A History of Christianity - S1.E3 ∙ Orthodoxy From Empire to Empire
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00:00Here in the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople on the 16th of July 1054, a disaster unfolded
00:15for Christianity.
00:21It was actually during a service that a papal delegation swept up to the altar and placed
00:27on it a document excommunicating the leader of the Church in Constantinople, the Patriarch.
00:35The Patriarch excommunicated the Pope in return.
00:41The moment has come to be remembered as the Great Scism, a split between Eastern Orthodox
00:46Christianity and Western Catholic Christianity.
00:49At the time, it seemed like one petty incident in a whole series of disagreements, but the
00:54fact remains that 1,000 years later, that split between East and West is still there.
01:09Today Eastern Orthodox Christianity flourishes in the Balkans and Russia, and it has over
01:16150 million worshippers worldwide.
01:21But much of my third program charts its fight for survival.
01:28After its glory days in the Eastern Roman Empire, it stood right in the path of Muslim
01:33expansion, suffered betrayal by crusading Catholics, was seized by the Russian Tsars
01:43to ally with tyranny, and faced near extinction under Soviet Communism.
01:51So what is Orthodoxy?
01:54And what is the secret of its endurance?
02:23I'm the guest here at the congregation of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London.
02:36What you get in any Orthodox act of worship is a fragment of a vast annual ballet of worship,
02:45carefully choreographed and woven into a texture of ancient music.
02:50They reflect the timelessness of God's imperial court in heaven.
03:07On that spoon, bread and wine mingle to symbolize the indivisible nature of Christ, who is both
03:14human and divine.
03:28All around us are the symbols of 1,500 years of Orthodox tradition, the deeply venerated
03:36icons, and this fierce-looking bird, the double-headed eagle.
03:49What story is this ancient, passionate drama trying to tell us?
03:59It pulls us back to one of the great crises of Mediterranean civilization, the greatest
04:09empire which the West had ever known seemed to be tottering into ruin.
04:20From the beginning of the 4th century, the Roman Empire was Christian, but then the Christian
04:27God seemed to give up on it.
04:32In the West, barbarians overran it.
04:35In 410, they seized Rome itself.
04:42Yet still in the eastern half of the empire, there was another capital beyond the invaders'
04:47reach.
04:48Today, we call it Istanbul, but that's just a version of its original name, Constantinople,
04:56given it by its founder, Constantine the Great.
05:12Constantine had founded his city on the site of an old Greek fishing port called Byzantion.
05:20His dream was for Constantinople to become the perfect Christian capital.
05:25Indeed, he thought of it as the new Rome.
05:30Two centuries later, the dream lived on for a husband and wife who took power in the eastern
05:36empire in 518, Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora.
05:45They were one of the most unlikely couples ever to rule in Constantinople.
05:49He was a peasant from the Balkans.
05:51She was a former circus artist of allegedly daunting sexual prowess.
05:57Together, they set out to regain the lost territories of the Christian Roman Empire.
06:03Instead, they created something new, the Byzantine Empire.
06:13Justinian molded his new Christian Byzantine Empire round one church.
06:20Built up in just under six years, it was far and away the largest religious building
06:25in the Christian world, the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia.
06:38When Justinian entered the building for the first time, he was heard to murmur,
06:44Solomon, I have surpassed thee.
07:03That's the sort of ambition we're seeing here, an emperor who can outdo the Bible's most
07:09glorious king of Israel.
07:13For nearly 1,000 years, this was the scene of a constant round of sacred imperial ceremony.
07:21The emperor and patriarch were the leading actors in the drama, a union of church and
07:27throne.
07:30Today, Hagia Sophia is clogged with scaffolding.
07:40And frankly, there's a sadness about the place.
07:48It takes you a while to get over that and see one of the most sumptuous spaces ever
07:54created by human beings.
07:59The dome covers a vast congregational space, trying to bring heaven into daily worship.
08:08Because the dome is heaven, the sky above turned into human architecture.
08:16And that's the key difference between Eastern Christianity and the Christianity of the Latin
08:20West.
08:24The Western church has insisted that original sin opened a great gulf between God and humanity.
08:33But Eastern Christianity tells its followers that God and human beings can meet, even unite.
08:43It's a risky, exhilarating thought.
08:47And nothing expresses that mystical urge to make the invisible visible more than Byzantine
08:53art.
08:55Even though it's an art which is the result of a theological compromise.
09:00The solution to a big headache which all Christians face.
09:05How to make a picture out of the divine.
09:27The archeological museum in Istanbul is full of sculpture from the Greek world before Christ.
09:35Greeks took it for granted that you represent gods and goddesses with as much beauty as
09:40you can.
09:43Christianity took shape in this Greek world.
09:46But Christians also believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
09:53This points to a great fault line running through all Christianity.
10:00Greeks thought it natural to portray the divine as human.
10:03But Jews came to find it profoundly shocking.
10:06Jews stuck to their second commandment.
10:08You shall make no graven image for yourself.
10:10You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
10:13Who were Christians to follow?
10:15Jews or Greeks?
10:21The Western church tied itself in knots on this question.
10:27But Eastern Christians did something rather ingenious.
10:31They simply created art that was not graven.
10:35In other words, nothing sculpted, just flat surfaces.
10:40The busy jeweled walls of mosaics or paintings on wood.
10:47And those wooden painted tablets became the defining feature of the Orthodox church.
10:53The icon.
10:56This is not just art.
10:58It's a three-way meeting between artist, worshipper, and God.
11:09Very few of the first icons survive.
11:12To see them, I've had to travel to the fringes of the old Byzantine Empire.
11:16The Sinai Peninsula in modern Egypt.
11:33Here at the foot of Mount Sinai is one of the most ancient Christian monasteries in
11:38the world.
11:43Back in the 6th century, it was a frontier post for the Byzantine Empire.
11:49And another proof of the Emperor Justinian's enthusiasm for Christian building.
11:59Within its great fortress walls is the world's oldest collection of icons.
12:08The word icon means just what it says.
12:12The Greek word for image.
12:16A face, a person, a scene, painted on a portable wooden panel in special prescribed ways.
12:29God, Christ, the saints of the church.
12:38Icons invite the worshipper to stand not before a painting, but a real person.
12:44Each of them is an invitation to climb a ladder to heaven.
13:02Icons are focal points in every Orthodox church.
13:07They cover a screen in front of the altar called the iconostasis.
13:16Today you couldn't imagine Orthodox tradition so mystical, so ancient, without icons.
13:25But it wasn't always so.
13:33In the 7th century, a series of emperors did their best to wipe out icons from Byzantine
13:37religion.
13:38And strange though it may sound, it was because they'd begun to doubt that God was on their
13:43side.
13:54There was a good reason to worry.
13:56A sudden and unexpected challenge to the Byzantine Empire from a new religious force.
14:02Islam.
14:07By the middle of the 7th century, Muslim armies had snatched two-thirds of Byzantine territory,
14:13including the great holy cities of Damascus, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
14:26Twice, Islamic armies reached the outer walls of Constantinople.
14:35And as the Byzantines brooded on why God might have switched sides, they made a connection.
14:42A big difference between Islam and Orthodoxy.
14:47Muslims never make a picture of the divine.
14:52The holy book of the Koran forbids Muslims to make images of the sacred.
14:57The divine cannot be represented.
14:59And Muslims were winning campaigns against the Byzantines.
15:02Put two and two together, Christians, like Muslims, must destroy their images to win
15:07back God's favor.
15:12And so, with the survival of his empire at stake, the Emperor Leo III ordered the wholesale
15:18removal of icons from all Byzantine churches.
15:28At the present day, of course, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople presides over
15:33a church rich in icons.
15:37His own church of St. George is full of them.
15:41So what brought icons back?
15:45It was clear that in destroying them, Leo was asking for trouble.
15:50Riots broke out across the empire.
15:52It was a full-scale backlash.
15:57Amid argument and violence, iconoclasm was born.
16:07The word means smashing images.
16:09It was one of the greatest traumas of Christian history.
16:12And it soaked up energy in Byzantium for more than a century.
16:20Painting or venerating icons led to torture, sometimes death.
16:29And many were prepared to die rather than see their churches stripped of this divine
16:34gateway to God.
16:42It was an empress, Theodora, who at last stopped iconoclasm in the year 843.
16:50She commissioned a new liturgy, the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
17:02It acclaims those who defended icons, and it gleefully names their enemies.
17:08So the very worship of the church enshrines the memory of that traumatic century.
17:18The violent reaction to iconoclasm demonstrated that orthodoxy was not just a religion of
17:24the powerful.
17:26It was the possession of ordinary people, too.
17:30Future rulers would forget that at their peril.
17:39Right at the heart of Istanbul is a last word from the defeated iconoclasts.
17:46The 8th century Church of Holy Peace, Aya Ireni, built by an iconoclast emperor.
17:56Now it's a concert hall, stripped of nearly everything from its Christian past, except
18:03for a heart-stopping remnant from the fleeting era of iconoclast orthodoxy.
18:11Up in the apse, at the far end over the altar, a simple black cross in mosaic against a gold
18:17background, and that is iconoclastic art.
18:23That is what the iconoclasts put in their churches.
18:35You don't see this very often.
18:48Eight hundred years after the death of Jesus, Christianity was still expanding across the
18:53known world and beyond.
18:56The Church of the East was established in the Middle East, spreading its message from
19:01Baghdad to the far ends of Asia.
19:04The western wing of the Church, the Latin Church, based in Rome, was reviving and sending
19:10missions south, west, and north.
19:14And sandwiched between them was the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire.
19:24The Byzantine Empire might be battered and bruised, but it was still the world's largest
19:28Christian power.
19:30It had survived both Islam and iconoclasm.
19:34The Church of the West and the Church of the East were still united in formal terms, and
19:38the West had welcomed the defeat of iconoclasm, which had always horrified the papacy.
19:43But in practice, the gulf between Rome and Constantinople was deepening.
19:52While the orthodox had been arguing about iconoclasm, an ambitious ruler had united
19:57most of what are now France, Germany, and Italy into a new Latin Empire.
20:04Western Christians celebrate him as Charlemagne, Charles the Great, not the Orthodox.
20:12Charlemagne sent Catholic missionaries to convert non-Christian Slavs in the no-man's
20:17land between his empire and the Byzantine Empire.
20:28What was worse for the Byzantines?
20:30Central Europe full of unconverted souls, ripe for hell?
20:34Or Central Europe full of devout little Catholic Christian Slavs, all grateful to Charlemagne?
20:40Something must be done.
20:41The race was on to see who could get the Slavs to heaven the quickest, East or West.
20:50Today, Velehrad is in Roman Catholic territory, and this is an overwhelmingly Catholic celebration
20:59of Slavic Christian heritage.
21:02But it wasn't always so.
21:05The men embroidered on those stoles are heroes of orthodoxy, Cyril and Methodius, and they
21:13stole a march on Charlemagne's missionaries in what was then Great Moravia.
21:22Because the crucial question arose of which language the Slavs should worship God in,
21:26Greek or Latin, and Cyril and Methodius brilliantly outflanked the Latins by answering the question
21:32with neither.
21:33The Slavs could worship God in their own language.
21:37But now, another problem, Slavonic languages had never been written down.
21:41Cyril and Methodius had an answer to that, too.
21:58This is the answer to the problem, an entire new alphabet with symbols completely unlike
22:04Greek or Latin, because they're meant to represent the sounds of Slavonic.
22:08But actually, it was extremely difficult to use, so someone decided to start again with
22:14characters much more like Greek, but with exquisite tact.
22:17Whoever it was named their alphabet after Cyril, Cyrillic, and it's the alphabet which
22:23is still used by the Russians, the Bulgarians, and the Serbs.
22:30Cyril and Methodius were getting the Slavs to worship in the language which they used
22:33in the marketplace.
22:34That's what I find most astonishing.
22:37The cliché about orthodoxy is that it's timeless, ultra-conservative, unchanging.
22:42But this was innovative, creative.
22:48The great contribution which Cyril and Methodius made to orthodoxy was to equip it to stay
22:53orthodox in a rich variety of cultures, eventually even some which were not Slav at all, like
23:02the Romanians.
23:06This would prove absolutely vital for orthodoxy's long-term survival.
23:12But the immediate result was bitterness, competition between Latin and orthodox missionaries in
23:18central Europe underlined the growing distance between the two wings of the old imperial
23:24church.
23:36For the first thousand years of its existence, the church in the former Roman Empire had
23:41managed more or less to keep the appearance of one church.
23:47The orthodox emblem on the headquarters of the Patriarch in Istanbul is the double-headed
23:51eagle, one head for east, one for west.
23:59I don't think that it's coincidence that Byzantine emperors started using this symbol around
24:041000 AD, just when unity between the eastern and western churches was draining away.
24:16Separated by geography, language and culture, east and west had been drifting apart.
24:29There was, in particular, a little matter of words.
24:33In fact, one little Latin word, filioque.
24:38It means, and the sun.
24:42The filioque was a tiny western addition to the Nicene Creed, which is the creed held
24:46in common between the western and the eastern churches.
24:48It says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but the court of Charlemagne in
24:52the 9th century added, and the sun, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the sun.
24:57This was the source of both tension and then crisis for centuries.
25:04That one word, filioque, escalated east-west tensions.
25:11The Byzantine church felt any change to the creed was blasphemy.
25:16This was not going to end well.
25:23The crisis point came in 1054.
25:29Envoys from the Bishop of Rome arrived in Constantinople to deal with the growing rift.
25:38They were spoiling for a fight.
25:50Matters came to a head in the middle of the liturgy in Hagia Sophia.
25:58The cardinal from Rome lost his temper and took it upon himself to excommunicate the
26:04Patriarch of Constantinople.
26:08The Patriarch reciprocated.
26:16At the time, this melodrama in Hagia Sophia seemed just a passing diplomatic spat.
26:26But nearly a thousand years later, the schism between the Latin West and the Greek East
26:32has never been healed.
26:38And within 200 years, any chance of reconciliation was given a final, fatal blow in one of the
26:43most shameful episodes in Christian history.
27:00In the decades following the Great Schism, the Byzantine Empire was once more at the
27:04mercy of Muslim armies.
27:08The Byzantines swallowed their pride and appealed to Western Catholic leaders for help.
27:17And so, in 1095, Pope Urban II launched the first of many Crusades.
27:27The Latin Christian soldiers of the Fourth Crusade turned out to be less interested in
27:32defending their Holy Land than in their own wealth, power, and glory.
27:39In an astonishing act of betrayal, they attacked the very people they were supposed to protect,
27:47Christian Constantinople.
27:55The Crusaders broke through the city walls in spring 1204.
27:58Thousands in the city died before it fell.
28:01The known world's wealthiest, most cultured city was comprehensively trashed.
28:10And the rape of Constantinople was carried out not by Muslims, as the Byzantines had
28:15always feared, but by Catholic Christians.
28:25If 1054 had marked the formal separation between East and West, then 1204 was the gut-wrenching
28:32emotional point of no return.
28:40Constantinople was occupied by Western Catholic carpetbaggers for 57 years.
28:49But even though orthodoxy snatched back its city, the empire never recovered.
28:57For the first time, the Orthodox Church stood alone.
29:04Western Christianity had broken Byzantium's spirit.
29:08And now, another great power would finish the job.
29:19During the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks ruthlessly gobbled up the Byzantine lands.
29:25Soon, all that was left was the once great city of Constantinople, now a collection of
29:32shrunken villages, with Ayasofya still looming over them all.
29:39Ottoman besiegers snatched their chance.
29:43On the 29th of May 1453, the Ottomans poured into the city.
29:49In Ayasofya, morning service bravely carried on, while the Turks battered down the great
29:55door reserved for imperial processions.
30:02The Sultan gave orders that Muslim prayers be chanted out from the grand pulpit.
30:10Ayasofya had become a mosque.
30:27It was a savage end to the long Christian history of the Byzantine Empire.
30:35Now all the strongholds of Byzantine orthodoxy were under Muslim control, including four
30:41of the five ancient patriarchates.
30:44Only Rome was free, and Rome was not orthodox.
30:50For the next four centuries and more, Orthodox Christians were second-class citizens in the
30:55lands that their emperor had once ruled.
31:00In the mid-15th century, orthodoxy might seem to be fated to be pushed into ever-narrower
31:05confines like the Church of the East or the ancient churches of North Africa.
31:10But remember that mission of Cyril and Methodius back in the 9th century.
31:15Now that came to the rescue of the orthodox future.
31:23Cyril and Methodius had established a lifeline for orthodoxy in Moravia.
31:28Over the next 500 years, its spread north was to prove vital in this new crisis.
31:36Orthodoxy's future now lay far from its origins in lands of an entirely different character.
31:47These people lived in the darkness of harsh winters in communities often tiny and widely
31:53separated.
32:00Orthodoxy didn't just survive, it flourished, moving out of the work of Cyril and Methodius
32:05east to Kiev, encompassing everything we now think of as Russia to the frozen wastes of
32:12the Arctic in the far north.
32:16Orthodoxy people took to orthodox Christianity with a fierce commitment that shaped and even
32:21defined a Russian identity.
32:25Their faith was brought to them by lone individuals, wandering hermits and holy men who sometimes
32:31settled in small communities.
32:33And gradually, over two centuries, you had a great scatter of monasteries, perhaps a
32:40hundred or more, all over what is now northern Russia.
32:44But still, there would be holy men wandering beyond those communities, and that really
32:49is what rooted orthodoxy in the people.
32:52These ordinary men getting close to those scattered, lonely people over that vast territory
32:59made orthodoxy people's religion.
33:07But this people's religion was also inextricably linked with the rise of what became the Russian
33:13Empire.
33:15Its rulers learned to use the church to expand and control the empire, and make their rule
33:21sacred.
33:25The orthodox church came to be at the centre of a three-way tug of war between the ambitions
33:30of the tsars, the clergy, and the devout faith of the Russian people.
33:38During the 14th century, as holy men and women spread Christianity among the people, the
33:44rulers of a modest settlement with big ideas were quietly turning themselves into a power
33:49you couldn't ignore.
33:54The settlement was Moscow, and the ruling dynasty fashioned itself as heir of the Byzantine
34:03Empire.
34:11Just to make sure of its claim, in 1472, the Grand Prince of Muscovy, Ivan III, married
34:16the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and he adopted the double-headed Byzantine eagle
34:20as his symbol.
34:21And just occasionally, he used the title Tsar, which is simply the Roman imperial Caesar.
34:29The first Rome had fallen to barbarians, and sunk into Roman Catholic heresy.
34:37The second Rome, Constantinople, was now in the hands of Islam.
34:43The Orthodox Church of Russia now sees the title, the Third Rome.
34:49Eventually, it even gained its own patriarch in Moscow.
34:55Though Russian Orthodoxy's origins were in Byzantium, the rule of the Tsars and the intense
35:00religion of its people created a church which was distinctively Russian in character.
35:07You can see that straight away from a short walk through Moscow.
35:15Russia's church domes took on the shape of an onion.
35:21Some think the design was inspired by manuscript pictures of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
35:25in Jerusalem.
35:27Others see it as just practical, a way of stopping the build-up of snow.
35:32Either way, the design redrew the Russian landscape.
35:40The most famous of these churches was built in the 16th century.
35:53St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square.
35:59Its exterior is startlingly original.
36:04An eight-sided central church rising into a spire, hemmed in by eight smaller churches.
36:11Do you remember how Byzantine Orthodoxy had looked to one great church in Constantinople?
36:17The Holy Wisdom had been built by a great emperor and military commander, Justinian.
36:22Well, you could say that this church was intended to do the same thing for Russian Orthodoxy.
36:28The only problem was that it was built by the maddest, cruelest emperor in world history.
36:34Ivan the Terrible placed St Basil's in the centre of Moscow in 1552.
36:42And like Justinian a thousand years before, he made his church the centrepiece of his
36:47Russian Orthodox Empire.
36:51Of course, Ivan is better remembered for persecuting and butchering millions of his subjects.
36:58And inside St Basil's, you get an idea of his mindset.
37:03If you look at it on a plan, it looks perfectly rational and symmetrical.
37:07But no one ever did see it in plan, apart from the architect and the patron.
37:11Your actual experience of it once you're inside is a combination of vertigo and claustrophobia.
37:19I don't think that it's too much to say, it feels deranged.
37:31In Russian, the word terrible is better understood as awesome.
37:36But the English translation terrible gets Ivan just right.
37:42Born in 1530, he was crowned at the age of only 16 as the first Tsar of Russia.
37:49And this gave him ideas about the Orthodox Church.
37:54He became obsessed with making Russia Holy Russia, with himself at the centre as God's
38:00representative on earth.
38:03Early in his reign, he was full of energy, building churches, ordering exact rules for
38:08how icons should be painted.
38:15That concern for holiness was not necessarily a bad idea, but it was perverted into tyranny.
38:26During his 37-year reign, Ivan exercised absolute power through atrocities on an insane scale.
38:34And he clearly came to love terrifying and hurting people just because he could.
38:42And yet the Metropolitan Bishop of Moscow who crowned him left him with a terrible sense
38:46of sin.
38:47Ivan once cried out in a letter, I, a stinking hound, whom can I teach?
38:54What can I preach?
38:55And how can I enlighten anybody?
39:00Ivan's concern for the welfare of his soul was amply justified.
39:05His religious despotism reached deep into the lives of his subjects, as he dictated
39:12how orthodoxy should be practised down to the minutest detail.
39:21Not even men's beards escaped his judgement, for Ivan, the beard was an ornament given
39:28by God to Jesus.
39:31So he forbade the shaving of beards.
39:36And heaven help anyone who went against him.
39:44Ivan was convinced that God had made him emperor when the Metropolitan had crowned him, so
39:49that anyone who opposed Ivan was a heretic and deserved the punishment of death, preferably
39:55in as nasty a way as possible.
40:04In the worst years of his reign, Ivan enforced his crazy tyranny across the empire through
40:10the Oprichniki, a perverted version of a religious order, robed in black cloaks as they went
40:19about their inhuman business.
40:24Thousands of Russians were killed in Ivan's purges.
40:30And yet one man dared to stand up to the tyrant.
40:35And St Basil's Cathedral is now named after this hero of humble orthodox faith.
40:43St Basil was a very particular, peculiar sort of hermit, a holy fool.
40:49Holy fools overturned all the rules of normal society.
40:53He behaved like madman to show the power of God, and St Basil showed that very well
40:57because he was one of the very few people who could stand up to Ivan the Terrible and
41:02get away with it.
41:05In the middle of Lent, the saint once thrust some meat into the hands of the astonished
41:10Tsar, telling him that there was no point in him trying to fast since he had committed
41:16so many crimes.
41:19Ivan was humbled, St Basil unpunished.
41:26St Basil's story is the perfect reminder of a repeated keynote in Russian orthodox
41:31history.
41:35The depth of faith among ordinary Russians was so profound that whatever the Tsars did
41:41to them, they obstinately continued to worship in their own way.
41:46Russian was woven inextricably into the fabric of ordinary life, often in alarmingly eccentric
41:51ways, as in the case of the sect known as the Skopci.
41:55They were devoted to eliminating sexual lust from humankind by cutting off their genitals.
42:00Their founder had read his Russian Bible, but he'd misread it.
42:03He read the word for Jesus the Redeemer, Iskupito, as Oskupito, castrator.
42:11A century after Ivan the Terrible, another Tsar came up against that strength of feeling
42:18with blood-stained results.
42:21Tsar Alexei and his patriarch both wanted to tidy up the Church.
42:25Take it back to a pure Byzantine orthodoxy.
42:30Take sacred blessings, for instance.
42:33In the Byzantine tradition, clergy made the sign of the blessing using three fingers to
42:38symbolize the Trinity.
42:43But in Russia, two fingers were used to symbolize the two natures of Christ.
42:48Now Alexei ordered Russian clergy to change the sign of the blessing to three fingers.
42:59It might seem utterly trivial to us, but in that world, every detail mattered.
43:09Your average Russian couldn't care less about being faithful to Greek orthodox tradition.
43:14They knew what orthodoxy was.
43:17It was Russian.
43:19And this was heresy.
43:22So thousands, eventually millions of them, defied the Tsar.
43:30Some left the Tsar's Church and became known as Old Believers.
43:37Many were burned at the stake for their defiance.
43:43And some, rather than submit to the Tsar's heretical authority, actually set fire to
43:50themselves.
43:58The Imperial Church was still there.
44:09It continued to serve the people of this vast empire.
44:18But between Tsarist autocracy and the lives of the people, there was that third force,
44:24the hierarchy of the Church.
44:28And a question that even the Byzantines had never quite resolved.
44:33Who was truly God's representative on Earth?
44:36The Tsar or the head of the Russian Church, the Patriarch?
44:43In 1689, the throne of Russia was inherited by Peter the Great.
44:48He settled that question for the next two centuries.
44:53While Ivan the Terrible had been mad, Peter the Great was rational.
44:58But he was still a Tsar.
45:01He saw orthodox Christianity as just another useful tool to control the Russian Empire.
45:09And this is his statue, one of Moscow's latest tourist attractions.
45:14It's widely hated in the city, but I'm going to be unfashionable, I rather like it.
45:19It's quite fun.
45:21Peter was a moderniser, and a big part of his modernising Russia was to seize control
45:31of the Church.
45:32For nearly two centuries after his time, there was no Patriarch.
45:35The Church was run by a set of state bureaucrats.
45:38So now the Church had lost control of its own decision-making.
45:51There was now no question as to who was in charge.
45:56The Tsar.
46:02As usual in Christian history, the Church made the best of it.
46:06In fact, it prospered.
46:10In the 19th century, Russian monastic life flourished.
46:14Churches actually got more crowded, and at least the Church was safe.
46:20Orthodoxy had survived a turbulent 1300 years.
46:30But its next encounter nearly wiped it out.
46:39At the start of the 20th century, Russia was a great European power, and a Tsar Nicholas
46:45II.
46:46And yet by 1918, his world had been overwhelmed in the Great War and Revolution.
46:56And in the thick of it all was a Russian peasant from Siberia, a wandering hermit who became
47:04the focus of a public scandal surrounding the Tsar's family.
47:08The Tsarina believed that God spoke to her through the hermit, but his enemies said he
47:14was a lecherous drunk whose interference crippled the government.
47:24In the last days of the Tsars, during the First World War, Grigory Rasputin gained an
47:29extraordinary hold over Tsar Nicholas II and his Empress, because he appeared to be able
47:33to stem the haemophilia of their son.
47:36Was Grigory Rasputin a holy fool or a crazy drunk?
47:39Well, perhaps he was both.
47:41But his peasant faith made a fool out of the Tsars and helped to doom their regime.
47:50Russia was descending into nightmare.
47:53It was losing the war with Germany.
47:55Its people were starving and turning to revolution.
48:00And the Rasputin scandal became hugely symbolic, a dose of poison for the Tsarist regime.
48:07As hundreds of thousands died on the front, the troops voted with their feet and mutinied.
48:19In February 1917, there was revolution.
48:26The Russian Emperor was forced to abdicate, bringing to an end nearly 500 years of Tsarist
48:32rule.
48:38For the Church, there was a brief moment of hope.
48:41A liberal, provisional government was formed, Russia's first real experience of democracy.
48:48In Moscow, a council of bishops, clergy and laypeople made plans for a revived Church,
48:55free of Tsarist interference.
48:59Triumphantly, they elected a new patriarch, the first since Peter the Great.
49:09But it proved to be a false dawn.
49:14In October of that year, worldwide orthodoxy met its most terrible enemy so far, Soviet
49:22Communism.
49:26With Lenin at its head, the Bolshevik Party seized the revolution and installed a dictatorship
49:32of the proletariat, with absolute power over all Russia.
49:38In this new world order, there was no place for God.
49:46Orthodoxy had shaped Russia since the 10th century, but the Bolsheviks saw all religions
49:50the opium of the masses, a symptom of false consciousness, and worst of all, an obstacle
49:55to scientific socialism.
50:06In January 1918, Lenin formally separated Church from State.
50:16And that was just the first step in a systematic policy to purge Christianity altogether from
50:22Russian life and force atheism on its people.
50:28But it was a policy Lenin did not live to carry out.
50:36The task was followed through even more ruthlessly by a man who in just 10 years brought orthodoxy
50:43close to extinction, something neither Catholic crusaders, Muslim armies, nor Russian tyrants
50:51had managed to do in a thousand years.
50:57Joseph Stalin was a Georgian gangster whose mother had once hoped he would become a bishop.
51:04Instead, he had manoeuvred his way up through the ranks of the Bolshevik Party to become
51:09supreme ruler of the Soviet Union. A Red Tsar, one might say.
51:17His plan was to wipe out all real life in orthodoxy.
51:25In a society without God, there was no need for churches.
51:30This is the dynamiting of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 1931.
51:35Then there were the human victims, the orthodox faithful.
51:47Around 40,000 priests and 40,000 monks and nuns, plus millions of lay people, died as
51:54a result of Soviet terror.
51:56There was a manic thoroughness to the campaign.
52:03Some local Soviet commanders lined up icons, sentenced them to death, and shot them.
52:11By 1939, only a few hundred churches remained open, and only four bishops were not in prison.
52:22And yet, Russian orthodoxy survived.
52:26In the Second World War, Stalin was forced into a remarkable U-turn.
52:32Stalin needed the church's support to win the war, and in order to use the church, he
52:36needed to recognise the church.
52:38It was orthodoxy's patriotism that saved it from extinction.
52:44Stalin had to accept that for many Russians it wasn't the state that embodied Russian
52:48culture and national feeling, it was the church.
52:52And so, he allowed churches, theological schools and monasteries to reopen.
52:59But after the war, it was Soviet business as usual, more persecution.
53:08At the end of the Second World War, Soviet rule gripped most of Eastern Europe.
53:14When Stalin died in 1953, Russia was a world superpower.
53:19And for the next 30 years, it held orthodoxy prisoner.
53:26Yet the Orthodox Church kept its faithful followers, maintained its ancient liturgy
53:30and music through all the traumas inflicted on it by the Soviet Union.
53:36Indeed, orthodoxy outlived the Communist World Order.
53:45When General Secretary Gorbachev tried to implement a more humane communism, glasnost,
53:51it turned into an endgame for the system.
53:58By the 1990s, it was all over.
54:02All the emotional power had drained out of state communism, and nothing showed that more
54:07than the moment in 1991 when a crowd toppled this statue, that of Dzerzhinsky, the architect
54:14of the KGB system, which is now relegated to a quiet park, a sort of retirement home
54:19for tyranny.
54:22For 70 years, the Soviets had told their subjects that communism was the future.
54:30Now, communism had gone.
54:38What was compelling enough to fill that gap?
54:44Orthodoxy.
54:52It has triumphantly seized back its place at the heart of Russian life.
55:00In the 1990s, money poured in from the public for the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ
55:07the Saviour in the centre of Moscow, the cathedral which Stalin had obliterated 70 years before.
55:14In its sufferings, orthodoxy survived catastrophes quite unlike those faced by Catholicism and
55:21Protestantism.
55:24Stripped of the power it knew under the Byzantine emperors, it saw its freedom stolen by the
55:29Russian Tsars.
55:32In the 1990s, the Soviet Union was in a state of turmoil.
55:38Stripped of the power it knew under the Byzantine emperors, it saw its freedom stolen by the
55:43Russian Tsars.
55:46Its people nearly all expelled from Asia Minor.
55:50Its very existence nearly destroyed by the Bolsheviks.
55:55But in 21st century Russia, the double-headed eagle of Byzantium has once more become the
56:02proud emblem of modern Russia.
56:06It is still a legacy for the Eastern Roman Empire.
56:13But solve one question and another appears.
56:18Can orthodoxy survive its first meeting with Western freedom?
56:23The world of capitalism, consumerism, scepticism and sexual freedom?
56:30So far, the instinct seems to have been to reaffirm the old certainties.
56:35And you can understand why if you think back to all the places I've been.
56:40The solemn unfolding of the liturgy.
56:43The serene gaze of the saints.
56:46The experience of God in wordless prayer.
56:51And yet for all that, orthodoxy may still have to learn from Western Christians how
56:57to cope with new challenges which Western Christianity itself has helped to create.
57:18So in next week's programme, we're turning west again.
57:23We're going to see how the great monarchy, which was the medieval Western Church,
57:27split in two in the Reformation.
57:31And then we'll go on to meet the forces of the modern world from which no Christianity
57:36of the 21st century can now hide.
57:44Why not take part in the Open University's online survey,
57:47What Does It Mean To Be A Christian Today?
57:50at bbc.co.uk
57:53slash history of Christianity and follow the links.
58:01And the history of Christianity continues next Thursday at nine.
58:05Next tonight, Mark Kermode celebrates a family favourite on The Culture Show.
58:20The Culture Show.