The Holy See and the Byzantine Church and Empire

Extract

My intention here is to make a few reflections on the relations between the Papacy and the Byzantine Empire and Church, mostly from the cultural point of view. I wish to point out how the Popes continued for several centuries—from 1054 to 1453—to keep their attention fixed on the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, even after dissent had developed in the Byzantine clergy: how the Popes helped by their policy to bring about a new convergence of Greek culture with the Latin one, a convergence which gave birth to the Renaissance.

The cultural break between Eastern and Western Europe had its distant origin in the resolution taken by Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of his reign to divide the responsibilities of power. For about a thousand years before 284 A.D., the trend had been to join together die various peoples around the Mediterranean Sea and to amalgamate their individual cvivilizations. Hundreds of years before the rise of Rome, the Greek colonies developed in southern Italy, in Sicily and as far north on the Tyrrhenian Sea as Cumae. The first signs of Greek influence in central Italy were in art: protocorinthian vases appeared as early as the seventh century B.C.; then terracotta works from Greek models in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Greek divinities were received in Rome at the beginning of the sixth century. In die middle of the fifth century, the Law of the Twelve Tables was framed after three commissioners had been sent to Greece to examine the best of Greek legislation.