Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

11

The Near-Death of the Book, the Birth of Christian Art

Augustus, a practical man, had limited the extent of the Roman empire, on one side to the three great rivers, the Rhine, the Danube and the Euphrates, and on the other, to the desert belt of Africa and Arabia. He felt that these were natural borders which both made the further expansion of empire difficult and at the same time helped to repel enemies. Despite this, by the third century a credible threat had developed along several sections of the imperial frontier as a number of tribes hitherto settled outside the borders decided to go on to the offensive.¹ By this time, in particular, the region beyond the Rhine was no longer split into the many small tribes as described by Tacitus in his famous book. As was explained in the last chapter, these numerous clans had coalesced into larger groups and from the third century onwards, warfare on both the Persian and Germanic fronts was continuous, with only rare breaks. A combination of geography and diplomacy ensured that the great bulk of the German attacks was directed against the western empire, while the eastern half remained less affected, especially after the Sassanid attacks were contained from the 240s on (there was, for instance, no fall in the value of money there). Constantinople – a fortress protected by the sea – remained impregnable. This would have incalculable consequences for the preservation of ideas in the dark ages.²

The imperial government moved at first to Milan, then to Ravenna (which was difficult to attack from the land and was open to the sea).³ The Visigoths blockaded Rome itself three times and, on the third occasion, in 410, captured the city, ransacked it, carrying off as hostage the emperor’s sister, Galla Placida. In the early fifth century, Gaiseric, king of the Vandals and Alans, landed in Africa, from Spain, where they had been entrenched, and the first sovereign Germanic state to exist on Roman soil was formed.⁴ In the days of Augustus and Trajan, when the city was home to twenty-nine public libraries, Rome had a population of more than a million. During these bloody years, its population dropped to a low of 30,000 and it had ‘neither the funds to support libraries, nor yet the people to use them’.⁵ The disturbance to the existing order was, as Joseph Vogt puts it, ‘undoubtedly tremendous’.⁶ At the turn of the fourth century, brigandage was so bad that in some areas people were allowed to carry arms in self-defence, the worst-hit provinces being those affected by German invasions.⁷ By now many public buildings were in ruins, citizens were forbidden to change occupations, permits were required for an absence from town (people were always trying to leave, to find work on the land). After the late fifth century, there is no record of the Senate. Taxation was increased, and increased again. A new Latin word, Romania, was coined, to describe the civilised life of the Roman world, as distinct from savage barbarism.⁸

As ever, though, we do well not to exaggerate. Many of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy managed to keep their estates intact, even during the period of Germanic occupation. Fifth-century authors still managed to compile works which praised Rome and even listed her achievements. Again according to Joseph Vogt, the workshops of the potters and weavers ‘appear to have suffered little interference from the storm’. The Visigothic king Theodoric I and his sons were initiated into Latin literature and Roman law by Avitus, and were grateful.⁹ There are signs of dual law operating in the former empire: Roman law for the Romans, Burgundian law (with lighter penalties) for the Burgundians.¹⁰ It was messy and, at times no doubt, unsatisfactory. But it was not complete chaos.

The picture which has emerged, therefore, is of one where the barbarians did as much damage as was necessary to instil their authority, while at the same time appreciating the superiority of the Roman civilisation, or at least large parts of it. We have to be careful, therefore, in attributing to the Franks, Vandals, Goths and others the blame for the loss of learning that undoubtedly seems to have occurred at this time. There were other reasons.

This brings us back to Christianity. As was mentioned above, in early antiquity religious toleration had been the rule rather than the exception, but that changed with the animosity with which the pagans and Christians regarded one another.¹¹ We should not overlook the change that had come about in men’s attitudes with the arrival of Christianity as a state religion. There was an overwhelming desire to ‘surrender to the new divine powers which bound men inwardly’ and ‘a need for’ suprahuman revelation. As a result, the thinkers of the period were not much interested in (or were discouraged from) unravelling the secrets of the physical world: ‘The supreme task of Christian scholarship was to apprehend and deepen the truths of revelation.’¹² Whereas paganism had imposed few restrictions on the intellectuals of Rome, Christianity actively rejected scientific inquiry. The scientific study of the heavens could be neglected, said Ambrose, bishop of Milan (374–397) at the time it was the capital of the western empire, ‘for wherein does it assist our salvation?’ The Romans had been more than comfortable with the notion, first aired in Greece, that the earth was a globe. In his Natural History, Pliny had written ‘that human beings are distributed all around the earth, and stand with their feet pointing towards each other, and that the top of the sky is alike for them all and the earth trodden underfoot at the centre in the same way from any direction.’ Three hundred years later, Lactantius challenged this. ‘Is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? . . . that the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth?’¹³ Lactantius’ view became so much the accepted doctrine that, in 748, a Christian priest named Vergilius was convicted of heresy for believing in the Antipodes.

The whole structure of Christian thinking was at times inimical to pagan/classical traditions. Rhetoric provides one example. Traditionally, of course, rhetoric could not be separated from the individual who composed it. But in the Christian mind, it was God who spoke through his preachers. This is based on Paul, who stressed the power of the spirit – it is the spirit rather than the individual who speaks, which ultimately means that philosophy and independent thinking in general is rejected as a means of finding truth.¹⁴ Gregory of Nyssa was one of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers, great orators who were sympathetic to classical philosophy. Even he was moved to say: ‘The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone – to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.’ By the same token, the dialectical method – as epitomised by Aristotle, for example – was also outlawed: there can be no dialogue with God. It was largely as a result of this that, save for two works of logic, Aristotle vanished from the western world, preserved only because his works were hoarded by Arab interpreters. Scholars in Alexandria and Constantinople continued to read Aristotle and Plato but, as was mentioned above, saw their role as custodial rather than to add new ideas. In 529, as we have seen, Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens on the grounds that philosophical speculation had become an aid to heretics and an ‘inflamer’ of disputes among Christians. Many scholars headed east, first to Edessa, a Mesopotamian city housing several famous schools, then across the border with Persia to Nisibis, where the university was considered the best in Asia. This, says Richard Rubenstein, is how the Arabs inherited Aristotle and the treasures of Greek science. The Nestorians, who were famous as linguists, translated much Greek science and medicine into Syriac, then the international language spoken in Syria and Mesopotamia.¹⁵

Medicine provides other examples of the Christian closing of the western mind. The Greeks had not been especially successful in finding cures for illnesses but they had introduced the method of observation of symptoms, and the idea that illness was a natural process. In the second century AD, in Rome, the great physician Galen had argued that a supreme god had created the body ‘with a purpose to which all its parts tended’.¹⁶ This fitted Christian thinking so completely that, around 500, Galen’s writings were collected into sixteen volumes and served as canonical medical texts for a thousand years. It marked the abandonment of the scientific approach in favour of magic and miracles. Sacred springs and shrines were now invoked as cures, the plague was understood as ‘sent by God’ as a punishment, with medieval paintings in Italy still showing pestilence as being delivered from God through arrows, as had originally been the case with Apollo, more than a thousand years before in Homer’s world. Hippocrates had described epilepsy as a natural illness; as late as the fourteenth century, John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended that the malady could be cured by the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog. This approach was summed up most succinctly by John Chrysostom, a keen disciple of Paul. ‘Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words.’¹⁷ It was not just indifference. Philastrius of Brescia implied that the search for empirical knowledge was itself heresy. ‘There is a certain heresy concerning earthquakes that they come not from God’s command but, it is thought, from the very nature of the elements . . . Paying no attention to God’s power, they [the heretics] presume to attribute the motions of force to the elements of nature . . . like certain foolish philosophers who, ascribing this to nature, know not the power of God.’¹⁸ Reports of miracles in the sixth century were much greater than in the third and the very idea of causation as a natural process was downplayed.

In some Christian quarters even books – texts – were a source of deep suspicion: they might be full of error and they might record traffic with the occult. In the account of the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, detailing the actions of Valens, the eastern emperor in the fourth century, who conducted a persecution of pagan practices, he said that ‘throughout the Oriental provinces, owners of books, through fear of a like fate, burned their entire libraries, so great was the terror that had seized upon all’.¹⁹ His editor remarked ‘Valens greatly diminished our knowledge of the ancient writers, in particular of the philosophers.’ Several observers noted that books ceased to be readily available and that learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve.²⁰ In Alexandria it was noted that ‘philosophy and culture are now at a point of a most horrible desolation’. Edward Gibbon reported a story that Bishop Theophilus of the city allowed the library to be pillaged, ‘and nearly twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice’. Basil of Caesarea lamented the atrophy of debate in his home city. ‘Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the agora, nothing more of all that made our city famous.’²¹ Charles Freeman tells us that when Isidore of Seville began compiling his collection of Etymologies, a summary of sacred and secular knowledge, at the end of the sixth century, and although he had his own library, he was already finding it difficult to locate the texts of classical authors that he lacked. ‘The authors stood,’ he said, ‘like blue hills on the far horizon and now it was hard to place them even chronologically.’

Rome was virtually devoid of books by the middle of the fourth century, according to Luciano Canfora. The twenty-nine famous lending libraries had been closed, for one reason or another. In Alexandria, in 391, the Christian archbishop had destroyed the great library of the temple of Serapis, second only to the Mouseion in size and prestige. The Mouseion itself survived for the time being, largely because it appears to have become a repository of sacred Christian texts, though they were ill-copied parchments ‘crawling with errors’ because Greek was more and more a foreign language. But when the Arabs conquered Alexandria, just before Christmas in 640, the chief librarian of the Mouseion pleaded with the conqueror, Amr ibn-al-As, to spare the library. He passed the request back to the caliph, who remarked ‘If their content is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.’²² The books were thus distributed around the public baths as fuel for the stoves. The burning scrolls heated the bath waters of Alexandria for six months. Only the works of Aristotle escaped the flames.

The papacy had a library, or at least an archive to begin with, which appears to have survived intact (in general, and for obvious reasons, Christian libraries survived better than non-Christian ones). It was established by Damasus I (366–384), who installed it in the church of San Lorenzo which he had built himself at the family home, on a site close to what is now the Cancelleria. Later it was moved to the Lateran Palace, where the papal offices were. Over time, bibles and manuals and various Christian writings were added, many of them heretical. In one room of the Lateran Palace, dated to the seventh century, a mural has been found, showing St Augustine seated before a book, with a scroll in one hand. This room, it is presumed, was the original papal library.²³

Another ancient library was that at Seville, in Spain, which belonged to Isidore, bishop there from 600 to 636. This library certainly included many secular works as well as Christian texts, even though the bishop thought the secular works unfit reading for his monks.²⁴ Isidore’s books have disappeared but we know what was in his library because he composed a series of verses to go over the doors and bookshelves. The first verse begins plainly enough: ‘Here are masses of books, both sacred and secular.’ From the other verses we know that, among the Christian authors, he possessed Origen, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome, while among secular authors there were Paulus (poetry), Gaius (law), Hippocrates and Galen (both medicine).

However, one by one, the schools of classical antiquity closed (Justinian, remember, had shut the philosophical school in Athens in 529), so that by the middle of the sixth century only Constantinople and Alexandria remained. This was accompanied by a narrowing in the range of literature that was read. ‘After the third century it becomes more and more uncommon to find any educated man showing knowledge of texts that have not come down to the modern world.’²⁵ Modern scholars believe this reflects a state of affairs whereby a prominent schoolmaster (Eugenius is a candidate) selected a syllabus that was so successful that all other schools copied it. ‘With the general decline of culture and impoverishment of the empire no texts outside this range were read and copied often enough to be guaranteed survival.’²⁶ For example, seven plays by Aeschylus were selected and seven by Sophocles – and that is all we know.

By the end of the sixth century the decline of learning and culture had become serious. The only vital educational institutions in the main part of the empire were the imperial university at Constantinople, founded around 425, and a clerical academy under the direction of the patriarchate. The school at Alexandria was by now isolated. And, before things could get better, there was the notorious controversy over icon-worship (see below, this chapter). For three centuries – from the middle of the sixth century to the middle of the ninth (the true dark ages) – there is no record of the study of the classics and hardly any education. Very few manuscripts of any kind remain from this period.

The few schools of the time were located at Athens, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Alexandria, Gaza and Beirut. The latter, and Antioch, were devastated in earthquakes in the sixth century, and Antioch was also sacked by the Persians in 540. We cannot say, therefore, that the loss of learning, which was pronounced by the sixth century, was due to any one overriding reason: natural causes, the barbarian invasions, the rise of Christianity, the rise of the Arabs – all played their part. But by the end of the sixth century there were fewer and fewer signs of a literary life. There was, for example, a decline – almost a disappearance – in the knowledge of Greek. Even if Constantinople had never been a completely bilingual city, both Latin and Greek had always been well understood (Greek was, for example, Justinian’s first language). The most famous example of this state of affairs is a letter by Pope Gregory the Great in 597 which says that in Constantinople ‘it is not possible to obtain a satisfactory translation’.²⁷ And though the age of Justinian (527–565) was brilliant in many respects, there are grounds for thinking that book production had already begun to decline during his reign. Certainly, the withdrawal of the Greek and Latin worlds from each other was a crucial development. By the sixth century virtually no western scholar was able to understand Greek.

But this was a near-death experience for the book, and for learning, not, as it turned out, terminal decline. One reason for this is that a concerted effort was made to preserve the classics, in Byzantium. In an address to the Emperor Constantius on 1 January 357, the Byzantine scholar Themistius (c. 317 – c. 388) outlined a plan ‘to guarantee the survival of ancient literature’.²⁸ He was a man of such insight as to see that a scriptorium ‘for the production of new copies of the classics’, the survival of which was alleged to be threatened by neglect, would ensure that Constantinople would become a centre of literary culture. The authors most in need of this treatment were specified as Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Isocrates and Thucydides. ‘But’, continues Themistius, ‘the successors of Homer and Hesiod, and philosophers such as Chrysippus, Zeno and Cleanthes, together with a whole range of other authors, are not in common circulation, and their texts will now be saved from oblivion.’²⁹ In 372 an order was issued to the city prefect, Clearchus, to appoint four scribes skilled in Greek and three in Latin ‘to undertake the transcription and repair of books’.³⁰ Fifteen years had passed since Themistius had had the idea, but at last it was done. He had less influence than he had hoped.

Another reason for the eventual survival of classical ideas is that there was a set of writers who have become known as the ‘Latin transmitters’, men – encyclopaedists, mainly – who kept alive classical thought (or at least the texts of classical thought) and provided a crucial bridge between the fourth century and the Carolingian renaissance four hundred years later. Marcia Colish, among others, has described their work.

The first of these transmitters was Martianus Capella, a contemporary of Augustine and a fellow north African. Capella was probably a Christian but his religion is referred to nowhere in his writings. His main work bears a strange title: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. The structure and text of the book are no less bizarre, but in a very readable way, which make it clear that he at least thought that the seven liberal arts were under threat at that time and needed preservation.³¹ There were seven liberal arts – and not nine – partly because of the biblical text, in the Book of Wisdom: ‘Wisdom hath builded herself an house, she hath hewn out seven pillars.’ But medicine and law were omitted by Martianus (and hence from the arts faculties of medieval universities, and some modern liberal arts colleges) because they were not ‘liberal’, but concerned with ‘earthly’ things.³² The action of The Marriage takes place on Mount Olympus and, to begin with, Mercury is the centre of attention. Having spent so much of his time acting as messenger for the gods, in their quarrels and in particular their love affairs, he has decided to seek a wife himself. He is introduced to Philology, the language arts, and the introduction is a great success. The other gods agree to confer divinity on Philology and after the couple have exchanged vows, Apollo announces his wedding gift – seven servants. ‘These servants turn out to be none other than the seven liberal arts.’ Each art now gives an account of herself, all being suitably attired. Grammar, for instance, is an old woman with grey hair, carrying a knife and a file, ‘with which she excises barbarisms and smoothes the rough edges off awkward phrases’. Rhetoric is taller, much younger, far more beautiful, ‘whose colourful dress displays the flowers of rhetoric . . .’³³ The arguments brought to bear by Martianus rely on Greeks – Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy. Bizarre it may have been, but The Marriage of Philology and Mercury was very popular and helped keep alive at least the basics of Greek thought.

Boethius, the second of the transmitters, wrote his most famous work Consolation of Philosophy while he was in jail, awaiting execution. He had no reference library on which to fall back, just what was already inside his head. Before that, however, he had set himself the task of translating the entire works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. His premature death meant that he did not complete his task, but his translation of Aristotle’s logic was the only text of the great philosopher available in the west in the early medieval years, ensuring that some Greek philosophy was preserved. At the same time, Boethius’ conviction that his translations were necessary reinforces the view that he was persuaded of the importance of Plato and Aristotle and that there was little instruction in these authors available at the time.

The book he wrote in jail, the Consolation, is designed as an elegant dialogue between Boethius himself and Lady Philosophy, and its subject – why a just man suffers – made it an immediate success. Lady Philosophy is an extraordinary figure: her head touches the clouds and the hem of her Greek-style dress is decorated with the words ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’. She begins by chasing away all the other muses in which Boethius had sought earlier consolation.

Cassiodorus was a contemporary of Boethius and, like him, rose to a high position in the government of the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric. And, like Boethius, Cassiodorus was concerned about the decline of Greek studies in the west. (Unlike Boethius, however, he lived to a ripe old age.³⁴) His first idea was to found a Christian university in Rome. He approached the pope but, given the political unrest of the era, he was turned down. Cassiodorus next turned to the growing monastic movement. Using his own money, he founded (at Vivarium, in southern Italy) the first monastery that became a centre of scholarship, a practice followed by many other monasteries as the centuries passed. He collected manuscripts, of both Christian and secular works, and served as head of the school for the rest of his life. Cassiodorus shared the basic assumptions of the time in which he lived, namely that the main aim of education was the study of theology, church history, and biblical exegesis, but he also believed that, first, a proper grounding in the liberal arts was needed. He therefore prepared a kind of ‘syllabus of universal knowledge’ – this was his major work as a transmitter, the Institutes Concerning Divine and Human Readings, and appended to it a bibliography of classical writings that, he said, would aid monks’ understanding.³⁵ Besides identifying titles that should be read, Cassiodorus outlined the history of each of the liberal arts, even including authors whose views were by then dated, but who had been important in their time. This set of ideas became the basis of the curriculum in many monastic schools of the Middle Ages and in order to be able to read the classical texts more copies of these books were needed. Therefore, it was at Cassiodorus’ instigation that monasteries began to copy selected classical works, another reason why they became centres of scholarship. Cassiodorus also produced a book on spelling, which has generally been taken as proof that, in addition to the decline in Greek studies, there was at the same time a fall in Latin literacy as well.

We have already encountered Isidore, the early seventh-century bishop of Seville. His most important work in the transmission of ideas was the Etymologies, the title of which reflects his view, not uncommon at a time fascinated by symbolism and allegory, that the road to knowledge led through words and their origins. He made many mistakes (just because the origins of words are similar does not mean that the objects or ideas they represent are similarly related), but he had an extraordinary range – biology, botany, philology, astronomy, law, monsters, stones and metals, war, games, shipbuilding and architecture, in addition to Christian subjects. The gusto and relish which he brought to his task reveals, says Marcia Colish, his view ‘that if he did not save culture, armed with his own extensive knowledge and the weapons of scissors and paste, no one else would’. Despite its shortcoming, in the early Middle Ages Etymologies became a standard reference work. (As Charles Freeman has pointed out, ‘reference’ is the key word. ‘There is little evidence that until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries these texts had any inspirational role.’³⁶)

The historian Norman Cantor argues that the transmitters were neither original thinkers, nor yet masters of language, but schoolteachers and textbook writers. Nonetheless, given the dangers of the time, and the attitude of many Christians to classical and pagan thought, perhaps it is just as well that the transmitters had the values they did. Thanks to them, the classical tradition (or a proportion of classical texts) was kept alive.

Despite the fact that the true dark ages, from the point of view of ideas, extend from the middle of the sixth century to the middle of the ninth, two important changes in the history of the book nonetheless took place. One was the arrival from the Orient of a new writing material – paper. This became an alternative to papyrus about the end of the eighth century, when the Arabs are believed to have learned the secret of the technique from some Chinese prisoners of war taken at the battle of Tales, in 751.³⁷ Certain late papyri from Egypt show scraps of the new material but the oldest Greek book written entirely on paper is generally agreed to be the famous codex in the Vatican Library (Vat. Gr. 2200) usually dated to c. 800.³⁸ Papyrus was still being used in western Europe in the eleventh century but even so the use of paper caught on quite quickly, possibly because the Arabs controlled the supply of papyrus leaving Egypt and because what was allowed out was of inferior quality. To begin with, the Byzantines imported paper from the Arabs, but by the thirteenth century there was a flourishing paper-making industry in Italy.

At much the same time, there was a second innovation which also reduced the amount of paper/papyrus needed for making books. This was a major change in the type of writing which was in common use. Traditionally, the uncial script, as it was known, consisting entirely of what we would call capital letters, had been fairly large. Though it was technically feasible for scribes to write uncial script in a small hand, in practice this does not seem to have happened very much, making it particularly expensive when used with parchment which, as N. G. Wilson reminds us, could only be produced from the slaughter of animals.³⁹ To save on costs, parchment was often used more than once. A parchment with more than one text on it is known as a palimpsest, from the Greek palin psao, ‘I smooth over again’. Some authors, for example Sallust and certain writings of Cicero, are known only from the lower, half-rubbed-out scripts of palimpsests. Various experiments in what is now called the miniscule script were made around the turn of the ninth century but most were difficult to read. However, the first precisely dated book written in a clear and accomplished cursive miniscule script is the famous gospel book named after the archimandrite Porphyri Uspenskij, who picked it up on one of his visits to the monasteries of the Levant.⁴⁰ It is dated to 835.

Besides the date of the new script being uncertain, the place of its invention is also unknown, though one plausible hypothesis is that it was developed at the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople (a leaf of the Uspenskij gospels records the obituaries of certain members of the community, some of whom are known to have been expert calligraphers). From 850 on, whenever a new copy of a literary text was needed, the chances were that it would be composed in the new script; and after 950 it invariably was (few books in capitals are now extant).⁴¹ The new script was extremely significant for the preservation of ancient texts – a greater number of words could be fitted on to a page, meaning costs were reduced. In addition, the ligatures that were developed between letters (beginning with e, f, r and t) meant that writing was quicker. Other improvements included accents and ‘breathings’, aids to the reader, the beginnings of what we call punctuation. These were not in regular use, nor were they standardised, but a beginning had been made.⁴² At much the same time – i.e., at the end of the ninth century – the scribes began to mark word division, and guidance in the use of accents and punctuation was made a regular part of book production, at least at the Stoudios monastery. Abbreviations were common: p’ (= post), ⊃ (= con), li° (= libro). The question mark (?) evolved at this time, though Bernhard Bischoff found ten different forms; 300 might be written iii^c and new letters were invented: ☉ and Δ, for example.

In parallel with this, around 860, Bardas – the assistant emperor – revived the imperial university in Constantinople, which had disappeared in the preceding centuries. The school he founded was directed by Leo the Philosopher, together with Theodore the Geometrician, Theodegius the Astronomer and Cometas, a literary scholar. We now know that some ancient manuscripts had only survived in single copies and, to an extent, the school founded by Bardas became the official repository of these unique objects.⁴³ These were old uncial scripts and their transliteration into the new miniscule was now undertaken by the scholars of the ninth century. As Reynolds and Wilson say, ‘It is largely owing to their activity that Greek literature can still be read, for the text of almost all authors depends ultimately on one or more books written in minuscule script at this date or shortly after, from which all later copies are derived.’⁴⁴

It is also thanks to scholars in ninth-century Byzantium that we are aware, not just of what has been saved, but also what has been lost. A number of scholars, notably Photius (c. 810–c. 893), recorded the books they had read, or at least were aware of, and these listings contain many works we know about only from these sources. For example, before going on a long and dangerous journey, in 855, possibly to exchange prisoners of war with the Arabs, Photius wrote to his brother Tarasius a summary of books that he had read over a long period of time. Some accounts were two lines long, many much longer, but his Bibliotheca, as it is called, contained 280 sections, called codices, each related to a text in his possession. In this book Photius comments on a wide selection of pagan and Christian works.

He was born into a well-off, well-educated and well-connected family that was iconophile. During the persecution of iconophiles that took place in 832–833 (see below, this chapter), Photius’ family was sent into exile, where both his parents died. When the iconophiles regained influence in Constantinople, in the 840s, he was able to return and he and his brother rose to high rank in the government. (Among those who promoted him was Bardas.) Thereafter Photius had a stormy career but still managed to write. It is unclear when the Bibliotheca was completed – dates range from 838 to 875. The work seems always to have been intended as a compendium of what Photius had read, as is shown by the title he himself gave to it: Inventory and Enumeration of the Books That We Have Read, Of Which Our Beloved Brother Tarasius Requested a General Analysis.⁴⁵ The Bibliotheca lists 280 books, all but one of which Photius claimed to have read, but he left out the books that a well-educated Byzantine (like his brother) would have been familiar with, such as Homer, Hesiod and the great Greek playwrights. Where the Bibliotheca is of interest, in this context, however, is for the titles he mentions that are now lost – forty-two works in all.

Among the lost works is a biography of Alexander, by one Amyntianus (a book dedicated to Marcus Aurelius); a Collection of Wonders, by Alexander of Myndus (this work, says Warren Treadgold, in his study of Photius, falls into the genre of ‘paradoxography’); a work entitled For Origen, by an anonymous fourth-century writer; Marvellous Animals, by Damascius of Damascus (roughly 458–533); On Difficult Words in Plato, by Boëthus (first/second century); a book on medicine by Dionysius of Aegeae (first/third century); an anonymous life of Pythagoras from the third/second century BC; and On St Paul, by John Chrysostom. Besides the forty-two works totally lost, there are a further eighty-one works known only through the Bibliotheca. Which means that, of 280 titles, fully 123 (44 per cent) are now effectively missing. This is a heart-breaking statistic.

We have seen that, between the middle of the sixth century, and the middle of the ninth, little was accomplished in the realm of scholarship. That this period comprised the true dark ages is supported by the fate of the cities of Byzantium – cities being the centre of intellectual life, as well as of the theatres, the baths, the hippodrome and the craft workshops. Until the fifth century, the Byzantine empire was an aggregate of fine cities – one handbook listed more than nine hundred though, as Cyril Mango says, by the time of Justinian (527–565), that number would have almost doubled. Most of these were laid out in the Roman style, with regular streets, two main avenues, the cardo and the decumanus, meeting at right angles and terminating at the city gates (the cities were walled, against the threat of barbarian attack). The avenues were wide, and contained colonnades, where the shops were located. By our standards they were small: Nicaea, for example, was 1,500 metres from north to south and east to west. The average population of a provincial Byzantine city would have been between 5,000 and 20,000, with Antioch at 200,000 and Constantinople half as big again.⁴⁶

As a result of barbarian attack, however, one city after another was brought low. From Syria to the Balkans, Pergamum, Scythopolis, Singidunum (Belgrade) and Serdica (Sofia) were all destroyed or the population vanished. Plague, earthquakes and other natural disasters added to the chronic violence, making a bad situation worse. The Arab geographer Ibn Khordadhbeh (c. 840) recorded that in his time there were only five cities in Asia Minor: Ephesus, Nicaea, Amorium, Ancyra and Samala, to which could be added a handful of fortresses. There was a sharp decline in the number of bronze coins in circulation and at Stobi, in the Balkans, according to Cyril Mango, no coins have been found dating after the seventh century.⁴⁷

Although Constantinople was the exception to this picture, it was not completely immune. Its population almost certainly peaked around the year 500, after which it was hit by plague and declined. This retreat was long-lasting, reaching a low point around 750. In 740 when the walls of the city were devastated by earthquake, the local population lacked the resources to rebuild them and after the plague of 747 the emperor sought to rebuild the population by deliberate immigration from the Aegean islands. Even so, a guidebook of 760 depicts the city as ‘abandoned and ruined’.⁴⁸ It was only from the end of the eighth century that recovery was sustained.

Byzantine Christian art, important though it is in any history of ideas, is nonetheless very different from later ideas of art. From Giotto on, art in Europe at least was not only an account of changing forms but of artists, identifiable individuals, who made innovations, who had their own views, who were influenced by others and in turn influenced those who came after. In Byzantium, on the other hand, artists were looked upon as craftsmen and little else. (Only one Byzantine painter is known by name, ‘Theophanes the Greek’, active in Russia in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.) The same applies in architecture: we know that Anthemius and Isidore built Justinian’s Agia Sophia in Constantinople, but that is all. Because Byzantine art evolved so slowly it is virtually impossible to date. That does not detract from its importance, however, because it is the first fully fledged Christian art, the earliest art to show how Christian ideas – iconography – found visual form.

In view of what happened later, it is relevant to begin by noting that Jesus never suggested that figural images offended him.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, for the early Christians visual art was much less important than scripture, and so they never developed a programme of symbols and images. When Diocletian persecuted the Christians in 303 their church at Cirta contained scriptures, chalices and bronze candlesticks but there was no mention of an altar. In fact, prior to the second century there is really nothing that can be called Christian art. Despite Jesus’ neutral attitude, many early Christians, perhaps under the influence of Jews, had no place for visual art. Clement, bishop of Alexandria in the third century, told his charges that although Christians were forbidden to make idols, as the pagans did, they were allowed to make signs (such as a fish or a ship) to indicate ownership or as a signature. Clement also allowed other images – the dove, for instance, or the anchor. The dove was a symbol of the Christian in the world, after Matthew 10: 16: ‘I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.’

Byzantine art ‘is the art of the later Roman Empire adapted to the needs of the Church’.⁵⁰ The first real blossoming took place at the time of Constantine’s conversion, when he ordered a spate of splendid churches to be built. Before the fourth century, there was no such thing as Christian architecture. The early Christians used any convenient structure, which they called the domus ecclesiae, house for the church (community). The first churches – still recognisable today around the eastern end of the Mediterranean – took on a form likewise used by the pagans: the basilica, a rectangular hall, colonnaded, with an elevated bema at one end. Basilica, a Greek word meaning simply a large hall, was first used by Christians to apply to the seven churches of Rome established by Constantine.⁵¹

But the earliest catacombs in Rome, and the very early chapel at Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates, show that even before Constantine, Christians had evolved certain visual traditions, possibly based on an ancient illustrated version of the Septuagint. These were scenes from the Old Testament (the Fall of Man, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Crossing of the Red Sea) though the story of Jonah was a special favourite, because he was swallowed by a fish for three days before being thrown up on to the shore. Christians saw echoes here of baptism and resurrection. In the earliest depictions of Jesus, he is young and beardless; the nimbus does not appear until the fourth century.⁵² The earliest example of a New Testament cycle in a monumental context is in the church of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna, dating to around 500, and in an illustrated manuscript in the Codex Rossanensis (now in Paris) and the Syriac Rabula Codex, now in Florence. These date from slightly later but both underline the idea that an established iconography was in existence, in an ‘authoritative form’ by, roughly speaking, AD 500. Some of these codices were sumptuous – St Jerome refers to them contemptuously as ‘purple codices’, which may not have been meant to be read, simply for use in ritual.

The other feature which early Christian art absorbed from imperial Rome was the trappings of the court. As Lawrence Nees puts it, ‘at least in iconographic terms it is tempting to speak of a “conversion of Christianity” to a wholesale embrace of Roman and specifically imperial conceptions’.⁵³ Settings became more theatrical, the imperial purple was used more and more for holy figures, and important personages were rendered bigger than anyone else, often bigger than life-size. In the mausoleum of Galla Placida at Ravenna Jesus is no longer dressed as a shepherd: ‘he is mantled in a purple tunic with golden stripes’ (as Jesus Pantocrator, ‘the ruler of all’). In other images at Ravenna he is shown receiving acclaim from the apostles as an emperor receives tribute from his subjects.⁵⁴ ‘From the early fourth century on, the enthroned image of the Christian God suddenly becomes a central element of Christian iconography’, and this idea of introducing opulence generally into Christian art, into the Christian ideal, was nothing less than revolutionary, given the faith’s earlier appeal to the poor and outcast.⁵⁵ Slightly later than the introduction of the majesty of empire into Christian art, was the expansion of narrative. This might have occurred in the fourth century after the first basilicas began to be erected, providing more space on their walls, but in fact the breakthrough didn’t occur until the fifth century, possibly inspired by the cycle of poems produced by Prudentius in the early 400s. Now the narratives were strung together chronologically as they occurred in the scriptures, rather than thematically. It was in these narratives that much Christian iconography was worked out, based on a close reading of the new (late fourth-/early fifth-century) Latin Bible (Jerome’s Vulgate).⁵⁶

At the end of the sixth century an important change took place across the Christian world in regard to beliefs about images. Instead of regarding images as representations of people in the great Christian passion, more and more worshippers came to regard the images themselves as holy. This ‘cult of images’ was most intense in the eastern half of the Christian world, in effect the Byzantine empire, and may have had something to do with its relative proximity to the Holy Land, Palestine. Pilgrims to the Holy Land often returned with relics or souvenirs of one kind or another, such as stones from special sites that were regarded as in some way quasidivine (Justinian had sent a team of craftsmen to Jerusalem). This practice gradually spread throughout the West and even Rome itself was not immune: the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace houses an eighth-century image of Jesus that, in the Middle Age at least, was itself regarded as holy, and was brought out at times of crisis.

The change of attitude towards images is inferred from two specific developments. One, there was an increase in their portability, suggesting they were used at home and when travelling, not just on tombs or in churches. Two, there was a tendency to reduce or remove action from the image, ‘which conveys the holy figure as if divine, perhaps awaiting the holder’s invocation to come alive.’⁵⁷ (It is this ‘frozen’ quality that has lent itself to our use of the word ‘iconic’.) Despite this, and despite the fact that the scriptures give absolutely no information about the appearance of Jesus or the Apostles, or the Virgin Mary, by the sixth century Christian authors were providing descriptions in accordance with what they believed was tradition (often derived from visions). In one account, for example, St Peter was described as ‘of medium height, with a receding hairline, white skin, pale complexion, eyes as dark as wine, a thick beard, big nose, eyebrows that meet . . .’ Christ is shown as bearded, long-haired, haloed, dressed in white and gold, holding a scroll with one hand, with his arm raised in authority.⁵⁸ The physical features were invariably assumed to be related to spiritual qualities. Some of the images were regarded as of miraculous origin and described as acheiropoietai, meaning ‘not made by human hands’.⁵⁹

To us, today, icons are highly stylised but that is not how they were experienced at the time. To the Byzantines, an icon was a real likeness which fully depicted the actual features of the holy figure shown. This is why the images were not allowed to change – they were a true record of someone sacred. In 692, at the Quinisext Council, a new approach to the representation of the human form had been sanctioned. Before that date, Christ had been shown as a lamb but this was now dispensed with. Henceforth, he could be shown as a human likeness. ‘The drama of the church thus came down off the walls and on to the iconostasis, which separated the truly holy part of the church from the rest.’ As Cyril Mango has written, icons were the visual equivalents of hagiographies: ‘The faithful could gaze on their heroes (one of whom would surely fit with anyone’s aspirations, or address their fears) as they worshipped Christ.’ Hagiography emerged as a distinctive genre at this time.⁶⁰

This was too much for some people and their anger was further kindled by the fact that Jesus’ image was allowed on to coins by Justinian II. In the middle of the eighth century a sharp reaction set in against the worship of ‘holy images’ and this led to the so-called iconoclast controversy, which lasted from 754 to 843. Several reasons lay behind this battle of ideas, which had significant consequences for the concept of papal authority as well as for the expression of Christian art. In the first place lay the feeling that the making of images of Christ was blasphemous, that the divine nature of God, its very immateriality, could not by definition be rendered in any intelligible way and that to do so implied that Jesus was not divine, an attitude that accorded broadly with the views of the notorious Arian heretical sect (see above, Chapter 8). Second was the view that the depiction of Christ and of saints was mere idolatry and marked a return to pagan-like practices. And third, the iconoclasts argued that the cult of images was essentially a new phenomenon that violated the earliest and purest phases of Christianity, when there had been no interest in images (which is why the scriptures had no interest in the appearance of Jesus or the apostles).⁶¹

These arguments lay behind the church Council of Hieria, in 754, held under the auspices of the emperor Constantine V, which officially condemned the veneration of images and sought their destruction. As ever, there was more to it than that. Two further reasons lay behind the actions of the iconoclastic emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries. One is that the men who came to power in Byzantium in those years were from the east and so were much more influenced by the traditions of the Middle East, in particular the Jews and the Arab Muslims, both of whom prohibited images in their places of worship. Alternatively, the iconoclast controversy may be seen as an attempt by the Byzantine emperors to extend their power. On this reading, the emperors found an obstacle to their aims in the activities in particular of Greek monks, who had become hugely popular via a series of allegedly miracle-working icons – which moved, or bled – and were kept in monasteries.⁶²

Because of this, because of the strongly held views of the pope of the time, Gregory II, a follower of Gregory the Great, who believed that images in art were vital as a means of education and religious instruction for the poor and illiterate, the iconoclast controversy turned into a tussle over papal authority. Gregory II sent a bellicose letter to Constantinople, accusing the emperor of interfering in doctrinal matters that were not his concern and (somewhat optimistically) threatening force if he should attempt to do so again. From this moment on, the papacy turned to the western kings, in the first place Pippin, leader of the Franks, for protection. The emperor replied by transferring ecclesiastical jurisdiction of south Italy and Dalmatia from Rome to Constantinople, and the split between the Roman Church and what we today call the Greek Orthodox was begun.⁶³

During the most bitter stages of the iconoclast campaign many images were destroyed, portable icons were burned, and murals and mosaics were at the least whitewashed over, or scraped off completely. Illuminated manuscripts were cut or otherwise mutilated (when they weren’t incinerated), and liturgical plate was melted down. But this too was a near-death rather than a holocaust. The damage was worse in Constantinople itself and in Asia Minor than in other places – in other words, as Cyril Mango says, ‘where the power was’. The iconoclasts certainly succeeded in reducing the quantity of Christian art, but they did not fulfil their aim to eradicate it entirely. There is some evidence that, as a result, mosaic techniques declined, as did the grasp of the human form among painters.⁶⁴

In the churches, instead of human figures, the iconoclasts preferred what they termed ‘neutral’ motifs – animals, birds, trees, ivy and so on. The iconodules (the defenders of sacred images) replied that their opponents were turning God’s house into a fruit shop.⁶⁵ Many – perhaps most – writings of the iconoclasts were themselves destroyed, unfortunately, whereas those of their opponents (St John Damascene, Germanus, Nicephorus) show us history as written by the winners. In the main their arguments explore the scriptural and patristic authority for human likeness, the relation between an image and, say, the saint it depicted and, in particular, what authority there was for representing Christ – his dual nature, both God and man – in an image.

Eventually, after nearly two centuries of terrible conflict (with artists being tortured, having their noses slit or tongues cut out, and/or imprisoned), it was agreed that Christians could depict figures who had actually appeared on earth – that is to say Christ himself, the apostles and saints, and even some angels who had ‘manifested’ themselves in human form on specific occasions (for example, the Annunciation). But no attempt should be made to represent God the Father or the Trinity. A final important refinement was that any likeness must be ‘identical as to person’ – they must be a true rendering, as shown for example, in a mirror; the artist was not free to use his imagination. (One argument for rendering Jesus accurately was so that the faithful could recognise him on Judgement Day.) From this, it followed that traditional images could never be varied, nothing could be added or subtracted, rather in the way reasoned debate and innovation were discouraged elsewhere. By analogy, the same approach was applied to architecture and church decoration. Embellishment remained simple, with what the Byzantines called ‘outside knowledge’ being excluded. This meant there were no allegories, no liberal arts, no labours of the months. All that mattered, all that was allowed, was the central Christian drama – the birth, mission, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. (The Old Testament prophets were allowed, since they had announced the Incarnation.)

It was not only the faces of the Apostles that remained set. Scale and perspective continued to be ignored. The actual size of any one figure in a Byzantine painting is derived from its importance in the story rather than its position in space. This is why Mary, for example, is always bigger than Joseph, and it helps explain why saints may be as big as or bigger than the mountains in the background. Colour was not treated so as to give an impression of distance and figures throw no shadows that might interrupt the serene harmony of the composition. What mattered instead was that all elements of the painting should be bathed equally in celestial light. But, because no change was allowed in iconography, the anonymous artists of Byzantium directed their creativity into an ever more flamboyant and ostentatious use of colour. ‘Byzantine art was far richer in its palette than anything that had gone before, giving rise to pictures which glowed with spirituality, where the gold leaf and other expensive colours sparkled like jewels, real examples of which, in some cases, were encrusted into the images.’⁶⁶

To fully appreciate the first Christian art today we need to make an imaginative leap. Inevitably seen by smoky candlelight, its flickering, iridescent golds and purples and shiny jewels provided magical, mysterious, unchanging majesty and splendour in an uncertain and hostile world. Byzantine basilicas were richly coloured theatres where the point of the drama was that it never changed. ‘That the Byzantines regarded these images as true likenesses gave their basilicas an intense, sacred aura that we can only guess at today.’⁶⁷ These hard-won ideas adopted at the end of the iconoclast controversy, in 843, would remain unaltered for centuries. Not until the great age of cathedral building would change be allowed.

Few would argue with the proposition that Christian art is one of the leading glories of human achievement. All the more remarkable, therefore, that it was sparked at a time when other areas of intellectual activity were in decline. The very forces that produced Ravenna, San Lorenzo in Milan, or the monastery of St Catherine in Mount Sinai, had a dark side, to put alongside the light and colour with which they illuminated the world. The iconoclast controversy reminds us that cruelty and destruction and stupidity are as much the legacy of religious prejudice as are the finer things. That certain works of Cicero should survive only in one copy, and that the under-layer of a palimpsest, emphasises how fragile civilisation is.