but in such troubled times it was difficult to preserve a contemplative life, with the exception of the Holy Spirit. Mountains. Soon after the capture of Thessalonica by the Turks in 1430, Mount Athos was forced to recognize the authority of the Sultan. But he gave the monks the opportunity to form an independent monastic republic; They were able to retain most of their possessions and land, as well as their connection to the patriarchy. The practice of hesychasm did not cease there. Many centuries later, in 1782, an Athonite monk, Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, published a collection of excerpts from the Church Fathers, both Eastern and Western, beginning with the fifth century, on the theory and practice of mysticism. Nicodemus was not a scholarly publisher or critic of high-level texts, but his compilation, known as the Philokalia, is a very important work, not only because it includes many unpublished and otherwise unknown texts, but also because it shows the continuity of Christian mysticism. The hesychast theologians, led by Gregory Palamas, gave only a definition to those dogmas that had long been part of the Orthodox tradition and still exist in the Orthodox world, although weakened by the blows of modern life. [249]

Mystical experience lies in the heart of Orthodoxy. It seems to many outside observers that the Orthodox Churches are sometimes too ready to turn their backs on the material world and flee into the unreal world of the spirit, showing an excessive readiness to submit to godless governments and very quickly reconciling themselves to their godless deeds. Maybe that's true. Byzantium inherited from Rome such a deep respect for the Law that the Byzantines willingly left it to the state to punish criminals and correct social injustice, resenting only when faith or worship was involved. True, there were great ecclesiastical figures who wanted to ensure that divine laws prevailed in everyday life; But in general, it was accepted that the divine work should be to care for the soul, and not for the body. This position, of course, did not help charity. But it also gave strength to the Church, enabling it to endure the humiliation and demoralization that political conquest brought. A Christian in the East could humble himself before the Antichrist in everyday life, but his soul remained in communion with God.

Chapter 7. The End of the Empire

By the middle of the fifteenth century, it became clear to any impartial observer that the time of the life of the ancient Empire was coming to an end. Its territory now consisted only of the city of Constantinople itself, half in ruins, with a dwindling population, as well as a few cities along the coast of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea coast of Thrace and the islands of Tenedos and Imvros at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The vassal of the imperial house remained the despotate of Morea, which now included the whole of the Peloponnese, with the exception of a few Venetian fortresses. In the east of the Empire, the Empire of Trebizond of the Great Comneni dragged out a miserable existence. There were several other minor Latin states on the territory of Greece and the islands; other islands, as well as several port cities, belonged to Venice and Genoa. Everywhere, from the Danube to the Tauride Mountains, everything was in the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Empire was ruled by strong and capable rulers; The Ottoman army was the best and most modern in the world. When the Ottoman throne passed to the brilliant and ambitious nineteen-year-old Mehmed II in 1451, it could not be expected that he could long tolerate the fact that the great city would continue to exist as an alien island in the very center of his dominions.

There was a tense life in the city. The philosophical and theological disputes that had been waged in Byzantium in previous centuries were now subordinated to the burning political question: Could the Empire be saved? But this problem necessarily led to a religious question. If the Empire was destined to be saved, it could only happen with help from outside; and help from outside meant help from the West, the price of which was the union of the Churches under the dominion of Rome.

In this last moment of the agony of the Empire, the Church of Constantinople could do little to help its people. Its provincial administration was disrupted by the Turkish offensive. In Constantinople itself, the official policy in favor of the union caused chaos. There was no patriarch. The last to occupy the throne, Gregory Mammas, left for Italy. Since the episcopal sees were vacant, the emperor could not find anyone who could replace them and support the union. The clergy and communities of the city avoided divine services in the Great Church - St. Instead of her, they went for advice to the monastery of Pantocrator, where the monk Gennadius, formerly George Scholarius, delivered fiery sermons against the Unia. Did the Byzantines have reason to seek to save their bodies at the cost of the destruction of their souls? And could they really be physically saved? For Gennady and his followers, it was all too clear that the aid provided by the West could be tragically unequal. The Holy Scriptures stated that sooner or later the Antichrist would come as the forerunner of Armageddon and the end of the world. Many Greeks thought that this moment was near. Was this the right time to betray the purity of the faith?

Despite this, when the critical moment came, it was difficult to find a man or woman in Constantinople who would not stand up for the defense of the city. The Western Allies were few in number. But no matter who they were, whether they were Venetian and Genoese merchants whose main motive was self-interest, or noble adventurers such as the Bocciardi brothers, or the Spaniard Don Francisco of Toledo, or the clerics of Cardinal Isidore's retinue, all fought bravely until the last moment, until the bravest of them, Giustiniani of Genoa, mortally wounded, left the field of battle. The Greeks were overwhelmed by omens and prophecies, they were really aware that the city could not hold out for long, and although some of them were convinced that only Turkish conquest could now bring a solution to their problems, they all unanimously entered the battle. Old men and women restored the destroyed fortifications night after night. Even the monks were on duty on the walls as sentries and, forgetting the ancient prohibitions of the Holy Fathers, took up arms against the besiegers. There was envy and enmity between the allies, between the Venetians and the Genoese, among the Greeks among themselves, and between the Greeks and the Latins in general. But quarrels never seriously weakened the defense. Pride and devotion to the emperor and Christianity were stronger than their contradictions; and on the last night before the decisive assault, all who could be freed from the protection of the walls, regardless of their affiliation, came to the last liturgy in the Great Church to pray for deliverance, which, as they all knew, could only be brought about by a miracle.

The empire ended its existence in glory. And only when the news spread through the city that the emperor had been slain, and the Sultan's banner was waving on the Holy Palace, the Greeks stopped fighting and tried to adapt as best they could to life under the yoke. [250]