"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

Byzantium now adorned the central sacramental actions of the Christian
faith, without modifying its very heart, and thus leaving the door open to
authentic liturgical and sacramental theology, which would still inspire the
mainstream of Byzantine spirituality.
Another very important liturgical development of the fifth and sixth
centuries was the large-scale adoption of hymnography of a Hellenistic
nature. In the early Christian communities, the Church hymnal was comprised
of the Psalter and some other poetic excerpts from Scripture with relatively
few newer hymns. In the fifth and sixth centuries however with the
insistence on more liturgical solemnity (often copied from court ceremonial)
in the great urban churches and the unavoidable Hellenization of the Church,
the influx of new poetry was inevitable.
This influx met strong opposition in monastic circles, which considered
it improper to replace Biblical texts of the liturgy with human poetic
compositions, but the resistance was not a lasting one. In fact, in the
eighth and ninth centuries, the monks took the lead in hymnographical
creativity.
But as early as the sixth century, the religious poetry of Romanos the
Melody was regarded as revolutionary in Constantinople. The models of his
poetry and music were generally localized in Syria where poetic religious
compositions had already been popularized by Ephraem (T 373).
Born in Emesus, Romanos came to Constantinople under Anastasius
(491-518) and soon attained great fame by composing his fantasia. Generally
based upon a Biblical theme or, in other words, exalting a Biblical
personality, the kontakion is essentially a metrical homily recited or
chanted by a cantor and accompanied by the entire congregation singing a
simple refrain. It follows a uniform pattern beginning with a short prelude
and followed by a series of poetic strophe.
Romanos' poetry generally relies on imagery and drama and contains
little or no at all theology. The Christological debates of the period, for
example, are not at all reflected in his kontakya. Written in simple popular
Greek, they must have played a tremendous role in bringing the themes of
Biblical history to the masses; they undoubtedly strengthened profoundly
that understanding of Christianity centred on the liturgy, which became so
characteristic of the Byzantines.
Some of Romanos' kontakya remain in the liturgical books in an abridged
form, and the pattern, which he established, was reproduced almost exactly
in the famous Akathistos hymnos, one of the most popular pieces of Byzantine
hymnography. Although, as we shall see later, subsequent hymnographical
patterns formed in the monasteries were quite different from those of
Romanos, the work of the great melody of the sixth century played a central
role in shaping Byzantine Christianity as distinct from the Latin, the
Syrian, the Egyptian, and the Armenian.
The cultural framework of Byzantine theology after Chalcedon was
increasingly limited to the Greek-speaking world. The wealth of the various
non-Greek traditions of early Christianity - especially the Syrian and the
Latin - was less and less taken into account by the theologians of the
imperial capital. One should remember however that until the emergence of
the twelfth-century revival of theology in the West, Constantinople remained
the unquestioned intellectual centre of Christendom, with very little