Christendom at the First Millennium

preoccupied by the petty politics of the Roman aristocracy, as the institution needed for a reformation of Christendom.

CHRISTENDOM WAS A CIVILIZATION WITH a supporting culture that came into existence with the formation of the Church at Pentecost. It was not the product of the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, though Emperor Constantine’s embrace of the faith opened new opportunities for expansion. This culture was the product of the earliest Christians’ way of living, which in the eyes of Roman pagandom deviated sharply from what was considered normal. The author of the second-century Epistle to Diognetus commented on the “wonderful and confessedly striking method of life” lived by Christians.

They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. . . . They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. 2

From the start, the inhabitant of Christendom was one who lived in an incongruous union of earth and heaven, of world and paradise.

It might have seemed to those who read the Scriptures that the world has little in common with the ways of heaven. Jesus had declared that His kingdom is not of this world, and in the Sermon on the Mount He had sharply contrasted the values of each. Man’s fulfillment—and that of the world in which he lives—lay not in this age but in the kingdom of heaven.

Yet there was more to the faith than this, and it was contained in the doctrine of the Incarnation. The “hypostatic union” (as theologians would call the joining of two natures in the person of Christ) was in fact the most

2 The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Robert and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 26–27.

mysterious of the Christian doctrines and in a certain sense the key to them all. Whereas the Crucifixion brought special attention to Jesus’ human nature and the Resurrection to His divine nature, the Incarnation magnified both. The doctrine was the profoundest of paradoxes. God was beyond His creation and transcendent from it. Yet because He had become human He was now immanent within it. How this could be was beyond human understanding. It was even said to confound the angels.

But that did not change the fact that heaven and earth had been united in Christ. And if this were so, then the world could now experience the kingdom of heaven. Early Christians likened this experience to paradise. Here they had in mind not only that primordial state enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall but the eschatological one that awaited the blessed at the end of time. But while the latter could never be fully realized in the fallen world, the Second Coming was only one of two eschatological points of reference. The other was the Incarnation.

In his Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul emphasized that Christ had come down from heaven in order “that he might fill all things” with Himself (Eph. 4:10). His body the Church, established at Pentecost by the Holy Spirit, maintained this fullness. Members of that body were called to continue steadfastly in doctrinal integrity. By doing so they maintained “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” The fullness of paradise thus depended upon this unity. For as Paul continued,

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. (Eph. 4:3–5)

The Church, like the Holy Trinity, was undivided and indivisible. And insofar as she was filled with the divine presence, she brought paradise into the world. Hence Paul’s use of prepositions like “above,” “through,” and “in.” The kingdom of heaven awaited eschatological fulfillment at the end of time. But until the Second Coming, the Church would bring the kingdom of heaven into the world, thereby transforming it.

And so a thousand years after Pentecost, Christendom remained a civilization with a supporting culture that directed its members toward the heavenly transformation of the world.

This was evident, for instance, in Constantinople, where the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia stood high on the hill overlooking Europe’s maritime gateway to Asia. It drew the attention of all. The people who flooded into its vast interior every Sunday for the Divine Liturgy, the foreign dignitaries who caught sight of its glittering domes as they sailed into the Golden Horn on diplomatic missions, and even the Muslim potentates who dreamed of acquiring its treasures through conquest—all recognized the cathedral as a symbol of Christendom.

Hagia Sophia majestically declared the union of heaven and earth. The interior of its central dome was imprinted within by an icon of Christ Pantocrator, which proclaimed to those assembled for worship below—the largest place of Christian worship on earth—that God had come from heaven to dwell among them. The icons adorning its walls communicated the teaching of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, that humanity has been joined irreversibly to divinity. Any man or woman who experienced worship here could walk away with no other impression.

Hagia Sophia as it is today

In fact, when pagan visitors from Russia visited Hagia Sophia in the tenth century they exclaimed that they did not know whether they “were in heaven or on earth.” Deciding to convert to Christianity, they returned to Grand Prince Vladimir (r. 980–1015) to urge him to join them. He did, and as Christendom entered its second millennium, the Russians became its newest members.

Neophyte Russia was a good example of Christendom’s principle of heavenly transformation, the imperative to reconfigure life in the world according to the kingdom of heaven. Vladimir himself set the standard. A pagan warlord before his conversion, he had committed murder, rape, and idolatry. To judge by accounts recorded in the chronicles, however, baptism transformed his character. Once a prolific adulterer, he dismissed his mistresses and married a Byzantine princess, to whom he thereafter remained faithGrand Prince Vladimir ful. Once a notorious reveler, he converted court banquets into “agape meals” at which the poor were given a favored place. Once a ruthless tyrant, he responded to the Sermon on the Mount by ordering the suspension of capital punishment.

And when he died, his fellow-convert sons Boris and Gleb, favored by their father in the succession, voluntarily surrendered their power and their lives to another, spiritually untransformed brother because of their desire to participate in the Passion of Christ. These two princes were early witnesses to the experience of paradise in Russia. It is significant that they were the first Russians to be canonized as saints, demonstrating, among their fellow countrymen at least, the value placed on a moral transformation defined by the gospel.

They gave expression to an element in Christian culture that the historian George Fedotov called “kenoticism.” It centered upon the extreme humility of Christ in becoming human, expressed by Paul’s use of the word kenosis, or “emptying” (Phil. 2:5–8). This tendency had long been at the heart of Eastern asceticism. The fourth-century Makarios of Egypt, for instance, was renowned for sacrificing his will in order to obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit. 3 Among the many expressions of heavenly transformation, the Russians showed a particular capacity for this one.

The life of Feodosy (d. 1074) is another example of kenoticism. He was born soon after the millennium into a boyar (noble) family. As such, he was expected to exercise authority over those around him. He did, but only in extreme humility. His biographer, Nestor the Chronicler, documented a continuous Christlike inversion of power that manifested the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. We are told that as a youth on his parents’ estate, Feodosy longed “to be identified with the poor.” Deferential in almost every situation, he nevertheless demonstrated disobedience when enjoined by his mother to conform his life to the privileges of the boyar class. Nestor relates his habit of leaving the house daily to work in the fields alongside the family servants, welcoming the fact that doing so “would expose himself and his family to

Saint Feodosy of Kiev

3 In one of many examples, he did not resist the slander of a local girl who falsely accused him of seducing her, but instead accepted the scorn of villagers and even earned money to support her. Eventually she confessed his innocence, and he moved on to new acts of self-emptying.

disgrace.” In defiance of his social status, he chose to wear poorly made and threadbare clothing. When the grand prince presented him with a new and handsome cloak, he gratefully accepted it but then passed it off to the first beggar he could find.

Feodosy eventually found his way to the Caves Monastery in Kiev and there under obedience to the abbot rose quickly in the esteem of its brotherhood. Soon he was selected by the monks to be the new abbot. But “even in the post of authority,” we are told, he

did not alter his rule or his humble way of life, for he kept in mind the words of our Lord: “Whosoever will be the greater among you, let him be your minister.” And so he humbled himself, and was the least of all, serving everyone and offering himself as an example. 4

The kenotic standard of extreme humility defined his every action as abbot.

When pilgrims visiting the monastery failed to recognize Feodosy and asked to see the abbot, for instance, his characteristic response was, “What do you want of him? He is a sinner.” He regarded all of the monks under his authority as superior to him. In accordance with the Studite Rule (that used at the Studion Monastery in Constantinople), Feodosy made the rounds of each cell at night to enforce monastic decorum. But we are told that if he heard laughter or other signs of misbehavior inside a monk’s cell, he would only tap lightly on the door. When the malefactor responded asking what the matter was, the abbot would reply meekly “You know” and move on.

Once, a particularly wayward brother violated one of the most basic rules of monasticism: he decided to forsake his vows and abandon the brotherhood. But then he returned, and when he did Feodosy scandalized the others by welcoming him back with tears of joy. When the monk violated the rules again in the same way, again Feodosy accepted him back without reproach. And so it continued, to the indignation of the self-righteous brotherhood: the abbot weeping copiously each time for his faithless brother, begging

4 “A Life of St. Theodosius,” in A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, edited by G. P. Fedotov (London: Sheed and Ward, 1950), 15–48.

God to forgive him, and rejoicing like the father of the prodigal son every time he repented and came back.

Feodosy was meek before fellow monks, but to the powerful he could act imperiously. This was revealed in an incident in which the grand prince was betrayed by his brothers and exiled from Kiev. Feodosy, like Ambrose of Milan before him, condemned the act of violence and called the usurpers to repentance. When threatened with reprisals he merely scoffed, welcoming the opportunity to bear witness to the gospel and to be punished for its heavenly standard of prudence.

His attention to life beyond the monastery walls was also revealed in his efforts to comfort the sick and poor of Kiev. Whenever he saw a beggar he was said to weep as he personally gave him alms. He also built a shelter for the poor, assigning a tithe of the monastery income to alms and instituting in Kiev its first regularized distribution of food to the needy.

Through the lives of such saints, Russian Christendom distinguished itself with examples of heavenly transformation. So did Byzantium, though its better-documented historical record is replete with exceptions. The political system, for instance, was a centralized autocracy that generated a court culture of cruelty and deception. This culture had been transformed in certain ways since the time of Emperor Constantine, abolishing blood sports and establishing charities. But it continuously slid back into the spiritually untransformed habits of Roman pagandom, and with depressing consequences. One of these habits was the practice of blinding one’s political enemies. The reign of Emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025) was an example of the political system’s far-from-complete transformation. For it marked not only the successful defense of Christendom against the perpetual threat of Islam in the east, but the savage blinding of thousands of unarmed Bulgarian prisoners of war, all of them Christians.

Far from the Great Palace of Constantinople, where political power was concentrated, cathedrals and monasteries provided an environment for Byzantium’s flowering intellectual life. The result of prayer and fasting, theology was a means toward communion with God. It was not an intellectual quest for knowledge about the truth so much as a means for communion with the

Truth, who according to the Gospel of John the Theologian was God Himself. Familiar with the rich legacy of pagan learning, theologians carefully circumscribed the influence of philosophy in their reflections, always favoring biblical and patristic inspiration.

A particularly important doctrine in the East was that of “deification” (theosis). Patristic teaching about human salvation emphasized the full range of Christ’s actions, including the Crucifixion and Resurrection. But the Incarnation was at the center of a fascination with the divine participation of man. Fathers held the conviction that because man is made in the image of God, man now has the opportunity through the Person of Christ to participate in the very life of God. Athanasius had famously given expression to the principle with the aphorism “God became man so that men might become gods.” Other fathers elaborated it. Maximos the Confessor, for instance, claimed that man,

the image of God, becomes God by deification. He rejoices to the full in abandoning all that is his by nature . . . because the grace of the Spirit triumphs in him and because manifestly God alone is acting in him. 5

In the East, then, reflection on human salvation (soteriology) was fundamentally optimistic. The grandeur of Byzantium and the zeal of neophyte Russia offered encouragement that history would continue to be an age of paradise. Western Christendom at the millennium was, by contrast, a reminder of the world’s inherent brokenness. Gone was the powerful Carolingian Empire Charlemagne had built in magnificent rivalry to Byzantium. The 843 Treaty of Verdun had dissolved it into three much weaker parts, just as a new power was looming in the north. The Vikings descended from their mountain-ringed fjords like a thunderbolt from Thor, brutally hammering the West into submission. Their swift longships and a ferocious fighting ethic made them nearly unstoppable. Coastal monasteries like Lindisfarne in Britain were the first to be wiped out. Then, as confidence grew, their marauding fleets ventured

5 Quoted in John Meyendorff, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 40.

further inland by river, sacking all the towns and monasteries that lay in their path. In 885 they laid siege to Paris (then populated by no more than a few thousand citizens). The Christian townspeople, though starving and sickened by plague, ultimately managed to fight them off. But the raiders continued to conquer and pillage the West for more than a century yet.

The reign of terror began to ebb only when Viking leaders saw value in joining rather than obliterating Christendom. In 911 the warlord Rollo was granted the Duchy of Normandy on the northern French coast on condition he convert to Christianity and defend the region against further invasions by his still-pagan relatives. Back in Scandinavia a century later, conversions began apace under the boyhood convert King Olaf II of Norway (r. 1015–1028), who brought both Anglo-Saxon and Russian influences into a nascent Scandinavian Church. King Canute of England (r. 1016–1035) helped establish Christianity in his native Denmark.

As Scandinavian pagandom converted to Christianity, western Europe entered a new phase of its political history. This was marked by a system of government known as feudalism. In stark contrast to the system in Byzantium, feudalism featured a decentralized state in which local lords offered military service to a king or duke as subordinates, known as vassals. Taking an oath of fealty, these vassals would pledge their service in exchange for a nearly complete monopoly over the economic resources of the lands to which they were thereby entitled. Since the king rarely made an appearance, they were mostly free to do as they pleased. As a result, feudalism exchanged the centralized power of a monarch or a metropolitan for the localized power of barons and bishops. Fragmentation was Rollo of Normandy greatest in France, where the collapse of

the Carolingian Empire had left local knights warring against each other for territories. Division was less extreme in Germany, where the long reign of Otto the Great (r. 936-973) led to comparative political stability.

The papacy also played a role. Following the precedent of Charlemagne’s famous crowning at the hands of Pope Leo III in 800, tenth-century popes conferred legitimacy on Otto and his successors in exchange for military protection in Italy. However, by the end of the century, papal influence collapsed, at least in part because of the disturbing spectacle of what became known as the Cadaver Synod (897). Pope Stephen VI, in order to consolidate his power, ordered the body of his predecessor Formosus exhumed and, to the astonishment of all, posthumously placed on trial for perjury. The scene took place in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, the principal papal cathedral in Rome. Though defended by an archdeacon, poor Formosus had little chance of acquittal, and once found guilty, his corpse was unceremoniously cast into the Tiber River.

But in the aftermath of this spectacle, partisans of both popes waged such a divisive quarrel that the papacy as an institution became thoroughly discredited. In response, the Roman aristocracy moved in and during much of the tenth century succeeded in manipulating elections and dominating the papacy. What was worse, a string of unqualified popes began to show more interest in the vanities of court life, leading to wholesale demoralization. Pope John XII (r. 955–964), before dying in the arms of a married lover, was said to have turned the Lateran Palace into Christendom’s most notorious brothel. Not for nothing has the papacy during this period been labeled a pornocracy. 6

To escape aristocratic subjection, popes during the late tenth century began to look beyond the Alps to the Holy Roman Emperor, a self-styled successor to Charlemagne. By the turn of the millennium, the papacy’s dependence on Germany had become so complete that in 1014 Pope Benedict VIII finally submitted to a longtime imperial demand dating from the time of Charlemagne—that the filioque be added to the Nicene Creed in Rome. Previous popes had condemned the divisive clause and refused to

6 See Age of Paradise, 259–260.