Page 146 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
A man can come into contact only with God’s energy, and not with His essence, in spite of the fact that the energies are inseparable from the essence.54
As noted by Ostrogorsky, the result of the controversy manifested, once more, a neg- ative attitude towards Western culture, an attitude which was simultaneously religious, philosophical, and political.55 In fact, during the last two centuries of the Byzantine Em- pire, the more the supposed superiority of the Roman Catholic Church was imposed on the Orthodox Church, the more the entire Byzantine culture disassociated itself from the Latin West, and the Hesychast Debate constitutes a climax of that process.
As noted by Bishop Kallistos Ware, within Byzantine society in the last decades prior to the fall of Constantinople, in broad terms there were the following three main groups, not mutually exclusive but overlapping: “First, there were the imperial ideologists, who regarded the Empire as an enduring and unalterable element in God’s providence, and who looked on Empire and Church as essentially interdependent. Secondly, there were those who, like George Gemistos Plethon, looked for inspiration to the pagan Hellenism of classical antiquity. Thirdly, there were the hesychasts, such as the anti-Unionist St Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesos, who were primarily interested not in the maintenance of the Empire or in Hellenic learning, but in the purity of the Orthodox faith.”56 As Bishop Kallistos concludes, it was indeed the third group – the hesychasts, who provided the oppressed Byzantines with the resources to survive the Ottoman op- pression.57
54 Ibid., 218.
55 Ibid., 219.
56 Kallistos Ware, ‘Act out of Stillness’: The Influence of Fourteenth-Century Hesychasm on Byzantine and Slav Civili-
zation (Toronto: The Hellenic Canadian Association of Constantinople and the Thessalonikean Society of Metro Toron- to, 1995), 21–22.
57 Ibid.
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