23
Dreading a repetition, I will nonetheless state again that if Byzantine soil turned out to be so favorable for Islam it was most likely because of its ethnic texture—a mixture of races and nationalities that had neither local nor, moreover, overall memory of any kind of coherent tradition of individualism. Dreading generalizations, I will add that the East means, first of all, a tradition of obedience, of hierarchy, of profit, of trade, of adaptability: a tradition, that is, drastically alien to the principles of a moral absolute, whose role —I mean the intensity of the sentiment—is fulfilled here by the idea of kinship, of family. I foresee objections, and am even willing to accept them, in whole or in part. But no matter what extreme of idealization of the East we may entertain, we'll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy.
And I am speaking here of Byzantium before the Turkish domination: of the Byzantium of Constantine, Justinian, Theodora—of Christian Byzantium, anyway. Still, Michael
Psellus, the eleventh-century Byzantine historian, describing in his Chronographia the reign of Basil II, tells us about Basil's prime minister, also Basil, who was the Emperor's illegitimate stepbrother and, because of that, was simply castrated in childhood to eliminate any possible claim to the throne. "A natural precaution," comments the historian, "since as a eunuch he would not attempt to usurp the throne from the legitimate heir." Psellus adds, "He was completely reconciled to his fate, and was sincerely dedicated to the mling house. After all, it was his family." Let's make a note that this was written at the time of the reign of Basil II (a.d. 976-1025), and that Psellus mentions the incident very much in passing, as a routine affair—as, indeed, it was—at the Byzantine court. If this was a.d., what, then, of B.C.?
24
And how do we measure an age? And is an age susceptible to measurement? We should also note that what Psellus describes takes place before the arrival of the Turks. There are no Bajazet-Muhammad-Suleimans about, none of that. For the time being, we are still interpreting sacred texts, warring against heresy, gathering at universal councils, erecting cathedrals, composing tracts. That's with one hand. With the other we are castrating a bastard, so that when he grows up there will be no extra claim to the throne. That, indeed, is the Eastern attitude toward things—toward the human body in particular—and whatever era or millennium it is is irrelevant. So it is hardly surprising that the Roman Church turned its nose away from Byzantium.
But something needs to be said here about that church, too. It was natural for it to shun Byzantium, both for the reasons given above and because Byzantium—this new Rome—had abandoned Rome proper completely. With the exception of Justinian's short-lived efforts to restore imperial coherence, Rome was left solely to its own devices and to its fate, which meant to the Visigoths, the Vandals, and whoever else felt inclined to settle old and new scores with the former capital. One can understand Constantine: he was born, and spent his entire childhood, in the Eastern empire, at Diocletian's court. In this sense, Roman though he was, he wasn't a Westerner, except in his administrative designation or through his mother. (Believed to be born in Britain, she was the one who was interested in Christianity first—to the extent that she traveled later in her life to Jerusalem and discovered there the True Cross. In other words, in that family it was the mom who was a believer. And although there is ample reason to regard Constantine as a true mama's boy, let's avoid the temptation—let's leave it to the psychiatrists, as we don't hold a license.) One, let's repeat, can understand Constantine.
As for the attitude of the subsequent Byzantine emperors toward the genuine Rome, it is more complex and rather less explicable. Surely, they had their fill of problems right there in the East, both with their subjects and with their immediate neighbors. Yet the title of Roman emperor, it would seem, should have implied certain geographical obligations. The whole point, of course, was that the Roman emperors after Justinian came for the most part from provinces farther and farther East, from the Empire's traditional recruiting grounds: Syria, Armenia, and so on. Rome was for them, at best, an idea. Several of them, like the majority of their subjects, knew no word of Latin and had never set foot in the city that even by then was quite Eternal. And yet they all regarded themselves as Romans, called themselves so and signed themselves as such. (Something of the sort may be observed even today in the many and varied dominions of the British Empire, or let's recall—so that we don't twist our necks looking for examples—the Evenki, who are Soviet citizens.)
In other words, Rome was left to itself, as was the Roman Church. It would be too lengthy a haul to describe the relations between the Eastern and Western Churches. It may be noted, however, that in general the abandonment of Rome was to a certain degree to the Roman Church's advantage, but not entirely to its advantage.
25
I did not expect this note on my trip to Istanbul to expand so much, and I am beginning to feel irritated both with myself and with the material. On the other hand, I am aware that I won't have another chance to discuss all these matters, or if I do I will consciously miss it. From now on, I do promise myself and anyone who has got this far a greater compression—though what I would like to do right now is drop the whole business.
If one must resort to prose, a procedure utterly hateful to the author of these lines, for the very reason that it lacks any form of discipline aside from that generated in the process—if one must use prose, it would be better to concentrate on details, descriptions of places and character: i.e., on things the reader presumably may not have a chance to come across. For the bulk of the aforesaid, as well as everything that follows, is sooner or later bound to occur to anybody, since we are all, one way or another, dependent on history.
26
The advantage of the Roman Church's isolation lay above all in the natural benefits to be derived from any form of autonomy. There was almost nothing and nobody, with the exception of the Roman Church itself, to prevent its developing into a defined, fixed system. Which is what indeed took place. The combination of Roman law, reckoned with more seriously in Rome than in Byzantium, and the specific logic of the Roman Church's inner development evolved into the ethico-political system that lies at the heart of the so-called Western conception of the state and of individual being. Like almost all divorces, the one between Byzantium and Rome was by no means total; a great deal of property stayed shared. But in general one can insist that this Western conception drew around itself a kind of circle, which the East, in a purely conceptual sense, never crossed, and within whose ample bounds was elaborated what we term, or understand as, Western Christianity and the world view it implies.
The drawback of any system, even a perfect one, is that it is a system—i.e., that it must by definition exclude certain things, regard them as alien to it, and as far as possible relegate them to the nonexistent. The drawback of the system that was worked out in Rome—the drawback of
Western Christianity—was the unwitting reduction of its notions of evil. Any notions about anything are based on experience. For Western Christianity, the experience of evil was the experience reflected in the Roman law, with the addition of firsthand knowledge of the persecution of Christians by the emperors before Constantine. That's a lot, of course, but it is a long way from exhausting the reality of evil. By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to nonexistence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.