Byzantine Empire
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I've often felt that the Byzantine Empire is perhaps the best kept secret of world history. Yes. Why is it a secret? Well, because, for instance, it's not taught in schools or in our schools anyway in the West.

But why? Why is that? Well, because, I mean, nowadays classics is hardly taught. The Roman Empire is hardly taught. And they do very, very little medieval history. So they certainly don't do Byzantine or Eastern Roman history. And people don't know about it. If they do know anything, they think of it as bureaucratic, you know, because the word Byzantine is used all the time

in the press, in the media, by all sorts of people to mean bureaucratic and convoluted and complicated and unnecessarily complicated. It has its own entry in the dictionary and everything. Does it really?

That's Professor Dame Avril Cameron, one of the world's most distinguished historians of late antiquity and what we have come to call the Byzantine Empire. She was made a Dame in 2006 in recognition of her services to classical studies.

Before she retired, Dame Avril was Warden of Keeble College at the University of Oxford and Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King's College London. She was also Chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research for 10 years and she remains the current President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. She

She's written several important books, including Byzantine Matters and Byzantine Christianity, A Very Brief History. And while I'm here, let me read you one of those Byzantine entries in my Oxford English Dictionary app. Unfair.

Well, I know. Well, there we are. What can we do? I try to say that, of course, it was bureaucratic in the sense that it had a functioning civil service, a functioning state apparatus. But, you know, it wasn't bureaucratic in that sense. It wasn't any more bureaucratic than other states. Here are a few examples of the way you might hear Byzantine used in modern language.

The contest for the Republican nomination will follow the usual path, a Byzantine series of state-by-state caucuses and primary elections in which Republican voters will send delegates to a national convention to select the nominee.

His Byzantine behavior has reduced the commission to a useless and a toothless tool, Kersoula hit out. Ko's heart still belongs to sport, and despite a politic refusal to publicly countenance the future, it is a reasonable bet that it lies in the Byzantine world of sports governance. The Byzantine appointments procedure has involved secret interviews with MPs and peers in London, as well as question sessions in Paris and Strasbourg.

Those news clips from places like Bloomberg News and the UK Guardian use Byzantine to describe complicated red tape with a hint of deviousness. If that's what you think when you hear me say the Byzantine Empire, then I'm afraid you've been misled.

It was Montesquieu, a political philosopher of the Enlightenment, who popularized the use of the term Byzantine to mean complexity, intrigue and corruption. He wrote that the complicated politics of the empire were nothing but a tissue of rebellion, sedition and treachery.

other Enlightenment thinkers were equally scathing. From Voltaire to Edward Gibbon, the Byzantine Empire was dismissed as so fundamentally religious and therefore backward that it wasn't worth our time. As Peter Sarris writes in his excellent Oxford Very Short Introduction to Byzantium, Holy Byzantium was represented as a prison of the intellect and the soul.

But the reputation is undeserved, to say the least. The Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was famously fortified with an impenetrable three-wall network, which preserved it from foreign conquest for centuries. But the Byzantine Empire itself doesn't have to be impenetrable to us today.

And by knocking down some of the walls of our modern prejudice, we may discover that the Byzantine Empire, the thousand-year Christian Empire, held some of the best-kept secrets of world history. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics Master Lectures, a streaming service to satisfy your curiosity and to understand the Bible with the world's leading Christian scholars. It is awesome. And you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to get 50% off your first three months subscription with the code undeceptions50.

Each episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

This particular episode has a special sponsor, my good friends at Green Bay Community Church, Wisconsin. They generously bankrolled all our costs for this episode and it wasn't a cheap one to make.

Why, you might ask, would a single church in Midwest America want to sponsor an episode about ancient Byzantine Christianity? Stay tuned for the answer. In the meantime, feel free to check them out at gbcommunitychurch.com. Music

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Well, perhaps starting with the first thing, how do you pronounce Byzantine? Because I keep on hearing people say Byzantine, and I'm thinking, oh no, have I been saying it wrong all my life? No. No.

I say Byzantine. Americans say Byzantine. I've been in the States a lot, so I sometimes say Byzantine as well, which is very confusing. Phew, I've been saying it right. Byzantine, with due respect to my American friends. Dame Avril Cameron was kind enough to welcome me into her home in Oxford earlier this year.

I don't know if you can tell, but I was a little nervous meeting her. She's a dame, and that sounds very posh. And she's a professor at the top of a field I've admired for years. But she was so down to earth and friendly. And it turns out we have some mutual academic friends. Well, we'll stick with Byzantine. All right, I'll try. That's what I learned at Macquarie University. Yes, well, I have very good friends at Macquarie.

After the interview, Dame Avril tells me she's just been chatting online with my friend, Professor Alana Nobbs of Macquarie University, my alma mater. You may remember her from our episode on Constantine. So I got a selfie with Avril at the end and sent it straight to Alana. Fun.

Anyway, that's just for free. The thing is, the Byzantine Empire was not called the Byzantine Empire until long after it was gone. Those within it just thought of themselves as Romans. It's one of the odd things we really have to get our heads around in this episode.

We often hear that the Roman Empire fell in the 400s AD to the Visigoths and Ostrogoths. But that would come as a huge surprise to the millions of people living in the eastern part of the Roman Empire right up through the Middle Ages for almost another millennium. It's an entirely Western European perspective to think of the fall of western parts of the Roman Empire as the collapse of the Roman Empire per se.

Many go further into the silly. They describe that period from, say, AD 500 as the Dark Ages, which allegedly persisted right up until the clever people of the Renaissance saved the world in the 13 and 1400s. But that completely misses reality.

Way back in Emperor Constantine's day, 313 to 337, the capital of the Roman Empire had already moved from the city of Rome to an ancient Greek city known as Byzantium in the northwest tip of what today we call Turkey. This was a much more strategic location from which to govern such a vast empire.

Constantine rebuilt the city of Byzantium on a massive scale and then renamed it after himself, of course, Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. The effect of all this, long before the city of Rome fell to the Goths, was to shift the centre of gravity in the Roman Empire to the east, to what we call Greece and Turkey and Syria and Israel and Egypt.

Well before the collapse of the Western regions, this Eastern region was by far the more intellectually, culturally and financially rich part of the Roman Empire.

So when the western parts of the empire fell, it was of course considered a tragedy in the east. But not for a moment did the millions of eastern Roman citizens, now largely Christian Roman citizens, think that the empire itself had fallen. They carried on for centuries with emperors, armies, trade, art and architecture, universities, religion, hospitals and much more.

but I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to Dame Avril. What do we mean by the Byzantine Empire? Can you just, as briefly as you like, give something of the chronology and geography of this thing? The Byzantine Empire lasted for 1,100 years. It's unbelievable. So if you think it began when the Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, that is now Istanbul,

It went on for a hundred years until conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. So really, and it was for a long period, a long time in that 1100 years, the most important empire in the world. They didn't think of themselves as living in the Byzantine Empire, did they? How did they think of themselves? No, no, no, no. They thought of themselves as Romans.

They always call themselves Romans. They sometimes later on call themselves Greeks. And Hellenes and Hellenes meant Greeks, really. That is one key historical point to get across to people who don't know about this. They really not just claimed to be part of the Roman Empire,

They were in fact the continuation of the Roman Empire, yes? Yes, they were, because for example, Gibbon's wonderful decline and fall of the Roman Empire ends with the end of Byzantium. So they were a continuation of the Roman Empire. But then in the West, Western Europe, you have Charlemagne setting up as an emperor and calling himself the Roman Emperor. So it's deeply confusing. I'm not surprised that people are confused.

After the fall of the western parts of the Roman Empire, the West looked like a patchwork of shifting barbarian kingdoms. How did the people in this Eastern Roman Empire... That's better. Good. View the decline of Rome, I balk at saying fall of Rome in the 5th century, and of course the breakdown of Roman systems in the West. How did the Easterners view that?

Yes, I think they were not terribly conscious of it, but they started having to deal with different people. So there wasn't an emperor in Rome anymore after the 5th century, but there were barbarian kings and they still had ruling. They still ruled in Ravenna, for example. They had interests in Italy. So I think they still thought of themselves as continuators,

In the 6th century, the Byzantine Emperor, I mean, I should really now just say the Roman Emperor Justinian, liberated Italy and North Africa from the barbarians. And he had hopes of restoring the western parts of the empire to be one giant east-west empire again.

Justinian was viewed as a second Constantine, not just because of his important military victories and almost 40-year reign from 527 to 565, but also because he was a staunch supporter of the Christian church, perhaps even more so than Emperor Constantine. Justinian is credited with transforming the Roman Empire into a thoroughly Christianized society.

So I want to talk about Justinian then. Tell us something about him because the little I've read he seems an extraordinary figure. How do we not know about him? Well, you know, there are these wonderful mosaics in Ravenna of Justinian and his wife Theodora. So that's always something we think of. Well now a lot of historians

very hostile to Justinian. But he was also seen as, he brought Roman law, he codified Roman law, he did incredible things. He built cities and churches all over North Africa, for example, as well as Italy and other parts of what was the Roman Empire. So he's a kind of Janus figure. You can't put him down, you can't pigeonhole him.

So he was both Roman emperor and the first of the Byzantine Eastern Roman emperors. And that was pretty difficult. Justinian certainly has mixed historical reviews, and we'll get to some of the criticisms in a moment. But he was incredibly diligent. He earned himself the nicknames the Sleepless One, a bit like Winston Churchill, I guess, and the Many-Eyed Emperor because he made sure he was across everything.

One of Justinian's first great acts as the emperor was to codify Roman law. He commissioned the archivists and lawyers to collate all of the valid decrees and laws of emperors from the second century up to his own day. He wanted to standardize and harmonize the whole thing.

On my bookshelf, the Codex of Justinian extends to three large volumes, each of about 800 pages. The Code influenced later canon law, that's church law, which in turn influenced the wider Western legal system. One of the interesting laws ratified in the Codex of Justinian confirms churches as places of refuge for runaway slaves, victims of revenge, or refugees fleeing danger.

The idea originally came from the Jewish scriptures or Old Testament, as is so often the case. The book of Joshua speaks of cities of refuge to which people could flee if they were accused of manslaughter and liable to become victims of revenge. That's in Joshua chapter 20, if you want to look it up. In any case, centuries later, Justinian formalized this practice.

so that anyone fleeing danger would be protected with the full force of Roman law if they could just make it to the precinct of a church. This sanctuary law, as it's called, was in effect for centuries. In fact, the common law of England maintained the status of churches as places of refuge right up until the 17th century for criminal cases and the late 18th century for civil cases.

Individual churches continue the practice even today. It doesn't have legal effect anymore. But authorities are usually pretty hesitant to raid churches who are looking after illegal immigrants. It's a pretty controversial topic here in America. So let's get back to Justinian and his intellectual interests.

Am I right that he was also quite philosophically minded, theologically minded? Oh yeah, sure. Well, I wrote a book about Procopius, who was the main historian, and he says that he hated Justinian. And he says that Justinian never slept, but also that he used to go around in the palace at night without a head. He was a demon, in other words. So, well, he was pretty biased, Procopius. Yeah.

Procopius, by the way, was a contemporary of Justinian. He was an administrative official from Caesarea over on the coast of Israel, or Palestine as it was called. He wrote a long book about the emperor's military exploits. But after Justinian died, he also wrote a secret history, which purports to be a tell-all account of Justinian and his wife Theodora. Avril has written a whole book on Procopius, if you're interested.

Didn't like Justinian's wife either, am I right? No, he hated Theodora too. Can you tell me his account of her? Yes, Procopius, according to Procopius, she started out as, well, a sex worker, not to put too fine a point on it. And she was in Egypt and she was performing in the theatres in Egypt and she did all sorts of pretty awful, you know, rude things.

in the theaters of Rome, of Egypt. But Justinian somehow met her and fell in love with her. And they had to change the law to get married. So he had to persuade his uncle, who was the emperor at the time, to change the law so that he could marry an actress.

oh it was that she was an actress in inverted commas well actress in inverted commas yes oh so procopius's account though biased is based in fact oh i think most people

Recognize it, yes. Yes, they don't necessarily believe the details. But Gibbon, of course, loved the details. But then Theodora became very religious. Like Justinian, they both became very religious. And they supported monks and churches, built churches, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, and she built a convent for reformed prostitutes. Wow.

That's great. It is. Wow. Some people say, and I guess it's from this tradition that dislikes Justinian, that he basically created a theocracy. Well, yes, he did. It was a theocracy. I don't think there was anything new about that. I'm not sure that he created it either. I think it was already in existence.

But then you have to ask, what does theocracy mean? And that's a difficult word. I mean, the church did not, of course, officially rule the empire. But the church, from about the end of the fourth, fifth centuries onwards, was very, very important. And it kept on being important.

Justinian and his successors in the East used the law to shape a Christian society, as they saw it. Not only did he introduce legislation against blasphemy and gambling, both of which showed up in later Western law, he effectively banned non-Christian religion. Pagans and Jews were subjected to official persecution, and they were coerced into the Christian society. One Byzantine law declares...

Those who have not yet been deemed worthy of worshipful baptism must make themselves known, whether they live in this imperial city or in the provinces, and go with their wives and children and their whole household to the most holy churches to be taught the true Christian faith, so that thus instructed and having cast off their former error, they may be found worthy of saving actors,

Or if they despise these things, they shall know that they shall have no part in our empire, nor shall they be permitted to be owners of movable or immovable property, but they shall be deprived of everything and left in poverty.

Another law around the same time, AD 529, closed down the famous Philosophical Academy of Athens, which centuries earlier had been the most venerable school in the ancient world.

Some see this as a move against classical learning itself, an act you'd expect in the so-called Dark Ages. But that overlooks the fact that this particular academy, under the leadership of a certain pagan academic, had been practicing divination and other occult rituals. So Julian, as a Christian, shut it down. But at the time, it was seen as unremarkable.

Partly because there were much bigger and much better schools of classical learning which Justinian's empire fully supported. The one in Alexandria in northern Egypt, for example, was arguably the greatest centre of learning in the world at that time.

More significant by far, in my view, was a law of Justinian that aimed to end the influence of pagan professors forever. A century and a half before him, the pagan emperor Julian had expelled Christian professors from the great classical schools. And there were a lot of them, actually. Get rid of the intellectuals and you'll sideline the movement. That was Julian's idea.

Well, I'm sad to say Justinian returned the favour. He didn't want pagan professors infecting the youth, so he sacked them and expelled them. Education wars and cancel culture are nothing new.

I've read a book called Byzantine Hospitals and was quite taken aback because it's precisely in this period isn't it Justinian started to build hospitals in Constantinople and elsewhere. Can you tell me something about that extraordinary movement? Yes, well it was the tradition of Christian charity and welfare and the emperors Justinian and other emperors built hospitals and old people's homes

and places where orphans could go. And that carried on all the way through the empire as well. So they did good things. They weren't hospitals with very good medication, I suspect. Yeah, but they were trying to blend that ancient Greek tradition with Christian charity. Would that be a fair assessment? They were, yes.

Yay, this is where I get to tell you about one of the great fathers of the church, who's part of this Byzantine story. Basil of Caesarea, also known as Saint Basil the Great, was Bishop of Caesarea in the mid to late 4th century. He oversaw the creation of history's first dedicated welfare centre and public hospital.

Roman armies of course enjoyed hospital services, the rich could always employ doctors, and the temples of the healing god Asclepius allowed people to sleep the night at their shrines and receive prayers and attention from the priests in return for donations and public acclamations of the healing powers of Asclepius. But there was no such thing in the ancient world as free public medical services before Basil.

Basil's idea, what he just called his patokion, the poorhouse, initially grew out of a famine relief program he led in 368, but it quickly expanded into a large complex for broader welfare and medical care. It employed live-in medical staff who cared for the sick, drawing on the best traditions of secular Greek medicine.

His health care center included six separate departments, one for the poor, another for the homeless and strangers, a house for orphans and foundlings because the church was still collecting abandoned infants in this period, a separate section for lepers, rooms for the aged and infirm, and a hospital proper for the sick. Basil died in 379.

And his friend, Bishop Gregory Nazianzus, another of the great church fathers from the East, gave the funeral oration, which has survived. In it, he described Basel as the great mayor of an even greater city. He's just talking about the welfare complex. Here's a quote.

Others had their cooks and rich tables and enchanting refinements of cuisine and elegant carriages and soft flowing garments, Gregory says. Basil had his sick and the dressing of their wounds and the imitation of Christ, cleansing leprosy not by word but in deed.

The thing is, charity was a huge part of the story of the Byzantine Empire, especially medical charity. Justinian, for all of his bigotry toward other religions, worked to enhance and professionalize the charitable healthcare institutions that were popping up all over the place after Basil the Great. Justinian wanted everyone to be able to access medical care.

Both official church law and Justinian's imperial legislation made it clear that local bishops were now duty-bound to maintain facilities and staff to care for strangers, the poor and especially the sick. In all provinces of our empire, Justinian declared.

And charity wasn't the half of it. The Byzantine Empire was an intellectual powerhouse that ended up influencing the great Islamic intellectual tradition and later the Western tradition as well. The intellectual and creative life of Byzantium, Peter Brown, the famous Princeton historian, said something to the effect of they never needed a renaissance.

because they had never lost any of the classical learning. Do you agree with that assessment? Yes, I absolutely agree with that because they went on reading the classics and making new manuscripts of them all the way through. I think there was a time after Justinian when not very many people did actually read the classics, but they never lost it. Aristotle was very important as well as Plato. And then later on, much later on,

We don't get a Renaissance, but we get a sort of wonderful cultural revival around the 11th century. And there are real scholars and textual critics doing editions of classical texts, which is pretty extraordinary. And don't forget, they didn't have Greek in Western Europe at that time. They got Greek from the Byzantines.

During the reign of Justinian, one of the greatest intellects of the late Roman world arose, John Philipponus. It's a name rarely heard today outside the obscure fields of Byzantine studies and the history of science. In addition to treatises on Christian subjects like the Trinity, Philipponus produced detailed commentaries on Aristotle and wrote the first full-blown critique of Aristotle's concept of an eternal cosmos.

His argument wasn't that the Bible said so, you know, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and so on. Philoponus made his case for a time-bound contingent universe created out of nothing on purely philosophical and logical grounds. His work touching on physics and metaphysics influenced early Western scientists like Galileo.

And it's not well enough known that these great Byzantine Christian intellectuals were the ones who gifted classical Greek learning to the growing Muslim communities. It was even Christians who put it all in Arabic. And from there, Islamic society developed its own powerful intellectual tradition, which would later come back to the West. But it all started with the Byzantine scholars. Byzantine's intellectual tradition continued into the following centuries.

Princeton's Peter Brown points out, and I'm here quoting, "...most of our finest manuscripts of the classics were produced in medieval Constantinople. Indeed, if it were not for Byzantine courtiers and bishops of the 9th and 10th centuries onwards, we should know nothing, except from fragments in papyrus, of Plato, Euclid, Sophocles, and Thucydides."

In the West, classical works existed in Latin translations, but it was the Byzantines, these Christian Romans of the East, that preserved the works of the Greeks in their original form. The library of Constantinople at the time of Justinian housed 120,000 works. Think about that.

Oxford University's famous Bodleian Library only got to 120,000 works in the 18th century, six centuries after the founding of the university. Another impressive Byzantine figure who stands out to me is Photius I. He's the patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th century. The patriarch is the head of the Eastern churches, by the way. He's sort of like a pope.

sort of. Anyway, Photius left us some notes about his own recommended reading in a document known as the Bibliotheca. Photius summarizes and reviews 380 different books that he recommends people read. How many of us could recommend even 50 books nowadays? I think I'd struggle.

Photius' list includes many theological books, of course, 233, including Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and others. But a further 147 of them are pagan or secular works, including Herodotus, Arian, Plutarch, and so on. He frequently notes his disagreement with an author, whether a pagan author or a Christian author, but he still suggests that people should read each and every one.

He knows more classical authors than we do because he knows about ones who are lost to us now. Focius became the patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th century. In fact, he had a rather...

a colourful career because he was thrown out and then he was brought back. There was a lot of that. But he wrote this work called The Bibliotheca, which just means the library. And he's supposed to have written it for his brother. I don't know if he did. And it was little notes about all the authors that he'd read. And they were classical authors. So he had access to all these texts

He must have had a wonderful library. But he's so free in it. I mean, even though he's a devout Christian believer, he can simultaneously say, oh, so-and-so has...

pagan beliefs, but gosh, his writing is beautiful. And that sort of thing. It's so, it's generous as well. I think it is. It is. And then a century or so later, there was a lexicon which did something rather similar. It was called the Suda. So they tell us how educated the Byzantines were in classical works, even when we think that they'd forgotten about them. Fortunate love.

It's interesting to me that Christianity continued to grow in both the wealthy, powerful East, the Byzantine Empire, and in the fractious, deteriorating West.

In the uncertain times of the 5th century, just after the fall of the city of Rome, people in the western parts of the Roman Empire now lived under the rule of various barbarian kings. In this context, it seems people increasingly looked to the church, and especially to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, as a source of social authority, legitimacy and stability.

Minor kingdoms in Gaul, or what we call the Franks and later the French, started to convert to Christianity. One king of the Franks was called Clovis. He declared his allegiance to Christianity around the year 500 and was baptised, which is probably the most Christian thing he ever did.

The most famous king of the Franks was Charlemagne in the 700s. He extended the territory held by the Franks so that it now encompassed present-day France, Germany and northern Italy, bringing the Franks closer to lands heavily influenced by the Pope.

The Western Roman Catholic Church's ties with the Byzantines in the East were strained. And in the year 800, Pope Leo III named Charlemagne the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. That's what they called it.

The claim that Charlemagne was now emperor of a new and holy Roman Empire in the West raised eyebrows in the East among the Byzantine emperors. For the Easterners, the actual Roman Empire never ended. The ancient ideal of Roma Aeterna, eternal Rome, still seemed entirely plausible to them in the East.

Charlemagne's empire, the Carolingian Empire, deserves an entire episode. It was stunningly good and bad. But that's not this episode. So let's head back east to some extraordinary accomplishments and the eventual downfall of the Byzantine Empire after the break. BESANTINE EMPIRE

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We always get into this discussion of what is a painting and what is an icon. An icon is a painting.

but it is not only a painting. These icons were not meant to be recognized as, "Oh look, this was painted by a great artist." They were painted by that artist to be used in ritual. So icons are more than a painting, but the word icon means image. And legally, an icon is any image of the holy. A way to think of, respect, and have access to the holy.

People sponsor icons to be put in the church. You can have one for your private home, for your personal devotions. If you are trained in these messages, you have a whole sermon

That's a clip from an educational video from the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Byzantine art in the world. For many, religious images or icons are what most obviously distinguishes Eastern Orthodox Christianity from the Western tradition. And the emergence of this practice in Byzantine Christianity was tumultuous.

Obviously, a distinctive element of Byzantine Christianity is the use of icons. It's both beautiful art, and I noticed a couple, oh, there's one there, and a couple in this house. Yes, I've got more. I find them mesmerizing personally, even though as a Protestant, I'm not meant to. Oh, no, of course not.

Can you give us a sense of the significance of icons in the Byzantine mindset? They became immensely important, but not until around about the end of the 6th century or 7th century and 8th century. But they were also important in the West. You know, the earliest icons that we still have come from Rome. They come from Rome in the 6th century. So there are several icons.

still surviving, whereas in Constantinople, nothing survives from that period. But I think also lots of Western people, if they know anything about Byzantium, they think, oh, that wonderful art, but they don't understand what it meant, which is very, very sad. I mean, we've had these huge, wonderful exhibitions in the major cities in London and Paris and New York. And I've been around those exhibitions with

people who were not Byzantinists and they just think, oh, that's wonderful, but they have no idea what it means. What does it mean? What do icons mean beyond the art? Well, they came to mean they carried a lot of meaning. They were restricted in their content and they told the Byzantines about the history of Christianity.

But we need somebody to explain it to us before we can understand it, before we can appreciate it. So art history is very, very important for understanding Byzantium. I'm not an art historian, but you can't be a Byzantine historian without knowing about Byzantine art. Did they see...

art and icons in particular as like a window to the eternal dimension? Absolutely. Well, they wouldn't call it art. And there's a book I'm thinking of about images before the era of art. So art, we mean by art something very different. We think about the creative artist, but makers of icons were not supposed to be creative. They

followed lines that were more or less laid down. They were depicting the same versions or variations on the same subjects. And they thought they were acting literally as the vessels of God.

And actually, I was at a conference once about icons and a lady in the audience said, well, I'm an icon painter and you've got to realise that we think we are inspired by God. We're not artists. MUSIC PLAYS

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And you've just been listening to some beautiful Byzantine hymn singing performed by Capella Romana and we want to really thank them for giving us permission to play this for you. A group of musicians, historians and scientists got together to record the actual acoustics of the famous Hagia Sophia, the magnificent architectural wonder of the Byzantine Empire in Istanbul.

The first church there was built under Constantine in the 4th century, but the massive structure you see today in postcards was built under Justinian in the 6th century.

When Constantinople, now Istanbul, was taken by the Ottomans in 1453, the Hagia Sophia went from church to mosque, of course. In 1934, it became a museum, open to all, in keeping with Turkey's more secular constitution. But in 2020, under President Erdogan, it was converted back to

to a mosque. What Capella Romana pulled off between 2010 and 2019 could never happen now. It actually involved recording balloons popping in the Hagia Sophia itself. But go to the show notes for the amazing details of this project called Lost Voices of the Hagia Sophia. And

And for our undeceivers, we have a little bit more about the Hagia Sophia from my interview with Avril Cameron. More of this music, please, Kayleigh. CHOIR SINGS

Around the 8th century, the Byzantine world was thrown into a century-long religious controversy that centered on the appropriate use of these icons in religious worship.

The Old Testament, of course, prohibits the worship of graven images. It's the second of the Ten Commandments. Yet icons and sacred images were becoming increasingly popular in this Christian period. We have written evidence that stories were beginning to circulate about the miraculous powers of these icons. Anxiety began to spread about whether images like these were acceptable in Christianity or not.

It culminated in iconoclasm, which literally means image breaking. We have archaeological evidence that in some regions of Byzantium, icons were destroyed or just plastered over. The cross of Christ was promoted as the more acceptable decorative form for Byzantine churches. And a sometimes violent campaign was waged against those who persisted in the use of icons.

According to Dame Avril, the reasons for this anxiety among the Byzantines at this particular time remain unclear. It may have been a type of reform movement from within. People perhaps looked at the rise of Islam and thought it was God's punishment on the Christians for this controversial practice of using icons.

Whatever the reason for this iconoclasm period in Byzantine history, it didn't last. Icons grew once again in popularity and eventually it was wholly approved by the Byzantine religious elite. That's why it's still encouraged in the Orthodox Church.

The restoration of images shaped the Byzantine church for centuries to come, says Dame Averill, and in many ways reinforced the shift away from the Roman church in the West, which had long disapproved of icons. CHOIR SINGS

From my Western Protestant Christian viewpoint, the Orthodox Church of today can seem foreign and other. And icons, at least for me, have a lot to do with that. I'm mesmerized by the aesthetics of icons, I admit that. But I can't get into them as windows to the spiritual realm, as the Orthodox see them.

or as reminders of God's own bodily incarnation in the person of Jesus, which is another way the Orthodox often explain icons.

But it would be plain wrong to think of icons as the defining aspect of Orthodox or Byzantine Christianity. The fact is, the most unifying statement of Christian belief ever produced was, in large part, the product of Byzantine theological brilliance.

I'm talking about the Nicene Creed. Or what is more accurately called the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed. You can understand why we just go with Nicene Creed. It's the creed that was initially formed in 325 in Nicaea during the time of Constantine and brought to final form in the Council of Constantinople in 381.

It is the only statement of Christian belief accepted and proclaimed by Catholics, the Orthodox, and mainstream Protestants. You know, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and so on.

We sometimes forget that it was the great Eastern or Byzantine theologians, like Gregory of Nancyansis, who finessed the wording in very precise and succinct language, describing Jesus, for example, to quote from the Creed, as "...God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, through him all things were made."

One day we have to do an episode on the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed. There are so many silly myths about it.

But for now, all I want to point out is that this exacting language, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father or of the Holy Spirit, he is the Lord, the giver of life, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, all that language is a perfect summary of the New Testament teaching about the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity. And it was the Byzantine Christians who gifted this to us. And Jesus

Byzantine Christianity is our Christianity. It started out as a single Christianity and you then have to ask when and why did it separate?

So we think of the East and the West as very separate and different traditions, but they were not for centuries and centuries. It was the history, simply the history of Christianity. All these great figures like Saint Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, and Basil's brother, Gregory of Nyssa, they're all late 4th century.

They are revered in the West just as much as they are in the East. And rightly so. Fundamental, fundamental writers about theology. The Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil the Great, are best known today in theological circles for their defence of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But as I already pointed out with Basil the Great, all three were also passionate defenders of the poor and the sick. They were theologically conservative, rigorous and uncompromising. That's how I reckon it should be. But socially, I think some conservatives today would dismiss these Byzantine thinkers as social justice warriors...

One of the speeches of Gregory of Nancy Ansys, known as Oration 14, is titled On Love for the Poor.

It is the most systematic explanation of the centrality of charity I have ever read. It is 10,000 words of biblical, theological, and logical argumentation driving home the point that love for the poor is the supreme fruit of the Christian life.

There is a lovely rhetorical buildup in the speech through successive paragraphs. He goes like, faith, hope, and love are a fine thing before offering a sentence or two on that topic. And then he goes, hospitality is a fine thing. And then he adds a sentence or two about that. And then he says, zeal is a fine thing and so on. Humility is a fine thing. You get the idea. A thousand or so words into this oration, he reaches his point.

We must regard charity as the first and greatest of the commandments since it is the very sum of the law and the prophets. And its most vital part, I find, is the love of the poor, along with compassion and sympathy for our fellow human being. We must then open our hearts to all the poor and to all those who are victims of disasters from whatever cause.

From this paragraph, it's the kind of turning point in the oration, Gregory launches this massive barrage of arguments designed to leave his readers, especially the rich ones, with nowhere to hide.

Gregory's argumentation on behalf of the poor, just like Basil's invention of the public hospital, massively influenced the Western Church, which itself became the great champion of the destitute and founded literally thousands of hospitals throughout Europe in the following centuries.

As Dame Avril says, these Eastern fathers were and still should be revered in the West just as much as they were in the East. And here's why Green Bay Community Church Wisconsin wanted to sponsor this episode.

Under the leadership of my good mate, Pastor Troy Murphy, these guys have been trying to do something Byzantine in the best sense of the word. They don't just want to be a worship center. They want to be a community center, a locus of all kinds of good things in the city of Green Bay.

They run leadership programs for locals. They have a large giving tree food pantry for people in need. They have garden plots on their campus so neighbours who need to can grow stuff and support their families. They run disabilities events and they're a member of the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce. I wouldn't be surprised if one day I learn that they've started a free healthcare clinic for residents. Basil the Great would be chuffed.

Check them out, gbcommunitychurch.com. Thanks, guys, for bankrolling this episode. Well, back to antiquity. It's fair to say things weren't just sweetness and light in the Byzantine world. There were brewing tensions between the Eastern and Western churches. It ended up with a great parting of the ways. ♪

The beginning of a pilgrimage into history. Pope Paul VI leaves Rome airport on his precedent-shattering trip to the Holy Land. Even as he boards the plane, he creates a series of historical firsts. He is the first pope to fly, the first pope to leave Rome since 1809, and the first pope to visit the Holy Land in nearly 2,000 years.

That's some historical news footage from 1964 of the first meeting between the Roman Catholic Pope and the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch since what is known as the Great Schism. In 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Keralarius, was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in Rome. And to return the favor, the Pope was excommunicated from the Eastern Church.

It was the culmination of a complex mix of disagreements about things like two words in the Nicene Creed.

Seriously, just two words. Whether clerics should remain celibate and particulars about the sacrament of communion. The disagreements weren't trivial. For hundreds of years, we have the records of councils where church leaders met to discuss and try to resolve these differences, as they did at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

But Dame Avril believes that the great schism of 1054 was not really as great as it's often made out to be. In fact, she reckons it was the Crusades decades later that really forged the great chasm between the Eastern and Western Church.

Remember, the Crusades started with the Byzantine Christian emperor Alexius I begging the Western Pope, Urban II, for help to stop Muslim armies from conquering Constantinople. The West came to the rescue. It looked good for a while, but then not so much. Well, the problem really started with the Crusades.

And when Venice, for example, started to want to go to the Holy Land and seize territory, first of all, the Byzantines thought they could work with them. And then they realized they couldn't. And so things became very difficult then. And they started hurling insults at each other. But actually,

There wasn't really a split in 1054. There was a row, but there wasn't really a split until even later than that. It's always called the Great Schism. I know, I know, but it's not really. I mean, there were quarrels, but it didn't really end the unity of the church.

It's really easy to oversimplify the Crusades. So if you're looking for more in-depth listening, you should check out our two-part series on it, episodes 41 and 42, God's War. But all we need to know for now is that the terrific success of Islam took everyone in the ancient Near East by surprise.

Only a few years after Muhammad's death, his armies defeated the Eastern Roman Byzantine army on the Golan Heights near the border of modern Israel and Syria. They moved south, taking Jerusalem and Palestine in 637 and all of Egypt in 642. And on they went.

Let's go from 7th century right through to 1453. So what happened? I mean, because prior, so in Justinian's period and shortly after, the Byzantine Empire is massive. I mean, hard to fathom.

and then islam comes along so can you can you just take us something in between because what happened in between in that period the the far east um was really the territory of ancient persia persian empire iran and byzantium and iranian persian persia fought a massive war at the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century and that really wore the byzantines out and

Nobody knew, nobody knew that a new religion was going to emerge. Nobody knew. But that's what happened. Persia was defeated, by the way, and

the first Arabs started raiding in what had been Byzantine territory, in the Holy Land, for example, in Palestine. So this is late 630s? Sorry, 6... This is 630s, yes, 630s. And by that time, the Byzantine emperor...

And the army, they were just exhausted. They couldn't deal with it. And anyway, they didn't know what was coming. So they just retreated and left it. And then we know what happened. It was overcome by the Arabs. And the Arabs were...

amazing really because they were able to to take over large chunks of the Byzantine Empire yeah so Syria Palestine Egypt North Africa and on yeah and Spain of course yes was this viewed as a catastrophe back in constantinople it was of course it was yes

Yes, it took them a while to realize what was going on. Well, of course, it didn't happen overnight. And the population of Constantinople shrank, and they had a very, very bad period for about 100 years. But

They recovered themselves and they didn't exactly learn to live with Islam, but they recognised it as a feature of world history now and they found ways of dealing with it. But they were much smaller, much smaller. So what happened in places like Alexandria, which was a flourishing intellectual centre in the Byzantine period? Well, obviously in the pre-Byzantine period, but some of those great

Yes. Scholars, John Philip Honnus and so on, from Alexandria. What happened to them when these became Islamic cities? Were all the schools shut down? I just can't comprehend how you stop a whole culture like that. In the first place in Egypt, the Arabs set up their own capital.

And that was a place called Karawan. And they didn't try to rule from Alexandria. So they didn't really, as it were, conquer Alexandria and turf everybody out at all. It just happened gradually. And then when they moved their capital a bit later, it was to what we now call Tunis. So it was to...

It wasn't Alexandria. And Alexandria became a backwater. I've been there and my word, it's still a backwater. It's tragic. So the Islamic empires obviously curtailed the Byzantine Empire. But did the Islamic empire receive anything from the Byzantines? Well, they used to trade with each other. Mm-hmm.

Of course they did. And the slave trade was very important in both directions. But yes, but in the first place, the wonderful thing that the Arabs did in a very short time, because they'd arrived in Syria, they hadn't got any sea power. They built a fleet and they defeated the Byzantines in sea battles in the Mediterranean within decades. That was really extraordinary. It must have been a terrible shock.

So by the 1050s, Islamic forces had captured much of the old Byzantine Empire. That's what provoked the First Crusade, which in 1099 won back the Holy Lands into Christian hands. But that didn't last for long. Muslim forces pushed back successfully. So there was a Second and Third Crusade, both Western military failures.

Then comes the Fourth Crusade, which wasn't so much a failure as a Christian catastrophe. The Crusaders struck a military financing deal with Venice, and together they attacked Constantinople itself.

They felt these Eastern Christians hadn't done enough to support the Crusader project. So the Crusaders took the very city from the very people who had begged them for help against the Muslims in the first place.

You mentioned the Crusades. Bizarrely, the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople. Yes, yeah, that was a low, that was a very low ebb. Why and what happened? Well, because they weren't all wonderful, religious, high-minded people, the Crusaders, and nor were the Byzantines. So the Venetians in particular were blamed for this. And they realised that they could just, you know,

take Constantinople. They hadn't set out to do that, but in fact, that's what they did. So for 50 years or so, the Byzantine rulers were driven out and there was what we call a Latin empire. So it was called Romania and there were Westerners or Latins as they are often called, actually ruling in Constantinople. But then the Byzantines got back again.

1261 they got back. By force or by negotiation? No, not really. You know, the thing had really petered out and the Westerners couldn't really maintain it, not forever, it was impossible. And so the Byzantines in the intervening period, they'd moved across to Western Turkey.

Nicaea, and then they got back. And then the very final period, which in many ways is the most culturally flourishing period of Byzantium, was that time after they recovered the city in 1261 until 1453.

In her book Byzantine Christianity, Dame Avril argues that the Byzantine experience of the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 led to, quote, intense bitterness against the Latins, which became an intensifying factor in the hostile attitudes to the Western Church. Fair enough, really.

The whole thing was bizarre. For 57 years, there was a Latin empire in Constantinople, the seat of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire. But in 1261, the Byzantines regained the city and began the last flourishing era of Christian Byzantine history. But it was a very different world.

The Ottomans, named after the great Islamic dynasty of Osman I, soon crossed into Europe in the 14th century and began their conquest to become another of the world's most powerful empires, one that would last until the 20th century. Though even then, the Ottoman Empire lasted about half the length of the Byzantine Empire.

Well, what I say is that, of course, by then, the Byzantine Empire was very, very small. They had shrunk. In my opinion, it wasn't because they declined. It was because the world changed around them.

And the world in the 15th century was very different from what it had been in the 4th century. So just as they hadn't really understood or realized what was happening with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, so they didn't really realize that the Turks were going to be so important

And the Ottomans were, in the meantime, growing and developing their own rule. And that was the reason, really. But they, my word, they tried hard to hold on. So the story of the last days of Constantinople and the siege is quite inspiring in many ways. But they were relying on ships coming from Venice to help, and they never arrived. Why was that?

Oh, because the Venetians were treacherous. They were only interested in money. They never intended to send the ships, probably. How the world might have been different. Well, we don't think Venice is a villain in this story.

At the turn of the 15th century, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus made a desperate visit to the west to ask for help to beat back the Ottomans who had surrounded his lands. He visited Paris and he even dined with King Henry IV of England, where one courtier wrote of this meeting,

But the West, of course, demanded that the Byzantine Church accept the authority of the Western Pope. And Manuel couldn't do that.

Manuel's successor, John VIII, attempted to accept those western terms. But the eastern bishops said no chance. So they couldn't look to the west, so they looked to the north, to Russia, the only state still ruled by an orthodox, that is, a Byzantine Christian monarch. Maybe they would protect the orthodox world.

Constantinople did fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Even Russia couldn't stop this final collapse of the Byzantine Empire. But here's the weird thing. Russia came to see itself as the protectors of the orthodox or Byzantine culture and religion. And so, just as Constantinople had been considered the second Rome,

So now Russian writers began to speak of Moscow as the third Rome. Ivan the Great, the Grand Prince of Moscow, married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI, in 1472. And Ivan assumed the double-headed eagle of the Roman and Byzantine Empire as his symbol of the Russian Empire.

Russian leaders began to call themselves Tsars, T-S-A-R, which comes directly from the Latin Caesar. I know it's complicated, there could be episodes within episodes within episodes, but the thing is, the Byzantine influence is everywhere.

Whether valid or not, there is a stream of contemporary Russian thinking that sees itself as the continuation of the Byzantine Empire and therefore the continuation of the Roman Empire. Can we probe what you would regard as the legacy of the Byzantine Empire? Oh yes, well it's very important to know something about it because

I've tried to emphasize that they stayed together, East and West stayed together for a very long time. But of course, Eastern Christianity is now very, very widespread in the form of orthodoxy. And you can't really understand Middle Eastern politics or what's going on in the world today, or indeed Russia, or Ukraine, or any of those countries, unless you know something about

Orthodox churches. And there are very, very many Orthodox churches in the world now, different ones. And the structure of that church is very different from Roman Catholics, for example, or indeed Protestants. But I think people need to know something about it. And I'd be very struck in the reporting about Ukraine that hardly any mention has ever been given to the religious element. And yet Putin

It's very important for Putin because Christianity came to Russia from the Ukraine. The Prince Vladimir was Prince of Kiev, known as Kyiv now, and he became a Christian through the influence of Byzantium in the 10th century.

And after that, I mean, Moscow hadn't been founded. Moscow hadn't been founded for several centuries, but it became Christian because it followed the example of Eastern Christianity in Ukraine. They didn't call it Ukraine, of course. So you're saying that there is this religious element that Putin's Russia sees Russia

Kiev as its birthplace or birthright? Oh, yeah. Oh, Putin. Well, Putin himself certainly does. And Putin is very close to, I don't know what he believes and what he doesn't believe, but he's very close to the Church of Moscow and the Patriarch of Moscow, who takes a very hard line as well. So you can bet your life that that was a powerful influence for Putin, but it's hardly ever mentioned.

We'll put a few links in the show notes for you to explore for yourself the Byzantine history of Russian President Vladimir Putin's desire for a Russian empire. Of course, nothing is simple here, but there is something in the idea that Byzantine history underpins the current Ukraine-Russian conflict. History matters.

And popular history has completely messed things up along the way. As I said at the outset, you'll often hear that the Byzantine Empire was a dark, ignorant and oppressive blotch on history's page. Bookended by the light of the Roman Empire before it and the enlightened West on the other. That is just nuts. Byzantium was amazing and a mess.

It was mixed. Like us, really. Peter Sarris, who wrote the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Byzantium, makes an interesting comment. Let me quote. Byzantium was a Christian society in which monks and churchmen, as well as Christian laymen, preserved the fruits of the classical Greek and pagan philosophy, literature, and learning.

Because of this, it would always generate individuals who, through their reading, would come to prefer Homer to Christ or Plato to St. Paul. Byzantium, in other words, was often a combination of pagan and Christian. It was violent and charitable, learned and bigoted.

But we should never forget that the intellectual founders of the Byzantine Empire, Basil, Gregory, Photius and many others I haven't mentioned, achieved massive intellectual and practical good from the Nicene Creed to hospitals, from charity to the poor to the Western legal tradition itself.

These people read both Homer and Christ, both Plato and Paul, and they found a way to love both and reshape society in Christ's name. Sometimes for ill, yes. Often for lasting good. It's history, folks, so it's not simple.

You can't have a simple legacy from an 1100 year empire. What I try to emphasise is how it changed. It changed during that immensely long period. Some aspects stayed, there was always an emperor, but many aspects changed and the world

in which it operated and functioned as an empire changed as well. So we don't think other states were always the same. They weren't. Nor was Byzantium.

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and just, you know, see where the wind blows. And while you're there, send us a question by audio or text and I'll try and answer it in an upcoming Q&A episode.

Next episode, we're heading to Narnia for our second session looking at the life and work of the great C.S. Lewis. You might think the Chronicles of Narnia are just for kids, but scholars have discovered some amazing historical, literary and theological keys in the story that Lewis never talked about openly.

and that bind the seven stories together in a way only Lewis could have imagined. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is our writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. And Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Editing by Richard Humwe. And special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan Academic, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out.

An Undeceptions podcast. I'm talking about the Nicene Creed, or what is more accurately called the Nicene Constantinopolitan. I always get that. I always miss that one. Nicene Constantinopolitan. Constantinopolitan. Constantinopolitan.