The Fading Influence of the East

a united monastic network ruled from a single source was reborn at Cluny.

Liberated from the proprietary system that was choking the life out of contemporary monasticism, Cluny could turn to the restoration of Benedictine monasticism. But it did not do so spontaneously. Its influence was the result of the leadership of a series of visionary abbots whose lengthy periods of governance elevated the network above all other reforming centers. Abbots like Odo (r. 927–942), Maiolus (r. 964–994), Odilo (r. 994–1049), and Hugh the Great (r. 1049–1109) labored tirelessly to restore the healthy ascetical practices that had, in centuries past, supported the union of heaven and earth. Cluny revived Western monasticism and became an equal to the spiritually transformative life of other cloisters in eleventh-century Christendom, such as Athos and the Caves in Kiev. Behind its walls one could once again hope to snatch “a glimpse of paradise.” 8

But outside those walls, Western Christendom was still in shambles. So great was the spiritual disorder of the world in which monastic reformers lived that they were forced to draw a line of division between the world, which in traditional Christian cosmology radiated God’s presence, and the monastery. Only in a “world-weary monasticism,” one historian of the reform movement has noted, could Cluniacs experience “a fulfillment of the first Pentecost, a return to man’s original state and the actual beginning of his future glory.” 9

AS VISIONARIES IN A TIME of decadence, monastic reformers looked to the past to chart the future. The vast spiritual wealth of Eastern Christendom was a possible source of inspiration, as the life of Benedict of Aniane had shown. In fact, historians have recently noted the continued and ironic influence of Eastern Christianity throughout the West on the eve of the Great Division.

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9 Tom Holland, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 164. Bede K. Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background to Citeaux (Washington, D.C.: Cistercian Publications, 1972), 45.

Patterns of worship are a particularly good example of this influence. The principle of “orientation,” by which a Christian temple was built so that the altar table was at its easternmost point, symbolizing paradise (which according to Genesis was located in the east), had historically been more consistently followed in Byzantium. The papal cathedral of Saint John Lateran in Rome, for instance, actually faced westward. Now orientation became a standard throughout the West as well. 10 The expansion and elaboration of liturgical services also continued to follow, as they had in the past, “essentially Byzantine characteristics.” 11 One of the best-known features of Cluniac monasticism was an elaborate liturgical rite, undoubtedly influenced by the rites used in Jerusalem and Constantinople.

The East-to-West cultural exchange was also facilitated by the flow of Greek ascetics who stayed in Western monasteries and in some cases even built new ones. Southern Italy was a center of Eastern Christianity due to its Byzantine heritage and Greek-speaking population. There in Calabria monks had begun to revive the intensive prayer of the heart typical of Egypt’s legendary desert fathers. One of these monks, Nilos of Rossano, left this “new Thebaid” and traveled northward up the peninsula to bring the Eastern practice to Latin monasteries. He helped reintroduce Monte Cassino to the Rule of Saint Basil, from which its founder Benedict had originally drawn elements of his own Rule. Nilos finally settled on the very outskirts of Rome, where in 1004 he founded the Greek-speaking monastery of Grottaferrata. 12

Much more influential for the future of Western Christendom was Peter Damian (d. 1072), who though thoroughly Latin in his identity hailed from Ravenna, the former capital of western Byzantium when, in the time of Justinian, it included all of Italy within its borders. In the eleventh century the city was no longer Byzantine, but it was a reminder that Western culture

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11 12 John Howe, Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 281. Lackner, 59. Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 280.

had once been Eastern. Its sixth-century basilicas were a complement to the much more famous Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. Ravenna had also been the home of Romuald, a monk heavily influenced by Eastern asceticism. Peter was his champion and biographer and communicated many of his ideals to the restless monastics of the eleventh century. Peter was also a contemporary of Nilos and visited the new centers of Eastern piety at Monte Cassino and Rome.

Above all, Peter valued solitary prayer and strict asceticism. Practicing both with a zeal Peter Damian greater than that of perhaps any other monk of his time, he experienced the paradisiacal transformation of life known by eleventh-century predecessors like Romuald. Nor was it any different from that of the Greek Symeon the New Theologian, whose life was first written by Niketas Stethatos at precisely this time. Symeon had been emphatic about the monk’s experience of paradise even now, in this world, equating it with tears of contrition and a vision of the divine light. Similarly, Peter, in a letter to a fellow monk, expressed the conviction that “holy men are able to look even now upon their Creator by the grace of contemplation.” 13

And yet Peter was less sure than his Eastern contemporaries that he really had a hold on paradise. Being filled as they were “by the shining rays of the Divine light,” he was indeed impelled with longing to ascend ever higher toward heaven. Like Symeon, he used the analogy of a bird in flight. But unlike him, he considered his wings to be fundamentally flawed, incapable in their humanity of sustaining, at least in this age, contact with the divine presence. The body was too corruptible in his opinion to allow his spirit to soar for very long. In the end, he lamented, he was like a flying fish, whose wings might break the plane between the waters of the earth and the

13 Patricia McNulty, editor and translator, St. Peter Damian: Selected Writings on the Spiritual Life (New York: Harper Publishers, 1959), 29.

firmament of heaven momentarily, but which would soon plunge back into the dark abyss of the sinful world. 14

Peter Damian’s affinity with Eastern Christian cosmology and anthropology was therefore limited, and in his writings we can observe a striking shift away from its paradisiacal themes. He was not unique in this. His transalpine contemporary John of Fecamp (d. 1079) expressed consistently disparaging views on “this most unhappy life,” and in a treatise entitled On Contempt for the World, Herman of Reichenau (d. 1054) simply grumbled “I am disgusted to live.” 15

Despite such sentiments, Eastern Christian influence in the eleventhcentury West did not come to an end. Nor did it stop at the Alps. Numerous monasteries in France and Germany became homes to Greek monks such as those invited to reside at the episcopal palace of Toul, where, at the end of the tenth century, they celebrated divine services “as it was done in their native land.” 16 All of this was a reminder that on the eve of the Great Schism, the West retained at least some of its ancient Eastern character.

But one must not make too much of Eastern influence at the millennium. Since the time of Charlemagne, the Franks and their descendants had done much to discredit the “Greeks.” Polemicists like Theodulf of Orleans (d. 821) had attacked them as idolaters because of their claim, articulated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, that icons did more than visually illustrate the Scriptures. The iconophobic Franks were unsettled by the Eastern assertion that icons proclaimed the doctrine of the Incarnation. And of course they impugned Eastern Christians for the refusal to adopt the filioque (which was, after all, a Frankish innovation). Ironically, they even claimed that by this refusal it was the Greeks who were deviating from the original Nicene Creed.

In short, while Eastern Christianity had not yet been driven completely out of Western Christendom, its reputation had been greatly diminished by the time the millennium arrived. The lands once ruled by the Franks—France and Germany—were now in the hands of their anti-Greek intellectual heirs.

14 15 16 Ibid., 29–30. Lackner, Eleventh-Century Background, 142. Ibid., 135.