Hesychasm and the Byzantine Commonwealth

Meyendorff’s largest historical thesis: that the hesychast movement of the fourteenth century was not merely a monastic and doctrinal episode within Byzantium but an international current that reshaped the culture and the ecclesiastical politics of the whole Orthodox world — Byzantium, the South Slavs, and Russia — and that this is the key to the late Byzantine centuries. This file sets out the thesis, its relation to Dimitri Obolensky’s “Byzantine Commonwealth,” and the questions it raises.

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

The Thesis

Most accounts of hesychasm stop where the controversy stops: with the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351, the vindication of Palamas, and the incorporation of the Palamite definitions into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (The Councils of 1341–1351). Meyendorff’s argument is that this is where the interesting part begins.

The victory of the hesychasts, he contended, had “ideological and political consequences” — the title of the fifth chapter of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, ch. 5). The party that won at Blachernae in 1351 did not stop at defining a doctrine. Its members took the patriarchal throne (Kallistos I, Philotheos Kokkinos), the metropolitan sees, and the great monasteries; and they pursued a coherent program: the unity of the Orthodox commonwealth across national and political boundaries, the renewal of monastic life, and a deliberately supra-national conception of the Church over against the emerging national monarchies.

The evidence Meyendorff assembles is institutional and prosopographical rather than rhetorical. Hesychast monks moved between Athos, Constantinople, Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia; hesychast patriarchs appointed hesychast metropolitans to distant sees; translation programs carried the ascetic literature from Greek into Slavonic; monasteries were founded on the new pattern. The same men appear in Constantinople and in Kiev.

The Commonwealth Frame

The container for this argument is the concept of the Byzantine Commonwealth, given its classic formulation by Dimitri Obolensky in The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) — a family of polities beyond Byzantium’s political borders, bound to it by Orthodox faith, Byzantine liturgy, art, law and letters, and by the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Obolensky’s book was published a decade before Meyendorff’s, and Meyendorff worked within its frame, using the term “Commonwealth” for the northern periphery he was describing (Cambridge University Press, catalogue description of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, on “the Northern periphery of the Byzantine Orthodox ‘Commonwealth’”).

The two projects fit together. Obolensky supplied the long-range structure — how Byzantium held a cultural sphere together for a millennium. Meyendorff supplied a fourteenth-century mechanism: a specific religious movement, with names, dates and archives, doing the holding at the moment when the empire itself had almost no political power left to do it with. It is a striking claim, and Meyendorff clearly relished it: that at the point of Byzantium’s political extinction its spiritual influence was at its most effective.

The Commonwealth concept has since been much debated. It remains widely cited and is generally credited with having established the field, while being criticized for imposing a Constantinople-centered and somewhat static model on a more varied set of relationships, and for the assumptions it carries in art history. Readers using Meyendorff’s fourteenth-century argument should know that its frame is a scholarly construct of the 1970s and is treated as such by current Byzantinists.

The Russian End: Cyprian, Sergius, and the Transmission

The concrete Russian case is the one Meyendorff develops.

Metropolitan Cyprian (c. 1330–1406), Bulgarian by birth, formed on Athos and in the hesychast circles of Constantinople, appointed to the Rus’ metropolitanate by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, and after long conflict finally established in Moscow, is the personal link. He brought with him the liturgical books of the new Jerusalem typikon, the corrected Slavonic translations, and the hesychast spiritual literature (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981, ch. 9 and following, on Cyprian).

St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392) and the monastic movement that radiated from the Trinity Lavra transformed Russian monasticism in the same decades, and Russian religious art reached its height in Theophanes the Greek and St. Andrei Rublev at the turn of the fifteenth century (see St. Sergius of Radonezh and Holy Icons). Meyendorff argues that this Russian flowering is not a parallel and independent development but part of the same international current — that the “religious and monastic revival in Byzantium,” communicated through the ecclesiastical channels, gave the Church in Russia an orientation toward supra-national unity, toward spiritual and artistic achievement, and toward political reconciliation among the principalities (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981).

[Disputed: the strength of the causal link between Byzantine hesychasm and the Russian monastic and artistic revival. Meyendorff argues for a strong link, mediated by identifiable persons, texts and appointments. Other scholars have emphasized indigenous Russian factors — the retreat of Mongol pressure, the internal dynamics of the "northern Thebaid," the eremitic tradition of the forest — and have cautioned that the Russian revival is not simply an export. The two readings are not exclusive, and Meyendorff himself argued for a convergence rather than a simple transmission; but the weight to be given to the Byzantine channel is a live question, and this collection does not adjudicate it.]

The transmission continues past the fourteenth century: through St. Nilus of Sora, who studied on Athos and brought the hesychast texts back to the Russian north, to the Philokalic revival of St. Paisius Velichkovsky in the eighteenth century and its Russian flowering at Optina (see The Philokalia, Orthodox Monasticism, and Mount Athos). Meyendorff’s fourteenth-century argument is the first link in a chain the repository traces elsewhere in full.

Hesychasm as a Cultural Key

The larger claim behind all of this is that hesychasm is the key to late Byzantine culture — that one cannot understand the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Orthodox world without it. Meyendorff put the point in several forms across his work: that the Palamite settlement determined the theological character of Orthodoxy for centuries; that the hesychast party’s supra-national ecclesiology set the pattern for Orthodox self-understanding down to the modern debates over nationalism; and that the late Byzantine artistic renaissance and the hesychast theology of the uncreated light belong together.

This is a thesis, not a finding, and it should be read as Meyendorff’s. It has been influential — the framing of “hesychasm” as a civilizational phenomenon is largely his and Obolensky’s — and it has also drawn the criticism that it makes a single movement carry more explanatory weight than it can bear, and that it reads the fourteenth century backward from what the twentieth century wanted to find there. Norman Russell’s general caution applies here too: the modern construction of “Palamism” as the organizing principle of Orthodox identity was shaped in modern controversies, and projecting it onto the fourteenth century risks anachronism (Russell, Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age, Oxford, 2019; see The Wider Revision and What Stands).

Why the Argument Still Matters

Whatever weight one gives the causal claims, the book established two things that have not been undone.

Ecclesiastical history is political history. Meyendorff demonstrated, from the patriarchal register, that Byzantine church appointments in the fourteenth century were instruments of policy and had measurable political effects. No account of the rise of Moscow can now leave the metropolitanate out.

Orthodoxy in this period is transnational. The habit of writing Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian church history as separate national stories is broken by the evidence of men and books moving continuously between them. That is a lasting methodological gain, and it is the substance behind the Commonwealth metaphor even for those who find the metaphor too tidy.

References

Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (Ch. 5, “Victory of the Hesychasts in Byzantium: ideological and political consequences”; ch. 9 on Metropolitan Cyprian; the post-1370 reorientation toward supra-national unity, spiritual and artistic achievement, and political reconciliation.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Hesychasm: Historical, Theological and Social Problems — Collected Studies. London: Variorum Reprints, 1974. (The specialist articles behind the thesis.)
Meyendorff, John. The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. History of Civilization. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson / New York: Praeger, 1971. (The classic formulation of the Commonwealth concept.)
Cambridge University Press. Catalogue description of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. (The “Northern periphery of the Byzantine Orthodox ‘Commonwealth’.”)
Russell, Norman. Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.