Sailing from Byzantium (7 page)

Byzantium's humanists found themselves once again opposed by its monks, this time in the monks’ new Hesychast incarnation. They boldly challenged the monks in a bitter
public dispute that historians call the Hesychast controversy.

The humanists were more conscious of shared history and eventually became more open to the West, which reciprocated with a flattering interest in their beloved ancient literature. Many would convert to Catholicism. To them, Christian solidarity seemed the reasonable, obvious—indeed only—way to escape political extinction at Turkish hands, and appeared to be attainable only if the Orthodox church was willing to compromise with the Catholics.

But they were out of step with the Byzantine mainstream and its champions, the monks. A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. This is what happened to the Byzantines. In that sense, Byzantium chose its fate. Military conquest by the Turks was less of an evil than spiritual submission to the hated Catholics. Without strict adherence to Orthodoxy there could be no hope of spiritual salvation, and spiritual salvation came before political survival.

As their empire edged closer to extinction, the Hesychasts and the humanists became often bitter ideological enemies, in a spectacular clash of values and beliefs that frequently spilled over into politics. It was not a simple situation, and much of the time there were no clearly marked lines of separation between the factions. There was much common ground. Both were patriots who wished to save Byzantium and its heritage. The question, inevitably, became which heritage, classical or Christian, and at what price? With tragic inexorability, the antagonists came to act as if the price of survival for one tradition must be the death of the other.

Now we can grasp Theodore Metochites’ ultimate significance. His life, which lasted from 1270 to 1332, spanned the years of good morale, the last hurrah that came with Constantinople's recovery. Metochites lived during the last historical moment when Athens and Jerusalem would coexist peacefully with each other in Byzantine civilization.

In the decades after Metochites’ death, what was originally a doctrinal dispute snowballed into a culture war to the death. At times the monks and humanists seemed to put their differences aside, but more often they ignored the common ground and treated each other with contemptuous inflexibility. Under the stresses of the looming Turkish conquest, the great rift between the pagan Greek and Christian Greek traditions—a fault line that rumbled ominously through Byzantium for long centuries—burst to the surface with a vengeance. The Hesychast controversy contributed to the civil wars of the mid-fourteenth century, at a time when unity was Byzantium's only hope of hanging on against the Turks.

Yet, this very tension drove the gears that spread Byzantine influences abroad, even as the Turks closed in at home. For this reason, the Hesychast controversy proved as fertile for us as it was destructive for the Byzantines. That strange and complex process lies at the heart of the story that follows, as the Byzantine champions of Athens and Jerusalem each found new horizons beyond a dying empire.

he Byzantine humanist who triggered the Hesy-chast controversy was a brilliant but sharp-tongued Greek from southern Italy named Barlaam. An Orthodox monk himself (though he later converted to Catholicism), Barlaam was also thoroughly versed in the classics, an astronomer and mathematician as well as a philosopher and theologian. Unfortunately for him, his formidable learning was coupled with an arrogant, sarcastic manner, so caustic at times that he put off even his friends and allies.

Born about 1290 in Calabria in southern Italy, Barlaam came to Constantinople in the 1320s.
^∗
His learning immediately won him a wide reputation and a post as abbot of an important monastery. In 1334, two Catholic missionary bishops in Constantinople on their way from Genoa to the Crimea challenged the patriarch to a public disputation.

Such debates were a common and favorite spectacle. Not willing to take on the bishops himself, the patriarch turned to Barlaam.

Barlaam's assignment was to defend the Orthodox position that the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father and not from the Son. He chose an approach that was aggressively rationalistic, invoking Aristotelian logic to argue that matters concerning God could never actually be demonstrated but could only be rationally inferred. Even at the time, Barlaam's rationalism antagonized some in the crowd; afterward he wrote several tracts in the same vein.

Barlaam's arguments drew the attention of a stern Hesychast monk named Gregory Palamas. In particular, Barlaam's use of pagan philosophy—which Palamas likened to snake poison—inflamed Palamas, who attacked Barlaam in tracts of his own. The problem with Barlaam's rational position was that although he meant it to refute the Catholics, it went equally against the beliefs of the Orthodox. In Barlaam's hands, Aristotelian rationalism was a double-edged sword.

Provoked, Barlaam now loosed his considerable powers of invective not merely on Palamas, which he might have gotten away with, but on Hesychasm itself and, most outrageously, on the revered monks of Mt. Athos, the community of monasteries in northern Greece where Hesychasm was strongest.
^∗
The Hesychasts’ meditative practices included gazing at their navels as a way of focusing their contemplative powers. Barlaam singled out this practice for his derision, calling the monks
omphalopsychoi,
which might be loosely translated as “navelheads.” He also attacked them on
doctrinal grounds. Palamas leapt to the Hesychasts’ defense, incidentally sharpening Hesychast doctrine as he defended it against Barlaam's attacks.

In responding to Barlaam, Palamas drew an important distinction between God's “essence” and His “energy.” This distinction, implicit in earlier Orthodox theology but never fully ironed out, was necessary in order to defend the Hesychasts’ mystical approach, because to suggest the possibility of human participation in God's essence would be heretical. It was not reason that was the key to enlightenment, Palamas’ argument went, but the possibility of partaking in God's divine energy directly, through meditation, controlled breathing, and repetitive prayer. God could indeed be demonstrated, Palamas said, but not rationally known, experienced but not articulated—roughly the reverse of the position taken by the rational Barlaam and his followers. Posing mystical spirituality against human reason, this balanced antithesis of belief was the knot at the heart of the matter.

At that point, perhaps partly to defuse a touchy situation, the emperor Andronicus III sent Barlaam on his first diplomatic mission west. The emperor's goal was military aid against the Turks, not a new Crusade (by this time, the Byzantines had had quite enough of Crusades) but an expedition of professional soldiers from the West. Barlaam's first stop was Naples, where he got on well at the humanist court of the Neapolitan king Robert the Wise, a curious and intelligent patron of culture whose entourage included the Florentine expatriate writer Boccaccio. Arriving toward the end of spring, Barlaam
stayed for a few weeks before moving on to Paris and the French court, and finally to the papal curia at Avignon, where the pope kept his shaky grip on power with French support.
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The price the Greeks wished to avoid paying for aid was submission to the pope. Union, possibly; outright submission was out of the question. But how one without the other?

Barlaam brought his own plan for resolving this dilemma. A long address to the pope in Latin, it aptly summarized the whole intractable situation. The Orthodox position was (and still is, for that matter) that the pope may be first in prestige among Christian bishops, but he is not the final authority: they allow him primacy, in other words, but not supremacy. The Orthodox have always held that important issues must be decided by a council of bishops, like those held in the early centuries of the Christian era. But by the fourteenth century that era was long over, and the popes were accustomed to unchallenged rule in the Western church.

Barlaam's proposal was to call a joint church council in the East, in Greek territory, with representation by the Orthodox patriarchs and papal envoys. There was no other way, Barlaam argued, that the Greek populace would accept a unionist decree. And before anything else the pope must press for an expedition to clear the Turks from Asia Minor. Yet, constrained by his own dicey political situation, the pope could never make the first concession—as Barlaam must have known. In one form or another, over the rest of Byzantium's life this same spin cycle would make the issue of Western aid into an ongoing farce: neither side would deliver what the other demanded before being promised what the other side couldn't deliver anyway.

So it's hardly surprising that nothing concrete came of Barlaam's negotiations, and that in diplomatic terms the trip was a failure. On top ofthat, Palamas had taken advantage of Barlaam's absence to strengthen his position. Ever rash, on returning Barlaam accused Palamas of heresy. But at the resulting church council, on June 10, 1341, with the patriarch, the heavy-hitting monks of Mt. Athos, and the loudly anti-Western populace lined up carefully behind him, Palamas had no trouble defending himself. Barlaam was not the only anti-Hesychast around, as events would prove shortly thereafter, but as a south Italian Greek he was suspect. Anti-Western feelings saturated the city; the council ended up condemning Barlaam himself.

A mere five days later, Andronicus III died, leaving a nine-year-old son, John V, plus a number of intimates and other rivals who wished to claim the powerful role of regent until the young emperor came of age.

Barlaam protested briefly against the council's ruling, but he soon realized that it had ended his prospects in the East. His trip two years earlier, however, had won him real friends in the West. In late summer he returned to Italy, stopping in Calabria and then Naples, where once more he was welcomed by King Robert and the humanist circle at the Neapolitan court. The Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily, was a fascinating melange of Byzantine, Arab, Italian, and Norman influences. Its Norman rulers liked to keep the pot bubbling; Robert the Wise was merely one in a long line of enlightened kings.

Boccaccio, reclaimed by his family after his father's death, had moved back to his native Florence, but Barlaam renewed his relationship with Robert's court librarian, Paul of Perugia. Barlaam helped Paul arrange the Greek manuscripts in Robert's growing library. He also assisted with the
Greek parts of Paul's own book on classical mythology,
The Collections.
The two were rough contemporaries. Paul, Boccaccio wrote, “enjoyed peculiar friendship with Barlaam, and though it could not be based on common interests in Latin culture, it was a means by which Paul drank deeply of Greek lore.” Barlaam stayed in Naples from late summer 1341 to early 1342, and sometime during his stay he converted. It was as a Roman Catholic that he journeyed to Avignon in the spring of 1342.

In Avignon waited Petrarch, who worked in close association with the Avignonese papacy, and whose beloved villa was nearby at Vaucluse. It's unclear whether he and Barlaam had met on Barlaam's earlier visit, but they became friends this time at least. Petrarch had managed to get his hands on a Greek manuscript of Homer from a Byzantine diplomat in Avignon. His letters show it to be one of his most prized possessions; he was dying to be able to read it.

Paul of Perugia, Boccaccio, Petrarch—these pioneering humanists were just starting to rediscover the glorious Roman past, along with the Latin authors who had memorialized it. However, it is impossible to read those authors for long without realizing that reading classical Latin literature with any sensitivity requires familiarity with ancient Greek literature.

This goes further than mere influence or inspiration: in self-consciously forging a national literature, classical Latin authors based virtually all their works on Greek models. Virgil is the most commonly cited example, and one obviously of great relevance to Petrarch and Boccaccio. The
Aeneid
(imitating Homer's
Iliad)
was only the last such work Virgil wrote; in his two earlier works, the
Eclogues
and the
Georgics,
Virgil imitated the Greek authors Theocritus and Hesiod, respectively. In his letters and speeches, Cicero, too,
whom Petrarch and many of his successors idolized above all, constantly refers to his own Greek models and sources (an important one being, for example, the Athenian orator Demosthenes).

Because these Greek texts survived only in Byzantium, the Italians found themselves cut off from the works that had not only inspired but almost
dictated
the Latin literature they were in the process of rediscovering. Learned Byzantines such as Barlaam offered the only access. “Not infrequently I quote Barlaam,” Boccaccio wrote later in
The Genealogy of the Gods.
“Though his body was slight, he stood higher than others in learning. Shall I not do well to trust him, particularly in all that pertains to Greek?”

Barlaam stayed in Avignon from mid-May to mid-November 1342. He went on the curia's payroll in August, receiving fifty-three florins and twenty shillings for eighty-one days’ “lecturing in Greek in the curia.” This probably refers to the famous lessons he gave Petrarch. However, it turned out there was little time, for at Petrarch's own request, Barlaam was given a bishopric in Gerace in Calabria, far to the south.

Time wasn't the only factor. Lectures in Eastern languages were not unknown at the curia, but ancient Greek is difficult. Without the teaching aids that eventually became common, such as grammar books, exercises, vocabulary lists, and above all bilingual Greek and Latin texts (which later humanists would particularly come to favor), the odds were stacked against Petrarch. “I wasn't so lucky as to learn Greek,” he wrote. “I'd thrown myself into the work with eager hope and keen desire, but the newness of a strange tongue and the early departure of my teacher frustrated me in my purpose.”

After several unhappy years in Gerace and a brief and even more unhappy visit to Constantinople on behalf of the pope, Barlaam returned for a third time to Avignon in 1347.

He gave more lessons to Petrarch, but this visit, again of only six months’ duration, was also too short to be productive. Boccaccio, urged on by Petrarch, would have slightly better luck in the 1350s, under the tutelage of Barlaam's student Leonzio Pilato, who had also briefly tutored Petrarch. Pilato, like Barlaam a Calabrian Greek who had sojourned in Constantinople and Thessalonica, was a less than ideal teacher— in Boccaccio's words, “a man of uncouth appearance, ugly features, long beard, and black hair, forever lost in thought, rough in manners and behavior.”

For almost three years, according to an impressively game Boccaccio, they stumbled through Homer together in Greek. Boccaccio even secured for Pilato a position teaching Greek in Florence in the early 1360s, but nothing came of it. It was simply too early for interest to have spread from standouts such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Renaissance humanism's founders, after all, to their followers. The Italian humanists needed the pressure of greater numbers—and they needed, too, a teacher of Greek who could supply real teaching and the deep inspiration that goes with it. Both were coming, but not for a while yet.

Barlaam, despite his abrasiveness, was missed by Byzantium's younger intellectuals. In 1347, the year that he made his second attempt with Petrarch, Barlaam entered into a brief correspondence on theological matters with a talented young Byzantine named Demetrius Cydones, whom he had met on his last visit to Constantinople.

When he met Barlaam, Cydones had recently arrived in Constantinople to seek his fortune. In his early twenties, he
had been born to a noble and recently impoverished family in Thessalonica, the empire's second city. His father, an ally of Andronicus III, had undertaken several sensitive diplomatic missions for the emperor, but Andronicus had died only days after the council condemning Barlaam had adjourned. A bloody and exhausting six-year civil war ensued between Andronicus’ best friend and prime minister, John Cantacuzenos, and an alliance between the patriarch and Andronicus’ widow, Anne of Savoy, an unpopular Western princess who managed to hold power in Constantinople for much of the war's duration. Cantacuzenos eventually won the war, although the political infighting festered for decades. Cydones’ family had supported Cantacuzenos but lost everything in violent riots in Thessalonica against Cantacuzenos’ side.