Bases teóricas de la comprensión lectora

The eleventh century

In recent years, scholars have tended to downplay the contemporary significance of the events of 1054. In a 2007 article, Jean-Claude Cheynet went as far as to ask whether the Schism constituted an ‘event’ in Byzantine history at all, or whether it should be relegated to the status of a ‘non-event’.3 The discovery of points of contention between branches of the Church was no novelty: Photios had condemned the Latin ‘addition’ of the filioque and various other ‘errors’ back in the ninth century. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that the events of 1054 had only the most minimal of effects on relations between Rome and Constantinople, let alone on broader political and ecclesiastical dealings. Most contemporary Byzantine sources are silent on the topic of the Schism of 1054,4 _{and in} 1089, when a Constantinopolitan synod investigated the reason for the exclusion of the Pope’s name from the diptychs, they could find no evidence that a schism had even taken place.5

However, Cheynet notes that, while Byzantine narrative sources largely pass over the Schism in silence, ecclesiastical sources are slightly more forthcoming—particularly in Rus. Here, Cheynet leans heavily on the tract attributed to Metropolitan Efrem, which Chichurov dates to not long after the Schism, as evidence that the Schism had at least some immediate resonance in the Orthodox community beyond the ecclesiastical actors personally involved in it.6 _{Apart from the obvious point} that neither the date nor the identity of the composer of this tract are certain, I have no objection to this argument. Indeed, there is a reasonable amount of evidence suggesting that certain Rusian ecclesiastics were composing polemic in the few decades after the Schism, and that this polemic was influenced by the particular controversies that took centre stage in 1054, notably the problem of azyme use. Questions of dating and authorial identity are particularly troubling in this case, but at least some of Feodosii of the Caves, Metropolitan Efrem, Metropolitan Georgii, Metropolitan Lev of

3 _{Jean-Claude Cheynet, ‘Le schisme de 1054: un non-événement?’, in Faire l’événement au Moyen Ȃge, ed. by} Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007), pp. 299–312.

4 _{Cheynet, ‘Le schisme’, pp. 305–08.} 5 _{Louth, Greek East, p. 317.}

Pereiaslavl and Metropolitan Ioann II seem to have been composing polemic in the eleventh century (even if most were composing in Greek rather than Slavonic).

As the previous chapters have made clear, the post-1054 Rusian interest in Latin ‘errors’ was largely confined to texts concerned with the definition and maintenance of orthodoxy. The events of 1054 make no more of an impression on most Rusian sources than they do on most Byzantine sources— although, of course, there are few extant eleventh-century Rusian texts on which the Schism could

have made an impression, and even fewer texts from before 1054 with which to compare them. The exception is Ilarion’s Sermon on the Law and Grace, composed not long before the Schism. In his list of regions which have cause to praise God, Ilarionincludes ‘the Roman land’ as a centre of Christian orthodoxy which has reason to praise Peter and Paul, its teachers in the faith.7 _{The significance of this} should not be overstated. This kind of ecumenical thinking did not disappear after 1054, either in Byzantium or in Rus: witness the recurrent concept of the Pope as defender of orthodoxy in Rusian chronicles.8

In short, the Schism does seem to have opened up new rhetorical possibilities for discussing Latins in Rus. As far as we can tell, it is only after 1054 that Rusian ecclesiastics began to write about Latin ‘errors’, particularly the ‘error’ of azyme use, which came to prominence at the time of the Schism. On the other hand, there is no evidence that it made itself felt in most of the writing or broader culture of eleventh-century Rus. The Schism can only be conceived of as a ‘turning-point’ in a very restricted sense. Not quite a ‘non-event’, then, but hardly a watershed moment in the history of Rus–Latin relations.

The twelfth century

The twelfth century appears to be a period of relative stability as far as ties between Rus and the Latin world are concerned: it sees none of the political and ecclesiastic turbulence of either the eleventh century or of the thirteenth. For Lind, however, the twelfth century possesses a particular significance as the period in which indigenous Rusian ecclesiastics belatedly became aware of the rift between the churches. As a result, Lind suggests, hostility towards ‘the Latin rite’ ‘began to creep in from the mid- twelfth century in Novgorod’, although it may have been more prevalent from an earlier date in Kiev, where Byzantine ecclesiastics were apparently more influential and numerous.9 _{Does the twelfth} century then qualify as a turning-point in Rusian (especially Novgorodian) attitudes to Latins? The

7 _{‘римьскаа страна’. ‘Proizvedeniia Ilariona’, ed. by Sumnikova, p. 26.} 8 _{PSRL 1, col. 27; PSRL 2, col. 827.}

historical evidence might suggest so: contacts between Rus and Scandinavia became considerably less frequent and intensive from the middle of the twelfth century, when Rus–Scandinavian marriages came to a virtual halt10 _{and Scandinavian saints and rites were no longer adopted by the Rusian} church.11

However, there is little to suggest rhetorical change in twelfth-century depictions of Latins, which brings the likelihood of a sudden shift in attitudes into question. Lind cites the Questions of Kirik, with its two questions concerning Latins, as testimony to a new-found Novgorodian consciousness of the divisions between the Latin and Orthodox churches.12 _{But why assume that the Questions of Kirik} represent a new attitude to Latins, a sudden realisation of Latin difference? There are no earlier, similar Novgorodian texts with which to compare the Questions, so no way of establishing Nifont’s

predecessors’ sentiments about Latins. What’s more, as we have seen, questions about Latins are entirely standard for other Early Rusian erotapokriseis.13 _{It is of course within the realms of possibility} that Kirik and Nifont’s work is the spontaneous expression of a Novgorodian clerical epiphany about the rift between the churches; but it seems more likely that Kirik and Nifont were simply working within a pre-existing Early Rusian rhetorical tradition which sanctioned, indeed prescribed, the expression of anti-Latin sentiment within erotapokriseis. Their work tells us little about the evolution of attitudes to Latins in twelfth-century Rus—certainly not enough to permit us to class the twelfth century as a turning-point in either rhetoric about or conceptions of Latins.