The Great Church in captivity: a study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the eve of the Turkish conquest to the Greek War of Independence
Steven Runciman, Cambridge University Press (Publisher)
“The Great Church, as the Greeks called the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, was the spiritual centre of the Byzantine world. The Church’s survival during the four centuries of Turkish rule which followed the fall of Constantinople bore witness to its strength and to the unquenchable vitality of Hellenism. Sir Steven Runciman’s history of the Great Church in this period is written with scholarship, sympathy and style.The first part of the book describes the condition of the Church before the final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The author has written elsewhere that it is their ‘overwhelming sense of religion that makes, and always has made, the Byzantines difficult for the West to comprehend.’ Here he makes this quality more comprehensible, showing in an opening chapter the contrasts between the philosophic and legalistic Roman Church, and the mystical and ecumenical Orthodox Church. Further chapters describe Orthodox monasticism and mysticism, the organization of the Church and its relations with the Empire and with other Churches.The second part of the book covers the period from 1453 until the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. The Church ultimately became the focus of Greek nationalism, but only after a humiliating and costly subservience to the Turkish Sultans. Education, traditionally a responsibility of the Church, declined drastically within the Greek world, in contrast to the considerable contribution of Greeks to Renaissance thought and education in Italy. The author presents much new material on relations between the Greek church and the Anglican, Calvinist and Lutheran churches during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” - Publisher
Print Book, English, 1968
Cambridge University Press, London, 1968