Byzantine Legacy to the Slav World:Approach and Dialectic Process
completely subject to him52 . The Byzantine state system with its emperor and patriarch as heads of state no longer existed in Russia. The Byzantine/Slav view of Russia had passed into history. The question unavoidably arises: what happened to the huge intellectual reserves which had gone from Byzantium to Russia over so many centuries? What had it given to Russian civilization and where were the obvious traces of its positive impact? It is not easy to give a brief answer to this huge question, because it is connected to a network of individual problems. We have already remarked that the Southern Slav countries, due to political circumstances, followed a path of development almost identical to that of the Greek world. In Russia, on the one hand, the development of an intense national consciousness and imperial ideology, and, on the other hand, the creation of a critical and revolutionary group, the intelligentsia, changed the situation and cast clear doubt on the values of Byzantine culture. The Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century was riven by the dilemma: Russian tradition or the West?53. The movement of the so-called Slavophiles deified the Slav people’s soul, with its religious and folklore particularities, and in this encountered the essence of the Russian spirit, Holy Russia54, while the Western52
See Verchovskij 1916 and Cracraft 1971 (a complete bibliography in pages 308-322). Peter drew up the “Ecclesiastical Regulation” the basis of the administration of the Russian Church. On the publication of the Regulation and the related statutes, see Beneševič 1915, 88-228. There is also a Greek translation entitled Πνευματικὸς Κανονισμός, published in Petrograd in 1916, by P. V. Verchovskij with an introduction by S. A. Zebelev. Peter’s ecclesiastical reforms, unprecedented in the history of the Orthodox Church, were endorsed by the patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch, so they were given validity and could no longer be doubted. 53
The crisis of cultural identity was intense in Russia during the 18th century (see Garrard (Edit.) 1973 and Salvo and Hughes 1996) and came to a head in the 19th. V. Zenkovskij’s work on this subject is both trustworthy and informative: Zenkovskij 1955. See also Danilevskij 1895. This discussion continued during the 20 th century and has not ceased to occupy Russian thinkers and writers of the diaspora. See the two-volume work Russkaja ideja 1994 with its treatises related to the subject. 54
Fundamental works for the study of the Slavophile move-
15
izers, supporters of the Enlightenment and Western concepts, looked for new ways of thinking for Russia, far from the past and especially from what they called ‘dark Byzantium’. Between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, emerged a new, completely different trend. It was a new spiritual reality that came from the translation into Slavonic of a book of purely Byzantine provenance. It was the collection of works by Byzantine ascetics and mystics, called The Philokalia which, thanks to Makarios Notaras, former bishop of Corinth, was published in Venice in 1782. Eleven years later, the great Ukrainian spiritual teacher, Paisij Veličkovskij, published this huge work in Slavonic55 and it became very popular. And so the movement known as the ‘Philokalic’ was born, which was nothing more nor less than a return to the Byzantine roots of Russian spirituality56. This movement was not populist, neither was it in harsh opposition to the spirit of the Enlightenment, nor did it fight against any contemporary ideological movement; it was simply a return to the view of the world and of people of the great Byzantine teachers who had shaped the spirit of Byzantine Orthodoxy57. The return to the spirit of Byzantium which manifested itself in Russia from the middle of the 19th century influenced the powerful Theological Academies of Russia, which turned to the study and translation of the works of great Byzantine writers58. This spirit found its place again in the Russian sphere, as it did later in that of the Southern Slavs. The turn towards the inner person, the easing of the unbearable worry over the problem of tortured existence and human pain, the contemplation of a ray of light in the darkness of a drifting world, these could ment are those by: Gratieux 1939 and Gratieux 1953, Petrovich 1958, Gleason 1972. Cf. Serafim 1987 and the collective volume Slavjanskaja ideja 1998. 55
On the creation of the Greek Philokalia and its Slavonic translation, entitled Dobrotoljubie see Tαχιάος 1984(a): 108119, Tachiaos 1981. 56
The volume entitled Amore dell Belo 1991, refers to the Philokalia and the Philokalic renaissance and includes the proceedings of a conference on this subject. Cf. Tachiaos 1993. 57
Cf. Tachiaos 1991.
58
Kern 1957.