Medieval Essays (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

The Christian East and the Oriental Background of Christian Culture

i i The Christian East and the Oriental Background of Christian Culture T he tradition of higher culture which was created by the ancient Greeks and transmitted by the Roman Empire and the Christian Church to modern Europe was never an exclusively Western one. It arose in the Mediterranean, where the warrior peoples of Europe first came into intimate contact with the higher civilization of the Ancient East, and from the union of these two disparate elements represented by the warrior tribe and the sacred city a new culture was born which proved stronger and more adaptable than either of its constituent elements. In the age of Alexander it spread eastwards across Asia to the Indus and the Oxus; in the age of Caesar it spread northwards across Europe to Britain and the Rhine; so that by the first century a.d. it had become almost conterminous with the known world. But this world expansion of Hellenistic culture was too rapid and too superficial to endure. In the East the influence of the subject oriental population gradually undermined and transformed the Hellenistic culture, and in the West the unconquered barbarians of the North destroyed the Roman order and overran the western provinces. Finally, by the eighth and ninth centuries the sphere of Western culture—the society which preserved the traditions of Greece and Rome—had become no more than an island surrounded on every side by the advancing tide of Islamic conquest and barbarian invasion. Throughout this phase of regression, which lasted for about eight centuries, from a.d. 200 to 1000, the leadership of world civilization passed to the East, and the vital influences that aVected Western cul15 ture were predominantly of oriental origin. Consequently it is impossible to explain the rise of medieval culture in purely European terms, since we have to look outside Europe to find the source of many of its characteristic institutions and ideas. This is especially true in the case of the Byzantine Empire, which throughout this period remained by far the greatest European power and the chief surviving representative of higher culture in the West. But while it is diYcult to exaggerate the importance of the Byzantine influences on medieval culture, it is no less diYcult to exaggerate the strength of the oriental influences on Byzantine culture itself. These are so obvious that many historians have been unable to see anything else and have described Byzantium as a strictly oriental empire which had adopted the Roman name and the Greek language, while remaining utterly remote from the living tradition of Western culture. Today, however, there is a tendency among Byzantine scholars to dispute this view and to emphasize the non-oriental character of Byzantine culture. Thus Professor Norman Baynes has recently asserted that there are no grounds for the view that the Byzantine Empire underwent a process of progressive orientalization, and that “the elements which in their combination formed the complex civilization of the Empire were indeed the Roman tradition in law and government, the Hellenistic tradition in language, literature and philosophy, and a Christian tradition which had already been refashioned on a Greek model.”1 I do not believe that either of these views can be accepted in its entirety . The fact is that the Byzantine Empire and its culture have a double aspect. From one point of view they represent the last phase of that great movement of conquest and colonization which had carried Greek culture far into the heart of Asia and had founded Greek cities on the banks of the Indus and as far as Balkh and Khojend. The tide of this great expansion had begun to ebb long before the Byzantine Empire was founded, so that its whole history may be regarded as a long and stubbornly contested rearguard action of Greek culture against the advancing forces of the East. Nevertheless, from another point of view 16 The Oriental Background of Christian Culture 1. In his introduction to Byzantium: An Introduction to the East Roman Tradition, edited by N. H. Baynes and H. S. B. Moss, p. xx. the Byzantine Empire may be seen as the result of a process of orientalization which had profoundly transformed the character of the Roman Empire and the Greek culture. The old traditions of the classical citystate , with its ideals of freedom and citizenship and autonomy, had given place to a sacred monarchy of the...