Erot under the bummer

Under the red -hot sun near the rockets aimed at the sky on the Industry Square, under the auspices of the Dynasty Foundation, a cycle of shocking, but replete with academic details of lectures on carnal love, was held. Especially Fireword was a torn cover from common ideas about Byzantium Sergey Ivanov - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of the Russian State University, St. Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics, the leading researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We publish a summary of his speech.

For Byzantium, spiritual love, love for God is primarily important. Byzantine art is directed upward, grief, it parted with ancient baggage, the cult of flesh and earthly love. The clothing of the Byzantine hid the outlines of the body, asceticism, rigorism, monasticism, and harsh morality flourished in society. On carnal love, Byzantine society is trying not to concentrate.

The earthly radically rejected not only Christianity, but also other currents of thought that competed with Christianity for the souls of people. For example, neoplatonists reproached Christians for the thesis about the possibility of deification of the flesh, for them everything carnal and visible was originally evil and criminal. The urge to the asuza was permeated by a late -ant society. It became inflamed by the passion for killing the flesh, contempt for matter. Why? Scientists argue, finding the reason is as difficult as catching a sunny bunny. One version is that the ancient policy attitude (sensualism, the cult of the body and fertility) crashed in the conditions of a huge impersonal empire, where people ceased to perceive each other in family warmth. The old paganism was compromised. The crisis of the cult of the body can be judged by the statues of Roman emperors. At first they are depicted naked. We wildly imagine the monument to the head of state naked, but Emperor Augustus adhered to another look. However, by the 3rd century, emperors began to portray in clothes, the paradigm changed.

Christianity defeated ideological disputes, so the majority of information draws from Christian sources. In the IV-V centuries there is a huge number of plots with the moral "Love-Crime, Love should not be." The plot for example. The young man looked after a girl who wanted to become a nun. The young man insisted on his own. "What do you like in me the most?" - asked the girl. “Your beautiful eyes,” the lover answered. Then the girl took an awl and burst into both eyes. The affected young man soon tonsured the monks. Another common plot: the devil appears in the image of a woman before the anachoret, the monk tortures himself to drive away immodest thoughts: burns his hand with a candle or cut off his finger with an ax (recalls the “father of Sergius” by Leo Tolstoy).

When Christianity became the official religion of the empire, it concluded an alliance with Roman statehood and Greek culture. Capital Christianity, refined, educated, close to the throne, inherited from antiquity a love of erotic poetry and graceful composition. In the VI century, when the Gentiles were executed by the death penalty, the court poets of Emperor Justinian wrote very frank love poems. The tall official Pavel Silentia, the author of the solemn ode to the vernisage of the newly rebuilt temple of St. Sophia, also composed a huge number of very frank epigrams, like this:

Breasts in hands, mouth on the lips, silver neck
I hug and I have lost my mind at all.
I try to master all the foamed all : I try in vain:
Virgo does not want to divide her bed with me.
Divide Athena and Pafia Lodge in half ,
And between them two I constantly languish.

Thus, different rules worked on different floors of culture. However, by the 7th century, the merger of secular and religious is gradually taking place. Church establishments are among state requirements. The canonical law merges with the criminal, the reprehensible from a moral point of view becomes criminally punishable. The official position: the best is abstinence, love should be directed exclusively to God. However, the empire did not want to be completely without subjects and soldiers, so conjugal love was allowed, but the ideal of marriage was the transition to fraternal and sister relations after the appearance of offspring, the so-called “white marriage”. So in the life of Theophanes the Confessor describes the relationship of his parents.

Church law forbade marriages even between distant relatives, consisting in the sixth or seventh degree of kinship, as well as between relatives through the baptismal font (say, the Byzantine could not marry the sister of the godmother). But the prohibitions could not be observed strictly, otherwise noble aristocrats or inhabitants of the low -powered villages simply had no chance to find a wife. The adultery was supposed to be cut off, for homosexuality - the death penalty. But in historical sources there are no references to applying such laws in practice. Apparently, justice in this area was carried out selectively, same -sex love or treason was only a reason for condemning objectionable. Especially strictly church canons condemned the self -scenery. But, no matter how wild it is for us, in the Middle Avizant’s time the youngest son in the family often tried to fragment, since the eunuch had good chances for the career of the court official.

The life of Vasily New, the text of the middle of the 10th century, tells in detail about the ordeal of the soul. The hero is Theodore, not a holy, but a very righteous woman, and tells how heavenly heaven got into the kingdom. On the way, she went on 21 commission, or customs post. Byzantium is a bureaucratic state, and that light builds a bureaucratic life along the pattern. The commissions sit demons, turning over huge files, where all the sins of the dead are recorded. Demons go after a person all their lives, record his sins in the scrolls and send him to the dispatch, where they are distributed in appearance. Three commissions deal with issues of love. In jurisdiction 16 - fornication, passionate thoughts, consent to sin, bad tactiles and passionate touches, 17 - marital infidelity, 18 - incest, handwritten, appropriation of cattle. Demons were very surprised that Theodore managed to go through all previous ordeals, and began to scrupulously list everyone with whom she sinned in her youth. “I could not answer anything, trembling with fear and shame,” says Theodora. Her lawyers, the holy angels, began to tell that she had long been settled and spent for many years clean and abstinence, but demons did not back down: Theodore did not open to the confessor and did not introduce epithemium, so the sins did not erase. Then there is a casuistic competition for the soul of the righteous. Fornication in Byzantium was considered a crime less terrible than adultery. Theodora was not married and lived with her husband in marriage, not consecrated by the church, so the angels managed to conduct all Theodorins of a sexual crimes in the category of fornication and facilitate her posthumous fate.

The love lyrics disappeared from Byzantium for 400 years and was revived only in the 10th century under the pen of the mystics, following the biblical “song of the song” of love for God in incredibly passionate and sensual erotic images. The most famous mystic of the Byzantine millennium is Simeon New Theologian (949-1022). He had friction with the official church, but the reason was by no means the ambiguity of his religious and lubric confessions. Let's say he describes God as an emperor, and sinned as a rebel, a rebel. (The detail is topical: in the Byzantium of that time there were a lot of usurpations.) The emperor sends ambassadors to the troublemaker, he surrenders. What happens next?

“The sovereign raised him and kissed him for many hours, especially his eyes wet from tears. Then he ordered to bring royal robes and shoes that he wore, and put on his former enemy with his own hands. In the afternoon and night he rejoiced at him, hugged him, kissed his lips on his lips and loved him to such an extent that he did not even part with him for sleep: he slept with him in the same bed, hugged him on the bed and covered his own blanket, and rubbed his face about all his members. ”

The secular culture of Byzantium continued to exist according to the laws included in complex and conflicting relations with church ones. Sometimes the state showed its power, and the church was resigned. In Byzantine theology, the concept of economy existed - the doctrine of the endless condescension of God to human weaknesses. Disputes flashed to what limits this condescension could extend. Basically, we know about them by intrigues, gossip and scandals in the highest circle of Byzantine society, which is under the sofins of historians. Say, Emperor Lev VI wise (866-912) was unhappy in family life, changed one wife after another, but the Almighty did not send him a male heir. Even the third marriage was categorically prohibited by the church, and the emperor decided to marry for the fourth time. Then unheard of: the head of state was excommunicated. Leo did not remain in debt and sent the patriarch to exile. The new patriarch also did not approve of a new marriage, but removed the excommunication.

Church hierarchs were not separated from the ruling class of Byzantium with an indestructible wall, as in the West-including due to the lack of celibacy, the ban on priests to marry. Often, aristocrats became bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans. In the XII century, the military leader and protoprinedr Nicephorus Vasilaki created an elegantly stylized composition of an essay on behalf of a mythological heroine who fell in love with a bull and gave birth to a minotaur. The author did not perceive her behavior as criminal cattlefit. The literary game went beyond the prescriptions and prohibitions of the church.

The lecture ended with a story more reminiscent of the script of the Hitchcock film than medieval spiritual literature. There was a young priest. Once before Easter, his prodigal passion covered. But his wife refused him: “On the eve of Easter?! Not for the world! And I won’t sin, and I won’t let you sin. ” The priest with grief mixed with cattle. The next day he served in the temple. During the sacrament, the sky darkened: a flock of terrible blood -sucking birds swarmed around the church. The priest realized that they flew into his soul, fell to his knees, confessed his sin to the parishioners and courageously went outside.

Everyone fell behind him in anticipation of the spectacle. To universal amazement, a monstrous flock did not touch either a priest or parishioners. The last priest's wife came out. The blood -sucking birds attacked it, torn into small pieces and flew away.