Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes

A walk through the two halves of Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology (1974): the historical narrative from the aftermath of Chalcedon to the fall of Constantinople, and the systematic exposition of doctrine from creation to the last things. This file sets out what the book actually contains, section by section, and what its treatment of each area contributes — with the repository’s own cross-references to the doctrines and councils concerned.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

The historical half narrates the shaping of Byzantine theology through its controversies. Meyendorff’s organizing conviction is that Byzantine doctrine was not developed in the abstract but hammered out under pressure — imperial, monastic, and polemical — and that the shape of the result cannot be understood apart from the pressure (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, New York: Fordham University Press, 1974).

After Chalcedon. The narrative opens where the Christological problem was left in 451: with a definition that satisfied neither the Alexandrian party nor the empire’s need for unity. Meyendorff’s key move — argued at length in Christ in Eastern Christian Thought — is that the sixth-century “neo-Chalcedonian” settlement, which affirmed both the legitimacy of Cyril’s “one incarnate nature of God the Word” rightly understood and the Chalcedonian “two natures,” was not a capitulation to monophysitism but the correct reading of Chalcedon through Cyril (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, on neo-Chalcedonian Christology; see Constantinople II and the Three Chapters and The Neo-Chalcedonian Retrieval).

Justinian and the imperial factor. Meyendorff gives close attention to the religious policy of Justinian, the Three Chapters affair, the schism of the Istrian bishops, and the sixth-century Origenist controversy — material he would later expand into Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989, on Justinian’s religious policy and the Origenist controversy; cited at Constantinople II and the Three Chapters). His treatment of the emperor’s role is deliberately anti-caesaropapist: emperors convened councils and pressed for outcomes, but the guarantee of orthodoxy lies with the whole Church in council, not with any single throne (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989, cited on the Honorius question at Constantinople III and Monothelitism).

Monothelitism and Maximus. The Sixth Council is treated as the necessary completion of Chalcedon: two natures entail two natural wills and two natural operations, and the reason is soteriological — the human will is the seat of the fall and must therefore be assumed to be healed (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, on Maximus’s doctrine of the will; see Dyothelite Christology).

Iconoclasm. Meyendorff reads the eighth- and ninth-century crisis as a Christological one. The iconoclast argument — that the divine cannot be circumscribed and the human of Christ cannot be depicted apart from the divine — is, on his account, a failure to hold the Chalcedonian union; the icon is the proof that the Word truly became flesh (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the iconoclast Christology, cited at The Iconoclast Controversy). He also supplies the historical detail — the 338 bishops at the iconoclast council of Hieria (754) — that the repository’s own file takes from him.

Monastic theology and the Synodikon. Meyendorff treats the monastic tradition not as a parallel piety but as the carrier of Byzantine theology’s most characteristic claims. The Synodikon of Orthodoxy — the annual proclamation on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, into which the Palamite definitions were interpolated after 1351 — is his standing example of how Byzantine doctrine is preserved liturgically rather than in a code (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the Synodikon, cited at Councils in the Life of the Church; cf. Gouillard, Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie, 1967).

The schism and the encounter with the West. Meyendorff’s account of the estrangement of East and West is theological and gradualist: the divergence is real, it concerns the Filioque, the papal claims, and behind them a different theology of grace, and it did not begin or end in 1054. The material is elaborated in the volume he wrote with Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1994), which supplies the Orthodox scholarly history for the repository’s own schism collection (see The Great Schism and Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor). He credits St. Photius with the classic distinction between the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and the temporal mission of the Spirit through the Son (The Neo-Palamite Lineage, citing Byzantine Theology for the attribution; see The Filioque).

Hesychasm. The historical half culminates in the fourteenth century — the Barlaam controversy, the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351, the Palamite settlement — which is where Meyendorff’s own scholarship lay (see Section 02, and The Councils of 1341–1351).

Part Two: Doctrinal Themes

The systematic half sets out the doctrine under headings that would be familiar from any dogmatics, but with the ordering and the emphases of Meyendorff’s central thesis.

Creation and the created order. Byzantine theology, in Meyendorff’s presentation, holds a strong doctrine of creation ex nihilo and a corresponding refusal of any necessary emanation — which is precisely why the essence–energies distinction is needed: God’s gift of Himself must be genuinely God and genuinely gift, not a natural overflow and not a created substitute (see The Distinction).

The human person. Here is the heart of the book. Meyendorff argues that Byzantine anthropology defines the human being not by a self-enclosed nature but by an orientation to God: to be human is to be capable of God, and sin is the frustration of that capacity rather than the incurring of a juridical debt. He accordingly reads the Greek patristic doctrine of ancestral sin as inherited mortality and corruption rather than inherited guilt — a reading he grounds in the Greek text of Romans 5:12 — and treats this as one of the sharpest points of divergence from the Augustinian West (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974, on the doctrine of man and ancestral sin; see Theological Anthropology and Soteriology).

Christ. The Christological chapter compresses Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (see Section 04): the hypostatic union understood as the personal identity of the Word, the communicatio idiomatum taken with full seriousness (“one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh”), and the two wills of the Sixth Council as the guarantee of a real humanity.

The Holy Spirit and the Trinity. Meyendorff presents the Cappadocian Trinitarian grammar — the monarchy of the Father as the source of the divine unity — and reads the Filioque as a departure from it (see The Holy Trinity and Pneumatology).

Sacramental theology and the Church. The sacramental chapters ground the ecclesiology: the Church is what she is in the Eucharist, and the doctrine of the Church cannot be extracted from the doctrine of the mysteries. This is the point at which Meyendorff’s work and Schmemann’s converge most closely, and it is the theological basis of the American ecclesiological program the two shared (see The Divine Liturgy, The Holy Mysteries, and St. Vladimir’s and the OCA).

Eschatology. The last things are treated with the characteristic Byzantine reserve: the resurrection of the body and the transfiguration of the whole creation, with a marked reticence about the intermediate state and a refusal of the Latin doctrine of purgatory as satisfaction (see Eschatology and Azymes, Purgatory and Created Grace).

What the Structure Implies

The two halves are not independent. The historical narrative is written so as to arrive at the doctrine the systematic half expounds, and the systematic half is written so as to be recognizable as the outcome of the history. That mutual fit is the book’s great pedagogical strength and, from a strictly historiographical standpoint, its principal vulnerability: a survey whose history vindicates its system is doing something other than pure description.

Readers should therefore use Byzantine Theology as it is best used — as the most reliable one-volume orientation to what Byzantine Christians believed and why, checked where it matters against the conciliar texts themselves (The Seven Ecumenical Councils) and against the current scholarship on the fourteenth century (The Scholarly Reassessment).

See Also

References

  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974; 2nd ed. 1979. (The two-part structure; ancestral sin and Romans 5:12; the iconoclast Christology; Hieria’s 338 bishops; the Synodikon; the Photian distinction between procession and mission.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975. (Neo-Chalcedonian Christology; Maximus on the human will.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. The Church in History II. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. (Justinian’s religious policy; the Three Chapters; the sixth-century Origenist controversy; the conciliar rather than papal guarantee of orthodoxy.)
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994.
  • Gouillard, Jean. Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire. Travaux et Mémoires 2. Paris, 1967.