No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A Layman’s Ministry in the Byzantine Church: The Life of Athanasios of the Great Meteoron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The line between things spiritual and things temporal, between religious and secular, was never very precisely drawn in the Byzantine world. It was not unusual that a man of affairs should be an erudite theologian, that a priest should be a a married man with a family, that a holy man should remain unordained, or that a layman should be appointed as Patriarch of Constantinople. Thirteen of the 122 Byzantine patriarchs were elevated from the laity, four of them in the eighth and ninth centuries. Among them were the Patriarch Tarasios in 784 and his formidably learned nephew Photios in 858, Neither was a priest. Both were high-ranking civil servants and scholars. The popes disapproved of this practice and said so rather forcibly in the case of Photios; but the Byzantines saw nothing odd in it. They continued, from time to time, to appoint a layman rather than a priest to the highest office in their Church. The tenth canon of the Council of Sardica in 343 had recommended that laymen should not be made bishops until they had been ordained and moved up the various rungs of the hierarchical ladder to the top. This, according to the later Greek canonists, required a minimum of seven days on each rung. In later times, Gregory of Cyprus, an admirable lay scholar and theologian, was ordained and elevated to the patriarchal throne in 1283, though he claims in his autobiography that he was ‘pushed’ on to it against his will. John XIII Glykys, who was made patriarch in 1315, had been a distinguished civil servant with an academic turn of mind and a teacher of philology. The facts of his preferment are outlined by his learned friend Nikephoros Gregoras. Not only was John amarried man with sons and daughters; he also suffered from an ailment which, his doctors declared, required him to eat meat. He was therefore excused the customary tonsure as a monk before his ordination. A carnivorous monk would not do; a carnivorous patriarch was all right. John’s wife, in accordance with the canons, obligingly left him and entered a convent.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989
References
1 Bréhier, L., ‘Le recrutement des patriarches de Constantinople pendant la période byzantine’, Actes du VI’ Congrès d'Etudes Byzantines 1 (Paris, 1950), pp. 221–7 Google Scholar; idem. Les Institutions de l’Empire byzantin (Le monde byzantin, 2, 2 edn., Paris, 1970), pp. 384–8.
2 Hefele, C.J., Histoire des Conciles, 1 (Paris, 1907), pp. 790–1.Google Scholar S. Gregorii Theologi, Orath XLI:in Pentecosten, PG 36, col. 433C; Theodore Balsamon, in G. A. Rhallcs and M. Potles, Syntagma tön theiōn kai hierōn kanonōn, 2, pp. 702–4.
3 Gregory II of Cyprus, Autobiography, with French translation in Lameere, W., La tradition manuscrite de la correspondance de Grégoire de Chypre (Brussels-Paris, 1937), p. 187 Google Scholar. Cf.Papadakis, A., Crisis in Byzantium. The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarclmte of Gregory II of Cyprus (1283-1280) (New York, 1983), pp. 39, 49.Google Scholar
4 Gregoras, Nikephoros, Byzantina Historia, ed. Schopen, L., I (Bonn, 1829), pp. 269–70 Google Scholar. On his elevation and career, sec S. I. Kourousis, The Learned Oecumenical Patriarch John XIII Glykys [in Greek] (Athens, 1975).
5 S Pachomii Vitae Craecae, ed. F. Halkin (Subsidia hagiographica 19, Brussels, 1932), c. 27; Festugière, A. J., Les Moines d’Orient, IV/2 : La première Vie grecque de Saint Pachôme (Paris, 1965), c. 27, pp. 171–2.Google Scholar
6 Nicol, D. M., ‘Byzantine political thought’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.1450, ed.]. Burns, H. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 49–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 70–1.
7 Guilland, H., ‘Les empereurs de Byzance et l’attrait du monastère’, in Guilland, , Etudes byzantines (Paris, 1959), pp. 33–51 Google Scholar; Nicol, D. M., Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 53–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Nicholas Kabasilas, De Vita in Christo, PG 90, cols. 657D-660A; English translation by C. J. deCatanzaro, Nicholas Cabasilas. The Life in Christ (New York, 1974), pp. 173–5.
9 Magni, S. Basilii, Sermo Asceticus, PG 31, col. 881B Google Scholar; English translation by Clarke, W. K. L., The Ascetic Works of Saint Basil (London, 1925), p. 141 Google Scholar. Alonius, in Apophthegmata Patrum, PG 45, col. 133A; The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, 2 (London, 1907), p. 13.
10 On fourteenth-century hesychasm and its influence in and beyond the Byzantine Empire, see J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Hesychasm: historical, theological and social problems. Collected Studies (London, 1974); idem, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. A Study of Byzantine-Russian relations in the fourteenth century (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 96–112, 132-44; references in Nicol, Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium, pp. 9 n. 13, 36–42; Joan M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 1986), pp. 258–60, 286—9. On the term ‘Hesychast International’, see D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth. Eastern Europe, 500—1453 (London, 1971), p. 302.
11 For the two versions of the Life of Athanasios and the Akolouthia, see D. M. Nicol, Meteora. The Rock Monasteries of Thessaly (2 edn., London, 1975), pp. 73–6. N. A. Bees, Tlte Manuscripts of the Meteora [in Greek] 1 (Athens, 1967), nos. 354, 404.
12 The text of the typikon of Athanasios is included in both venions of his Lift. Nicol, Meteora, pp. 98–100.
13 The works of John Klimax or Klimakos (Climacus) are in PC 88, cols. 596–1209.
14 Curzon, R., Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, ed. with introduction by Hogarth, D. G. (London, 1916), pp. 289–90.Google Scholar
15 Gibbon, E., Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 6 (London, 1898), p. 506.Google Scholar
16 Hussey, Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, p. 365.
17 Nicol, Meteora, pp. 128–31, 168-70.