Patrick Comerford
Books and journals are always welcome Christmas presents. And I have had extra time to catch up on my reading in recent weeks, with some long train journeys, a hospital visit and flights to Dublin since we got back from Kuching.
Over the next few days, I hope to become engrossed in some of those books, some other books I picked up in Oxford and Cambridge or have been asked to review, and on the bumper editions of favourite magazines, including New Statesman and Private Eye.
In recent days, I have been engrossed too in some papers and reviews published in the latest edition of History Today (volume 74 issue, December 2024). which, as you might expect, has some interesting Christmas reading, but also has papers with important findings in Greek and Byzantine studies.
Dr Katherine Kelaidis is a research fellow at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge and he Director of Research and Content at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago. Her paper in the Christmas edition of History Today, ‘A Christmas to Save the Byzantine Empire’ (pp 28-39), recounts how the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos was a guest of Henry IV in England at Christmas dinner at Eltham Palace, near Greenwich on Christmas Day 1400.
Although they were united by their Christian faith, these two monarchs were on separate sides of the East-West schism. So, she asks, ‘How did they celebrate?’
The embattled Byzantine emperor was on the final leg of a desperate tour across Europe in a last-ditch effort to encourage the powers of Western Christendom to come to the aid of his empire against the real threat of an Ottoman assault.
His father, John V, had visited Naples and Rome in 1369 in a failed attempt to end the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity. Otherwise, no Byzantine emperor had ever left the borders of his empire.
The mutual excommunications of Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael I in 1054 came to be viewed as the moment of final division between what would later become the Catholic west and the Orthodox west. However, as Dr Kelaidis points out, the idea of a ‘schism’ or even the use of the term did not appear with any regularity until the Reformation in the 16th century, and how the emperor and the king celebrated Christmas matters.
The division deepened in the 350 years between the initial schism in 1054 and Manuel’s tour in 1400. It seemed so deep as to be unbridgeable to the generations who came after the Ottoman conquest that Manuel had sought to prevent.
‘In reality, however, this was not the case’, she argues. ‘Indeed, the state of Eastern-Western ecclesiastical relations remained much more fluid than is commonly assumed.’ Manuel’s European tour and his Christmas in England reveals something often missed by historians: ‘the divisions and differences which split Christianity in the late medieval era were less real for those who lived through them.’
Manuel’s entourage included a number of Orthodox priests, providing the emperor with spiritual and sacramental support. In Paris, they celebrated a public liturgy, perhaps at Sainte-Chapelle. A contemporary account says the Eastern rites were ‘unusual’ but that ‘everyone could attend’.
‘Differences in custom – perhaps even in theology – did not appear to stop a shared celebration of the Eucharist, the ultimate symbol of Christian unity,’ Dr Kelaidis notes.
She points out that while late mediaeval Christians, regardless of their divisions and loyalties, would have celebrated Easter in a largely similar fashion. However, the series of winter feast days between Christmas Day on 25 December and the Epiphany (or Theophany) on 6 January was a different story.
Christians had always celebrated the Resurrection, and Easter had been the central feast day in the Christian calendar from the earliest days. Christmas, however, was another matter, and celebrations associated with the winter solstice in northern Europe were transformed into the celebration of Christ’s birth. She argues, ‘It is for this reason that the Feast of the Nativity, the first of the 12 days of Christmas, celebrated on 25 December, is the only major Christian feast to have moved from West to East.’
She goes on to ask what Henry IV and Manuel II’s priests did regarding the celebration of the religious services that Christmas in 1400, including multiple Eucharistic services. There were significant differences between East and West in celebrating the Eucharist, including the Eastern use of leavened bread mixed into the chalice, and the Western use of unleavened bread and separate distribution of the wine and bread.
Dr Kelaidis notes how ‘later descriptions of the events – most of which are from the centuries after the Reformation, when the divisions within Christianity, and particularly divisions over the Eucharist and its proper form, were much more pronounced – tend to declare unquestioningly that neither the two rulers nor their priests would have celebrated together. This certainty is anachronistic at best.’
It is unclear whether there was a co-celebration or not, particularly since the English Church maintained a self-appointed autonomy from Rome, she argues. Both the English and the Byzantines saw the English Church as being semi-independent, and so not necessarily party to the growing division between Rome and Constantinople.
She notes, moreover, how there are plenty of instances, many well into the 18th century, of Eastern and Western priests co-celebrating the Eucharist when practical or political concerns were at play. English diplomats often received communion in Orthodox churches, both in Russia and in the Ottoman Empire, while Greek sailors aboard Spanish ships were communed by Catholic priests.
‘In the case of Christmas 1400, the question was not just of ceremonial importance. There were serious, worldly, concerns at stake. At the heart of Manuel’s pilgrimage to the West was a central premise: that the Christian Church, whatever conflicts or disagreements there might be, was still united and that Christian brothers ought to unite with one another against a common enemy. For this premise to hold, Manuel and his priests would have needed to emphasise the ways in which the Church of Christ remained united – or rather that they were still members of the One, Holy, True and Apostolic Church.’
Of course, she admits, ‘one might say that had such a momentous event as a co-celebration of the Eucharist occurred – had priests from Canterbury and priests from Constantinople celebrated the Eucharist together – there would most certainly have been some sort of record. But what if it was not as remarkable an occurrence as we, from our vantage point of 600 years, might think? In the four centuries between the so-called ‘Great Schism’ and Manuel’s arrival in England, relations between the Eastern and Western halves of the Christian world had ebbed and flowed. And co-celebration, if not common, was not unheard of. There is reason to think that it was possible – maybe even likely – that the priests of Henry’s court and those of Manuel’s celebrated together that Christmas.’
Beyond the immediate political concerns, she says, ‘this curious episode at Eltham Palace in 1400 offers a window into a time when divisions between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, though certainly present, had not yet hardened into the later, unbridgeable schisms that have come to define the received views of modern religious history.’
And that is food for ecumenical thinking at Christmas time.
There are other Christmas and Greek themes in this delightful feast of history in the Christmas 2024 edition of History Today
The Greek themes are continued by Phiroze Vasunia, Professor of Greek at University College London, who looks at ‘How Ancient Greece Shaped the British Raj’ (pp 40-53). ‘British agents of empire saw their actions in India through the texts of their classical educations. They looked for Alexander, cast themselves as Aeneas and hoped to emulate Augustus.’
The Christmas themes continue with Matthew Lyons who questions the claims of William Strickland to have introduced the turkey to England. Strickland applied to have a turkey on his coat-of-arms in 1550. But his claim remains a puzzle to ponder over the Christmas dinner as the truth followed him to his grave when he died on 8 December 1598.
And, if you are enjoying the carols, the choirs and the church organs this Christmas, you might consider how the organ was a controversial instrument in many churches after the Reformation.
Anna Steppler is a junior research fellow in music at Peterhouse in Cambridge. In ‘Listen like a Lutheran’ (pp 62-71), she recalls that for much of the 200 years between Luther’s Reformation and Johann Sebastian Bach’s appointment to the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1723 ‘the instrument’s spiritual role was far from assured’ and in the debates between Calvinists and Lutherans, ‘the use of music in church was a particularly sensitive topic.’
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