The Invisiblity of Orthodoxy

For many in the West, Orthodoxy is hardly on the radar screen. Our notions of Christianity are very binary; it's either Catholic or Protestant.

For example, I was once in a Confirmation class where my Anglo-Catholic priest was teaching that the Roman Catholic Church and Anglicanism were the only two Denominations that had preserved the Seven Sacraments. I quickly reminded him about Eastern Orthodoxy.

He was at least aware of the Christian East my fellow students' ignorance is much greater.

Well there is a new book that seeks to bring the Christian East to the attention of the West scholars at least. Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.

Transporting the reader back to a proud and golden time, Herrin's narrative vivifies a shadowy era, most poignantly when she leads us through the streets of the magnificent capital. If Constantinople was the heart of the empire, then the Hagia Sophia was the soul. Herrin's description of that breathtaking masterpiece, that wonder of the Byzantine world, is unforgettable: lamps solemnly burning round the clock, casting a copper glow on massive, larger than life icons that bring people to their knees in reverence. Marble flooring, gold-painted gallery ceilings, silver disks, precious stones, linens, and colors from the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, all led Emperor Justinian I to proclaim his satisfaction "Solomon, I have surpassed thee." Visitors from other civilizations agreed: when Russian envoys entered this largest church in all of Christendom in 988, they later recounted, they "knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth … . We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there."

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