The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer’s name per century which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that Christianity was not the determining cause of the arrest. Civilization progresses by the contact of cultures; and where that is lacking the results are the same under all religious systems. Byzantium presents the symptoms of China, because, like China, it was politically and intellectually isolated for a whole era, under a centralized government which imposed certain norms of life and doctrine, and prevented the variation and mutual reaction that would otherwise have arisen between its provinces. Only inasmuch as it promoted and consecrated such a system was Christianity a primary factor in the resulting arrest of growth. As a matter of fact, it lent itself alternately to division and to petrifaction. In the period to the end of the seventh century, dogma was a source of strife which dismembered the empire; in the period of contracted empire, face to face with the Moslem enemy, religious feeling tended to prevent further disruption, very much as the Church had been unified in the pagan period by persecution.

Within the contracted empire, however, there was no durable progress. Its condensed annals give a picture which even the barbarian West could not outgo. In the period from 668 to 716 seven emperors were dethroned, four of them were put to death, one (while drunk) had his eyes put out, and two more, in addition to two brothers of emperors, had their noses cut off—punishments which in Byzantium became classical. Under Christianity there was certainly more cruelty and demoralization than under early Islam. The Caliph Aboubekr had given to his followers those injunctions: “Be just: the unjust never prosper. Be valiant: die rather than yield. Be merciful: slay neither old men, children, nor women. Destroy neither fruit-trees, grain, nor cattle. Keep your word, even to your enemies.” Only those who refused either to become Moslems or to pay tribute were to be slain. In that spirit the Caliph Moawyah rebuilt their Church for the Christians of Edessa. Fifty years later, Justinian II invaded Armenia, and on driving out the Saracens seized and sold as slaves the majority of the Christian inhabitants, reducing the richest parts of the country to desert. And when, after he had been dethroned, deprived of his nose, and exiled for ten years, he returned to triumph over his enemies, the Greek populace applauded him with Biblical quotations as he sat in the circus with his feet on his rivals’ necks.

The advent of Leo the Isaurian (716) marks an epoch in Byzantine history. Acting as head of the Church, the established function of the eastern emperors, he set himself to check idolatry, first by ordering that the pictures in the churches should be placed high enough to prevent the people from kissing them. On this issue the populace and the lower clergy united against him, to the length of rebellion; and he in turn made his edicts more stringent. Whatever may have been his motives, he acted on principles afterwards founded on by Protestantism; and during a century and a half—save for a relapse from 787 to 813, in which the government was sometimes tyrannically orthodox and sometimes tolerant—his views were more or less fully maintained by succeeding rulers. It is interesting to note that, as repeatedly happened centuries later in the West, a long period of religious strife through the whole State created a party in favour of complete tolerance and liberty of conscience. But though they so far gained ground as to convert the emperor Nicephorus I (802–811), who employed some of them in his ministry, and treated both Paulician heretics and rebels with unusual tolerance, there was no such intellectual life in Byzantium as could long sustain a tolerant policy. It is a miscalculation to suppose, as some do, that the triumph of iconoclasm would have meant the regeneration of the empire. To work regeneration there were needed further forces of variation, since Islam stagnated without image-worship as Byzantium did with it.

Leo the Armenian (813–820), who was averse to image-worship but desirous of keeping the peace, was forced by the zeal of the iconoclastic party and the obstinacy of the orthodox to resume an iconoclastic policy. Under such circumstances numbers of the clergy became temporizers, leaving to the monks the fanatical defence of images; and as Leo himself was capable, with the approbation of both parties, of an act of the grossest treachery toward his enemy the king of the Bulgarians, it is clear that neither iconoclasm nor image-worship was raising the plane of morals. Significantly enough, it was at the beginning of the reign of Michael the Drunkard (842–867), who was professedly orthodox, but openly burlesqued the ceremonies of the Church, that image-worship was definitely restored under the regency of his fanatical mother, Theodora. The great majority were weary of the strife, and many of the iconoclasts had come to the conclusion that relative sanity in religion was not worth fighting for. For the rest, Michael was finally assassinated, as Leo the Armenian had been before him.

It was at this period that Photius, the most learned man of the Dark Ages, became Patriarch of Constantinople, in the teeth of the opposition of the pope of Rome, who after the formal restoration of image-worship had been appealed to, as a champion of orthodoxy, for the decision of some official disputes in the Eastern Church. After his position was assured, Photius effectually fought the Roman claims, completing the schism between the Churches; and in his own sphere he did much for the preservation of learning, and even something for the cultivation of judgment. In theology, it is admitted by one of another school, “he made use of his own reason and sagacity”; and he is notable, in his period and place, for having reached the idea that earthquakes might not be divine portents. But Photius is the high-water mark of Byzantine intelligence; and no man of equal capacity and culture seems to have arisen during the six remaining centuries of the eastern empire.

It is impossible, indeed, to say whether there was not in Byzantium, behind the official scenes, a higher intellectual life. It was from Michael II (“the Stammerer”) that Louis the son of Charlemagne received (824) the copy of the writings of Dionysius “the Areopagite,” from which was made the first Latin translation; and as this writer had a great influence on John Scotus, who may even have acquired his first knowledge of him from that very copy, which he translated afresh, it may be that in Greece also, where Dionysius was much admired and studied among the monks, there were deep thinkers whom he stimulated. But whereas even Scotus could reach few in the West, any higher thought there may have been in the East remained entirely latent. Learning fared better. After Photius, the East produced for posterity the important Lexicon of Suidas, which apparently belongs to the tenth century; and in the twelfth Eustathius of Thessalonica produced his valuable commentary on Homer. But the populace in the East was as ignorant and superstitious as that of the West; and the system of caste occupations or hereditary pursuits made eastern learning even a less communicable influence than western.

In the political life there were fluctuations; and though in all ages alike there were dethronements, assassinations, and mutilations of emperors and of their suspected relatives, the time of the Basilian dynasty (867–1057) was one of relative stability, with even some military glory, and temporary recovery or expansion of territory, as against Saracens and Bulgarians. Still the sum-total of each century’s life was practically stagnation. Under emperors, empresses, or eunuchs, the administration was substantially the same. Alien elements, which might under other conditions have generated new life, had entered the empire with the Slavonians, whose race, after occupying Dalmatia and Illyricum at the wish of Heraclius in the seventh century, flourished and multiplied, and invaded the Peloponnesus early in the ninth. The later iconoclastic emperors were vigorous enough to bring them to submission; but Roman imperialism and Christian ecclesiasticism between them undid all progressive influences, just as the policy of militarism and fanaticism finally did among the Saracens.

The attempts at change, indeed, were many. Conspiracies were chronic; and when one failed the conspirators were blinded according to Byzantine rule: emperors on the other hand were often unmade; but the political machinery remained the same. In the period to Heraclius, the ruling class at Constantinople were mainly of Roman stock; under the Iconoclastic emperors, who were Asiatics, it was mainly Asiatic; later it became substantially Greek, as each party drove out the other; but all alike maintained the old imperial ideals. “Men of every rank,” says the historian Finlay, “were confined within a restricted circle, and compelled to act in one unvarying manner. Within the imperial palace the incessant ceremonial was regarded as the highest branch of human knowledge.... Among the people at large, though the curial system of castes had been broken down, still the trader was fettered to his corporation, and often to his quarter or street ... amidst men of the same profession.... No learning, no talent, and no virtue could conduct either to distinction or wealth, unless exercised according to the fixed formulas that governed the State and the Church. Hence even the merchant, who travelled over all Asia, and who supported the system by the immense duties that he furnished to the government, supplied no new ideas to society, and perhaps passed through life without acquiring any.”

Yet such is the strength of the biological force of variation that even in religion there was chronic heresy. We have seen, in tracing the history of western belief in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, how a strenuous anti-clerical heresy, the Paulician, had arisen and thriven in the East, defying the bloodiest persecution, and developing in the old fashion into a force of hostility to the empire. After that heresy had been thus fatally expelled, others arose. In the twelfth century, under the theological emperor Manuel Comnenus, there was a return to the inexhaustible problem of the incarnation: men disputed as to how God could at the same time be a sacrifice and the offerer thereof; and the emperor himself, convicted of heresy, came round to the orthodox view, whatever it was. Soon the dispute took a new form, over the awkward text “My Father is greater than I”; and the emperor gave an orthodox decision which he engraved on tables of stone for the great Church, denouncing death on all who taught otherwise. As usual, the dispute was not settled, and the later emperor Andronicus was fain to take down the tablets and forbid all discussion on the subject. All the while anti-clerical and anti-ceremonial heresy persisted; and the burning alive of the monk Basil, founder of the Gnostic Bogomiles, did not mend matters. The brutal sack and pillage of Constantinople by the Latin crusaders, and the generation of western tyranny that followed, did much to unify the Greek people of the thirteenth century in a common hatred of their masters, whom they at length cast out; but this, again, meant no new intellectual life. To the last there was a sufficiency of static Greek scholarship to preserve much of the ancient heritage for the time when the Turks should scatter it through the West; but no Byzantine name belongs to the roll of light-givers in the age of the Renaissance.

If we search for the bearing of religion on the popular life during the thousand years of the eastern empire, the conclusion will remain very much the same as that reached by a study of the conditions of the first centuries of established Christianity. Boundless credulity, boundless superstition, and zealous idolatry are the standing features from the seventh century onwards. Conduct was substantially what it had been in pagan times; and whatever might be the legal status of those born in slavery, the myriads of captives enslaved in every successful war can have had no better lot than those of the ancient world. Doubtless the lot of the Byzantine people in the mass was better than that of the westerns of the Dark Ages insofar as they were artisans living under a regular government; but in the rural districts and outlying regions they can have fared no better, either in peace or war. When the Saracens wrested Crete and Sicily from Byzantium early in the ninth century, the majority of the inhabitants seem to have been little loth to turn Moslems. “In almost every case in which the Saracens conquered Christian nations,” says the Christian historian already quoted, “history unfortunately reveals that they owed their success chiefly to the favour with which their progress was regarded by the mass of the people. To the disgrace of most Christian governments, it will be found that their administration was more oppressive than that of the Arabian conquerors.” We have already seen that both the Arabs and the Mongols, as apart from the Turks, were by far the more tolerant. When the Byzantine empire recovered Crete in the tenth century, its rulers planned to exterminate the Saracen population; and though the purpose was not carried out, the Saracens who remained were reduced to virtual serfdom.

Of the moral and intellectual unprogressiveness of Byzantium we may say, finally, that the Christian State, like those of the Saracens and the Turks, was in large measure kept stationary precisely by the relation of constant strife set up by the existence of the enemy. Each was the curse of its antagonist. And Christianity did no more to raise men above that deadlock of enmity than did Islam; nay, the further factor of Byzantine isolation represented by the rupture between the Greek and Latin Churches was a special product of the Christian system.