The Cambridge Medieval History: IV the Byzantine Empire, Part II:
Government, Church and Civilisation edited by J. M. Hussey (cup 75s)
Byzantium
DAVID KNOWLES
It is just over a year since the first part of this volume was published and reviewed 44/hese
pages. That part was concerned almost exclu- sively with the political history of Byzantium and the neighbouring countries. It was a massive volume of 1,100 pages. The present volume contains a mere 500, and deals with particular topics, religious, intellectual and
administrative. It should therefore be, and is in large part, of greater general interest, for while only a few non-specialists would wish to read or to possess a thousand pages of political facts about Byzantium, there are many who would wish to know more of the social and spiritual life of that brilliant civilisation.
The editor has flung her net wide among the experts, and many of the chapters are clear and masterly expositions of their themes...Those on government, law and the secular church are excellent, and the first and third together supply a very adequate description of the Emperor's powers and position, which have served time and again from Charlemagne to Henry VIII as models for heads of state to follow. On Byzan- tine music Dr E. Wellesz provides an expert's survey for those who can read musical notation, though here and elsewhere it is tantalising to be told of the superlative excellence of hymns and verses which one cannot sample either in Greek or in translation.
The editor herself writes on monasticism in what is probably the best short account of the subject, though for a still briefer outline that by the late Pire Delebaye in Byzaatt, a collection of essays edited by Baynes and Moss twenty years ago, is still valuable. In the following chapters on theology and spirituality Professor Hussey and T. A. Hart wrestle with the difficult subject of hesychasm and come very near success. Here a comparison with the classical western teaching on contem- plation and a glance at similar controversies, such as those on illuminism and quietism, might have been found helpful. Professor DOlger's chapter on literature is little more than a cata- logue: that on art by Professor A. Grabar is as competent as might be expected from such an authority, but the subject is too vast for a chapter of fifty pages.
By what is surely an innovation in the Cambridge Medieval History, there are thirty pages of half-tone plates. Such illus- tration might be thought unprofitable in view of the many sumptuously illustrated books on Byzantine art, and indeed the architecture and mosaics receive little help, but the plates of carving, enamels, metalwork and ivories are less familiar. They reveal a direct development from classical art and a foreshadowing of western medieval forms, together with aspects of Byzantine taste and craftsmanship—and therefore of life and sentiment—very different from the frescoes and mosaics. Only two chap- ters survey the whole period: that of Professor Jenkins on social life and that of Sir Steven R unciman on the influence of Byzantium. Neither has great depth or originality, but they are easily the most readable pages of the volume.
Great as is the bulk of these two volumes, there are omissions. The editor herself notes the absence of sections on economic topics and military and naval history. More regrettable, in many ways, is the absence throughout of reflection and analysis. This is an endemic weakness of the Cambridge histories, traceable in part to the original sin of J. B. Bury, and in part to the basic plan of the series. Although several of the contributors begin at the begin- ning far outside the limiting dates, the reader is given little or no sense of the movements of taste and sentiment, Or of the unfolding of the scroll of time. In this Gibbon remains the master. Why is it, for example, that the eastern church contributes to the general stream of
Christian thought till the age of Chrysostom, but not- beyond? How far was it due to the
general eclipse of Latin and the Roman imperial and provincial system in the east? And, at a later turning-point, why did the Orthodox church in the age of Photius become outgoing, apostolic and more independent of the imperial power than hitherto? Indeed, one of the most notable omissions in these volumes is that of a critical and reasoned presentation of the growth of the schism between east and west. After reading this ponderous work Byzan- tium still remains an enigma, a dream-world which we can see but cannot touch and compre- hend. No other people or period is at once so near and yet so far from us. It was, as all historians continue to repeat, an extra- ordinarily religious people, and the practices and beliefs differ very little from those of western traditional orthodoxy, yet a western Catholic finds it easier to hit the wave-length of a Baptist, let us say, or a Quaker, or for that matter, of a medieval Waldensian or Hussite. The Byzantines wrote classical Greek and handled the masterpieces of Greek litera- ture, yet had so little of the range, the univers- ality, the humanity and the sublimity of the Greek genius. Plato was theirs, and Aristotle, Homer and Aeschylus, yet in the thousand years of Byzantine history how small, how very
small, was the output of great literature and great thought. And how few of its personalities come across the gulf of time to us as do Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Caesar, Virgil and Catullus. Neither Greek nor Roman, neither ancient nor medieval, defending Christendom against the east, and themselves against the west, they stand almost as the ancient Egyptians or the Incas stood, polished, elaborate, civilised, apart from their contem- poraries and from posterity. We see the beauty, the solemn pageant, the drastic energy end courage, and the cruelty, but as it were in a glass darkly.
It would be unjust to end without a tribute to the labours, the patience and the scholarship of the editor. She has erected a monument, and it will endure for a generation at least. She is presumably responsible also for the biblio- graphy, which in this part runs to a mere hundred pages. But was the volume not long enough, without reprinting from Part I the editor's preface and introduction, the original preface of Bury, and twenty pages of general biblography?
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