A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on—one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume comparative equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a result of many causes—of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium might latterly have profited—the Saracen—was made tabu by creed, which was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and Italian life.
Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed—this if only external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore away all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the hold of superstition on the general mind. On the other hand, the final Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant mass, rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon, might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people. "If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373] Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.
FOOTNOTES:
[319] Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890, pp. 138, 139.
[320] Cp. Prof. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, ch. xi; Bury, History of Greece, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration," says Bury, "came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil."
[321] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 533-36; A.R. Hall, The Oldest Civilisation of Greece, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer, Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the more noteworthy because it counters his primary assumption of race-characters.
[322] Cp. Galton. Hereditary Genius, ed. 1892, p. 329. The contrast between the policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that of Megara, which boasted of never having given the citizenship to any stranger save Hercules (Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain the inferiority of Megarean culture.
[323] "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate territory" [as distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so great a number of free and equal citizens" (Freeman, History of Federal Government, ed. 1893, p. 22, note). And the number was greatly swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in the Delian Maritime League" (Maisch, Greek Antiquities, § 28), so that in 451 it was felt necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.
[324] Cicero (in Verrem ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of Greek cities in buying paintings and statues in his day, and their unwillingness to sell.
[325] The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture as the Persians had. It is in every respect inferior to the Assyrian which it copies. See Reber, History of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 121-28.